Navigating the metal minefield 

Attention intolerant metal-heads: Jada Pinkett Smith ain't skeeerd'a y'all. As the dark pageantry of Ozzfest Tour 2005 -- the bacchanal of hardcore ring-led by heavy metal and reality TV icon Ozzy Osbourne -- rolls through your corner of the Dirty South, know that the actress and her metal band Wicked Wisdom are braced for impact. Go ahead and boo. Unleash your toxic waste. Flip the bird. Spew. Wicked Wisdom got a l'il sumpin' fo' that ass, fo' sho'. She just thought you'd like to know, thank you very much.

For all the rest of you who haven't followed this saga -- and considering the prolepsis that is Ozzfest, you are legion -- the addition of the LA-based Wicked Wisdom to the second-stage roster of performers has extricated the collective bile of some of the headbanging faithful. Message boards at both Sony (Ozzy Osbourne's label) and the Ozzfest websites were deluged with harsh critique, invective, even death threats and talk of riots. At many of the dates, Wicked Wisdom has been saluted with half-peace signs, "F-U" bombs, water-bottle barrages and demands that the band leave the stage during its performances. On some dates, Pinkett Smith and company have cut their sets short.

As celebrity/race/gender controversies go, this one hasn't resonated as violently with the public as did the O.J. Simpson trial (or even Paris Hilton's alleged abuse of the "n-word," for that matter), but it does raise the question of how far we've collectively evolved (or devolved, as the case may be) in this wild and wooly enterprise called rock. In one corner, an earnest, multicultural hardcore band on the rise. In the opposite corner, indoctrinated lily-white heavy metal fans attending the biggest annual tour of the genre. As the two sides clash, it's caused a dust-up in industry circles and the media. The rights and wrongs of the matter are murky at best. As is invariably the case, the truth is somewhere in the epicenter.

Paying Your Dues To Play The Blues

Presumably, Pinkett Smith knew what she was getting into when she signed on to Ozzfest. Since the flap broke, she has vehemently maintained her dedication to her band, her music and her right to rock. "It's who I am, who people believe that I am," she told Billboard.com of the misconceptions of her. "Of course it would seem really bizarre and awkward and just completely out of line and out of place, so people come in with preconceived ideas because unfortunately we're all taught to think so limitedly. Even myself, even when I got the invite, I wasn't jumping at the opportunity to do Ozzfest. I had to really open my mind, and I'm glad I did."

Oddly enough, Wicked Wisdom is the only band listed on the Ozzfest website without a single representative PR photo (guess Jada's trying to pull the same invisibility = audience dollars ruse as country exec Roy Acuff and his permanently tanned artist Charley Pride did in the 1960s).

For her part, Pinkett Smith, who has put her acting career on hold to establish footing for the band, has vowed to stay the course. "I'm not here asking for any favors," she told Billboard magazine. "You've got to show and prove. And not every audience is gonna go for it."

Wicked Wisdom has developed camaraderie among other bands on the tour. "Everybody gets along with each other," said the band's guitarist, Pocket. "Everyone shows up for each other's show when they can when they're not signing autographs, and they support each other. And I think fans need to see that more and more."

From a tour stop in Texas, Pinkett Smith told Creative Loafing that tour organizer and celebrity rocker wife Sharon Osbourne knew what she was doing when she invited the band to perform at Ozzfest. "I know that Sharon's not going to tear down something that she's built for 10 years on the little Wicked Wisdom band," Pinkett Smith said. "Our first week and a half was a little rough, you know, but we just kind of plowed through it and it's gotten better and better."

The singer added that she had no fears of coming to the South. In fact, Pinkett Smith noted, she attended North Carolina School of the Arts in Winston-Salem and knows this area well.

Still, early on, the animosity had apparently reached such a boiling point that Sharon Osbourne issued a statement on the band's behalf, declaring Wicked Wisdom would remain on Ozzfest. "Let me tell you, I was blown away," Osbourne told Billboard magazine. "When you see and hear Jada with her band, it's apparent that she has nothing but love and respect for this genre of music. I totally respect that the band wants to pay their dues playing the second stage."

"In an ideal world, you just tour with the best or the most popular bands, depending on your objectives," said Bill Toles, independent tour producer and former president of the Black Rock Coalition. "But given America's perennial racial anxiety, scripts get flipped, particularly when you have the so-called ruling-class suffering delusions of exclusion of the so-called underclass. You know, these people are 'allowed' to do this and these people aren't. Never mind that the people you're excluding created what you're preventing their participation in.

"Ozzy and Sharon aren't at fault," Toles added. "They should be commended for trying. The problem is -- and it's a problem other prominent white rock stars have as well -- they have the luxury of never having to deal directly with the conflicts black rockers have to contend with everyday. Everyone should know this going in. At this late date, it's delusional not to."

If It's Black, Get Back

So the tour lumbers on with the band still slugging it out. But the unanswered question befouling the air still lingers: What's up with all the Haterade?

The knee-jerk reaction to the controversy would be to blindly accuse Ozzfest fanatics of racism and/or sexism. But though it would be unfair to paint the entire Ozzfest audience with the same broad stroke, it also would be guileless to completely dismiss this undercurrent in the calcified thinking of many metalheads. Particularly when so much of the verbiage has been so terrifying.

One poster to the Ozzfest board warned, "This chick has no idea what she is in for. Imagine being a hardcore Mudvayne fan and THIS shows up. They better build a brick wall in front of her mic stand because she's going to get pelted worse then Jamiroquai at Woodstock."

Another poster predicted "a bunch of high and drunk metalheads waiting for an actual metal band to come on are going to be chucking shit, rocks, piss, you name it, at them."

A black Ozzfest attendee dismissed the contradictory reasoning of most of the white metal fans who have posted vitriol on the tour's message boards. "I laugh at their comments," she said, "They'll say, 'I can't be a racist -- I like Jimi Hendrix, Killswitch Engage, God Forbid, and Bad Brains!' Then they'll say rap sucks ass and that Jada's music is hip-hop and R&B, which it clearly is not."

Despite the ugliness, Ozzfest, to its credit, has been surprisingly open. Bands of mixed race and gender, including P.O.D., Incubus, Kittie, Otep, Linkin Park and God Forbid have participated in the past. And in addition to Wicked Wisdom, this year's bill features the mixed-race Velvet Revolver and Killswitch Engage. As the tour is still in progress, most of the performers were unavailable for interviews before press time.

From Princess Of Pop To Princess Of Darkness

Ozzfest apostles have posited "lame-ism" and "poseur-ism" as their principal beefs with Wicked Wisdom, the band having committed the high crime of opening for Britney Spears on her last tour. Being a recent convert to the ostensible lure of metal -- Wisdom went full-on hardcore only after the Spears tour -- the band's pedigree is suspect among metal zealots, to say the least.

Moreover, as one of three known black TV actresses-turned-rockers -- the other two being A Different World's Cree Summer (first in the band Subject To Change, then as a solo act under the tutelage of Lenny Kravitz) and Girlfriends' Persia White (lead singer of XEO3) -- Pinkett Smith already has three strikes against her, image-wise (strike one: black, strike two: woman, strike three: celebrity). It probably doesn't help that her ever-present husband, the über-wholesome MC and actor Will Smith, has been moshing in the wings throughout the tour. To compound matters, during at least one show, Pinkett Smith attempted to match the crowd, bird-for-bird, F-bomb-for-F-bomb, even challenging the crowd to give her its worst.

"She was kinda asking for it," noted one attendee. "She came out and gave everybody the finger and started screaming at them. Most of the crowd stood slack-jawed. She said something like, 'Go ahead and boo me.'"

Pandering to idiots' logic is a white flag disguised as a middle finger.

The Eye Of The Beholder

Sorting through cryptic "blog-speak," mash notes and e-gibberish, the reviews of Wicked Wisdom's music and stage show have been pretty evenly divided among both black and white circles of band supporters and detractors. Apart from the overtly poisonous posts, even those who disliked the band tried to be temperate and fair. Typical negative posts were along the lines of, "I didn't find it offensive, but it's not the sort of thing I'd listen to. It doesn't sound any worse than any of the other cornball, woe-is-me radio metal bands that go out with Ozzfest. So I don't see why she's getting booed every night."

Even on community boards in web sites featuring black rock musicians (afropunk.com, okayplayer.com, blackrock.vze.com, and blackrockrebelradio.com), opinions were split. Black women rockers tend to champion Pinkett Smith's band ("I heard her perform at Ozzfest today and she kicks ass. . . Go-o-o-o-o-o, Jada! I even bought her CD! I am supporting that sista"), while males were by and large disaffected.

One post on afropunk.com summed matters up this way: "I wanna support our people too. But where do you draw the line? I wanna support black actors but I'm not watching every damn show on UPN. I think we can support black rock without being fans of every single black rocker. Because seriously, why put mediocrity on a pedestal? There are so other many great black rockers out there."

Am I Hard Enough?

Having gone on the Wicked Wisdom website and checked out mp3 samples posted on its music page, it's clear to me that the quartet is no threat to bands on the level of Trail of Dead, the Misfits, Slipknot, Chiamaira or countless other so-called hardcore or metal standard-bearers. But considering the literally thousands of bands claiming that throne, all of whom boast varying degrees of the elusive "hardness" quality -- many more so than Wicked Wisdom, many less -- the question is: What the hell is the big deal?

As one blogger pointed out, Ozzfest has featured tamer bands on its bill in past years. For that matter, one of this year's big main-stage acts, Velvet Revolver -- Slash and Scott Weiland's amalgam of Stone Temple Pilots and Guns 'N Roses -- doesn't exactly invoke the fear of Satan in anyone.

"The question I have," said journalist and musician Greg Tate, co-founder of the Black Rock Coalition, "is why is the onus always on black rockers to get white folks to change their minds? We always have to come eight times harder with ours than they do, 'cause we'll catch hell just for showing up."

Former BRC president Toles sees Wicked Wisdom's celebrity status as the main issue. "If it wasn't Jada Pinkett Smith and all the baggage that comes with that, I don't think anyone would care, at least not to the level of psychosis that's manifested here," said Toles.

"Sure, race and gender color the situation, but it's not the sum-total," he added. "If she were some other, less-famous black woman leading the band, the dialogue would be completely different, if it were to happen at all. But Jada's a lightning rod. Black rock in white America is not for the faint of heart."

Darrell M. McNeill is a freelance journalist who has written for the Village Voice, Vibe, Spin and other publications. He also produces the radio shows Creative Unity Collective, on New York's WBAI, and Radio BRC, at Soul-Patrol.net. Full disclosure obliges us to point out that McNeill also is director of operations for the New York-based Black Rock Coalition.

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