(Toure is a writer who lives in Brooklyn.  He writes for The New
Yorker, The New York Times, Rolling Stone, and The Village Voice.)

EXTERIOR: AMERICA, 1978-Morning.  Jimmy Carter is in the White House.
"Mork and Mindy" is a top TV show.  Close Encounters of the Third
Kind, Saturday Night Fever, and Animal House are top movies. Fade to
Black.

INTERIOR: YELLOW SCHOOL BUS (MOVING) - REALLY early morning.  Every
possible seat is filled with teenage Black boys and girls, obviously
in over their heads.  They are traveling from Watts to Hale Junior
High in the San Fernando Valley, being bused, the latest form of
African-American mandated movement.  The audience knows, from
earlier scenes, two previous major forms of mandated movement - the
Middle Passage and the Great Migration - begat cultural mutations
which begat from the first journey, blues, gospel, and jazz; and
soul, funk, and hiphop from the second.

ZOOM in on one small Black male seated quietly in the second to last
row, by the window, battling the urge to doze off.  He rubs sleep
from still-groggy eyes and glances wearily out the school bus
window.  We see an audacious pimp, clearly heading home from a long,
long night, cruising by in a long white Cadillac.  Funkadelic's "One
Nation Under A Groove" oozes from his ride.  The boy blinks slowly. 
When his eyes open again, the pimp-mobile has become a
weather-beaten green Volvo station wagon, a White teenage boy with
long scruffy hair at the wheel, blaring rush's "Trees."  The Black
boy on the bus looks down at the brown paper bag in his lap, and
slowly opens it, looking to bite into the plain old turkey or ham
sammich Mom always makes.  But somehow, he opens it and finds the
brown paper bag filled with thick, bubbling hot gumbo ...

TITLE CARD: "... So far as culture is concerned all Americans are
part-Negro.  Some are more so than others, of course, but the
essential qualification is not color or race ... [In this] I include
Afro-Americans.  THEY ARE PART NEGRO, BUT ONLY PART." 			 						

		-Literary legend, Albert Murray

INTERIOR GUMBO (MOVING).  A thick, reddish-yellow, clearly piping
hot sauce floats around.  Tasty shrimps, plump slices of sausage,
and white rice float by in peaceful harmony.

OVER GUMBO, WE HEAR NARRATOR: Busing in LA only lasted from 1978 to
1981, but for a certain handful of Black boys from Watts - known as
Norwood, Special K, Dirty Walt, Chris, and Fish - and one Angelo
from the Valley, the damage had been done.  Nearly a decade and a
half later, the mulattoized sound of Watts meeting the San Fernando
Valley remains at large because the only band in the history of
Black music to form as children (12 and 13 years old!) and maintain
into adulthood (some fathers many times over!) is still doin' its
funkskapunk thang hardcore.  We know them (DRAMATIC PAUSE) as
Fishbone.

What it means to be Black, according to the example laid down by
some prophets named James, George, Bob, Marvin, Stevie, and Sly, is
that, Saturday night ain't that far from Sunday Morning.  That
commentary and catharsis should be simultaneous.  That in the same
four and a half minutes you ought to make rumps shake and tell it
like it is.  With that paradigm in mind, and within that pantheon,
Fishbone can stand proudly.

With Fishbone, style screams out the message.  With Fishbone you know
they're not marking borders within themselves - it's One Nation Under
A Groove - Everybody Is A Star - One Love - unity universal - as done
by the affirmative action generation.  With Fishbone they just don't
give a fuck - so you know that whoever you are, IF YOU WANT TO BE
DOWN, SHEET, YOU IS DOWN.  And when they burst in the door with their
uncategorizable, multiply-miscegenated groove and their unbelievably
unabashedly exquisitely sexually enthusiastically manically pure
energy shows ...

"A lot of people claim bravery, but only Fishbone is COMPLETELY
FEARLESS.  At one show in Chicago with Living Colour, Angelo somehow
climbed onto a speaker stack and the speaker stack was incredibly
high.  It was so high that it was like, you really shouldn't do this.
 I remember Angelo climbing to the top of the speaker stack and we're
talking, off of the stage, it was twenty or twenty-five feet which,
it's insane.  It was like, Oh my God, he lost his mind ... He can't
be thinking about ... And as soon as I thought to myself, he can't,
he did - he DOVE.  It was the most foolhardy ... he could've been
killed ... he literally put the fate of his life in the love of the
crowd ... if the crowd didn't catch him ... there's no way that from
the height he jumped he wouldn't have been killed ... but when he
jumped it was like the mosh pit ... in the spot where he would've
landed ... it was as if the cells of a body, ya know, the white blood
cells come to attack an intruding ... it was like people gathered in
the spot where he would be ... it was like people had a sense that if
there weren't enough of them to catch him he would've been killed ...
so the crowd gathered into the spot where he was going to land ... In
the moment it was beyond terrifying, but ultimately it was beautiful
and it was about the fact that the love was there for him ..."

		- Guitar legend, Vernon Reid.

Of course, if the story is about being Black in America, it can't
have a happy ending.  This one is no different.  While the story of
Fishbone is, musically, about what it means to be Black,
commercially it must be about what it is to be the tragic mulatto,
shunned by White and Black (radio).  Fishbone has had to bitterly
accept the limited commercial acceptance of their genius, to
understand that their deeply influential, massively important, madly
loved music would never sell widely.  Fishbone fulfilled the
promise: they rocked hard and they talked deep, but - in a fact more
reflective of American racial myopia than anything else - through
eleven years of recording not one of Fishbone's albums went
platinum.  At the end of his autobiography, Malcom X says the credit
for his success is due to Allah.  Only the mistakes were his.  For
Fishbone, the music is genius from above.  If they didn't blow up,
the fault is ours.

Fishbone leapt from a killer height.  Did you catch them?

		- Toure

(Toure is a writer who lives in Brooklyn.  He writes for The New
Yorker, The New York Times, Rolling Stone, and The Village Voice.)