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With their passionate new album, "Dear Science," TV on the Radio stake their claim as a great American rock band.
By James Hannaham
Read more: Music, Rock 'n' Roll, Indie Rock, Brooklyn, Music Reviews, Arts & Entertainment, Reviews, James Hannaham
TV on the Radio
Sept. 30, 2008 | Let's refresh our collective memory: Black Americans invented rock 'n' roll. So it's frustrating to contemplate the nearly total segregation among bands who have played rock music since the early '70s. OK, there have been some flies in the buttermilk here and there. Some of those flies have been as large as Prince, who endured hostility from rock fans who threw chicken parts at him when he opened for the Rolling Stones in 1981. With the help of his mixed-race band, the Revolution, he crossed over into the promised land with "1999" and "Purple Rain."
The Revolution may have been televised (on MTV), but they did not cause a surge in the number of respected black rock bands out there. That very short list included hardcore punk trailblazers Bad Brains and Vernon Reid's group Living Colour, the flagship act of the Black Rock Coalition, which also nurtured Me'shell Ndegeocello and 24-7 Spyz. Bad Brains continue to chug along in a hardcore niche, and while Living Colour created a splash on the charts, they didn't break a lot of new artistic ground compared to forward-thinking black innovators like Sly and the Family Stone and Parliament-Funkadelic. (Living Colour's music was often categorized as funk rather than rock, which may have aided its ghettoization.) Fishbone, the raucous Los Angeles ska band, enjoyed a loyal cult following in the '80s, but never broke out; and we will not even discuss a certain embarrassing New Wave band called the Bus Boys.
The simple, startling fact is that there hasn't been a great mostly black rock band since Sly and Funkadelic -- until TV on the Radio. This Brooklyn, N.Y., group (which began as a duo and expanded into a quintet) has released three albums' worth of stirring, modern and inventive alternative rock, integrating elements as diverse as electronica, guitar atmospherics and doo-wop soul vocals that recall both Peter Gabriel and the Brothers Johnson. Sometimes they sound a little like Prince, too, but only if he were produced by Radiohead.
Their third and latest album, "Dear Science," might make you wonder, Why has it been so long? Despite the foundations laid by Jimi Hendrix and numerous electric blues musicians, hard and heavy rock became pretty much British property as early as 1970, with Led Zeppelin's "Immigrant Song" putting a Viking stamp on the genre. Zep ushered in an age of faux-paganism and power solos, a Celtic world so crammed with fair maidens and elves that there was no room for Negroes. By the '80s, metal was a whites-only section in the arena of rock: Guns n' Roses guitarist Slash never revealed the African roots beneath his curly mop, and who could blame him, with his own bandmate Axl Rose unironically dropping the N-word in "One in a Million."
Metal wasn't the only genre stuck in the Great White North in the '80s. Few other genres of the time demonstrated significant integration until hip-hop merged with pop in the '90s. Despite the progressive politics of punk, new wave, alternative rock, college and indie-rock, these genres remained whitewashed. This wasn't simply a matter of whites excluding blacks -- nearly everybody young and ambitious wanted to rap. Once Public Enemy and others turned black identity and solidarity into the main subject of hip-hop, the majority of black musicians who wanted to be visible, let alone relevant, gravitated to hip-hop.
But enough about history. It's been a long time since any mostly black rock band has produced an album as pleasurable or complex, both thematically and sonically, as TVOTR's third album, "Dear Science." What's funny about this incredible achievement is that the band did it by raising the profile of African and R&B influences in their music. The move doesn't come across as an attempt to "be true to their heritage," but as a masterly use of the African roots of all rock music. This record does what Barack Obama ought to do; mixing Euro-American and African culture naturally and seamlessly, it gets indignant about politics without simplifying its positions, brings its multicultural constituency together, stirs you to action and makes you want to party at the same time. Better still, its catchy grooves and ambitious texture blur the distinctions between sexuality, political passion and the need to dance.
TVOTR had serious Williamsburg, Brooklyn, art-rock cred to overcome, riding into prominence on the coattails of the punkier Yeah Yeah Yeahs, who were in turn indebted to the glammy Strokes. Founding TVOTR member David Sitek (the group's lone Caucasian) produced the Yeah Yeah Yeahs' critical smash, "Fever to Tell," an exhilarating, practically nonverbal skronk full of energy and noisy guitar, but his own band's sound favors antique drum machines and soaring guitars with heavy effects. It's not surprising that their U.K. label is 4AD, an imprint best known for championing eccentric alternative bands like the Pixies, the Cocteau Twins and Throwing Muses. They've managed to sidestep the usual knee-jerk critical opposition to art rock, though -- Spin named their second LP, "Return to Cookie Mountain," 2006's album of the year.
"Dear Science" isn't as much a departure from "Cookie Mountain" and their 2004 debut, "Desperate Youth, Bloodthirsty Babes," as it is a purification of TVOTR'S sound. You can still prominently hear the wide range of influences that made those first records so extraordinary.
Next page: Taking the left to task for its complacency
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