Better known as the auteur that birthed the poorly monikered "blaxploitation" genre with his groundbreaking 1971 film Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song, Melvin Van Peebles also made contributions to literature with La Permission, Broadway with his score for Ain't Supposed to Die a Natural Death, and theatre with his own Don't Play Us Cheap. So, when not starring in and producing independent features, painting, writing plays and books about trading futures, or else making a soundtrack with some unknown band known as Earth, Wind & Fire, he was concurrently cutting proto-rap tracks along the lines of Gil Scott-Heron and The Last Poets and releasing LPs on A&M; and Stax.
Originally issued by Atlantic Records in 1974, Van Peebles' third album takes truth in advertising to its excruciating extreme, as he really can't sing on any of these eight songs. Wince as his warble rafts out from the manholes like tone-deaf Dr. John gris smoke or Ol' Dirty Bastard's hustler uncle, and realize its potency: forcing poetry through like Leonard Cohen with Thunderbird breath, Melvin's intent clench of voice stinks like cigar smoke, obnoxious and burning on tracks like "A Birth Certificate Ain't Nothing but a Death Warrant Anyway" as hookers chirp back from across 110th Street that you got to "get it, get it." And yet, the world-weary breath of Van Peebles also knows the hard-earned truth, enough to croak to you from across "So Many Bars" that: "Between a woman's breast is the thickest thorns you can ever lay your head on."
Is it worth wading through the viscous chocolate pudding that he drools like Bill Cosby? When he's coughing up razor blade lines like, "If the Lord's eye is on the sparrow, what's wrong with Big Brother watching you?" while telethon femme robots coo "Save the Watergate 500," the answer is yes. As he steps out of the time of Nixon and into the fog of war (and misinformation) to deliver a verse like: "Sure we lost a couple of soldiers and they raised a tax or two/ Yeah, maybe there was a promise broken and that law and order rallying call don't seem as shiny as it used to/ But come on and rally round the flag, y'all," it's plain that it takes the ugliest of voices and darkest of humors to survive and render the horror of truth, either personal or political.
Not quite the iconoclast in the recorded medium, though, the arrangements by Harold Wheeler draw too heavily upon the standard production sound of the day. Stevie Wonder's "Superstition" gets recast with a Richard Pryor "Wino vs. Junkie" opening bit, twinkling steel drums, and overwrought female choruses. But it all comes together on the sappy, stringy, cloyingly sweet tale, "Eyes on the Rabbit", which utilizes Melvin's syrupy Elmer Fudd baritone to greatest effect: Melvin realizes he misses his old girlfriend, a preschool teacher, as he humbly cuts out paper rabbits and glues on the eyes. Leave it to the actor/writer/director to nail the cheesy sentiment in such as a way as to make you misty-eyed.
