Special
Delivery
by Tunsi
Parana Records, Oakland CA USA, 2005
Audio CD, $9.98
Distributors website: http://www.paranarecords.net
Group
Therapy
by Elephant Tribe, featuring Talman Greed
Total Spontan Productions/DRO Entertainment,
Chicago IL USA, 2005
Format, Catalog number, price
Distributors website: http://www.hilltopstudios.net
Reviewed by Michael R. (Mike) Mosher
Saginaw Valley State University, University
Center MI 48710 USA
mosher@svsu.edu
Novelty songwriter Jimm Juback, while
listening to James Brown in 1972, predicted
that black music would soon become entirely
rhythm. The ensuing three-plus decades
of hip hop rap music have not proven him
wrong as to the primacy of a good beat.
In affirming that, two CDs from 2005 also
provoke thoughts on rap as text.
Text is often used as a visual motif by
Chinese contemporary artists, and Michigan
photographer Shaun Bangert has covered
portraits of members of her family with
text. Tunsi delivers dance beat as text,
as telegraphy of the body, gestural movements.
One is reminded of those pages of the
faux-texta sort or German
blackletter and a linear electrocardiogram
stutterfound in Rick Griffin's
Man from Utopia 1971 comic book for acid
heads.
Tunsi's Special Delivery makes
use of a high banshee descant, comparable
to the one enervating "Jump" by Irish-American
crew Ace of Bass in 1991. Like a Jamaican
dub version, Tunsi provides Special
Delivery in an instrumental form as
well. Juback's collaborator Gary Malvin
once demonstrated a simple riff "Gordon
and Bobby", whereas Juback exclaimed it
was like the mnemonic the high school
nerd would use to memorize an electronics
formula. Tunsi's "Whoop De Do" fits that
description too, using a smart/stoopid
motif as a bed for motormouthed braggadocio,
while "Shock Pain" is powered by another,
similarly engaging riff. "Politics at
Work" is a promising slice of critical
dance music, a genre briefly explored
in Britain a quarter-century ago like
M's "Pop Music" or something by the Gang
of Four. It's as if only bodies in movement
on the dance floor can shake apart a glimpse
of the inner workings of the Spectacle.
Whereas Oakland's
Tunsi appears to be a one-man production,
a studio mastermind along the lines of
Prince, the Elephant Tribe of Chicago
is a crew. Four faces appear on the cover,
which are likely b-knucklez, israel, jay
and drunken monkee, for they receive the
most numerous songwriting credits on the
27-track CD. Other collaboratorssharing
the humility of lowercase namesinclude
demo, rusty, shake, bacardi, brando, turon,
billie and phoenix. Illiana obviously
wants her name capitalized, thank you.
The Elephant Tribe's Group Therapy
CD is a "mix tape", purchased (possibly
from one of the Elephant Tribe) at a table
set up on Chicago's Michigan Avenue one
afternoon last August, appropriately a
couple blocks from both the Apple Computer
store and Tower Records. It has a surprising
variety of hip-hop approaches, and plenty
of good tracks. The disc is marred though
by the rambling spoken bits attributed
to Talman Greed. Perhaps he's a neighborhood
character that the crew finds funny or
wise, or perhaps its just the kind
of foolin'-around indulgence that mars
homeboy productions like the movie "Straight
Outta Compton."
Beyond the good beats for dancing and
grooving, the storytelling, scene-setting
and personal boasting, hip hop is also
interesting here as that textual artifact,
its rap an easily-visualized verbal typography,
one that needs to be embodied to be appreciated.
Moving body to beat, vertical movement
of shoulders and arms like ascenders and
descenders on a well-designed letter.
As traveling child, this reviewer played
a game of looking out train window and
pretending a motorcycle rider was rolling
over land, treetops, jumping rivers and
highways, beside the Chicago-bound train.
Elephant Tribe's wordplay serves as a
contemporary soundtrack for that game,
the train rolling through Chicago neighborhoods
and their south side home. Their boisterous
effusiveness sports a Hieronymus Bosch-like
excess. Easy to criticize as intemperate
until I recall my own college favorites,
writers like William Burroughs, Hunter
Thompson, and Lester Bangs, none of them
circumspect or terse.
The listener contrasts the Chicago posse
of MCs at the mic, with the Oakland guy
who works as one man, one voice and one
machine full of beat-making and recording
software. M.K. Assante's essay in the
San Francisco Chronicle "We Are the Post
Hip-Hop Generation" spoke of how today's
youth that hears this medium institutionalized
on most TV commercials directed towards
them. Yet both Elephant Tribe and Tunsi
see their creativity still flourishing
in the hip-hop camp.