Maybe it’s just me, but the 1990’s was a good era for hip-hop—rebellious and hopeful at the same time. Or maybe I was just a kid and heard what was naturally rebellious and hopeful in myself in the music. At any rate, I expected good things when I learned that Naughty By Nature was going to be playing at Le Poisson Rouge on Bleeker in the LES last Friday night, Sept. 11, as a part of the weekly Freedom Party staged there—it gave me a sense of lightness, like neon tennis shoe laces and those wack designs on jam pants.

But you got to wonder, with Naughty By Nature, as with other resurgent groups from back in the day: Do they still got it? And yeah, I’m gonna say, I think they do. What rocked most about Naughty By Nature’s performance was the aforementioned lightness that carried over into their new work. Their stage presence and their new songs were energetic and melodic. Like their old hits, the heavy beats and bass-sounding vocals were layered with softer sounds and frisky percussions. (And I must mention, they still look good, especially Treach who didn’t waste time taking off his shirt and flexing his stuff.)
NBN didn’t waste time, either, gratifying the audience with their classic hits. Unlike most revival rock shows I’ve been to, where the aging band waits until the very end to play the one song everyone wants to hear or doesn’t play it at all, NBN opened up with “OPP” and then quickly headed into “Hip Hop Hooray.”

“OPP,” due to the recent death of MJ, has been receiving more play-time than usual. Not that it ever truly left the spinning table—you can’t go wrong with sampling the Jackson Five, after all. However, it’s a good time for NBN to begin releasing their new album just when people are asking, “What are they up to?”

The plan is to release a new album this year, and the group is promoting two songs, “I Gotta Lotta” and “Get To Know Me Better” as singles. Both songs deviate from the frenetic rhyming of the 90’s, which I find somewhat disappointing. They seem to be influenced more by Southern rap than Northeast hip-hop; the beats and the vocals are slower and heavier than what characterized the group in the past. They are also more filled with siren sounds and club-type hype. It’s all very danceable, but perhaps audiences are already beginning to tire of this particular formula. NBN is best when the rap trips over itself in a dizzying sound-puzzle filled with snarky word-play that gratifies only repeated listeners. They are good song-writers, and I think they can pull a radio-friendly album, but to get back to favorite-album status they need to remember their roots. Today’s multi-media savvy audiences will find them, and if it’s good, maybe they can bring back something that’s been missing in the hip-hop world for a while.

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