It was, in the beginning, music by and for blacks, documenting in the black vernacular the everyday agonies and ecstasies of black life. So why, nearly forty years on, is the idea of a black rock & roll band such an anomaly in pop's social order, not to mention unspeakable on AOR radio? At a time when Jesse Jackson is confronting America with the serious possibility of a black man in the White House, what's so improbable about a black rock band – fueled by racial pride yet preaching the unity gospel, equally inspired by Led Zeppelin and George Clinton – scoring in the white mainstream?
flagship band of New York's Black Rock Coalition, has already wowed local rainbow crowds of Mohawks, metalheads and soul brethren with its fusion of buzz-saw punk, slam-dunk funk, avant-jazz frenzy and arena-rock
waaaagh! It's all wrapped up tight with the pop-hook savvy and barbed-wire fretwork of guitarist-songwriter Vernon Reid, and if nothing else, you can easily dig
Vivid on a purely visceral level, thanks in no small part to the in-your-face fidelity of Ed Stasium's production.
"Cult of Personality" and "Middle Man" are right up Heavy Metal Blooze Street, Reid slicing and dicing riffs like some six-string Zorro. "Glamour Boys," one of two dynamite pre-Epic demos produced by Mick Jagger and wisely included here, kicks like an ornery mule and sports a knockout chorus ("I ain't no glamour boy – I'M FIERCE"). And singer Corey Glover lights a Memphis R&B bonfire under a brilliant reconstruction of Talking Heads' "Memories Can't Wait," torching David Byrne's original nervous paranoia with a brooding soulful hurt stoked by Reid's periodic guitar tantrums.
But Vivid isn't just a call to rock. Rooted firmly in the black rock-and-rhetoric continuum of Sly Stone, late-Sixties James Brown and the Bad Brains, it's also a call to accounts. "Which Way to America?" is a righteous demand for a fair slice of the American-dream pie. In "Open Letter (to a Landlord)," a power-rock protest against creeping gentrification and unchecked greed, Living Colour backs up its show of rage with chilling images of arson and blood money and a startlingly poignant chorus.
In its own way, Vivid is an open letter to rock & roll itself, a demand for equal time and respect from a music that is Living Colour's birthright. Vivid is too good to succeed in the white – or black – mainstream by virtue only of racial guilt, for kicking you at the base of your conscience. At its best, it combines the dance stance of classic Sly and P-Funk with a raw guitar frenzy born of both James Marshall Hendrix and James Blood Ulmer. But much of Vivid's power comes from Living Colour's direct address to the unspoken but very real problem of racism in modern rock & roll ("No, I'm not gonna rob you/No, I'm not gonna beat you/
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