Happy 30th Anniversary to Living Colour’s second studio album Time’s Up, originally released August 28, 1990.
When Living Colour embarked upon making their sophomore record following the critical and commercial success of their debut Vivid (1988), the aim was to reflect the themes of the day with music that built on and expanded the funk rock that had shaped their debut.
What they delivered was an album that has become timeless. Now, normally a timeless album would be something to be celebrated and revered. And don’t get me wrong, Time’s Up is an album that should be. It’s just that its timeless status is bittersweet.
There is no doubt that the musicianship and songwriting craft has stood the test of passing decades. Which is great. But sadly, the urgent and pressing narrative of the day still remains heartbreakingly relevant 30 years on. If not more so.
With Time’s Up, Living Colour delivered a monster of an album bursting with social resonance, eliciting warning calls and wake-up calls for the new decade of the ‘90s. It is both a musical marvel and a lyrical shamming.
Living Colour has always been a collective with a social consciousness, not afraid to confront issues of peril whether it was racism, sexism, politics, or the plight of the planet. It’s just sad that many of the issues raised in the album’s narrative haven’t improved. In the 30 years since its release, so little real progress has been achieved.
On the titular album opener “Time’s Up,” lead singer Corey Glover’s soaring vocals ache as he sings, “The rivers have no life / The world is full of strife / The sky is falling / The Lord is calling!” Like a fire and brimstone preacher raging from the pulpit, Glover brings power and intensity to every word he utters. With lyrics as relevant now as they were upon its first airing, when he sings, “Moment by moment / Day by day / The world’s just slipping away,” he could be singing about…well, take your pick from our modern day doomed landscape, whether ecological, political, medical, or scientific.
Musically, Living Colour is a multi-hyphenate entity. To try and reduce its sound to one genre actually does it a disservice as theirs has always been a cross-stitch of sonic textures. Even in total ear bleeding moments of intensity, like in the thrashing hardcore of “Time’s Up,” there amongst the clanging clocks of doom and the breakneck speed of beats exist elements of jazz, soul and hip-hop. And the lyrical content has more in common with Marvin Gaye’s masterpiece “Mercy Me (The Ecology)” than it does with most of the typical content of their metal contemporaries.
In “History Lesson”—an eye-opening assessment of the slave trade built around samples of spoken word pieces featuring James Earl Jones, Ossie Davis, and Ruby Dee—one line that resonates is the observation that “in Africa, music is not an art form as much as it a means of communication.” This rings true for the urgency and passion in the music and lyrics of Time’s Up. If Chuck D’s observation that hip-hop was the CNN of the inner cities holds, then Time’s Up serves as breaking news. For as a white teen growing up in Australia, a track like this (as with many of the tracks from Time’s Up) acted as an introduction into the history and struggle of African-Americans and a window into the life experience of another. The repeated phrase “A Negro has got no name” likewise sparked a question in my mind that led to research and understanding, and would be reinforced and revisited years later by Prince’s song “Family Name.”
Following “History Lesson” is the pounding, fist raising anthem “Pride,” written by drummer Will Calhoun that details the struggle of black culture when it is equally admired, appropriated and admonished. “You like our hair / you love our music / our cultures large so you abuse it” wails Glover before launching into the powerful hook that “History’s a lie that they teach you in school / A fraudulent view called the golden rule / a peaceful land that was born civilized / was robbed of its riches, its freedom, its pride.”
When set against the current wider (or is that whiter) awakening around the hidden or little known history of Black Wall Street and the Tulsa Race Massacre or the revisiting of the imperfections of the founding fathers, the song examines the belief that history is written by the victors. And here was a song looking to redress the fact with pride and dignity.
This is a theme that rears its insightful head throughout the album on tracks like lead single “Type” that deals with the notion of stereotypes, bias, and the media’s portrayal of black lives grown in projects and a twisted depiction spawned by the media, as Glover sings, “We are the children of concrete and steel / This is the place where the truth is concealed.” And again, the foreshadowing is present in lines like “Science and Technology / The new mythology” that rings ever so true in our 2020 state of pandemic and partisanship.
Likewise on “New Jack Theme,” which portrays the shortsightedness by quick cash glorification of drug dealers that presents the blurred moral reality of right or wrong with lines as telling as “I make more money than a judge or a cop / Tell me the reason why I should stop?”
This is dramatically contrasted against Muzz Skillings’ lamenting “Someone Like You” that reflects on the innocence of life “before our city forgot us / and let the drug lords take our streets.”
This song alone is packed with as much social relevancy today as it chides, “Pacify me politician / Pacify me with your lies / Blind to the people’s suffering / Deaf to the children’s cries” (Fake News and Corona Hoax conspiracies anyone?) in one verse and confronts police brutality and police killings of black men in the next with the telling “Police they chased my brother / Policeman licensed to kill … / … Policeman are you happy? / You snuffed a medical student out / Maybe he could have saved the world / I guess we’ll never find out.” (Sadly, take your pick.)
The foreshadowing continues in the sci-fi tinged observations of “Information Overload.” Opening with sublime Vernon Reid guitar trickery that sounds more like an 8-bit computer game misfunctioning and rebooting, the song builds on a rocking, menacing groove that features Glover declaring, “They say the future is on a micro-chip / Don’t you know we’re all on a sinking ship.”
Issues of sexuality in a time of the growing AIDS epidemic are present in the soul funk seduction of “Under Cover of Darkness,” which features a powerful turn by Queen Latifah rebuffing a Lothario lover in her signature turn of phrase, while Glover seems caught between desire and dread.
The pangs of romance pop up once more in the album’s biggest hit, the sublime “Love Rears Its Ugly Head.” Perhaps best known in its Soul Power Remix form, the album version with a more relaxed sauntering jazz blues vibe is the superior version in my books. And for all the perceived doom and gloom present in the bulk of the album’s lyrics, there’s also a sharp hint of humor ever-present in lines like, “And when I come home late you don’t complain or call / So as a consequence I don’t go out at all.” And the curious call back to Vivid’s racism confronting “Funny Vibe” alluded to as this narrative’s wedding march always had me wondering if this too was a sharp commentary on the judgmental eyes cast on interracial relationships.
The humor is also sharp and targeted in the idol-worship turn vulture preying criticism of “Elvis is Dead” in this funk rocker that features a guest rap by the true architect of rock, the one and only Little Richard, whose cameo is hinted at when his signature holler is heard during the truth telling line “A black man taught him how to sing / and then he was crowned king.”
As Time’s Up winds its way through its stellar 58-minute run time, the heavy confrontation of reality begins to give way to a sense of hope and unity as songs like “Fight The Fight” urge everyone to be aware (or in today’s parlance, “woke”) of the world around them and the clarity that we have more in common than not when we can actually look past the false labels and narratives we’ve been told.
There’s also comfort and hope present in the standout “Solace of You,” which I will go to my grave extoling as one of the greatest songs ever written, criminally unknown by a wider audience. With its African township shuffle and shimmering guitar playing, Glover’s vocals are pure and filled with emotion. Pain and hope mix together in this sweet song of love, belief and connection. If you haven’t heard it, do so now. Thank me later.
And album closer, the epic “This Is The Life,” flips the grass is greener pining we all have in our lives for better, richer, happier existence by showing how this is the one chance at life you get, so make the most of what you’ve got, good and bad, and use it to fuel you. And that pining for another life is just wasted time. As Glover inspires in his delivery on the twist, “In your real life treat it like it’s special / In your real life try to be more kind / In your real life think of those that love you / In this real life try to be less blind.”
It’s powerful stuff and testament to the thought-provoking music Living Colour do best.
As I posited at the start of the this look-back, Time’s Up offers a soundtrack for the past and sadly the present. It offers a chance to reflect, pause, reassess and hopefully be inspired to make real progress so that in its next milestone retrospective we can point to change. If you haven’t heard Time’s Up in its entirety, or it’s been a minute, I encourage you do so. And do so with a thought about what it says about us, then and now. For me is a masterpiece of an album. And I’d argue, if I could borrow a resonant phrase, it is AS MUCH an art form as it is a means of communication.
Written by every member of the band, Time’s Up is a tour de force that showcases the individual brilliance of each member and the synergy it resonates.
And this is the power of Living Colour. Even on the bulk of the tracks written by guitar virtuoso Vernon Reid, there is space for all to shine (including a healthy smattering of guest artists.) Reid doesn’t write a riff heavy track that only showcases his prowess, he writes with the whole band in mind, creating voids and valleys for the sublime Muzz Skillings to wander all over the fretboard of his bass, and for Will Calhoun to barrage with a mix of time signatures, blitzing rolls and off-beat accents that makes his drumming so compelling. And then there’s Glover, giving voice to Reid’s words and making them his own, applying a deft touch to the power or softness needed.
LISTEN: