An ensemble called The Black Opera doesn’t arouse much suspicion to hashtag »SWAG« in the next best social network. The Mello Music-Group-signing likes the mystery, staging themselves as an international artist-alliance with bastions in Atlanta, Chicago, Detroit, New York, Los Angeles or Paris, trying to conceal their identities in videos and on stage, remaining incognito. One could easily debunk strategical anonymity as an image-generating PR-campaign, but The Black Opera mostly share political visions through artistic expressions. Of course, the slightly over-ambitioned goal of wanting to change the world cannot be expressed without pathos and polemics. But the MCs (whose names are not mentioned once) manage to deliver this message through true-to-life and even slightly funny contexts, while being exceptionally catchy at the same time. True to the motto »flows instead of flowery phrases«, they produce political music, not musical politics. What makes the – occasional indigestive – tracks even more approachable is the support of Melody Betts, Lalibella, Boog Brown, Rasheeda Ali and Mayer Hawthorne. Astronote is the sonorous cross point in the masked conglomerate . It’s him who creates a patchwork of beats on »Libretto: of King Legend«, mixing up streams of thought from different genres in an eclectic-experimental manner. Where one might expect wacky tape-jam-beats, there is a boom-bappy orchestra orgy, sounding like Kraftwerk and Lamont Dozier meeting in Pete Rock’s studio. We could call it worldmusic 2.0. But we could also call it HipHop. The Black Opera do it the Willy-Brandt-way: »The best way to predict the future is to create it«.
Moor Mother
The Great Bailout
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