New Orleans funk band Galactic skirts the hip-hop frontier

Some people,” Galactic bassist Robert Mercurio says, “think we’re just a bunch of college kids playing old New Orleans music.”

That may have been so at one point. But the funk-based, mostly instrumental quintet has garnered plenty of respect over its nearly 15-year existence. Thanks to crossover success with younger listeners as well as its high visibility in the jam-band scene, Galactic stands poised as Crescent City ambassadors to an audience that otherwise may not have found acts like the Meters, Dr. John or Professor Longhair. Still, when he considers his band’s place in the city’s storied pantheon, Mercurio politely demurs.

“We’re not trying to present ourselves as being on the throne of New Orleans music or anything like that,” he insists. “And I don’t know where we fit in, to be honest.”

For Galactic, credibility didn’t just come from years of practice and persistent touring. When the band formed in the early 1990s, all but one of its current members had relocated to New Orleans for college. (Mercurio arrived in 1990 to attend Tulane; the others were already there and going to Loyola.) Drummer Stanton Moore may be Galactic’s only NOLA native, but the other members immediately fell in love with the city’s rich musical climate — so much so, in fact, that they all decided to stay.

Mercurio emphasizes that the band put in the time and energy to absorb and relate to the city’s musical culture, modernizing the music with the proper sense of respect. From Galactic’s sophomore album, Crazyhorse Mongoose, in 1998, through its latest, From the Corner to the Block, in 2007, the band has shown a staunch progressive streak, throwing fresh twists into the funk formula with each release.

“When we first started out, we were in our 20s playing music that was written 30 to 40 years before us,” Mercurio says. “So no matter what, our interpretation is going to have somewhat of a modern or new approach. At first, it wasn’t as conscious, but lately we’ve thought about it a little more.”

Even a cursory listen to today’s funk music reveals how endemic the retro craze is and how often bands get stuck in the past. Although it’s arguably a great thing that younger musicians have taken to classic funk, it’s also dismaying to see bands acting more like anthropologists than like musicians who are capable of coming up with fresh hooks.

“There are bands that are doing the retro thing very convincingly and great, like Sharon Jones and the Dap-Kings. But it’s been done, so why do that?” Mercurio says. “We’ve been there, too. Our first album, Coolin’ Off, is very retro. We even recorded at the same studio that the Meters recorded at. But after you tour with a band for a while, it hits you: What are we doing? We’ve got to do our own thing.”

On From the Corner, Galactic’s own thing took the form of the band collaborating on every song with guest rappers, including Boots Riley from the Coup, Ladybug Mecca from Digable Planets, Gift of Gab from Blackalicious, Chali 2Na from Jurassic 5, Lyrics Born, and a host of others. After parting company with vocalist Theryl DeClouet in 2004, Mercurio says the band found itself free to pursue an inspiration that first struck in 1992, when British funk band the Brand New Heavies released Heavy Rhyme Experience: Vol. 1. That album also featured a roster of guest MCs who, at the time, were up-and-coming.

“We’d always wanted to make an album like that. In a way, like us, [the Heavies] weren’t setting out to make a hip-hop album per se either. They were just doing what they do and combining it with the MCs that were current at the time. And now there’s a slew of new current MCs that we were friends with or that we appreciated. I really do think that a lot of hip-hop is where funk has gone. I mean, if the Meters were here now, they’d probably have a rapper in the band.”

And true to Galactic’s forward-thinking nature, From the Corner bears a distinctly futuristic sensibility. Additionally, the band was striving for more than laying rhymes over music that was already written.

“We sent [the guest MCs] pretty basic stuff,” Mercurio says. “It was usually just some drums and bass, and maybe some type of other instrument on top like a guitar or keyboard. So then they would do their vocals, and then we would add and arrange a lot. For the title track with Juvenile, he literally rapped over a metronome set to a tempo, and we built that whole track around what he gave us. So, in a way, it was a true collaboration.”

Unsurprisingly, after a year of touring with guest MCs, Galactic is already looking ahead. Current dates feature guest horn players who only occasionally drop a rhyme or two. “We really hope people aren’t like, ‘They’re a rap group now,'” Mercurio says.

At the end of the day, Mercurio says, Galactic is still an instrumental band, which presents some creative limitations, he admits. “You have to make broader strokes. When there’s a singer, it’s very obvious: ‘This is the chorus coming up.’ With instrumental music, it almost has to be overly done for people to be affected.”