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The Jungle Brothers are young (19, 20, 21) Afrocentrists from Afro-New
York. After 1988's Straight Out the Jungle moved 200,000
sopies on a local label, Warners coughed up over a million including
buyout, one hears, for the right to market Done by the Forces
of Nature, and if it never breaks beyond rap radio the company
could recoup on street and MTV exposure alone. Such are the economics
of hip-hop these days, and let's hope the artists get a share, because
these high school grads have their own sound and vision. Imagine
De La Soul's shambling weirdness played casual rather than arch.
Drawling funkily through well-observed narratives and rallying cries
that retain a surprising gentleness even when they predict Judgment
Day or deny that Columbus discovered America, the JBs bring the
old black-music ideal of positivity to rap--an almost utopian musical
rendition of a life spent sipping orange juice under the sun that'll
probably make white people nervous anyway.
But not two 22-year-old white Afrocentrist sympathizers whose style
is a good deal more militant than the JBs', maybe because they have
more to prove. Though 3rd Bass came up in the same street and project
culture that shaped their black brothers (check Product of the
Environment), their desire to reach the hardcore rap community
with The Cactus Album (Def Jam) goes up against rap's newly
entrenched ethos of racial solidarity. No lovers of self-hatred,
they have the guts to dis Nation of Islam as well as white supremacist
dogma, and a pussy song called The Oval Office ("Lunch became
filet of sole with tongue/Oval office work is never done") made
me wonder whether Prime Minister Pete Nice took a John Donne seminar
at Columbia. All of which suggests that 3rd Bass will do it their
way if they do it it all. Good. In the rap community, that's usually
the best way.
Playboy, Dec. 1989
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Nov. 1989 |
Jan. 1990 |
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