Things I Will Keep #4: THE NEGRO PROBLEM, Post-Minstrel Syndrome

The Negro Problem
Post-Minstrel Syndrome
1997, Aerial Flipout

One of the reasons why I stopped collecting records is because music, for the most part, stopped contributing anything to my life that I needed.

That’s not a criticism of music. That doesn’t mean that I dislike music now. Music didn’t fail me. I just stopped needing it.

I still hear things, new and old, that I like all of the time. I’m still married to a few longtime favorites (see my Robert Pollard series, for example). I’m also not an old crank who jerks off to the bands he loved twenty years ago and shuns anything new. (A lot of the new indie rock I hear is just as good, maybe even better, than what I came up with in the 90s; I like that they often embrace the synthesizer sounds of the 80s, which 90s indie bands naturally tended to avoid.)

We all follow our own paths and on mine these days I rarely put on music as a voice that I need to hear. Looking back, music was often a balm for my daily depressions. It got me through problems with relationships and jobs and self-loathing. It calmed my nerves and provided comfort, as well as a very real endorphin rush when I’d spend a little too much money on it at a record store counter.

These days, I still get the daily depressions, but now I consider it my responsibility alone to get myself out of it. I need to move and think and write and crack jokes. Other people’s music can’t help anymore. Other people usually can’t even help anymore. It’s all on me.

I have these nightmares that I’ve wasted my life. The dreams are never explicit about it. They’re short abstract films where nothing seems to happen. I’m riding a bicycle around my old neighborhood where I grew up. I’m in an empty apartment that I lived in back in 2006 and staring out the window or looking around the kitchen (I dream often about empty houses and apartments; I don’t know if I’ve moved out or I’m moving in). That’s the whole dream, but I wake up crushed with sadness.

So, pop songs from twentysomethings about how great and exciting life is and how the worst problem they ever faced was their breakup from their college sweetheart tend to not do it for me.

My absolute, top shelf, favorite music is all from aging fucks who flipped over life’s game board years ago and are too old to have any other option than to make their own rules. They’re not glamorous. Kids don’t like them. They’re not chasing stardom; they’re chasing a vision. They’re rare, but they’re out there.

Like Stew from The Negro Problem.

Behind the provocative band name is some of the world’s most fearsome and beautiful psychedelic-soul. The songs are loud and unruly, for the most part, while songwriter Stew shouts, bellows, leaps into a falsetto and sometimes whispers. The Negro Problem are one of those bands who were onto something from their first album.

It helped that Stew wasn’t a kid. He was in his late 30s. He’d gone through a lot of phases. Been around the block. Done this and that. Made some of the same mistakes that we all make. Worked on his shit for years and was dedicated to being an artist. He developed a healthy sense of humor along the way and a love for songcraft. As I said before, we all have our own paths and Stew’s took him straight down Melody Lane.

I first heard Post-Minstrel Syndrome in 1999 when, because the band emerged from the Los Angeles underground pop scene, a lot of power pop geek-types heard this and didn’t know what to make of it. Some loved it; others hated it. The controversy intrigued me and sent me straight to Tower Records (R.I.P.), where you could find anything. I was all of 22 years old and… I did like this album, but I didn’t really understand it. It took me about ten years to appreciate its odd mix of pop melody, funk, soul and so many A&M Records-style horns and strings that it sounds like a thrift store vinyl bin exploded. I can be a little slow sometimes. I just needed to live a little more, I guess.

Today, I love every weird and busy moment on this record, from the single-ready hook monster of “Buzzing” to the gorgeous slow-flowering “Miss Jones”, the solo acoustic candle-burn of “Doubting Uncle Tom”, the El Lay smog of “The Great Leap Forward”, the full-on pulsating-organ psych of “Witch”…. and I could go on.

And how do you NOT love lines like “I’d like to meet your new main squeeze/I hear she’s such a Tastee Freeze” or “I watched the Oprah Winfrey Show today/I never thought the world would end this way”? And I still think of the line “trivial birdcage Sunday newspaper” when I glance at the “news” that the internet wants to me to know about.

I still hear new things on this album today. The weird twists in the songs. Little pieces of wisdom in the lyrics. This is one of those albums that you can listen to for the rest of your life.

The Negro Problem also deserve credit for being the only band in the world that I’d care to hear cover “MacArthur Park”, which they do here and for which Stew updates its most famous lyric as “someone left their crack out in the rain“.

There are eighteen tracks here (thirteen mentioned on the back cover and then four gorgeous, mostly skeletal and acoustic unlisted bonus tracks, and one sound collage joke, that start up immediately after the “final” song), but you can tell that Stew has probably written five hundred other songs that we’re not hearing here.

At the time, 60s-style retro pop bands were everywhere if you were into indie rock. Kids with guitars had learned to perfectly imitate The Kinks or The Zombies or The Beach Boys. You’d trip over bands like this when you went out to check the mail. The Apples in Stereo. The Minders. The Ladybug Transistor. All of those Elephant 6 dorks that I don’t care if I ever hear again.

The Negro Problem eat all of those bands for breakfast, because Stew wasn’t idealizing the Summer of Love. He knew that it wasn’t 1967 anymore and he had no interest in pretending otherwise.

But some of those sounds are worth savoring, so he picked them up and ran with them for an album about the complications of love, about the things that he sees on the streets, about the life of a black man in America.

Stew’s songs are weird, yet sound, pieces of architecture while the band and production take it over the top and rip the baroque pop sound from English gardens and transplant it to the streets of Los Angeles to glorious results.

All of Stew’s albums are great, whether it’s with The Negro Problem or his more mellow solo work. All of them are albums worth keeping after you’ve dumped almost everything else. Watch this space for future gushing.