A few songs into Living Colour’s Shade, their first album in eight years, we hear the voice of Houston rapper Scarface vocalizing the familiar, herky-jerky hard...
A few songs into Living Colour’s Shade, their first album in eight years, we hear the voice of Houston rapper Scarface vocalizing the familiar, herky-jerky hard rock riff that drives the fusionists’ classic, Grammy-winning 1988 single, “Cult of Personality,” as he excitedly recalls catching one of their concerts in the early Nineties.
The praise for the group precedes the similarly chunky new tune “Program,” an implied vibe that links the outfit’s past and present like how we scroll through our smartphones’ selfie history before taking another snap.
“You know what, human life changed utterly when we created the means to look backward,” says guitarist Vernon Reid. “There was a time when people only lived life forward. There was a time when there were no mirrors other than when you had to look at your face in a lake. The idea of a band looking back at itself, I mean, that’s the whole thing about ‘Program.’ ‘Program’ almost is a conversation about technology, but also the way we interact with it, the way we use those things en masse to deal with each other, or not deal with each other.”
It’s not just Living Colour’s past that gets explored and expanded upon throughout Shade. Rather than an original composition, it was a run-through of Robert Johnson’s “Preachin’ Blues” at a 2012 centenary concert in Harlem for the late guitar legend that kick-started Living Colour’s creative process.
Reid recalls going to the New York Public Library in his youth to study “haunting” 78s of the master bluesman, with “Hellhound on My Trail” sticking with the fledgling player throughout the years in a web of influences that also included John McLaughlin and Allan Holdsworth. Decades later, Living Colour stomped out Johnson’s “Preachin’ Blues” in Harlem, pretty well