Another blast from the past from the The Stranger's music blog Line Out...
MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 19, 2011
Paris's Black Power Mixtape
posted by KATHY FENNESSY on MON, SEP 19, 2011 at 7:48 AM
SCARFACE/TOMMY BOY
"Paris is my name, I don't sleep. I drop science, and keep the beat."
In light of the documentary Black Power Mixtape 1967-1975, which opens at the Varsity Theatre on 10/14, I've been thinking about Paris's 1989 album, The Devil Made Me Do It.* With lyrics about civil rights, dirty cops, and the beauty of blackness, what is it if not a "Black Power mixtape"? Other hip-hop records have referenced the Black Panthers, but I submit that Devil is definitive.
Around the same time he released his debut, I read Eldridge Cleaver's Soul on Ice and Bobby Seale's Seize the Time: the Story of the Black Panther Party (I also read The Autobiography of Malcolm X and Amiri Baraka's Blues People). Paris's opening salvo served as the perfect soundtrack to their words, and that's to take nothing from Public Enemy, with whom he would go on to collaborate.
*PBS has acquired it for broadcast (disclosure: I work at KCTS 9).
In his Nation review of Black Power Mixtape, Stuart Klawans mentions a particular Panther chant, which sent me scrambling for the Paris disc, because I recall that he samples the tune (it appears on "Panther Power"). But there's a difference between hearing the rhyme and, as Klawans writes, watching the Panthers teach "little kids to shout slogans in exchange for a pancake breakfast, and to sing a suicidal little ditty I had all but forgotten, 'Pick Up the Gun'."
It's the world from which P-Dog (born Oscar Jackson, Jr. in 1967) sprang. Like Tupac, son of party member Afeni Shakur, he grew up in the Bay Area in the long shadow of the Panthers (as with Pac, he also had a connection to Oaktown’s Digital Underground, but more as an associate than a collaborator).
If Paris would filter his feelings about the Bush-era though more militant means, he shared Pac's anger, and his debut deserves to stand alongside Public Enemy's It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back and NWA's Straight Outta Compton.
As DJ Davey D told SF Weekly, "Public Enemy was Afrocentric, but Paris was the first hip-hopper on the West Coast to do it in an uncompromising way."
But anger isn't enough in and of itself. If it marred his controversial 1992 follow-up, Sleeping with the Enemy (with hard-headed harangues like "Bush Killa" and "Coffee, Donuts & Death"), he gets the balance right on his first record, where his sinuous flow and sinister grooves make the econ major's knowledge hit all the harder (Paris graduated from UC Davis). The tone is nervy and noirish: a letter from the underground written in generations of spilled blood, but it's also, as he declares (in "Break the Grip of Shame"), "A call and a plea for unity."
The former Nation of Islam member still writes, raps, and produces, and worked for a time as a stockbroker to fund his projects and to provide for his family. As he reflected to SF Weekly about his years working for The Man, "I saw what was going on with favoritism in the mutual funds. That's real gangsta shit."
I wouldn't have thought I'd ever get the chance to tag a post using Rick Springfield's name, but then this DVD showed up in my mailbox. I was never a Springfield fan, but I wasn't a detractor either. I'm old enough to remember his 1980s heyday, and although I never bought any of his records, I did go through a brief General Hospital phase, which coincided with his first run as Dr. Noah Drake (he would return to the show in 2005). This was back when Demi Moore ("Jackie Templeton") was also part of the cast. If anything, I would've pegged Springfield as the breakout movie star, but he decided to make music his primary focus.
Sylvia Caminer's flattering, yet strangely compelling documentary, An Affair of the Heart, doesn't present a conventional portrait of a celebrity. Instead, it's more like 2012's Still Alive, which caught up with 1970s singer-songwriter Paul Williams. If 63-year-old Springfield, who looks 20 years younger, enjoyed his biggest hits, like "Jessie's Girl" and "Don't Talk to Strangers," in the 1980s, his fans have sustained his career, and Caminer profiles a few of the most ardent.
Mike Nipper first posted this video in 2010. That's Rick on guitar.
After a break of almost a decade, Springfield returned to live performing in the 1990s, and fans travel thousands of miles just to see him. His friends Mark Goodman, Linda Blair, and Corey Feldman speak to his past. To Goodman, Springfield was a "dick" and a "lightweight," who's only gotten better and more humble with age. As with the super-fans who’ve congregated around the Grateful Dead and Phish, his shows have spawned friendships and even romances.
Suburban stay-at-home moms JoAnn and Sue welcome the chance to leave their troubles behind for a regular "Rick fix," as they put it. In their case, that means up to 10 shows a year, including Springfield's annual cruise to the Bahamas (and since Goodman participates in that venture, it's fair to take anything he says with a grain of salt). Fourteen-year-old guitar player Dustin has been a fan since he was a toddler, a bond he shares with his single dad, Jeff—who looks a little like Springfield—while Steve proposed to his wife, Jill, on stage at a concert.
Pure '80s Velveeta.
Other fans talk about the comfort they took in Springfield songs while recovering from sexual assault and heart surgery (Laurie says her "pity party" over her cardiac woes lasted for 24 years). There's a darker side, too, since Rick addiction has put a strain on Sue's marriage. Oddly, her cardiologist husband, Mike, started out as a New Jersey thrasher,* and he's never understood his wife's obsession.
If there isn't much here about his personal life, Springfield has written a bestselling memoir, Late, Late at Night, that discusses his battles with infidelity, depression, and other more personal matters (amazingly, he's still married to his wife, Barbara, who appears in the film). Watching Caminer's documentary didn't change my mind about his music, but I found his relationships with his fans genuinely touching.
* Mike Devita was the guitarist for Sacred Denial (1982-1988), which had a brief run on Atlantic Records.
My favorite quote: "We touched his butt last time he was here."
Breaking Glass Pictures releases An Affair of the Heart on July 16, 2013 (Blu-ray release TBA).
I write about popular music and film and the relationship between the two. I'm Irish on one side, Italian on the other—British on both. I was born in Connecticut (Far From Heaven), raised in Alaska (Northern Exposure), and I've lived in Seattle, WA (Trouble in Mind) since 1988.
