Special Delivery, and: Group Therapy (review)

Novelty songwriter Jimm Juback, while listening to James Brown in 1972, predicted that black music would soon become entirely rhythm. The ensuing three-plus decades of hip-hop rap music have not proven him wrong as to the primacy of a good beat. In affirming that, two CDs from 2005 also provoke thoughts on rap as text.

Text is often used as a visual motif by Chinese contemporary artists, and Michigan photographer Shaun Bangert has covered portraits of members of her family with text. Tunsi delivers dance beat as text, as telegraphy of the body, gestural movements. One is reminded of those pages of the faux-text—a sort of German blackletter and a linear electrocardiogram stutter—found in Rick Griffin's Man from Utopia 1971 comic book for acidheads.

Tunsi's Special Delivery makes use of a high banshee descant, comparable to "Jump" (1991) by the Irish-American crew Ace of Bass. Tunsi provides Special Delivery in an instrumental form, like a Jamaican dub version, as well. Juback's collaborator Gary Malvin once demonstrated a simple riff, in "Gordon and Bobby," whereas Juback exclaimed that it was like the mnemonic a high-school nerd would use to memorize an electronics formula. Tunsi's "Whoop De Do" fits that description, too, using a smart/stoopid motif as a bed for motor-mouthed braggadocio, while "Shock Pain" is powered by another, similarly engaging riff. "Politics at Work" is a promising slice of critical dance music, a genre briefly explored in Britain a quarter-century ago, as in M's "Pop Music" or something by the Gang of Four. It is as if only bodies in movement on the dance floor can shake apart a glimpse of the inner workings of the Spectacle.

Whereas Oakland's Tunsi appears to be a one-man production, a studio mastermind along the lines of Prince, the Elephant Tribe of Chicago is a crew. Four faces appear on the cover, which are likely b-knucklez, israel, jay and drunken monkee, for they receive the most numerous songwriting credits on the 27-track CD. Other collaborators—sharing the humility of lowercase names—include demo, rusty, shake, bacardi, brando, turon, billie and phoenix. Illiana obviously wants her name capitalized, thank you.

The Elephant Tribe's Group Therapy CD is a "mix tape," purchased (possibly from one of the Elephant Tribe) at a table set up on Chicago's Michigan Avenue one afternoon last August, appropriately a couple of blocks from both the Apple Computer store and Tower Records. It has a surprising variety of hip-hop approaches and plenty of good tracks. The disc is marred, though, by the rambling spoken bits attributed to Talman Greed. Perhaps he is a neighborhood character that the crew finds funny or wise, or perhaps it is just the kind of foolin'-around indulgence that mars homeboy productions like the movie Straight Out of Compton.

Beyond the good beats for dancing and grooving, the storytelling, the scene-setting and personal boasting, hip-hop is also interesting here as that textual artifact, its rap an easily visualized verbal typography, one that needs to be embodied to be appreciated. As a traveling child, I played a game of looking out the train window and pretending a motorcycle rider was rolling over land, treetops, jumping rivers and highways, beside the Chicago-bound train. Elephant Tribe's wordplay serves as a contemporary soundtrack for that game, the train rolling through Chicago neighborhoods and their South Side home. Their boisterous effusiveness, a Hieronymus Bosch-like excess, is easy to criticize as intemperate until I recall my own college favorites, writers like William Burroughs, Hunter Thompson and Lester Bangs, none of them circumspect or terse.

The listener contrasts the Chicago posse of MCs at the mic with the Oakland guy who works as one man, one voice and...