Live at the Belly Up: The Styletones, Bushwalla (KPBS-TV, 2013)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2021 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

After the Vienna Philharmonic’s New Year’s concert KPBS showed a quite different sort of musical entertainment: a Live from the Belly Up show from 2013 featuring two quite effective and unusual local bands, the Styletones and Bushwalla. Both of them have roots in the 1970’s funk movement, which largely stemmed from the beat-driven soul of James Brown; as Ben Moore, organist for the Styletones and billed as the band’s founder, put it in an interview segment, in the 1970’s Brown’s beats started infiltrating virtually all popular music: soul, rock and even jazz. The Styletones were clearly trying to evoke the mid-1970’s funk of bands like Sly and the Family Stone and George Clinton’s Parliament and Funkadelic (Clinton had “exclusive” contracts to two record labels for Parliament and Funkadelic even though they were exactly the same people, except Parliament had a horn section and Funkadelic didn’t). The lead singer and front man was a heavy-set Black guy named Stevie Harris who in his interview segment named Al Green as his all-time favorite singer, but his voice was way too gravelly to sound like Al Green. Instead he came off as if James Brown had just had a religious conversion; quite a few of his songs (the Styletones played nine songs in a half-hour set, which will give you an idea of how short they are – usually on Live at the Belly Up you can tell how much a band likes to improvise from how many songs they play, and nine denotes a band that plays to set routines and doesn’t want to let a song overstay its welcome) touch on spiritual themes. His opener was called “Sanctified Strut,” and after a second song called “Try and Try and Try” he explained that he was wearing an all-white outfit because he’d been inspired by a former band member who’d taken up Santería and had preached to him about the spiritual power of dressing all in white. The song itself was called “Jewel in the Heart of the Lotus” – an image from Eastern spirituality (it’s the literal meaning of “Om mani padme om”) that obviously marked this as more than just another peppy, uptempo dance song with funk rhythms. The other songs the Styletones played were “Say Yes” (also a piece with spiritual themes), “Whatcha Looking For,” “Can You Feel Me Now?,” “Tell It,” “Pink” (a gnomically named song whose tag line, “Let me see you dance,” would have been a better title) and “Inspiration.” Though all of them sounded pretty similar to each other, the Styletones played with an infectious beat (Harris is Black but virtually all the other members are white, though they have the funk rhythms “down”), and not only did Harris dance on stage he inspired some of the audience members to do quite good acrobatic dancing of their own – notably a young, sexy white guy who somehow managed to do a full flip in the crowded space of the Belly Up without bashing into or otherwise hurting anyone.

Bushwalla – whom both Charles and I had heard of before though I don’t think either of us had ever actually heard them – turned out to be an individual who grew up in Cleveland, Ohio, trained in opera and musical theatre and also studied circus performing. He’s used this eclectic mix of skills (it’s not clear whether “Bushwalla” is simply his stage name or the name of his band as well) to create an oddly eclectic act that blends rock and rap into an appealing style even this rapophobe found enjoyable. At least that’s what he was doing when this show was filmed; in 2016, three years later, he gave an interview to the San Diego Union-Tribune in which he said he was going back to his original name, Billy Galewood, and “taking his career in a new direction that includes improvisational comedy, theater, film and television acting and writing.” It’s obvious from this short sample of Bushwalla’s act three years before Galewood ended it (with a gala performance of the last Bushwalla album, also at the Belly Up) that this was a performer who wanted not only to avoid being stuck in any particular category but to avoid the clichés of any one particular style. Galewood a.k.a. Bushwalla is a surprisingly sexy performer who at first looked like your typical alternative-rock beanpole but turned out to be in excellent physical shape (all that circus training allowed him to do one number with hula hoops, at which he’s quite accomplished) as well as sporting a muscular torso, an ample basket and a nice ass, all of which the Live at the Belly Up camerapeople let us see. Like the Styletones, Bushwalla was doing an act whose individual components weren’t all that unique but the combination of them achieved originality.

After an opener called “I Raise Up” that sounded like late-1970’s alt-rock (both the song and Bushwalla’s appearance reminded me of the band Television) Bushwalla announced that he was going to do a self-deprecating hip-hop song (“hip-hop” being the euphemism for rap used by people who like it) because he’s noticed that virtually all rap lyrics are song-long brags about how great the singer is and how many women he’s impregnated, Queers he’s bashed, cops he’s killed and bad jewelry (“bling”) he’s amassed (to be fair, I’m putting a much more negative “spin” on the standard content of hip-hop songs than Bushwalla did), Bushwalla wrote a lyric that sounded like typical 1970’s singer-songwriter mopery, only delivered in the double-time cadences of rap and done in a half-sung, half-rapped style that’s the modern-day pop version of Sprechstimme. Then he did a song called “Tiger Spots” and took off his jacket in a sort of coquettish gesture that reminded me of Prince, got a call-and-response going with the audience, described himself as a man trying to juggle two girlfriends (which got the predictable moan from Charles!), and showed off his hula-hoop skills. The next song was called “Gangsta” but it wasn’t what you’d expect from the title; it was about growing up as a white kid in Cleveland and wishing to adopt the style of the Black “gangsta” rappers from the L.A. area (proclaiming the loathsome N.W.A. album Straight Outta Compton as a classic of music is as putrid and awful as proclaiming Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf as a classic of political literature!), and as much as I hate the “gangsta” rappers for their effect not only on music and culture but American life in general and African-American life in particular, I loved Bushwalla’s pathetic white-suburban-kid’s wanna-be fantasy about them for its sheer irony. Bushwalla wrapped up his set with a song called “Fall Through Glass” that returned him to the land of white alt-rock alienation, a quite satisfying set from a compelling performer who plays with audience expectations the way other people just play with guitars.