[Today: The Jungle Brothers go their own way...]
“But is hip-hop really music?” my mother-in-law Judy asked me over cocktails last August. Coming from anyone else, this would be a thinly veiled jab, a comment that hip-hop was most definitely not music. But my mother-in-law is a good egg, and not the judgmental sort, so from her it came as a genuine inquiry. Perhaps she’d been misjudging hip-hop because she was viewing it within the context of music, while this was some other kind of art altogether. I laughed and assured her that hip-hop was indeed music, but what I really wanted to do was drop the needle on the Jungle Brothers’ Done By The Forces Of Nature.
This 1989 album is a showcase for everything that’s right about hip-hop: thoughtful lyrics, clever rhymes, positive vibrations, smart samples, and good humor. Absent from its grooves are knuckle-headed misogyny, violent imagery, gratuitous cursing, and lame skits. The Jungle Brothers’ tunes live in a different universe from the typical rap topics – ghettos, guns and hos – and instead deal with subjects such as black pride, hard work, vegetarianism, house music and belly dancers. This is an upbeat joyride through real black consciousness, minus the stereotypes, and these tunes are driven by an outstanding collection of funky samples. Done By The Forces Of Nature is less frenetic than the Beastie Boys’ Paul’s Boutique, but both albums clearly came from an era when sampling old records was a low-cost, at-will proposition, and both artists exquisitely pillaged the past to create something undeniably new.
‘What U Waitin’ 4?’ was selected by VH1 as the 88th greatest hip-hop song of all-time, but it’s hard to think of many tunes in any genre that are better than this. There are at least twelve different infectious grooves embedded within the song, which is an open invitation to get down and boogie. ‘Feelin’ Alright’ pays tribute to the joys of a two-month paid vacation in Africa, and ‘Acknowledge Your Own History’ is a non-preachy primer on the typecasting of American history. Appropriately enough for a rap album named after a line in the Bhagavad Gita, Done By The Forces Of Nature sold just 27,000 copies on release. But 20 years later it remains one of the freshest, funkiest, smartest albums on the market – proof positive that hip-hop has an intellectual pulse and actually qualifies as music.
Listen: What U Waitin’ 4?
Listen: Feelin’ Alright
