Boscoe

During the late ’60s, several artists were jumping on the protest-music bandwagon as it was becoming less life-threatening and more The Thing To Do. You could speak in metaphors, lay out laundry lists of ghetto atrocities, point accusing fingers at society, complain about Vietnam, but more important we all had to Love Our Brother and Get Together.

Boscoe, on the other hand, didn’t just throw peace signs and power fists in the air. On this reissue of the Chicago sextet’s highly collectible 1973 album, the depths of its bitterness were immeasurable. While better-known funk bands such as Earth, Wind & Fire knew how to meet the mainstream halfway, Boscoe practically forced you to stare its rough edges dead in the face, with lyrics that were a little more specific than something like “Love Train” (the O’Jays’ brotherhood anthem), adding a paranoid, urgent viewpoint from the inside looking out. The album’s sole love song (“I’m What You Need”) tries to sweet-talk a single mom who just got dumped by her baby’s dad; it takes three vocalists to lay the story out, and one of them sounds almost garbled and unintelligible, but it works.

With the political fervor of the late ’60s on the wane , Boscoe may have been a little too coarse for the radio, but it didn’t just sing about the world’s struggles to get laid—the concern was genuine.