There’s several inherent problems with melding rap with rock. First of all it’s a pretty cliché-ridden combination, something the press release accompanying this collaboration conforms to – it’s utter tripe of the highest order, taken verbatim from the Introduction to Hype 101 manual. “Musical worlds colliding with explosive results” and all that crap. Secondly, rap is not known for its musical dexterity or complexity, in fact it’s predicated on precisely the opposite approach of minimalism, which allows the artist to deliver their message untroubled by tricksy arrangements or difficult key changes. This presents most rock bands with something of a quandary, as few musicians get pleasure from playing a four-to-the floor beat and the same few notes for four or five minutes solid. A rock song is built along different lines. Get it wrong and you end up with Nu-Metal or, god forbid, ‘Lethal’ by Anthrax/UTFO.
So combining Mr Shaodow, known for his biting, pithy, razor-sharp social and political commentary with Smilex, famed for their outlandish stage shows and big rock anthems, could have gone either way. Shaodow has no time for clichés, often performing a capella at his shows and challenging stereotypes of rappers with his intelligence and perception. Smilex on the other hand, whilst an incredibly entertaining and exciting band with some great tunes, are a cliché all to themselves. You know precisely what you’re going to get every time and they don’t stray from their well-defined path. They’ve become a local byword and blueprint for punky hard rock wrapped up in 80’s-style excess. That is a compliment, by the way.
In practice, somehow, the single manages to go *both* ways. It starts off pretty feeble, in truth. The aforementioned lack of a musically-interesting arrangement means that for the first half of the song Smilex are left chugging away ineffectually on an dull one-chord riff, the drum beat is lifted straight from the chorus of Def Leppard’s “Rocket”, and they are forced to try and spice things up with some random rock guitar noodling. Rage Against the Machine this is not. Smilex are often capable of making the simplest things sound immense, but even they struggle to pick this one up off the floor for the first minute and a half.
Despite the lumpen backing, Shaodow’s lyrics are given an extra element of bite and bile by the more aggressive production. The song stumbles in with a deliberately clumsy, garage-band-warming-up style intro but quickly gets into the meat of Shaodow’s tale of the perils of simply happening to be black. The all-too-predictable shouty chorus is undeniably massive, but even there you feel that the subtlety of the lyrics is somewhat lost in the effort of making it rock, and as the song races to its huge climax the lyrics get progressively more buried and more indecipherable.
Fortunately the second half is indeed much, much better; having got the tedious job of setting up the premise out of the way, Smilex finally manage to let rip and get a big groove going. It’s still variations on the same one-chord riff, but far less stilted and one-dimensional. Layer upon layer of gang vocals pile in and build the anger and momentum until the whole thing finally collapses under its own weight, dropping back to one last broken down chorus over a snippet of Shaodow’s original backing track. Ironically, it’s only now that you can really hear what’s being said.
Commendable then, and a long way from such travesties as Walk This Way and the like, but it still doesn’t quite hit the spot. Clarity is everything when you’re trying to get across a serious message, and here the message often gets buried amongst all the big rock bluster. On the other hand, Shaodow and Smilex have breathed new life into a three-year-old song that might now reach a different audience, and that can only be a good thing. Shaodow’s humorous turn of phrase belies the seriousness of the underlying message, and it’s truly sad to realise that a song like this even has to be written in the first decade of the twenty-first century. When looked at from that angle, they can do no wrong.