Black In The Box

Eager to keep cranking out pop hits, a nervous music industry is freezing out the adventurous funk fringe.

By Tom Moon Philly Inquirer Music Critic

In this spring's media swirl surrounding the "comeback" of Prince, there were effusive stories celebrating his unique approach to audio naughtiness, rhapsodic accounts of his skills as an entertainer, memory-lane trips through his groundbreaking funk-rock of the early '80s. The loving glance backward was overdue. But at the same time, it was a little sad because it raised a thorny question: Where are Prince's progeny? In contemporary popular music, who besides Outkast is galvanizing audiences from that slightly threatening outsider zone once known as the black fringe? Who's waving the freak flag, keeping P-Funk audacity alive, challenging the mainstream with Fishbone-esque stylistic smashups?

"You would think, in the age of Outkast, that there would be a lot of crazy types of innovation going on," says guitarist Vernon Reid, founder of the '80s black alternative-rock band Living Colour. Instead, there's a huge vacancy in left field. Declining revenue, allegedly due to file-sharing, has record execs more risk-averse than ever, particularly where a cash cow like urban music is concerned. The demand for hits is as old as the Victrola. But increasingly, that pressure has caused African American artists aligned with any sort of fringe - musical, social, whatever - to be marginalized by the big labels.

"There's a vicious amount of anti-intellectualism in our recorded arts," Reid argues. "Black music was the music everybody came to for emotional truth. That's what soul was. "Now, it's so constructed and artificial. We have singers who, to show their feelings, have to holler all the time... . The track might be hot, but there's no emotional investment going on underneath it."

This isn't a small problem. As urban music has assumed a place of commercial preeminence, its artistic horizons have been steadily narrowed by a wicked cocktail of assembly-line production aesthetics, fearful executives, and audiences that demand gratification within a song's first 30 seconds. The black rock franchise is owned by Lenny Kravitz, virtually its only practitioner. Guitarist and songwriter Ben Harper, the nonclassifiable artist most successfully amassing a fringe crowd, sells records, but not in Missy Elliott numbers.

Musicians who may need years to refine their sound, or whose ideas are already ahead of prevailing trends, don't have much chance. Within the business, even Outkast is seen not as a shining triumph of creativity, but as a high-achieving fluke: The folks who make pop records can find you 10 Reuben Studdards, but they won't dare bring you the next Shuggie Otis. Off-duty, some of the same suits desire music that's a touch more radical. But when it comes to selling, they recognize that it's folly to search for another Meshell Ndegeocello, the African American singer and bassist who has lambasted an industry she believes caters to the lowest common denominator.

"They make rap records about violence, which I don't consider to be among the most progressive ideas in America," Ndegeocello told Horizon magazine a few years ago. "It's all about making money, and then if you critique it, you're seen as a playa-hater. What about educating people of color and giving other alternatives?" "You have to remember, this is a business," counters Big Jon Platt, a senior talent executive at Virgin Records and EMI Music Publishing. There's not an executive "who doesn't want to find something unique, but things aren't set up the way they were in 1980: These labels are owned by corporations, and they need results."

Platt, who was involved with introducing talented rapper-producer Kanye West, believes that hip-hop is alternative _expression. But many in the genre say the industry maintains a double standard: White alternative rock bands aren't signed with the mandate that they become instant chart-toppers. In hip-hop, even the trippiest thinker is expected to connect with the MTV/BET audience.

The Roots have encountered this doublethink on their last three projects. Though the Philadelphia collective is a true band - an anomaly in hip-hop - and its music bears the influence of James Brown and Ornette Coleman, its alternative leanings don't matter much in the boardroom. Despite street cred as one of the most forward-thinking collectives in black music, it is pushed to follow a blueprint that's more Nelly than Hendrix - that is, play the accessibility game, generate singles and videos.

"The labels know that 75 percent of the buyers of black music are white," says Richard Nichols, the Roots' manager. "Most of those people have a very specific use for black music: It's about the beat, it's for dancing, whatever. They're not going to it looking for complexity or art. I'd argue that minstrelsy reigns supreme right now." For much of pop music's history, black artists have been not just kings of the dance floor, but art-minded trailblazers. Reid recalls Atlantic Records in the late 1960s, where the roster included jazz visionary Rahsaan Roland Kirk as well as Led Zeppelin.

"It was the will of that corporation to subsidize adventures," Reid says. "And they did it because they believed that those could lead to greater hits, different ideas getting through." Jazz pianist Jason Moran agrees, and detects an insidious trickle-down effect of the stardom-or-bust mind-set: With so few examples of black art made free of unreasonable commercial expectations, he says, the oppositional independence that distinguished work by Miles Davis and Public Enemy could disappear.

"You have to remember, as African Americans we've been told what to do for most of history," Moran says. "One of the lessons I've learned from people like [jazz artists] Greg Osby and Andrew Hill is nobody can tell me what to do as an artist. That's a hard thing for a kid to learn." Reid believes that Living Colour - which had several singles, including "Cult of Personality," and successful albums in the late '80s - was lucky: It heeded its instincts and still managed to wrangle some success.

"Things just sort of lined up," Reid recalls of Living Colour's run from 1984 to 1995. "What we were doing, what Public Enemy was doing, it was bubbling below the radar. Then when it popped out, it happened despite the industry." The same thing can happen today, but it doesn't happen often. Alternative hip-hop artists, such as the sharply observant female rapper Jean Grae, have trouble developing a coalition without the promotional muscle of a major label. Ditto for song-poets, like Carl Hancock Rux, whose work expresses a political or social perspective. African American tunesmiths who write straightforward pop, among them the Brian Wilson-influenced Stew, of the band Negro Problem, encounter marketplace indifference.

Even R&B artists who proffer a slightly different attitude - like Atlanta's Van Hunt, the rock-influenced singer and songwriter who will perform at 9 p.m. tomorrow at NXNW in Mount Airy - face uphill climbs, because after so many lean years, there's no clear black-alternative constituency for labels to aim at. "My music is never black enough for black people or white enough for white people," Hunt mused recently. "The way I see it, the problem is one of conviction:... Nobody wants to give artists time to develop. Think about it: We would never have gotten to Stand! if Sly didn't have somebody in his corner believing. That was his fifth album; 1999 was Prince's fifth album," he said. "Cats don't get five chances today."

Hunt and others say that despite what most see as a dire situation, a black-alternative could thrive again. All it takes is the right tune, says Virgin's Platt: "You could have the weirdest act, and if there's a hit song attached, it'll find an audience." Hunt agrees: "It comes down to the craft of songwriting... . Whether I'm considered rock or R&B or whatever, that's going to be a problem until I sell a million records. Then it'll all make sense."