Curly Castro

The socially conscious MC drops his solo debut. Can you deal?

by John Vettese

Jessica Kourkounis

Until it's over, you don't realize how long the clip was.

"It must be the devil. It must be the devil... OOOWOW! OOOWOW! Yeh! Devil! Yeh! Devil!"

Two tracks into his solo debut, Winston's Appeal, Philadelphia rapper Curly Castro (born Kinte McDaniel) interrupts the flow with one minute and 29 seconds of spoken word. Tweaked synthesizers and riding beats swap out for Amiri Baraka reciting "Dope."

The 1980 poem is a stunning, relentless and utterly captivating indictment of blame displacement by a racist society ("Caint be Vorster, Caint be apartheid, Caint be imperialism, Jimmy Carter wouldn't lie"). As Castro says over dinner at Tritone earlier this month, "It hits everything perfectly. You can't deny it — you might just have to listen in silence 'cause you might be ashamed that all this stuff is actually true."

Sampling it, however, is a total artistic curveball, a challenge to throw at listeners. Castro sees it the other way.

"In groups I did before, sometimes we had pop sensibilities and you don't want to offend this, that and the third," says the MC, once a side player in the defunct crew Bohemian Fifth. "Sometimes certain references I used to make weren't immediately recognizable.

"But I feel like in my solo ventures, that's what I'm supposed to do," he continues. "I'm supposed to make these terms recognizable. I'm supposed to make people know who Fred Hampton is, I'm supposed to make people know who Bobby Seale is, who Sonia Sanchez is. Or Amiri Baraka is."

Castro came to hip-hop 10 years ago while studying poetry at Temple under Sanchez. Some friends began performing as Nemesis, and he came on board as their hype man — a role he later relished in Natural Burners and Bo 5th.

But as those groups dissolved, Castro kept rapping and writing, developing his skills to do more than just bring the party. Today he cuts a charismatic figure next to Zilla Rocca (née Stephen Zales) in emergent noir-hop act 5 O'Clock Shadowboxers. But on Winston's Appeal, Castro takes the spotlight, delivering his treatise on society's ills and the music industry's ills, mixing a bit of autobiography into a punchy antithesis of your conventional rap record.

The dense commentary of "Moses" is reminiscent of outspoken artists like Saul Williams or The Coup. The personal scope of "Flatbush & Church" (a telling of Castro's Brooklyn roots) and unabashed criticism of "Eulogy to L" (based around a mutated Atmosphere sample) recalls KRS-One. Half of "The Preamble" is a two-minute clip of the black Civil War soldiers in the film Glory bonding and singing campfire spirituals before battle. The Baraka clip returns again, on "My Blood Runs Rebel," for a minute and nine seconds this time, a heady complement to Castro's rhyme "This is for the heavy-handed, the heavy readers/ Not those elitists, just true seekers."

Rocca, who sequenced the album and produced several tracks, admits the dense samples made him uneasy. "Consciously it's such a dope record," Rocca says. "But I was like, I don't know if people are ready to deal with it."

But as it shook out, he continues, the samples lend Winston's Appeal variety, as well as thoughtful depth — different tracks for different mood. With so much in the pot, Rocca concludes, you never get tired of hearing Castro rap.

Castro smiles knowingly — this was his plan.

"I'm not ashamed to say I'm a rapper, but sometimes, rap is boring," Castro says. "Sometimes you just oversaturate your listener. The way I set the album up, it allows people to take a breath, but not an intellectual pause."