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“Filthy Raggs Ridin Muzik” By NeckBone

 

 Album Reviews…

Music: November 27, 2009

http://www.austinchronicle.com/gyrobase/Issue/review?oid=921286

Texas Platters

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By Chase Hoffberger    Proving that soulful Texas hip-hop still has a pulse despite the departure of Bavu Blakes, locals Neckbone turn ATX on the Southern-playalistic tip with Filthy Raggs Ridin Muzik (Urbanian Entertainment), a 19-track mother ship connection that’s all “Bounce Slide Bounce.” Fueled by the dirty stank of Ter’ell Shahid’s Promethazine-injected funk, rappers Cooley Fly and James “Kowboy” Lang emerge “Soul V.I.P.’s,” with Kowboy’s guttural drawl setting the bar on “Tryin So Hard (2 Be a Baller).” Contributions from a slew of Austin’s finest, including Blakes, Gerald G, Black Mike, Drift, and D.O.S. make this a fitting “Welcome 2 Austin” for the modern age.

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Copyright © 2010 Austin Chronicle Corporation. All rights reserved.

Album Review: Neckbone “Filthy Raggs Ridin Muzik” (Urbanian Entertainment.com)

By Collins I. Aki (Boonation.com)

There once was a time when hip-hop was more than just a brand. It was something elusively authentic, blurred between the codes of a distinct experience and the novelty of an improvised expression. It was hip, because it was organic and dared to be revolutionary. But like all things that a dollar bill can attach itself to, it became commodified and docile, less of an art and more of an artifice. However, Ter’ell Shahid and his Austin based super-group band, Neckbone, have conspired to reset Hip-hop’s avant-garde.

 

“Filthy Raggs Ridin Muzik” is a 19-song middle finger directed at the hip-hop hegemony; those CEO’s and so-called moguls of the industry who have leased the discourse of rap out to self-aggrandizement and shameless fantasizing ad nauseam. Neckbone’s Cooly Fly declares on the brazen yet hauntingly looped track, “Pushin Dat Pen”, that they “refuse to let the state of affairs carry on”.  But just before you think this is another nettlesome batch of KRS-One bastard children who forgot that after the “Sound of the Police”, no one pays attention to KRS’s hip-hop jeremiads, Neckbone assures you otherwise. They don’t want to police the genre. They don’t even really want to purify it. They just want to grab MC Who-Gives-A-Damn-What-His-Name-Is by the popped collar and slap a little sense into him for thinking that making a record is only about hoping to remake “I Make it Rain” for the nth time, so that my daughter will download his ringtone for $2.95, and he’ll be able to lease, for another two weeks, that Maybach that he claims in his song he owns, and who knows, maybe even get his song into Oprah’s I-pod (okay, maybe he’s not that dumb, he’ll settle for Tyra’s). But more than trying to set the game straight, Neckbone is trying to turn the game inside out.

 

Neckbone takes a southern sound that is more Scarface –“Balls and My Word” than Slim Thug (whichever album), splashes in Ter’ell Shahid’s throw-back soul vocals over natural beats (no auto-tune here) and creates this indigenous metaphor called “Filthy Rags Riding Muzik”. This record is too grimy to be pedantic yet still too conscious to ever be gimmicky. Instead of aiming to strike a perfect note between indignation and hypocrisy (which is probably impossible), Neckbone exposes both the beauty and the beast of the idiom we call hip-hop. Aware of scandal in the truth, Neckbone asserts, on the track “Pimp Rituals”, a futurist record with the genetics of Tony Draper’s Suave sound, that the untold story of the hip-hop message is somewhere “between [the Gospels of] Luke and Mark [;] the untold chapter of a pimp”.  This street gospel of confessions and rebukes, contradictions and exhortations, dislocates what is de rigueur of the post-Shakur hip-hop artist: finding the next cute way to recreate the message of a primarily pain-free lavish lifestyle predicated on self-mythologizing and one-upmanship. And while this only reproduces a false consciousness of urban reality (these lyrical fantasies always take place in the ghetto), that product has begun to go stale and the need for authentic, grass roots hip-hop has increasingly become more relevant. Enter the Neckbone sound, as described: “A Southern Mothership, transporting lost souls and eardrums to the Father of all things through the Energy of lyrics”.

 

Neckbone, with an album called “Filthy Raggs Riding Muzick”, turns inside out, hip-hop’s ironic fetishsizing of blowing money. What Marx once described of religion, “the opiate of the masses”, Neckbone observes in urban America’s steady diet of hip-hop’s craze with lavishness: this is not creativity, this is not even imagination, this is just pure disillusionment. Already three tracks into the album, Neckbone begins its parody of hip-hop’s obsession with what is now the banality of the balling record, with the hook: “Trying so hard to be a baller, pimping hoes, gold and clothes and I ain’t even got a dollar”. Then later on in the album, as if to pause from lampooning the game, the emcees get serious and begin to ask the hard questions. In what is one of the most compelling songs on the album, “Highway tu-Hell”, the artists ask:

 

Does gangsta mean stupid niggas running from cops, do cool mean we keep our hood strung out on rocks, does boss mean all the time they keep us in jail, well I guess we got a lotta bullshit to sell, on this highway to hell

 

Neckbone realizes that the idiom of hip-hop has been bastardized. That long before hip-hop was even a genre; it was a sub-text of a black teen-age angst. Which would soon become a way of mobilizing that angst—with flavor of course—through the creation of cunning tales behind autochthonous break beats as a reaction to the neglect of Reagonomics’ greed, Daddy Bush’s war on drugs and the cognitive implications of living among inter-related disadvantage. Whereas hip-hop was once about making a caricature out of an authentic character (which is what culture does), it has now sadly invested in trying to authenticate a character out of a caricature (which is what marketing does). Thus, Neckbone laments, “hip-hoppers ain’t saying nothing, leaning and popping, looks like we running outta track and the train aint stopping”.

 

While Neckbone seeks to ask the hard questions, they fail in shaking hypocrisy from their own lamentations. But this is the price one must pay to be candid. This is no doubt a candid album and therefore a very necessary one. And as the group warns, “the industry should fear our words”, so should the listener. It’s a cliché we hear all the time in hip-hop, that this rapper or that rapper has come to change the game. But it is a rarity in a genre beholden of ring-tone downloads and ambitions of locking in a spot on the next Madden football soundtrack, that you have a group that embraces all-things and no-things all at once, as King T add-libs “ I’m still a gangsta, still a hustler, still a nerd…I ain’t shit”. The game may never know who will be the next one or next thing to bring about its next change, but if the funky brew of Neckbone’s “Filthy Raggs Ridin Muzik” is allowed to spill freely all over the landscape of hip-hop, it will know who gave it its latest kick in the ass: “I’m pushing that pen like fuck you play me”.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 ”NeckBone is killer, for real!”

-austinsurreal.blogspot.com

Hear NeckBone’s words here: www.myspace.com/neckbone512

Purchase Ter’ell Shahid and NeckBone material at: www.TerellShahid.com

 

Attention Austin, Texas:  If you care about the livlihood of Music in Austin, then PLEASE support the movement to save it!

The City is in deseperate need of a Music Commission to oversee the Music Events that make Austin what it is and what we love.

Click HERE to get information on the Music Commission

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Sit back, relax and enjoy the atmosphere. Take a look at our gallery, Chill out to our radio station. Or watch some new video’s.

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SXSW 2009 Appearances…ATX FUNKHOP BAND–NECKBONE!!HEAR OUR WORDS AT WWW.MYSPACE.COM/NECKBONE512

 

 

 

 Austin’s NeckBone YouTube (Flamingo Cantina)

 

 

 

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URBANIAN ENTERTAINMENT CONTACT INFORMATION:

Christine Thompson is Ter’ell Shahid and NeckBone’s Publicist!

Ter’ell Shahid is the Chief Creative Officer of Urbanian Entertainment

Tiffany Swingler is the VP of Marketing of Urbanian Entertainment

 

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