Arrested Development is old news in MTV Standard Time. But good music has shelf life, even if its accompanying video is no longer in heavy rotation. Fittingly, Arrested Development's work is for the long haul: It sinks deep roots into cultural (and musical) history, spins out new forms, and names the future as worth working for.
Unlike many innovators, Arrested Development has received commercial recognition for their sound. Their widely praised debut album, 3 Years, 5 Months and 2 Days in the Life of..., released last year, sold more than 1.5 million copies as of January 1993. They were named Musician magazine's 1992 Band of the Year. The group won two Grammys. All this, despite--or maybe because of--lyrics that name themes American culture variously romanticizes or squelches (and therefore all too rarely realizes): Honest spiritual searching. Political dissent. Racial and gender equity. The living power of history and memory.
Arrested Development is generally tagged as rap, but they blend hip hop, blues, rock, reggae, soul, and funk. Several of their songs move with a country-paced lope rather than urban punch and pop. In their first single, "Tennessee," rapper Speech is led by family grief and spiritual longing to make a pilgrimage to the rural South to "walk the roads my forefathers walked," while backup singer Aerle Taree clamors for a game of horseshoe.
The "deep in the country" theme is emphasized in a stage setup that includes patchwork sheets hanging on clotheslines and rusty hubcaps; their album cover shows the band standing in an open field. This hearkening to plowed earth as much as concrete and steel has led Arrested Development's work to be described as rural rap.
Primary songwriter Speech manages both bumper-sticker-brief turns of phrase ("Nurture another mind before yours expires"; "Passiveness causes others to pass us by") and narratives permeated with sensuality and humor. The themes are not slogan-simple: Revolution driven by spiritual searching and Afrocentric pride, not gunpower; sexual relationships based on mutual respect and love; celebration of life, from care of children to care of the Earth. Arrested Development stands apart, in style and content, from hardcore rap, rock, and funk that is linked with violence and disrespect for women.
However, Arrested Development is not just about hayseed-and-flower-power good vibes. True, they borrow the occasional line from Sly and the Family Stone (and they communicate a similar "family" rapport). But Arrested Development is aware of their surroundings and aware of the past. Neither allows for a naive and easy optimism. The truth always has an edge, even if it's cutting to a brighter side.
THIS CENTURY HAS witnessed a massive economic migration of black families and individuals from the agricultural South to the industrial North. Such moves represented another in a long line of forced displacement from heritage and land that taxed strength and spirit. (Stevie Wonder's 1973 song "Living for the City," includes a vignette of such a move.) Northern urban racism may taste slightly different than the rural Southern variety, but don't think that they aren't two pieces of the same bitter pie.
When Arrested Development heads to the country, it is not a retreat to a pastoral utopia, but a reclaiming of the rural part of the story, and on back to an African past. The urban experience--that forged powerful art and hard-edged politics--isn't abandoned but reconnected with Earth and mystical soul. Tennessee is "home" in that it gives historical, spiritual, and political perspective on "brothers on the corner playin' ghetto games."
That's all to say that this album is not so much rural rap as eclectic textures from a landscape that is both city and country. A wailing blues harp sample repeats over a fast rhythm mix to drive "Mama's Always on Stage." On top of this exuberant base, the offer is made to hold a young mother's baby so she can go dancing, pledging respect and support. "Dawn of the Dreads" is a reggae-flavored search for a dream partner, sprinkled with self-mocking humor ("I try not to admire what I can't obtain or have, things beyond my reach don't exist to Speech. Seeing how I'm a bit shorter than the average man").
Faith, and the seeking of faith, informs the work throughout. The album opens with a proclamation that the soul, not space, is humanity's final frontier. "Washed Away" is a mystical parable of resistance to a serpent determined to flood meaning and righteousness out of the world with an ocean of selfishness and greed. It is chanted as much as rapped or sung, swaying with a tide-like rhythm and persistence.
"Raining Revolution" and "Fishin' 4 Religion" both name faith as a power source for political and societal change. The latter challenges the institutional church (with humor you can dance to) to nurture activism instead of complacency: "The word cope and the word change is directly opposite not the same. She should have been praying to change her woes, but pastor said pray to cope with those."
For all the big (and delightfully trivial) thoughts it contains, 3 Years, 5 Months and 2 Days in the Life of... is at root fresh and entertaining music. Artists can choose to slip on off-the-rack clothing of ideological correctness, but they risk honoring politics and destroying their art. Arrested Development is sewing their own. The payoff is belief with integrity that is communicated by art with integrity.
Julie Polter is associate editor of Sojourners.
3 Years, 5 Months and 2 Days in the Life of ... By Arrested Development. Chrysalis Records, Inc., 1992.
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