It’s near midnight at Joe’s Pub in the East Village and the movement is in full effect. A roomful of twentyish and thirtyish black folk for whom hip-hop has been like a religion most of their lives are cheering as Mos Def, an esteemed rapper, roars through a set of hard rock songs, singing over the crunch of heavy guitars. He launches into a song called “Ghetto Rock.” The chorus goes: “Yes, we are so ghetto! Yes, we are rock ‘n’ roll!” The song ends, and Mos says, “Y’all want some more rock ‘n’ roll?” The crowd screams for more. He tells them: “It’s a whole movement, like Fela with Afrobeat. They laughed at the Wright Brothers. Noah, too.”

There is indeed a movement under way. Rock has long been one of the sounds hip-hop used in its pastiche, but aside from groups like Outkast and GooDie Mob, who drench themselves in funked-out rock, it has consisted of a sampled riff here and there. Now the hip-hop generation is grabbing guitars and making rock ‘n’ roll.

…Corey Glover, the lead singer of Living Colour, added to the thought: “There are some things you’re not allowed to express as a black person. You got to be in your b-boy stance. You’ve got to wear the uniform. If you’re out of the uniform, something’s wrong with you. My whole life it’s been like, `He’s cool, he speaks the language, but something’s wrong with that boy.’ But the freak contingent in the house is bigger than you think it is.”

Living Colour needed not simply to move the crowd, but also to get the crowd to accept the band’s validity, and that demanded changing the perception of blackness for countless listeners, a burden that neither U2 nor Jay-Z ever had to shoulder.

The persistent message of hip-hop and R & B is that working-class life is the most relevant of black American experiences: “keep it real” is often code for validating one set of mores to the exclusion of all others. Expanding the nature of music means expanding the definition of what it means to be black in America. The new black rock movement has talent, ambition, guitars and minds it has to change.

Read the rest in the NYTimes.

Let me just say… finally!. I can’t wait to hear some of these bands.