Fishbone - Chim Chim's Badass Revenge
(From Drivel #5, Oct/Nov 96)
(BMG)

After going through traumas more unique than any rewrite of Spinal Tap,
Fishbone are back - having been dumped by one major label and treated
with a fair degree of contempt by their current one. This album has been
out for a month or so now and could only be purchased on import. Fuckin'
what? A couple of minutes is taken for an Interlude in which you are
re-introduced to the band, perhaps as a remedy for the frustrating lack
of news on this band for the last two years. This is no small-time LA
ska-funk-punk outfit, and the band reflect their frustrations with the
music Biz most blatantly with Rock Star; classic Fishbone crunching
guitar, tightarse brass and Angelo Moore rattling off machine gun lyrics

"Racism!/Separation!/Media!/So you guess I can say I'm an angry brotha.
Can't play my music cause of barrier of colour/Deep in debt with a seven
record set/Videos and funky shows but no-one knows...."

Maybe a call of sourgrapes by a band who've never quite hit? Can you
imagine the sense of gall these guys feel? Together since 1979, they
watch as a 90s generation of snotty-nosed whiteboys take punk, dumb it
down and make it into pop every bit as inane as the shitty electro-funk
wheeled out and labelled 'dance' music.

If there was ever a band who played music expressly in order to get the
crowd jumping around like loonies, it was this. (Hands up all those who
witnessed singer Angelo Moore climb the outside of the Palace stairs and
jump backwards from the balcony into the crowd, only to roll across the
crowd and back on stage for a sax solo).

For ska, take their efforst Alcoholic and In the Cube. Oh yes, happyjoy
lyrics about being a punk rocker treated like shit by an alcoholic
uncle, but it's music to leap about insanely to, with glimpses of a
soon-to-be antiquated art-form - musicians able to sample other music
simply by playing it in the middle of something else, rather than DAT or
sample. In the Cube gives you that other side of Fishbone - the
completely insane one. Who sings big bluesy ska about being so fed up
with the world they live down a toilet?

The title of this album gives you a clue as to the afro-centric approach
to rock these guys have (Sweet Sweetback's Badasssss Revenge was the
1971 film classic that spawned the 'blaxploitation' era of film) yet
they don't beat you over the head with it, although precious honkeys may
have a problem with the scream of "KILLLL WHITEEY!" before the 58 second
thrash of Riot in which Moore screams When you ain't got shit / make you
wanna loot shit! When ya fuckin fed up/ sure gonna sshoot shit! Fishbone
are the masters of using music as monkey bars to swing and flip around,
and after so long gone it's great to hear them back in the playground in
such style.

Soulman Rushdie.