For a group that’s supposed to be in haste toward hitting the road for Detroit as the opening headliner for a tour sponsored by The WB television network, Kentucky’s favorite hip-hop sons Nappy Roots ever-too-leisurely pack up their belongings in the upstairs green room at Cubby Bear, a Chicago club in the yuppie-bohemian North Side neighborhood of Wrigleyville that’s directly across the street from the Cubs’ home baseball playground of Wrigley Field. Cubby Bear is celebrating its grand reopening-after renovating from a sports bar of evolving makeshift configurations to a definitive urban concert venue-by offering free admission all night. Even with Cubby Bear’s new look of expanded room to work with on the dance floor and stage plus a disappearance of haunting sambo images that once hung over what used to be the main VIP section, its new sound of a crisply transmitting sound system, and a closing performance by Nappy’s Alabaman power pop rock colleagues Course of Nature on the Atlantic Records imprint Lava, the Bluegrass B-boys effortlessly draw the bulk of oh’s and aw’s from Cubby’s patrons.
Everyone wants to meet Nappy Roots. White boys, African-American brothers, latinos pile praise and questions about music industry wisdom on the group’s bespectacled lead mic-controller Skinny Deville in cornrows, head band, a jersey in props to Jack Daniels, and shell-toe Adidas with mostly ebony color coordination minus the kind of non-melting ice from pressurized coal and a certain polish metal. A UN of girls from Chicago to Atlanta, including Asians with roots throughout the Orient, flock to the Kentucky lads like magnets to a refrigerator, especially to the prettiest Nappy Roots MC’s Ron Clutch and R. Profet. For all this adulation on their first Chicago appearance and Midwestern tour, these Roots farther west of Philly are comfortably engaged instead of overwhelmed or gassed up by it all.
“Nappy is like-real,” tall, extra swarthy B. Stille explains underneath a fishing cap, joining fellow Nappy MC Scales in carrying tubs of bottled water and other liquid refreshment Cubby Bear has lavished on them out to their tour vehicle. “We’re balling, but we’re balling on a budget. If we’re going to the club, everybody paying is going to go to side door and let us in.”
That same everyhead, down-to-earth homeboyishness is exuded by Nappy Roots’ debut major label LP Watermelon, Chicken, And Gritz. The group’s tri-coastal communion of real brother sounds from the Middle South metropolises of Louisville and Bowling Green, Ky., the Deep South town and former Georgia capital of Milledgeville, and the former Black Panther West Coast stronghold of Oakland, Calif., dating back to the mid-’90s when they were students at Western Kentucky University, is evident throughout every Watermelon cut from props to the everyday head in galloping “Aw Naw” to the hopeful humbleness of breezy gospel-folk in “Po’ Folks.”
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Thinking of a least esoteric Arrested Development rediscovering its sound in the body of New True School brothers from the lower Ohio River Valley who’ve been possessed by OutKast in their post-Southernplayalisticcadillacmuzik evolution, a more urbane Goodie Mob, and 2Pac’s holy ghost comes closest to labeling Nappy Roots in a nutshell. As Nappy’s rotund, Hoss of a baritone Big V explains, it’s a Dirty South, as in Earthy South, sound that defies pat categorizing by region.
“We’re a Top of the South sound,” Big V says. “We’re too far north to be South, too far south to be North, too west to be East Coast, too far east to be West Coast. We get a taste of all genres of music, we make our nappy [sound] gumbo.”
At the rate that Nappy Roots is building a cult following with its thickened soup ladled via a record label lately considered arsenic to a rap music career, it might not be too long before heads stop fronting and flossing and start letting their hair down in hip-hop.
