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Although he's a Los Angeles native, the Negro Problem's Stew (his given name is Mark Stewart) doesn't drive. |He doesn't even have a driver's license. Not that it bothers him. "I'm in a band, so when I have to go somewhere, usually someone else has to be there too," he says. The rest of the time, he travels by bus. "I don't mind it. I'm used to being a passenger; I use my time on the bus to write. I work out melodies and lyrics while I ride." This makes him possibly the first person to have a nice thing to say about the L.A. bus system and certainly the first to use it as a creative adjunct.
This isn't the only thing about the Negro Problem that catches your attention. There's the name, which was chosen "because it was funny," Stew explains, "and because even if people didn't get it, they'd have to say something along the lines of 'I don't like the Negro Problem.'"
Stew -- who is black and in his tall wool hat and brightly colored shirt resembles an African-American John Phillips (a comparison he relishes) -- says that not everyone finds the humor in the name. "Someone told me they can't tell their black friends about the band, and (legendary L.A. deejay) Rodney Bingenheimer won't say it on-air," he claims, dryly adding, "it says more about them than us, doesn't it." And questioning the taste of longtime Los Angeles Times critic Robert Hilburn in their debut single, "Birdcage" made sure that in L.A.'s largest newspaper, their name was mud. "Every ten years or so, some band writes a 'f--- Robert Hilburn song,'" Stew says, adding with a wicked smile that "there's eight or nine of them by now." Besides, he adds, "we were just poking fun at the guy; we should have known from his writing he has no sense of humor."
Other Los Angeles listeners have not had any difficulty getting the Negro Problem. The group has been steadily building a following, to the point where their self-released album, Post Minstrel Syndrome, has outsold Puff Daddy in the last few weeks at local record stores such as Arons and the Sunset Boulevard Virgin Megastore. A savvy mixture of Jimmy Webb and Burt Bacharach's pop classicism, XTC's new-wave ironies and the lysergic anger of Love's Arthur Lee run through the briccolage/mixmaster aesthetic that characterizes their hometown Silverlake scene. Indeed, the group -- bassist Heidi Rodenwald, drummer Charles Pagano, and flautist/singer Lisa Jenio -- easily handles the sharp twists and turns of Stew songs, which can swerve from sweet pop to avant garde noise on a dime. It's a sound Stew characterizes as "teen pop for adult sophisticates."
For all their surface blitheness, songs such as "Doubting Uncle Tom," "Ghetto Godot," and "Buzzing," which features the lyrics "look at Bill Cosby's face/such a credit to his race" address African-American issues with a gimlet eye, finding no solace in the politically correct, NAACP-approved solutions.
Stew bristles when some listeners express surprise that a black man can play pop music. "I have more in common with Syd Barrett or Robyn Hitchcock than I do with some blues guy from 1910." he says. "Why shouldn't I play their music?"
His mood brightens when he talks about the woman who collared him at a recent show. "She was about 50, a real suburbanite. Not the kind of woman you'd expect to see at (L.A. rock club) Spaceland." But after the band's set, she found Stew and told him how much she loved the band's songs. "If we can reach her, I have to think we're doing something right."
STEVE MIRKIN