TOLCHA FEATURING MAXX AND NOELLE POELLER
“Black Record”
Dub Rap//Our Now
from Gestalt (Meta Polyp)
6.5
“A ghetto is more than piss-filled staircases, stick-up kids and cheap liquor.
It’s more than the teenage pregnancies and broken homes.
IIt’s more than the everyday police brutality,
Or corporations exploiting poverty psychology.
It’s more than tryin’ to buy hope with church fees.
It’s more than bein’ broke in a world that’s overpriced,
And bein’ told that everyone deserves their slice.
It’s more than a climate of fear and lack of trust,
There’s beautiful people here.”
Does the last line seem too quick a script-flip, a tacked-on happy ending?
It probably won’t, if you listen to “The World Is A Ghetto,”
as written and performed by American expat rapper RQM,
on his northeast (ex-East) Berlin neighbors Tolcha’s first full-length release, Gestalt.
That relentless, uphill “It’s more than…” is the key that cuts and carves and
ignites and drives Gestalt,
which means “Shape,” after all. Here it’s always a verb, present tense,
as much as a noun, a process, and—!
(But before reflexing too far into stereotypically “German” lectures,
the American reviewer must flash back to the fact that Gestalt Psychology
earned its caps by becoming a groovy movement, a school’s-out old-school
dedication, to tracing and massaging the knotty connections of mind and body
to each other, and to other minds, other bodies.)
Just as dedicated to “sincerity and a good time,” as Janis Joplin
replied when a reporter asked her what the youth of today are looking for,
is Tolcha, made up of DJ Shira Khan and a steering committee of studiologists
/musicians.
They are: Le Lars, “computer nerd” and drummer, Smiler, who plays double bass
and “E bass,” and Rasda, responsible for percussion, live-dubbing,” and melodica.
This last he sometimes uses for the Far East Sound associated with dub pioneer
Augustus Pablo, but he doesn’t push the historicism or the sound too far;
melodicas are pretty limited
Rasda, who;s worked on projects with several of Tolcha’s other Gestalt guests,
exemplifies this album’s dub hub: what reviewers like to call the “shapeshifting”
implications and explications of remix as the mix, when it’s done righ
t (enough to suit us reviewers): the indomitable slipperiness of the truth!
And dub loops around the the
many-skilled skulls of the men and women on Gestalt, eventually taking
listeners more than one Tolcha-toke over the line, and past usual zones,
of comfort, for instance.
Which is not to say that the ambition of “It’s more than…” ever gets too greedy.
On Gestalt, Tolcha opens an inner space that’s effectively, though not too literally,
like Duke Ellington’s “Harlem Airshaft,” with diverse voices, themes, dreams,
and other sounds floating up to converge and resonate, in the shape of things as
they are and things to come (in the next beat, and however you might measure).
True, it’s often a gray-black space, a bone-tone poem, a stained container of
bon temps and mall palls, but it’s roomy, and not too doomy. Not too much echo, y
et we do get homely energy, like big ol’ floppy boot drums kicking the dirty boom
of dumpster bass. The boom can swing like a mic, though, and the drums aren’t too floppy
to flip paradiddles like bicycle pedals in the sky, when appropriate. Rusty appliances
can quack gastric and more drastic, like something you’d have to put up with in real life.
But never too long.
Thus, nothing in Gestaltspace upstages the rappers, nor vice-versa.
There’s no clutter of words or other sounds. Voices include those of RQM,
his friends and colleagues like Ride Shafique of Pressure Drop, Ras T-Weed
of of Rockers Hi-Fi and Overload Soundsystem, Sasha Perera of Jahcoozi,
along with Maxx (AKA Madd), of Philly’s own Goats. Also the Al-Haca crew,
who are practically a band-within-a-band, in Tolcha’s generous (and astute)
function at the junction. (Al-Haca’s waiting at the station, with RQM,
bout 20 minutes and 30 seconds past the “end” of Ras T-Weed’s “Benediction,”
and now you know. But you don’t know what they’ll do when youtube there.)
“Squeeze your third,” suggests RQM in”Focus,” to see the world a bit better.
But the pressure of his pleasure principle of his “third optical” floetic mode
gets crunched into the painfully clear visions of “Crushed Ice.”
The bad vibes that have so carefully timed and otherwise distanced, nibbling
around the edges of Gestalt’s shapes, even in the basically hopeful “World Is A Ghetto,”
now take over.
Especially when Sasha Perera raps and sings her verse. As the voice of Jahcoozi,
on 2005’s Pure Bred Mongrel, Sri Lanka-to-London-to-Berlin Pereras
(“The M.I.A. of Germany, “ Mojo Magazine proclaims) was satirical about
race, sex, and money, presenting “Black Barbie,” “Ally McBills,” and
“Asian Bride Magazine.”
But on “Crushed Ice,” the serious core of her satire cracks the track open.
“There’s a chill in the air,” she begins, and the chill factor,
the eerie entertainment value, in RQM’s and Tolcha’s balance
of light and dark, begins to develop hairline fractures.
Ah, right-thinking listeners and performers, what if that
good rapper over there, the one with the major label deal, idolizes Jay-Z,
and bites lines and themes from the movie Scarface, while you’re so cool
your whole atmosphere is inspired by Blade Runner? (Or Augustus Pablo,
or Bob Marley, or Bob Dylan?) What if you’re both ultimately suckers for
“corporations exploiting poverty psychology,”
as others were diagnosed in “The World is A Ghetto”?
And what if, in or out of the ghetto, all coping mechanisms,
ll safe distancing of disorienting negativity, turn out to be a kind of
dislocation, at least when you bump into your set limits, and are no longer so
complacently miserable, or even so comfortably numb? (And yet your music
is so much hipper than Pink Floyd’s.) When somebody wakes you up to
blame the messenger, whap the rapper, and dammmn, did you know it all along?
But Blue Maxx to the rescue once again, with comic relief,and then something else
. When he was still Madd, he quit the Goats, reportedly disgusted with their partying,
and also also denounced their pre-trend political-satirical rap-punk-metal approach,
just as that became the next big nexus, Furthermore, his next rap band, Incognegro,
also eschewed Jay-Z’s corporate rap endorsement of “money, power, and respect to
black people,” as Madd-to-Maxx put it in Philadelphia’s City Paper.
Now he’s living in Berlin, and first shows up on Gestalt with “Tomchak,”
which at first seems like a low-key,‘wry, everyguy balance to RQM’s intensity.
All about how he’s never gonna drink again, until he does, and on a work night,
and then references to various party misadventures are eventually replaced by,
“My job blows, your job blows, everybody’s cool cause everybody knows.”
Actually, it also sounds like he might be saying “cold,” “coal,” or “code,” and
the more he repeats this refrain, the more all of those words seem appropriate:
he and we (whoever) may be tools and fools, but somehow, the whole track is so
simple and subtle, that its political point doesn’t seem as cold and scary as “Black Ice.”
(Where some might be distracted by RQM whispering,
“Take a look in my eyes: crushed ice,” like Tricky might. Maxx doesn’t do that stuff.)
“Crushed Ice” is followed by another Maxxterpiece, “Black Record.”
Starts a s low-key as “Tomchak,” but he sounds a little older and wiser,
or maybe just resigned to the reasonably hopeful (?) slog of living.
“You can’t find it man, but I know you been searchin’.
Steady on the grind, but I know you been workin’.
He even advises himself and/or his buddy to
“Keep it inside, the sunshine the center.” Keepin’ it inside is the concern here,
no inspirational flights on this track.
Then he suddenly sees the electric light, is shocked to find the same old party’s going on!
“The masses sit back like nothin’s goin’ on, look through rose-colored glasses, every other
song ‘bout Cristal and asses!” So now he’s smashing false gods, or at least boasting against
the boasters, “My style’s like acid, almost subliminal, take a moment to grasp it.”
Yeah, and then he gets even more subtle, from boasting to rapid fire toasting
(at least making actual “banana fana” type rhymes, not unlike the ancient
Top Forty novelty hit, “The Name Game.”)
But theme to the point of being a sucker for the material:
“Dingin’ for the dolla, ya livin’ in squalla, falla mah meanin’,
Devastating, but then just in case we don’t get it,
Or is it “sugs,”as in “sucks”?
Beyond the possible alternates in“Tomchak,”
and even more than as a stand-in for “sucks,”
“sugs” gradually takes on a meaning and identity in distortion itself.
So does Poeller’s beat-down bimbo, done by the forces of
society, and self, and by Maxx’s heavy hand.
But she makes her presence signify, and soon she and he
are chanting softly together, “Gimme Gimme Gimme.”
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