Rock steady Mobbin’

Rip It Up, Issue 210, 1 February 1995, Page 14

Rock steady Mobbin ’

“Don’t be calling me a gangsta, y’hear.” Wouldn’t dream of 1t... sir. T-Bone, of Los Angeles rap group Da Lench Mob is making sure I get his point. “It’s a bad image. It’s not me, it’s not my group, and it’s not the way we want to conduct ourselves. None of our lyrics pertain to going out and doing drive-bys or disrespecting women. If you’ve got some kind of sense and some kind of morals, you wouldn’t want to be a gangsta, period.” T-Bone has this ability to make you sit up straight and pay full attention, even though he’s coming down a phone line 15,000 miles away. And he’s had that effect on his listeners for a while now. '. Drawing attention to themselves, initially as Ice Cube’s musical cohorts, Da Lench Mob moved on to drop .their own knowledge with the 1992 album Guerillas In Tha Mist. Like Cube’s album Predator, Guerillas documented the LA riots, and kicked major ass as one of the most hardcore, articulate rap albums of that year. Two years later, T-Bone is describing their second album, Planet Of The Apes, ' as “the ’ soundtrack to

Armageddon”. The end of the world as we know it occupies much of T-Bone’s train of thought throughout our chat. We fail to ride the same wavelength, and I can’t help but believe he’s too serious for a man in his 20s. Know any good jokes? “The Armageddon is here, believe it or not. It’s gonna be way bigger than the riot. If you have been following the news in the last 10 years, you would see we have had major earthquakes, big fires in Malibu and Oakland, a big earthquake in Mexico, the incident in Waco, Texas, the LA riot of 92, huge floods in the Mid West, the bombing of the World Trade Centre in New York, and you had Hurricane Eugene that almost wiped out Miami. It’s no coincidence that these incidents or events happened in the last 10 years. The time for change is here. We are in the last years. By the year 2000 there will be a major change. I think God will come down here, and whoever is not on his side will be wiped out... white or black.” I still don’t get it.

JOHN RUSSELL