Truth and Soul

The high-octane Los Angeles sextet Fishbone was always a force of nature. But 1988’s <i>Truth and Soul</i>, the group’s sophomore album, marked the moment in which these chaotic funk-punkers evolved into angsty agents for change. The album was a conscious step away from the oddball party jams of 1985’s self-titled EP and 1986’s <i>In Your Face</i>. As the decade came to a close, the members of Fishbone began gravitating toward protest music—equal parts raging and soulful—that confronted Reagan-era racial discrimination head-on. Guitarist Kendall Jones absorbed the crunchy riffs of heavy metal, which not only provided a coarse edge to Fishbone’s anti-racist party platform, but also helped introduce the thrash-funk revolution of the late 1980s. The album’s opening track and first single, a prog-metal cover of Curtis Mayfield’s “Freddie’s Dead” from <i>Super Fly</i>, updates the tale of a slain cocaine dealer for the crack era, positioning the virtuosic and socially conscious band as the legend’s incendiary heirs. The fast-and-furious “Subliminal Fascism”, meanwhile, takes on the media in an 87-second punk rave-up that’s part Marvin Gaye, part Joe Strummer, with singer Angelo Moore screaming, “I read the paper and I watch the news/It don’t give me the blues, it just gives me the blacks.” Elsewhere on the album, “Slow Bus Movin’ (Howard Beach Party)” ponders the last 40 years of the civil rights movement over some twisted country-western, while “Change”—which Moore described as “a cry for hope”—is a soaring acoustic-guitar number that proves the ultimate live band could also be stirring balladeers. Despite the group’s more focused lyrical approach on <i>Truth and Soul</i>, Fishbone still pinballed across the map musically, delving into Bad Brains-style hardcore (“Deep Inside”), slinky sex-funk (“Bonin’ in the Boneyard”) and their trademark ska-punk (“Question of Life”). And “Ma and Pa”, written about Moore’s parents in the midst of their divorce, is perhaps the band’s biggest contribution to the ska-punk canon, a reflective and humorous look at a fractured relationship that can be heard in the personal songs of fans like No Doubt and Sublime. Though Fishbone would find greater mainstream success with 1991’s <i>The Reality of My Surroundings</i>, the post-everything bouillabaisse of <i>Truth and Soul</i> remains the band’s most influential moment—a righteous collision of ideas that helped shape multiple movements, from the 1980s funk-metal wave to the 1990s ska-punk invasion to the 2000s Afropunk explosion.