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The Negro Problem
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March 16, 2000 | The bastards were everywhere, and the
sky was the color of blood poisoning and
the wind was whippy and bleak and gritty
as only New York wind can be -- studded
with whirling eddies of the East Coast
filth-pollen of seasonal depression. I was half-listening to my favorite
listener-supported radio station
(anybody notice how the quality of life
improves when all corporate influence is
extricated?) and caught the following
lyrics, from a resonant, yowling voice
that sounded like a black Cat Stevens,
about the plight of a gay Ken
doll: Suddenly the fist in my rib cage unfolded. Somebody, somehow, had broken free of the norm and was writing pretty, acoustic-guitar lines with nifty chord changes and totally irreverent lyrics, despite the lack of cash and stadium blow jobs they were likely to get from it. Wholly without hope for major-label distribution, and for my money, that's a good thing. I sat in the car double-parked and clutching the steering wheel, refusing to move until the band identified itself, and discovered that the Negro Problem, a small outfit from L.A., were doing a monthlong residency at New York's Knitting Factory. I made it a point to go see them; to go out, at night even, on a week in which I would rather have done nothing but hide under my couch and take all the Percocet left over from last year's oral surgery, and whimper and chew my thumbs. A whole set by the Negro Problem sounds like a fusion of the Fifth Dimension, Chicago, James Taylor, Burt Bacharach, ELO, the Five Stair Steps, the Beatles, David Sedaris and Tenacious D. I usually figure if you can hear more than nine influences, the band is "original." The Negro Problem are alive in a way that other bands are dead, because they own themselves. I interviewed Stew (just Stew), the smart-mouth of the operation, and Heidi Rodewald, the hot chick of the band, about their lives as self-made troubadours. They are clever musical weirdos who have carved out a tenable piece of the entertainment world for themselves, wrangled their 40 acres and a mule, grown their own infrastructure and kept things going a lot longer than other bands who think industry record deals are the only way to do things. The Negro Problem prove there is life for musicians outside the L.A. music industry. Bloody refreshing. And here, kids, they tell you how to do it, over croissants at Fortunato Brothers in Williamsburg: I told your manager I thought you were a broke-ass Cole Porter for the '90s. Stew: Wow. Thanks. We're just trying to keep ourselves entertained, basically, because I sure as hell know I'm not singing to the 14-year-olds. Jakob Dylan you're not. Stew: Exactly. So, I'll take the people who either know who Cole Porter is or those that don't know but kind of know -- that know enough to know that he's good. Because these days you've got two people -- the people that know things, who've read things, and the people who have just heard the echoes of things. And that's OK, I don't mind. I don't mind people who haven't really read "War and Peace." Have you? Stew: No, I haven't. Some of us have actually read things and some have just heard the echoes, but the great thing is that we can reference things, like Cole Porter or Noel Coward. Anything that smells slightly sophisticated to me at this point in history is subversive. Because, can you believe it? You turn on the TV, and you can still see these rock 'n' roll codes -- you know, jeans and long hair and slightly dangerous, this fake danger, like you see in the videos, like Kid Rock. You don't want your daughter to go out with him, do you? Well, of course not. But he doesn't even exist! He's this bizarre prototype of scary, dangerous rock. And that's so over! I mean, these guys all have lawyers; they're not dangerous. The Negro Problem fall between the cracks of any of the categories that would earn you major-label butt-sniffing interest. The fact that you've been able to keep yourselves going in this Jakob Dylan-type, L.A. music climate is a wonder. Stew: It's a wonder to us. The band has been together for about five years. It started out as a conscious decision to write songs with good lyrics. We knew that if we wrote songs with good lyrics we would attract a certain kind of person, and there wouldn't be tons of people, but once we got 'em, we got 'em, and they would be fans forever. It's like we were selling a certain kind of drug that we knew they could only get from us. And then we just kept playing and playing in L.A. We knew that by calling ourselves [the Negro Problem] it would hit people who admired the balls and who had the sense of irony. I don't know what happened to irony. If [irony] was in a box, on the Mayflower, they threw it off. The English and other guys still have it, and somehow we lost it. We had it in the '70s and then it went away. It got overly prosecuted in the '80s and then political correctness stomped out the last dying ember of it. And now it's gone. Stew: Absolutely. We started to get this really strong following in Los Angeles of people who were just fascinated that we were even existing. I think people actually came to see us, just to see, is this going to still exist in a month? I can't believe it, because surely these guys are going to quit and go off and get jobs at IBM or something. Do you have enough consistent gigs in L.A. that you're able to not have day jobs? Stew: Some of us still work. We make enough money where we don't always have to work. Heidi: Right now we're not.
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