The 'Days Between Stations' columns, Interview magazine 1992-2008: The Goats
April 1993
Roll up for the Goats’ scabrous carny rap!
“The Goats!" crowed the counterwoman as she rang up Tricks of the Shade (Ruffhouse/Columbia). It's the first album from a blacks-plus-whites Philadelphia rap aggregation, and it's an oddity: a stream of fast-moving, muscular songs about perfidy and corruption intercut with low-comedy skits on "Uncle Scam's Federally Funded Well Fair and Freak Show."
The Goats' "Cumin' in 'Ya Ear" was playing in the record store. "Aren't they wonderful?' said the counterwoman. The voices on the tune—raps traded off like a basketball going round the horn, by OaTie Kato (James D'Angelo), Swayzack (Patrick Jay Shupe), and Madd (Mats Stoyanoff-Williams)—seemed live in the aisles. "There's so much calculation in rap right now," the counterwoman went on, as if there wasn't here. For a moment the music did seem that loose, that much designed solely by its own momentum. There's a lot of calculation on Tricks of the Shade, or thought, but maybe not the calculation of what will please, what will sell, what's been presold. The disc comes wrapped in five panels depicting carnival scenes without any racial metaphors: full-color paintings at once grotesque and gorgeous. The last thing they seem to promise is "rap"; they're credited to one Vinnie Angel. The Goats' bio disclaims their hometown American Bandstand legacy of "gee-whiz apple-pie culture," but in the '50s Dick Clark's Philly show was grungy, sweaty, and if Vinnie Angel isn't a '50s American Bandstand name, I've never heard one. Thanks on Tricks of the Shade go to, among other conventionally legit hip-hop names, John Coltrane, A Tribe Called Quest, and various Goats' moms, but also to Emma Goldman, Billy Bragg, Noam Chomsky, The Progressive magazine (cover headline after Bill Clinton's election: FOUR MORE YEARS), and perpetual presidential candidate Lenora B. Fulani of the dubious New Alliance party. Every aspect of Tricks seems made to throw you off your step, to defeat whatever expectations you might bring to it, even the second or tenth time you're playing it.
Take the Uncle Scam carnival skits. They start out corny, even if their first premise is horrific. On July 4, 1999, "our hero, Chickenlittle," meets his newborn, seemingly full-grown (he walks, he talks) baby brother, Hanger-head, spawn of an aborted abortion: the kid's got a coat hanger sticking out of his head. "CHICKENLITTLE:... where's ma moms? DOCTOR: Your mom was arrested by the Prolivins for attempting an abortion and is now doing time in Prolivin Penal Prison.” So the two kids set off down the yellow brick road to find help in Uncle Scam's Well Fair. Their voices are squeaky, dopey, but there's something about their little pas de deux that keeps their fey routines alive long after you've got whatever joke there is. Partly it's their weirdly believable, pathetic eagerness; partly it's the rich, complex action in the background, the carny noises, stray bits of dialogue you don't quite catch, stuff you know you're missing, an ambience as layered and seductive as the science-fiction-of-ordinary-life soundscapes the Firesign Theater used to come up with. Mostly, though, it's the jarring, obvious, radical contrast of the little play. The kids are suckers, but everyone they meet on Uncle Scam's happy-go-lucky nightmare alley has sleaze oozing from his pores: the whole show seems set not on the outskirts of town but smack on Eighth Avenue. After a while, you kind of don’t really want to know who or what they're going to meet up with next—and after the climax of their awful adventures, you sort of really don't believe what you've heard. The boys' early visit to "Noriega's Coke Stand" is a bower of innocence compared to what happens in "Drive-By Bumper Cars."
Up against this futureworld the action in the strictly present-tense rap tracks is easy enough to follow, but no more predictable. The rhymes—diatribes against power, denunciations of the powerful, humor that's not really funny because it's so fully disempowered—aren't on a Public Enemy level, but they're never lazy. Without being brilliant, they're playful, infectiously so, sometimes holidays of meaninglessness in the middle of a point being made: “In this age of no phase ya know who's gonna be wreckin' it With the crazy, spacy, Hendrix like H, Purple maple syrup, jump the hurdle." That's from "¿Do the Digs Dug?"—which also features such homilies as "I'm gonna burn the Bushes and cut the Quayle's beak Uh oh, yo, here I come again Holdin' up the crap like the diaper Depends Aw George, ya don't pay attention Put down the golf clubs and stop takin' away the pensions Whatcha ma call it, the Emancipation Procla... somethin' It doesn't mean a thing 'cause back then I wasn't nothin' Just 1/3 of, what's that word, um, human."
Even here, there's no preachiness, no condescension, no moment when the voices on the disc are superior to what they're talking about. All over the music, there's surprise and energy. It's the surprise of a lovely, spooky slide blues guitar part on "Carnival Cops" (by Pierce Ternay), or the complete-in-itself female chanting/moaning in "Aaah D Yaaa" (presumably by Rucyl Mills, credited with “all singing"). The energy is special, coming, perhaps, from what Bill Clinton recently called a fundamental democratic principle: "The idea that most people can do most jobs." ("Don't vote for fascists such as Clinton, Bush, Reagan, or any Republican," reads the "Moral” to the lyric sheet on Tricks of the Shade.)
With three rappers, a DJ, backing vocalists, a five-piece live band, plus a streetful of comrade writers, musicians, voices, artists, and actors, and no feeling that as a listener you need separate a star from a worker, the patent joy in invention you hear in Tricks calls up, as much as anything else, a few lines from Alexis de Tocqueville, from Democracy in America (1835): "There are, in all, nineteen principal offices in a township. Every inhabitant is required, on pain of being fined, to undertake these different functions, which, however, are almost all paid, in order that the poorer citizens may give time to them without loss." The feeling in the Goats' music is that even if every participant is not part of every task, he or she could be—or, one of these days, will be.
Originally published in Interview Magazine, April 1993
Local triple-bill w/ Disposable Heroes of Hiphoprisy and The Coup would be a funky political jam.