Chris Thomas King is probably the most misunderstood figure in contemporary blues. He is born to the tradition of the blues, growing up in the shadow of his father, the great Tabby Thomas, and watching the best of old school blues players ply their trade at dad’s fabled Baton Rouge club. But King is also aware of his social context as a black artist in the 21st-century, and has worked to develop an artistic vision that embraces the postwar blues of his father’s generation with the Depression-era acoustic blues of his spiritual grandfathers Tommy Johnson and Robert Johnson and the street beats of his hip hop contemporaries.
Far from being a terrific commercial strategy, this approach only brings King grief from all sides—the hip-hoppers think it’s corny and the blues purists think it’s sacrilege. It is a courageous artistic stance whatever you think of it if only because the history of ideas doesn’t advance unless people are willing to experiment with new ones.
I marvel at the number of respected musicians and journalists who’ve indicated their disapproval with Thomas’ decision to mix these genres. Like a lot of intelligent and outspoken blacks over the years, he has been criticized as being pretentious for speaking out on the need for hip-hop and blues to find common ground. Hip-hop of course borrows from all sources, though traditional blues has been up until now one of its lesser wellsprings of inspiration. As it currently exists as a popular performance medium, blues is an extremely conservative genre with few genuinely new voices breathing life into the form. Its power lies in its reductive truth—the blues canon, circumscribed as it is, speaks to all needs. Properly channeled it is a liturgy with universal appeal. Poorly applied it is a cliché form applied by mechanical minds who can only grab at the shadows of its immutable truths. I suspect that it is those with the most mechanical view of the genre who most vigorously object to Thomas’ insistence on trying to cross over to a younger, blacker audience.
Of course, saying you want to do something and accomplishing it are two different things. Though Thomas is finally drawing attention to his quest—his new album, Dirty South Hip-Hop Blues is getting a lot of attention both positive and negative—its raps are not exactly bum rushing the Billboard rap charts. That’s a shame, because Thomas is saying some important and provocative things that go a long way toward proving his premise that, “This is the blues of the 21st-century.” Unfortunately the raps that get heavy hip-hop airplay tend to be long on false values and short on the kind of street poetry Thomas has long shown an affinity for. In fact, Thomas’ message is as inimical to rap style as it to blues conservatism. Like all artists looking for breakthrough, however, King knows how to accept defeat. “This is the blues of the 21st-century,” he repeats one more time at the album’s close, “and I don’t give a damn if you can’t get wit’ me.”
King knows his way around the recording studio, and Dirty South Hip-Hop Blues is an impressive performance by King as both producer and performer. He sounds the album’s opening theme with an electric guitar statement over an atmospheric synthesized orchestral swell that breaks into the slower version of “Welcome To Da Jungle.” This track is his statement of purpose, a storyteller’s attempt to trace hip-hop back through the blues as the authentic language of the middle passage. The dramatic storyline identifies the “paleface killas” of contemporary rap as 18th-and 19th-century slavers who kill the protagonist’s wife, steal his children, and keep him alive just to work the land.
“I cry and moan,” King sings, “I cry and moan, it sounds like I’m singin’ a strange new song.” Ethnomusicologists have been making this point ever since they started recording work songs, but the musical connection has rarely been so convincingly drawn.
King lightens up for the obvious pop R&B love tune “Yo’ Kiss” (in which he does his playa move “way down yonder in New Orleans”). “Ghetto Child, You’re Not Alone” uses an acoustic guitar-based arrangement to offer solace to the downtrodden, and “Feel Me” is and out-and-out ballad.
Father Tabby Thomas joins in for an interesting contrast of King’s style with B.B. King’s blues classic “The Thrill Is Gone” on “Da Thrill Is Gone From Here.” The message here is far starker than anything B.B. reached for in his version. As King raps his positive force lyrics about staying away from crime and avoiding being killed in a drive-by shooting, father Tabby sings “The thrill is gone” soulfully, over and over. At the climax they’re singing together, Tabby repeating the aching phrase like a mantra as King declaims “Still got the blues in Washington D.C., Philadelphia, Milwaukee Wisconsin, still got the blues in Dallas Texas.”
King winds it up again with his Delta dobro licks matched against scratch rhythms on “Tha Real,” which uses a spoken word bridge, “Fruit,” into the monster rocker “Mississippi KKKrossroads.” Even if you hate King’s attempts to fuse hip-hop with blues, you’re going to have to admit that this is a scorcher, and it moves into the mind-busting “Revelations,” a stone killer blues track that takes off from a sample of Son House singing “John the Revelator” and resolves into Robert Johnson’s “If I Had Possession Over Judgment Day.” In a nice twist King uses a traditional blues form on the album as the framework for the contemporary blues “Ghetto Life,” then follows with the solo acoustic “Hard Time Killing Floor Blues” and the sad, spooky acoustic blues tale about Bill McDowell, a black man hounded by a lynch mob in 1922, “Poetry of Young Bill.”
“Gonna Take A Miracle” is a complete anomaly at this point, an out-and-out pop song with a beautiful melody and an uplifting sentiment that could easily come off a Lionel Richie album. King applies biblical references to the post 9/11 observation that “it’s gonna take a miracle to find our way.” On the bridge he identifies that miracle as love. After this tune and the pop love song “Give Me A Chance,” King digs into the blues trilogy “Dirty South Chicken Heads,” “Southern Chicks Blues” and “Southern Chicks,” before the jarring “N Word Rap,” a Jimi Hendrix inspired rap against blacks disrespecting other blacks featuring 68 uses of the “N Word.” “I’m sick of this shit,” King spits in a hands-down condemnation of crackhead gangsta chic. “A sellout nigger, ain’t nothin’ but a slave. They say the Klan wearin’ po-lice suits. I say the Klan lookin’ just like you.”
Though that’s the last track listed, King wisely chooses not to finish on such a down note and includes a bonus track, an uptempo, Hendrix-style take on “21st-Century Blues” with a sampled intro from Martin Luther King.
I think even King’s detractors would find worthwhile material on Dirty South Hip-Hop Blues if they listen carefully to the album. Even if they don’t, there’s another new King release that they’re sure to approve of. Over the course of a recording career that stretches back to the 1980s King has made a series of albums that range from more traditional blues to contemporary rock and R&B styles. With King’s popular profile boosted immeasurably by his role in Oh Brother, Where Art Thou? HighTone Records has assembled a compilation release of some of the strongest tracks he recorded for that label and Sire in a more traditional style. Taken together, the tracks on A Young Man’s Blues add up to a hell of an album.
