If this years masterful sophomore album White Men Are Black Men Too hadn’t convinced you that Edinburgh’s avant garde alt rapper popsters Young Fathers weren’t simply one of the best bands around right this minute, their assured 45 minute run through the highlights of their seven year career yesterday as part of “OkayAfrica” at Central Park’s SummerStage should have done the job.
The trio (plus touring drummer) shared lead and backup harmonies, sometimes switching roles mid-song, where backing tapes when necessary and beats and beats and beats consistently lead them where they might want to go. Opening with the rhythmic cluttered straight to the feet “No Way”, at first I thought it was the Kayus Bankole show. But by the very next song, “Queen Is Dead” with its “Money money cash for gold” hook, it became clear this was a democracy and revolved around rapping over tough tough beats that spanked out all over the place: more house than hip hop. In the glorious summer afternoon, the 2014 Mercury Prize winners, performed with intensity befitting their unique agitprop world view. “All that, gimme that, gimme that, all that” they intoned at the end of the set, as though they’ve seen it and don’t like it.
“Don’t you turn my home against me , Even if my house is empty” they warn on “Deadline” to straddling bassy dub drums, something like M.I.A. without the tweeness or Massive Attack if they were all massive. Young Fathers know from money problems, “G” Hastings was raised in the Drylaw housing estate (part of paradise postponed), and the sound is both very dark and very heavy: to really mix metaphors, it isn’t like Marijuana, it is like a hammer in a knife fight.
The trio are all movement and performance, they come together and drift apart, spit out verses and disappear only to come back, sometimes they sing, sometimes they rap and on their best song “Old Rock And Roll” Alloysious Massaquoi takes the first verse before giving the reigns to Kayus but not really because all three chant “Niggah, Ohwae Ohwae, Awake” while Tom Toms beat from the back: like West Africa visiting Scotland. It is as great a concert moment as I’ve seen all year.
To say “Old Rock And Roll” is their best song is to insult no one, it is a stronger political concept than anything you’ll find on either Kendrick’s To Pimp A Butterfly or D’Angelo’s Black Messiah (if not Tomas Doncker’s upcoming The Mess We Made). Part of this may, indeed, be cultural: we live in a country where black men are systematically beaten down till they see life through a prism of defeated criminality, whereas a man from Ghana lives in a black country, and three men in what amounts to the projects in Edinburgh, are class minorities long before they are race minorities. Young Father don’t swagger exactly but they don’t harness black rage the way Kendrick does, or black opportunism the way Jay Z does. As Mark Pringle noted when I wrote the Zayn Malik story through a Pakistani paradigm: that wasn’t the way it was read in the UK.
The sound has been evolving through the entire 45 minutes, and the trio haven’t really stopped dancing all afternoon to the place where you bet they add strings on the next album. and for the penultimate song of the set, the superb “Shame”(I am posting the official video below), “G” Hastings barks “Do you want to dance? But really dance, no ironic dancing…” and everybody dances. Imagine if Portishead and TV On The Radio had a baby, that would be this. Yes, that good. I loved it and I also think I underestimated the subtle antiviolence track earlier this year, this performance had me gobsmacked. That it wasn’t a hit in the US suggests the US is a hard sell, but that it didn’t blow up in the UK??? How on earth did it not make Young Fathers superstars? I am guessing it was a problem with the label who should have lead with “Shame” instead of “Still Running”
Summerstage was less than full for Young Fathers performance, but I have no doubt the audience were enraptured, there was none of the usual shuffling and talking. They complained it was quiet but they missed the point: it was quiet because people were listening to this brilliant band. Simply one of the best anywhere today.
Grade: A
