Word: hoods
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...screecher PJ Harvey released a blues-shaded album, To Bring You My Love; Houston-born rocker Chris Whitley has just come out with the bluesy CD Din of Ecstasy; and this week Chris Thomas of Baton Rouge, Louisiana, releases his blues-rap album, 21st Century Blues from da Hood...
Thomas' 21st Century Blues from da Hood, with its unusual but mostly successful attempt to combine blues and rap, is the most ambitious of the three new CDs. His songs boast a crunching blues beat, brash guitars and howling harmonica solos. Thomas, 29, tries to bring the blues into the present. As he sings on the title track, "Whoever says the blues was dead/ Needs to come where I'm from where the streets are red." It's a gutsy album that works best when Thomas stops rapping and lets his music do the talking...
Sitting in overheated, crowded lecture halls with a few hundreds of our closest friends, we are supposed to be learning how to see the forest and not the trees. Instead, like Little Red Riding Hood on her way to Granny's house, we usually find ourselves lost in the woods and pursued by the Big Bad Wolf of academic myopia. Looking at the individual tree, like Hindu Myth, Image and Pilgrimage (Literature and Arts C-18) or Jewish Life in Eastern Europe (Foreign Cultures 56,) certainly has its place. Yet, if the Core is to succumb to such overspecialization...
...misery, nothing beats the blues. That's why many young musicians are adding a blue tint to new albums such as British-born screecher PJ Harvey's "To Bring You My Love," Houston native Chris Whitley's "Din of Ecstasy" and Louisianan Chris Thomas' "21st Century Blues From Da Hood."TIME critic Christopher John Farleysays Harvey's music lacks "subtlety or grace," while Whitley's album is "painfully, almost uncomfortably honest." But it's not all bad. Farley says Thomas' work features a "crunching beat, brash guitars and howling harmonica solos...
Another magnetic performance is given by Charlie Broderick as Ron, a small time New York hood. Ron introduces himself with a 'fuck'-ridden monologue about a Mets game, a mix-up in ticketing and an assault with a baseball bat, only to leave to pick up his dry cleaning and his daughter from Dalton. This character is 100 percent stereotype, yet Broderick keeps him fresh by packing his performance with sheer exuberance...