Live at the Belly Up: Soul Rebels Sound System, Talib Kweli (KPBS, 2017)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright @ 2020 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

I ended last night by watching an episode of the local KPBS music show Live at the Belly Up — just the idea of live performances, of people sitting (or standing) together in the same room watching a band perform in real time and not wearing masks or staying the obligatory “social distancing” of six feet apart from each other is a nostalgia item by now! The show featured an odd group from New Orleans called the Soul Rebels Sound System and had as their guest star rapper Talib Kweli (Greene), who got started with fellow rapper Mos Def in a group called Black Star. The Soul Rebels are a curious ensemble who use no electronic instruments and also almost none of the traditional harmony instruments — no piano or keyboards, no acoustic or electric guitar, no string bass (either acoustic or electric) — just five front-line horn players (two trumpeters, two trombonists, and a front man who plays tenor sax), a tuba (actually a sousaphone, but it sounds the same) player as the only bass instrument, and two drummers, both of whom play standing up and one doubles on timbales.

They began with a set of six (mostly) instrumental pieces, many of which had the word “rebel” in their titles (“Rebelosas,” “Rebel Rock,” “Black Rebel,” “Can You Feel the Beat?” “Get Freaky” and “Tear It Up”) and most of which blended so seamlessly with each other I was thankful for the Live at the Belly Up chyrons for telling me when they’d stopped playing one song and started another. The Soul Rebels are the sort of group that sound great for a song or two, then start to pale because virtually all their songs sound the same: all bouncy uptempo dance numbers with tightly harmonized horn voicings and only occasional solos by one or another of the horn players, and mostly instrumental except for a few barked-out lyrics, mostly instructions to the audience to stand up, get down , scream or what-have-you. After the six selections mentioned above Talib Kweli came out and behaved like a typical rapper: as nearly as I could figure them out, his lyrics occasionally mentioned being Black and having some of the usual problems, but at least seemed to avoid the usual rap boasts about the number of women the singer has fucked, the number of babies he’s conceived without having any further contact, familial or financial, with their mothers, the number of crimes he’s committed, the amount of “bling” he’s accumulated, and the number of Queers he’s bashed.

What annoyed me most about Kweli was the sheer speed with which he spoke; one of my ongoing complaints about rap is its frequent unintelligibility. If you’re going to reduce music to nothing more than rhythm and lyrics, it doesn’t seem to be too much to ask rappers to slow down so we can at least hear and decipher the lyrics. Kweli spok,e many of the lines on last night’s Live at the Belly Up as if were trying to make auctioneers jealous: “Look, I can talk faster than you can!” After his four numbers, “Push Thru,” “The Blast,” “I Try” (which had one of the few lines I actually comprehended: “Life is a beautiful struggle”) and “Get By,” he turned it back to the Soul Rebels, who turned it over to their front-line horn players to do some competitive rapping with each others (reminding us of rap’s origins in “the dozens,” a Black male street game in the 1920’s and 1930’s in which young Black men would gather on streetcorners and speak boasts of how great they were and how terrible the other guys they were “dozening” with were. All in all, this Live at the Belly Up wasn’t a bad show (the copyright date was 2017, by the way) but I think I reached my limit with too many horns playing too many of the same riff patterns on the same song, and a good ballad singer joining them on a slower song would have helped a lot.