The reason this was so crucial, is because the school, alongside the black church, has been a vital incubator of black musical talent. One of the stories spun regarding hip hop and the lack of instruments and bands in recent black music has been the elimination of music programs in public schools due to budjet cuts enacted by President Ronald Wilson Reagen. I was slightly jealous at the in depth nature of the schools program, way back in the ’80s! The school had a recording console, proffesional looking mixing board, the whole nine! I found this part of their story exceeingly interesting in regard to the musical changes since the late ’70s or so. Paul Central High School, in the recording arts program. Stokely explained that there were always live African rhtyms in the home and he began to play the conga drums early, four years old early, which led to him taking up the trap drums.
Paul, an afrocentrist and a college proffessor. Stokely Williams father, Mahmoud El-Kuti, was mentioned and interviewed, and he was a leader in the black community in St. Five of the original memebers hailed from St. The groups origins in Minnesota were covered. Various clips were shown with people like the comedian Sinbad stressing the need to appreciate the group while they are here because they had a special status as one of the last popular black bands. The members stressed that they knew the importance of their status as a band and the image of unity it represented for a group of black men to be united in the enterprise of playing music. As a result they never reached those peaks of success that the earlier bands reached in terms of being icons in music, but on the positive side, they seem to have avoided many of the personal problems those groups faced as well. Mint Condition is a group that started after the narrative that led to a lower profile for the Ohio Players, P-Funk, Bootsy, Roger and Zapp, and many other funk bands who have been featured on the show. Mint Condition is an interesting group for the program because in some ways, they represent what happened in black popular music after the collapse of disco, the rise of hip hop, and the emphasizing of singers and producers over bands. It was with her in mind that I checked out Mint Conditions’ Unsung. Every time the group is in town, usually at Yoshi’s, either the Oakland, or San Francisco clubs, she’s there, and her support extends to buying their new CD’s too. The Mint Condition episode was special to me because of a close friend of mine, a lovely Virgo lady named Liz who is absolutely the biggest Mint Condition fan I know.
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