Chocolate Genius' Black Music

By Barry Levey

You feel your bra being snapped off...

Artists today seem to have two options: invent some impossibly new sound (see Girls vs. Boys' slyly titled Feakonica) or revert to schlock-rock styles of old with a knowing, alt-rock wink (see Hole's slyly produced Celebrity Skin). But Marc Anthony Thompson, a.k.a. Chocolate Genius, has his own answer to fin-de-siècle rocker angst: if your album can't pioneer a new style, chock it full of every old one known to man.

This is no backhanded compliment. Chocolate Genius's debut album is both a study in sound and a suitable primer for Music 112a. With songs ranging from Living Colour-esque rock (rockonica) to neo-Robert Johnson blues (bluesonica) to Marvin Gaye soul (sexonica?), Thompson's album is as much about the experience of listening to music as it is about the music itself. Like a Cassandra Wilson album that uses new stylings to milk sublime reactions from old material, Black Music uses new material in old styles in an attempt to create definitive songs in disparate mediums.

The album's beginning climaxes in a soul track titled "Don't Look Down." When Thompson croons, "Are you hungry/ are you lonely/ what do you call divine," you feel your bra being snapped off, whether or not you've ever worn one. Then comes a stunningly sad song called "My Mom." With smart, concise lyrics, Thompson returns to his childhood: "See that wood-paneled room? That's where I learned to drink. See that hole in the wall? That was Seagram's, I think." But when his tour takes him to his mother's room, he finds that "my mom--she don't remember my name."

Though it's hard to re-enter a world of musical joviality after a sing-along about Alzheimer's,"My Mom" is followed by a Beck-like rocker called "Safe and Sound." Soon after comes a two-song cycle called "Hangover Five" and "Hangover Nine." The latter welds Pink Floyd to P-Funk so gently you may not notice, focusing instead on the loser-protagonist's defiant refrain, "Yes, I'll have another one."

It's tempting to group Thompson with other hybrid artists now finding fame. But unlike Maxwell or Bjork, Chocolate Genius doesn't so much mix styles as appropriate them. He isn't interested in fusing pop and soul but in flawlessly emulating them. He mines his protagonists' sadness as bluesmen have for eons--and like the best of them, extrapolates something shiny, black, bleak, and beautiful: chocolate gold. (V2)

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