≤br>by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
After the Watergate special on CBS I changed the channel to KPBS in hopes there’d be a Live at the Belly Up program. There was, but it was a major disappointment in two respects. First, it was yet another rerun from 2017 instead of a new show from 2022, when like a lot of other live performance venues the Belly Up has responded to the perceived end of the COVID-19 pandemic by reopening. Second, it was a show rooted in kinds of music I really don’t care for. It featured a New Orleans-based band called the Soul Rebels, with a guest rapper named Talib Kwali featured on four songs. The first six songs by the Soul Rebels alone were either instrumentals or songs with just bits of quickly barked-out vocals. I missed one of the chyrons that were there to tell me what the songs were called (a service to viewers I wish live music programs more prestigious than Live at the Belly Up, like Austin City Limits, would follow),and the band performed their pieces with seamless transitions in between, sort of like a D.J. mix. But the five I did get titles for were “Rebelosis,” “Rebel Rock,” Can You Feel the Beat?,” “Get Freaky” and “Turn It Up,” which gives you a pretty good idea of both their contents and what the band wanted you to do to them, which was dance.
I liked the band at first – especially the tight discipline with which the horn players stayed together and the percussionists drove them – but as the show wore on each song started to sound an awful lot like its predecessor. The whole set was uptempo dance music, and while it might have been a fun night if you were actually at the Belly Up dancing as ordered to the music, at home on a late-night TV program it just started to wear me down. Things didn’t improve much when Talib Kwali entered and was introduced as a former partner of Mos Def (and even someone with as little interest or love for rap – or “hip-hop,” to use the euphemism for rap used by people whu actually like it – as I have heard of Mos Def). He did four rap numbers with the Soul Rebels backing him up – “Push Thru,” “The Blast,” “I Try” and “Get By” – and then the Rebels played two rap songs of their own, with different people rapping – “Show Me What You Got” and one that was identified in the chyron just as “Get Up” but I thought it sounded more like “Get It Up.” Most of the rapping was so unintelligible I couldn’t make out what the songs were supposed to be about: as I’ve said before, one of my ongoing complaints about rap is if you’re going to eliminate melody and harmony and reduce music to just rhythm and lyrics, the least you can do ls actually give us a fighting chance to understand what you’re saying. To me this show emphasized the almost fascistic aspect of a lot of modern-day dance music; one of the things I liked about ABBA is they wrote songs that were genuinely infectious and made you feel like you wanted to dance instead of like you were being ordered to!
