Music Arcades: Living Colour: Time's Up

Well this is the ideal antidote to any suspect implication from yesterday's entry that the world divides into white/head versus black/hips.

I read about the Black Rock Coalition in the NME, and I think they may have even had a manifesto. Nowadays their mission is described variously as "to maximize the development, exposure, and acceptance of black rock musicians, and encourage artists who refuse to cater to 'the creative straitjacket the industry has designed'" and "to address the constrictions the commercial music industry places on Black artists." I think this means, partly anyway, not being constrained within Rap and R&B genres.

Vernon Reid was the leading figure in both BRC and Living Colour (how come the UK English spelling? it's like Yo La Tengo doing a song called Autumn Sweater — confusing), and I think it's fair to say that the band were, at the time, one of the leading manifestations of the BRC manifesto. As I remember it from the NME, the idea was to take the music that Led Zeppelin and AC/DC had stolen from black performers and re-possess it. It was a sufficiently intriguing concept to get met to the buy the album. Yet Living Colour don't swing like Led Zep or AC/DC. At the start they sound like Hüsker Dü or one of those other hardcore bands; later the guitar playing sounds like Alex Lifeson's. They show great taste in covering Pere Ubu's Final Solution, but somehow their execution of the song misses its sharp-wittedness.

To the extent that Living Colour represented a distinct "BRC sound", you can hear that sound being further refracted, borrowed, and borrowing from, multicoloured music from Prince to Material.

I saw Vernon Reid playing as part of the Punk-Funk All Stars a couple of years ago. I always imagined him to be a big man somehow.