Carl Hancock Rux

Carl Hancock Rux is a grown man with grown-up views on race, sex and politics that burst out of his lyrics with humor, rage and angst. In a world where the pop success of Lauryn Hill, Erykah Badu and Wyclef Jean shows that the mainstream audience won’t reject roots, culture and protest if they can sing along too, Rux Revue remains a daring proposition–if only because he’s more raw and more nakedly revealing about his origins, experiences and the actual size of his intellect.

Rux Revue, the 550 Music debut album by Carl Hancock Rux, is an experiment of sorts, a kind of science project. It’s a bold attempt to see what happens when you take a post-modern starchile of blues, groove, and book learning and bid him sing over tracks concocted by John King of The Dust Brothers and Tom Rothrock & Rob Schnapf (of Beck fame).

In 1994, The New York Times selected Hancock Rux as “One of 30 Artists Under the Age of 30 Most Likely to Influence Culture Over the Next 30 Years.” A 1998 issue of The Village Voice featured him as among “Eight Writers on the Verge of (Impacting) the Literary Landscape.” The New York Post described a 1997 live performance as a journey “from hellacious to hilarious and back again…one of the most engaging one-man shows you’re likely to see all year.” Rux Revue is a marriage of eclectic beats and esoteric rhymes from a singular African-American artist who is not a conscious rapper or a throwback blaxploitation militant-mack-daddy boy, but a twisted version of all those things and more.

Carl Hancock Rux possesses an amazing voice: His dulcet basso profundo tones have been known to make wombs quiver and anxious men tighten their lock on their woman’s waist as he gets to intoning his story-songs about ritual, abuse (sexual and substance), and redemption. Hancock Rux performs most often these days with an eight-piece band; Rux Revue boasts twelve superb tracks and a supporting cast which includes drummer Joey Waronker, guitarist James Hall, folk-rock singer Toshi Reagon, and DJ/composer Money Mark. Yet it is still not uncommon for Hancock Rux to show up at downtown New York venues to declaim a cappella his sometimes angelic, sometimes satanic verses.

A product of Harlem, New York City’s foster care system, and Columbia University, parts of Carl Hancock Rux’s life story (and subsequently his poetry) track like lost chapters from Manchild In The Promised Land or Down These Mean Streets. Take for example “Blue Candy,” based on the true story of his beloved grandmother’s railroad flat when her death-stench alarmed the neighbors. What’s amazing in the writing isn’t just the depiction of horrors (or that it’s unexpectedly performed in 7/4 time by Carole Kaye, Wah Wah Watson and James Gadson) but that Rux manages to sustain a child’s-eye view and a childlike innocence in retelling the incident.

Likewise in “Wasted Seed,” where the poet gives us the story of his conception on a Harlem rooftop (and the story of how he became a fatherless, motherless child), turning his inner child’s rage at abandonment into a blues lament with the double entendre motif of “Do You Want This Baby?” On “Fall Down,” Hancock Rux testifies with a preacher’s fervor over a supple, serpentine band track laced with Funkadelic feeling, while actually mocking the sometimes dangerous agendas of religious zealots: “We’ll break the shrines/We’ll spill their wine/We’ll plant our flags and burn their vines/Beautiful is our hill of Zion.”

Other major pieces on the album concern New York’s Black arts scene–the players, politics and psychodramas of which could make hiphop’s East Coast/West Coast debates seem mere piffles by comparison. In being true to his muse and medium, Carl Hancock Rux refuses to dumb down or provide footnotes for those out of the loop. So unless you frequent NYC’s Nuyorican Poets Caf, you might not know that the Miguel of the track “Miguel” (set to a War-like low rider track) is named after the godfather of downtown poetry, Miguel Algarin; or, unless you’re a Whitney Museum regular, that the song title “No Black Male Show” refers to the controversial exhibition on Black masculinity that was staged there a few years back. Such persons, places and events are as ineluctably a part of Hancock Rux’s world as Versace gear and Jeep Cherokees are to the mo’ bitches/mo’ money/mo’ problems crowd.

What connects Carl Hancock Rux to hiphop and contemporary r&b is Rux Revue’s musical brew: a simmering cup of lowdown and slithery bass lines, bluesy Fender Rhodes triplets, bar-room saxophone breaks, and the heavenly-choir effects served up by the front man’s regular vocalists, Helga Davis and Marcelle Davies-Lashley. They lace the greasy funkified stuff frying below them like some bent and twisted cross of the Supremes and Wagner’s Valkyries.

On the final track, “I Recall (There I Am),” Rux invokes the romantic dissonance of a Robert Johnson guitar riff (eerily played by Rob Schnapf) while singing “…yes at that moment I was nothing more than the spit and semen leaning against a black tar wall on a Harlem roof-top/Leaning and losing the privacy of self…”

Carl Hancock Rux is a poet, simple as that. If you’re questioning who, why or what Carl Hancock Rux is right now, there’s your answer. Meaning strip away the drum loops and the producers, and you’ve got a man who lives to write and who writes and performs for a living.

As operatic as any Wu-Tang recording, this album is also as ghetto-fabulous in its recombinant stirrings of real-life pain, abstract poetics, funky beats and home-grown heroism. Rux Revue is, hands down, the most uncompromising, catchy and coherent blend of politics, verse, vulnerability and rhythm heard since Gil Scott-Heron’s Winter In America.–Greg Tate