Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: WEDNESDAY, February 9, 1994 TAG: 9402100228
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 10 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: By MARA LEE STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: BLACKSBURG LENGTH: Long
The inventor of the quick cut and the public service announcement slicker than any Nike commercial is reinventing Beat poetry (sans berets, mostly).
Is it live, or is it MTV?
Yes.
Take one commercial name, no-nonsense female rapper MC Lyte; one college celeb, quirky King Missile's lead singer John S. Hall; one angry young black man, poet Reg E. Gaines; and one angry young woman, poet/singer Maggie Estep - and you've got something for every Generation X-er.
Promote the Free Your Mind tour with the buzzword "diversity," and you're all set for some hot press coverage.
Work it, baby.
"Making this interview interesting is something I wish I would put more energy into," said Hall as he sat on the tour bus before the show, new cellular phone laying like a trophy beside him.
When some of the boys on the bus noticed it, the group went into a shtick that ended when Gaines cried, "You're corrupt now!"
Gaines asked the MTV News camera crew that was interviewing him, "Can we sell this to the masses of the people?" even as he covered his Champion logo and tore off the Evian water bottle's label.
This is not the usual stuff of pop culture.
Hall explained that he writes because it exorcizes his demons. "I'm depressed," he said in a soft, nerdy way fans recognize in King Missile's sing-songy delivery. All the time? "No," he said in a small, shy, little-boy voice.
Then he put on a green-and-white Prozac anti-depressant capsule necklace.
Where Manhattanite Hall is autobiographical, across the river in Brooklyn, Lyte represents the yin to his yang. She's aggressive where he's retiring, rhymes where he does free verse, in-your-face where he's whimsical.
"Anything to cause the hype in the song, I'll make up the fiction," she said. Lyte raps about women who hit the streets and hit the sheets as readily as their gangsta-rapper brothers. Gesturing to her trademark Nike sweatsuit, she said she hoped her music and "how I am as a person" would show people that they should be free to be individuals.
Gaines' opening poem, an indictment of the materialism in black culture, "Please Don't Take My Air Jordans," delivered the same anti-conformist message with sometimes shouted, sometimes whispered melodic and rhythmic cadences that shocked the audience into silence.
Similarly, one of Hall's poems that got the most laughs and gasps was "The Commercial," a twisted satire about the Irish Spring soap commercial. Instead of cutting the soap open, the actors mutilate themselves until they are a bloody puree, still singing about freshness.
Name recognition. It's the name of the game that everyone's playing - advertisers, MTV, the poets, the rappers, each going for that lucrative niche. ``Just who can exploit whom first?'' - that is the $64,000 question.
The record companies, television, the newspapers and magazines, they all sell their distorted versions of his message, Gaines said. He pulls no punches in poems about Beat poet Jack Kerouac, Michael Jackson, Maya Angelou, actor Billy Dee Williams and malt liquor ads, police brutality, child abuse and crack use. And he certainly didn't hold back on those who would water him down.
"They're like pimps, they're like dope dealers," Gaines said. "I'm like a piece of heroin to those people. They're going to cut me, cut me, cut me with soap, with sugar, until I'm acceptable to the masses."
Members of the MTV generation, ambivalent as always toward authority, whether from the flickering screen or the politician's podium, were true to form Monday night.
As the students listened to Estep perform poems on being a political sex goddess and vampires who attack the Klan, they squealed with approval, and clapped even harder when she said her alter-ego vampire would implant dozens of fetuses in the bodies of men opposed to abortion.
But can they bite the hand that feeds them? Does the commercial creed of MTV leave a bad taste in these modern-day Beats' mouths?
"It's like I'm not connected to what MTV is because I don't have a television," said Hall, who has been TV- (and drug-) free for five years.
"I'm sure there are people with minds that can be freed by MTV or Billy Graham or Timothy Leary or Aristotle. Depending on where you're coming from, anything can be a liberating tool."
But then Hall admitted, "MTV is a powerful marketing tool. I think some of the things they are trying to do are positive, and some of them are cynical and manipulative and bad.
"Why do we expect our politicians to be honest? Why do we expect police to defend? Because they're paid to do it? Because they're sworn? We set up certain institutions to be better than the rest of us. MTV is a group of people who sometimes respond to greed, who sometimes respond to a sense of responsibility to educate, like everybody else."
And after all, MTV's own Beavis and Butthead said King Missile's latest single, "Detachable Penis," was cool. Heh heh heh.
by CNB