Arrested Development: Dropping Knowledge Since 1987
Arrested Development, the two-time Grammy Award-winning group that brought the world such classics as "Tennessee," "People Everyday" and "Mr. Wendal," has embarked on the West Coast leg of its "Strong" tour, which stops by Redondo Beach, Calif., on Friday, Aug. 21. The eight-piece assortment's front man, Speech, shared many insights about where the band has been, where it's going and the music industry in which it still has a home some 22 years after it was formed.
With Arrested Development’s heyday in the United States a distant memory for some, it may come as a surprise that the group that transformed the music scene in the early 1990s with its distinct blending of socially conscious hip-hop, funk, jazz and soul is feeling as confident as ever as it nears the release of its eighth studio album, “Strong,” this November.
Little do most know, the band has played sell-out shows for the longest in places like Canada, Australia, Japan, Germany and France. Formed in 1987, Arrested Development earned its share of accolades as a two-time Grammy Award-winning act and recipient of MTV Video Music, Soul Train Music and NAACP Image awards. Not to mention, it was named Rolling Stone’s Band of the Year in 1992 and became acclaimed for its hit songs “Tennessee,” “People Everyday” and “Mr. Wendal.”
Reuniting in 2000 after a four-year split, Arrested Development emerged with eight members: Speech (leader/vocalist/rapper), Eshe (vocalist/dancer), Tasha (background vocalist), Ras (drummer/vocalist), 1Luv (rapper/vocalist), Jjboogie (guitar), Za (bass) and Baba Oje (elder/former spiritual adviser).
I got the eclectic group’s front man, Speech, on the phone for a chat about the Atlanta-based band’s expansive career and what’s new with them, just in time for its show on Friday, Aug. 21 at the Brixton in Redondo Beach, Calif. Below is a mere snippet of our conversation.
AMR: What’s your favorite part about performing live?
SPEECH: Generally, we love outdoor shows the most because we love being out in the element. When you’re doing music and you’re out in the sun, or even [in] the rain, it just feels extremely powerful to me. But, even for indoor shows, probably the biggest thing that we like is just feeling that interaction with other people. It’s like a commune with music.
AMR: Do you have a favorite song that you like to perform?
SPEECH: There’s a song called ‘Inner City’ off of our [2006 ‘Since the Last Time’] album that we love to perform. It’s very high-energy. That particular song is one of the highlights.
AMR: Can you tell me a little about the message behind it?
SPEECH: Definitely. It’s basically a very simple message—for people to focus back on the inner city. Nowadays, everybody has kind of moved out to the suburbs, and there’s this suburbia cul-de-sac world that’s developed in the last 10 years, 12 years. That song is sort of calling people back to remember that the weakest among us is really who we are as a society. It’s not the strongest among us. The weakest link is the problem that we have to focus on. And the people of the inner city are many times those people—impoverished and don’t have the same opportunities that some of the others have. That song is just bringing it to that again.
AMR: Do you ever get tired of playing your classics?
SPEECH: To be honest, I don’t. The only time I could even imagine getting tired of it is if that’s all we were playing, just playing our classics. But, it’s always a pleasure to play the tunes that people remember from the past. It excites us, because a lot of our new material also gives the same amount of energy and response. For us, it’s just a good memory feel, as opposed to, ‘We better do our classics, or else this show is going to bomb.’ [Laughs.] It brings back the same memories that people in the audience are feeling when they hear our classics. It reminds us of a very incredible time in our career and in our lives.
AMR: What else is new for you guys?
SPEECH: I have a solo album that’s about to drop as well. In fact, people that go to my Web site can buy it now. It’s about to drop in November, called ‘The Grown Folks Table.’ It’s basically a mature hip-hop record where the beats are driving, and everything is sort of what people love about hip-hop, but then the subject matter is so much more up-to-date with anyone that has been around hip-hop in the last 20 years.
AMR: Can you tell me what people can expect on the “Strong” album?
SPEECH: The ‘Strong’ album is a record that’s very relevant to what is really happening in the world today. Even though we have a huge recession in our country, and even throughout the world; even though there is literal genocide happening in many countries in Africa; even though there’s terrorism that’s hugely an issue for the entire world, bombings, all this stuff—most of the music today—and when I say most, I mean 99.9 percent of it—is not addressing any of it. It’s almost as if people are in a matrix or in a state of denial, as far as the music industry is concerned. This album for us is actually acknowledging the world that we live in today and trying to talk about it and bring some solutions to it, or deal with it.
AMR: That brings me to the subject of hip-hop being divided. You have your underground, conscious rap, which you guys bring, and then you have the mainstream stuff. Do you ever think that a more mainstream artist will ever embrace these underground subject matters in their songs?
SPEECH: The way I look at it is, any underground artist can become mainstream and any mainstream artist can become underground. It just depends what people are promoting and pushing because Arrested Development in the ’90s was by all means a mainstream act. We won [many awards]. We were on MTV every five seconds. To me it’s just a matter of what people are promoting. A lot of the underground artists—no matter who they are—can easily become a mainstream success, if they were getting more promotion.
I guess to answer your question, I don’t really feel like Jay-Z or Kanye or any of them are any more mainstream or anymore palatable than Arrested Development or Talib Kweli or whoever else people consider underground. I just think we gotta balance the promotion out there.
AMR: One of the things that I like about Arrested Development is your lyrics. Where do you guys get the inspiration from during the songwriting process?
SPEECH: I’ve always been inspired early on as a kid from my mom, because she’s the publisher of a newspaper called the Milwaukee Community Journal, and it’s the largest black newspaper in Wisconsin, which is where I was born. As a kid, I would gather around the breakfast table and my mom and dad would be talking about all these issues that concerned the black community. It just moved me to realize how strong and how needed it was to spread information that could help people from being around newspaper publishers. When it was time for me to sprout and sort of see what I wanted to do in life, I knew it was music, but it was going to have to be music that helped to inform people. It wasn’t just going to be music that was just for me, and I think I got that from my mom.
To learn more about Arrested Development, log on to www.arresteddevelopmentmusic.com.
(Photo courtesy of Arrested Development)
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