A Slap from Left Field
Spank Rock fuses dance music and hip-hop for a bracing good time
There's a new generation of hipsters living on the edge of understated irreverence. Comedy has Saturday Night Live's Andy Samberg (with his YouTube omnipresence). Film has Jon Heder (Blades of Glory, Napoleon Dynamite). Gosh. And now pop music has rising, post-hip-hop act Spank Rock. Nearly a year ago, the quartet debuted with the critic-wowing YoYoYoYoYo, which staked a claim somewhere between Licensed to Ill and today's Dirty South. Nasty, schoolboy rhymes met sparse synths and spaced-out booty bass. Along with the likes of Lady Sovereign, Diplo, and M.I.A., Spank Rock is coming at hip-hop from left field, deflating the genre's thug archetype with sassy antics and up-tempo, e-music beats. It's almost as if Samberg's William Hung-level rapping as "the Blizzard Man" character has come to life, except that Spank Rock's Naeem Juwon can really spit.
Spank Rock is reprising last year's breakout with a new mix-CD, Fabriclive.33, part of London club Fabric's lauded series of DJ-mixed compilations. Officially due next month (but available now online), it's one of the year's best dance music long-players so far, taking listeners on a journey through hip-hop's leather-pants past (Kurtis Blow's "The Breaks"), dance music's skating-rink glory days (Yello's "Bostich," Kano's "I'm Ready"), and, of course, e-music's future sounds (Mylo's "Drop the Pressure"). That list might not sound that tongue-in-cheek. But then the Spank Rock boys drop rhymes over Kano's disco groove like it's 1982 at Manhattan's Fun House. And Mylo gets a cathartic, one-off rap off his own, marking the loop-frenzied peak of the 111-minute, 29-track trip. By the time Yes's "Owner of a Lonely Heart" drops, you're getting the picture: This is no 50 Cent mixtape with a gangsta pose. This is a come-one, come-all plastic-cup party.
"The thing is," says Spank Rock DJ Chris "Rockswell" Devlin, "we've been getting interested in the dance music scene since the release of YoYoYoYoYo. We were into hip-hop, but the album was the beginning of 'Let's figure out how to have a good time again.' That's the roots of hip-hop, playing good records, not necessarily hip-hop records, but just creating a good party."
Indeed, the second half of the mix ignites with K.W. Griff's James Brown-esque "Good Man," which gets accosted by some raunchy female rhymes. Soon, when Tangerine Dream's "Love on a Real Train" hits, you might fear that this whole thing is just turning into a glow-stick festival. The trance-like flow of Simian Mobile Disco's
"Hustler" doesn't calm your concerns, but then Rick Ross starts rapping about his own "Hustlin'" over the synths: "I know Pablo, Noriega/The real Noriega/He owe me a hundred favors." And he's still rapping when the Romantics "Talking in Your Sleep" drops, in-time.
The group, with roots in Baltimore, Philadelphia, and New York, formed at the millennium, with producer Alex "XXXChange" Epton, rapper Juwon (a.k.a. MC Spank Rock), and Devlin at its core. Battle DJ Ronnie Darko was recruited later. Amanda Blank is a frequent guest MC. This year and last have been booming for the quartet, with a January appearance on Jimmy Kimmel Live, songs licensed to videogames (on the Junkie XL-produced soundtracks to Madden NFL 07 and Need For Speed: Carbon), and a Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival debut Sunday night. The new mix-CD, produced mainly by studio whiz Epton, is brilliant, but it's not alone in its outlook. Diplo's own Fabriclive.24 helped reignite the eclectic dance music revolution. And, as it happens, the DJ helped Spank Rock get discovered when he passed a demo along to label Big Dada. The result, YoYoYoYoYo, was an unprecedented combination of Southern-tinged "Baltimore bass" with girl-obsessed player talk. But Fabriclive.33 is clearly modeled on Diplo's own precedent-setting, tossed-salad DJ excursions.
"We're lumped in as part of this DJ movement," Devlin admits. But paying homage to Diplo "makes sense," he adds.
Where Diplo's own Fabric mix started with Plantlife's derivative "Love 4 the World," Spank Rock's ends with L.T.D.'s original, "Love to the World." It was done, of course, with reverence.
Published: 04/26/2007
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