w/Killer Mike, the Youngbloodz
Thurs Feb 20, Chop Suey, 7 pm, $13 adv, all ages.
On their debut CD, 2000's Lets Get Free, the Brooklyn-based duo Dead Prez reintroduced black militancy into the dreamy, innocuous atmosphere of Billboard's top 100 albums (it reached an impressive #73). This was a noteworthy feat for several reasons: one, because Dead Prez's message and commitment to black liberation were more radical than anything produced by hiphop's underground and independent labels at the time. Also, the band's critique of black American poverty--and return to fundamental human rights issues such as "Food, Clothes, and Shelter"--was articulated at time when black American prosperity was said to have reached unprecedented levels. Black American purchasing power had expanded to $500 billion, a figure that was surpassed by only 10 other economies in the world.
Dead Prez were so successful at a time when they shouldn't have been because of their extraordinary rapping skills and the innovative way they politicized the thug--the most profitable pop figure at the time. While most underground hiphop acts rejected (with good reason) the asocial, anti-everything "thug nigga" (Ja Rule, DMX, and so on) entirely, Dead Prez kept and revised the thug and his rage. The ideal thug was (and still is--though the deep drop in rap sales last year indicates he may finally be in decline) the ideal American consumer; his world and needs were immediate and predictable, and all that mattered was the repeated satisfaction of these predictable needs--easy sex, drugs, expensive automobiles, gaudy jewelry, and guns. Dead Prez kept the guns but let go of everything else, so that what they had was something "between NWA and PE [Public Enemy]" ("I'm a African").
But a lot more was going on in this new figure--this new thug--that the duo, Stic.man and M-1, had reinvented. Their thug liked guns--not for triggering random acts of destruction, but for protection. Like the Black Panthers, their thug's enemy was not other black thugs, but the white cop and "Police State" white cops maintained. Their thug was formed more from a hiphop trinity, rather than a pure dialect between NWA and Public Enemy. This man got his street rage from NWA, his brains from Public Enemy, and his sense of personal care from the Native Tongues collective (De La Soul, A Tribe Called Quest, Jungle Brothers). Their thug subsisted on a diet of "fresh fruit," "ginger root," "barbecue tofu," "lentil soup," and other nutritious foods described in their song "Be Healthy."
The most impressive thing about Dead Prez's thug, however, was his recognition of and alignment with real Africa, sub-Saharan Africa--its history and armed struggles. Their thug didn't dream about the Nile, or any of that Afrocentric crap that preoccupied hiphop bands like the X-Clan, but about the realities of modern Africa: its poverty, its crowded townships, its modern political heroes. Nor did their thug get into all of that quasi-Islamic nonsense about "the gods of the earth," which obsessed the lower and upper members of the Wu-Tang Clan (Killah Priest, Sunz of Man, et cetera). Their thug was an atheist and a materialist--not in the consumer sense, but in the Marxist one.
Despite all of these excellent attributes, the Dead Prez's thug had serious flaws, which were not as apparent on their first CD as they are on their current, second effort, Turn Off the Radio. Though Dead Prez have the intelligence to connect their immediate situation with black liberation struggles around the world, their revolutionary potential is burdened by its debt to Eldridge Cleaver's now-bankrupt critique of white America. To go on, as Cleaver did in the '60s, about the evils of dating and marrying a white woman, the purity of black blood, and equating sexual positions (who is passive, who is penetrated) with other, larger social situations--as Dead Prez do on "Soulja Life Mentality"--is not inspired, interesting, or even shocking. It makes you yawn and wish their determination for black power had incorporated and proceeded from the best that black feminism has to offer.
Nevertheless, Turn Off the Radio is not without its merits. The weak beats on songs like "That's War!" or "We Need a Revolution" are almost eclipsed by Stic.man's and M-1's raps, which, as on their first CD, seamlessly fuse rhymes with political concepts.
