The Contents of Carl Hancock Rux's Backpack
Dateline: 11/9/99Carl Hancock Rux's amazing album Rux Revue (follow the link to RealAudio samples at Borders.com) is The Bomb New, the Bomb Hot, the Bomb Final, Poetry's Best Shot: Sony 550 Music decides to go with with the Greatest Voice since Gil Scott. . . Rux gets 'em to front for his high school back-up vocalists and the producers for Beck & Beasties (Dust Bros!). . . and what it adds up to is straight-from-the-streets-to-you via super production and righteous poetics. This tangle of words and beats just may give chance a peace: is this rave where poetry dents the charts?
We ran into Carl on the streets of The Hague, Holland, where he was headlining at Crossing Border, Louis Beher's amazing annual conflagration of poetry and music that occupies the whole of the City of Peace (well, the International Court of Justice is here. and Madurodam! the scale model of Holland, which itself is a scale model. . .) for a weekend in October. Rux was so clearly on the go that we asked him what he was taking with him as he goes there (read, “blows up”) -- “what is that in your backpack?” -- and when he dumped out the contents we weren't surprised to find super headphones, decent Discman, pounds of CDs and. . . a single book. Herewith,
The Contents of Carl Hancock Rux's Backpack!
- David Holmes, The Esential Mix
- David Murray, Flowers for Albert
- Oval, 2 Szenariodisk
- The Roots, Things Fall Apart
- Beck, Mutations
- Carl Craig, Innerzoneorchestra
- Led Zeppelin, Best of. . .
- Bill Withers, Live at Carnegie Hall
- Cecil Taylor, One Too Many Salty Swift & Not Goodbye
- Tricky, Maxinquaye
- Finley Quaye, Maverick A Strike
- Toshi Reagon (who is on Rux Revue), The Righteous Ones
- Flav-o-Pac, Memeograph 1, Live Fragments
- Shirley Horn, I Remember Miles
--Bob Holman
More about Carl Hancock Rux on the Net:
- Two of his poems are at Cafe Los Negroes: a wav sample of “Red Velvet Dress Lullaby” & the lyrics to “The Minstrel's Song.”
- Peter Ritter's review of Rux's 1-act play, Geneva Cottrell, Waiting for the Dog to Die, is in Minneapolis-St. Paul's City Pages.
