Son Raw has read his Stuart Hall, thank you very much.
Only in America? So the saying goes, but in this case one would be better served looking in London because I doubt this record could have been made anywhere else. While The United States’ often tragic, often romantic history of racial conflict has spawned a globe’s worth of music from the blues to bebop, folk to footwork, Romare’s Meditations on Afrocentrism is the kind of conceptual piece best conceived from the outside looking in. Combining ancient styles and samples to up-to-the-minute drum machine workouts, it’s the kind of exercise that gives cultural-studies profs hard-ons yet in this case at least, still has much to offer those among us for whom critical race theory remains a Santorum straw man argument.
There’s something perversely paradoxical about highlighting a century’s worth of localized African-American musical traditions only to de-contextualize those traditions and reshape them into intellectual think-pieces. After all, if Chicago Blues and Chicago Footwork are both results of the same creative and social impulse, why combine blues and bootyfunk into a way that’s as raunchy as neither? If you can get past this occasionally disconcerting disconnect however, Meditations on Afrocentrism simply works: the drums are funky, the samples expertly chopped and the whole project is imminently listenable which goes a long way towards generating good-will. Freedom (Aspirations of a Prisoner) bounces with all the energy of a genuine Juke track, The Blues (It Began in Africa) might be the best DJ Shadow track never made and Down The Line (It takes a number) leapfrogs past any conceptual limitations thanks to an expert groove. Even I Wanna Go (Turn Black) which repeats the Jive-to-Juke idea becomes more than the sum of its parts by virtue of being correct: one really can draw lines between these various musical “genres” – a process that’s far more worthwhile than fetishizing disparate eras of musical achievement while denigrating others.
Then there’s the fact that Romare has done his homework: the EP-ending 13 minute found-sound mission statement is proof enough of that. So you win Romare: this may be smarty-art Juke but while it dismisses the booty, it fully embraces the shake.
Buy:
MP3: Romare – Meditations on Afrocentrism (Boomkat)
Stream:
