Pop Music Reviews : Black Rockers Making Inroads

Follow for Now is a young black rock group from Atlanta, and it’s also what the band seems content to do: For now, it’s following in the footsteps of black-rock leaders Living Colour, Fishbone and rap’s Public Enemy.

But at the Music Machine on Sunday, performing as part of the third anniversary show of the Black Rock Coalition’s Los Angeles chapter, the quintet showed it has the will and, perhaps, the vision to someday be a leader itself. Starting with a rough, metalized version of Public Enemy’s “She Watch Channel Zero,” Follow thrashed through a brief set mixing rock and rap elements, and balancing youthful zeal with lyrical and conceptual maturity.

The leadership of Living Colour--whose Vernon Reid co-founded the Black Rock Coalition in New York in 1985--was also evident in two of the four other acts on the bill: Long Beach’s speed-metal quartet Frija and L.A.’s Blackasaurus Mex, which stayed closer to LC’s Hendrixisms. Jason Luckett provided contrast with his confessional, singer-songwriter approach, and veteran band Mother’s Finest closed the show with a mainstream, almost Pat Benatarish rock sound.

The variety demonstrated that black rockers are making inroads into the non-race-specific rock world. But acceptance is still slow to come. The most telling comment of the night came from Follow for Now’s David Harris, who surveyed the racially mixed crowd and noted, “I don’t think we’ve ever played for this many people of color before.”