Cody gets down and dirty

By REBECCA BARRY

You could forgive Cody ChestnuTT for getting a little testy. He and his band the Crosswalk stayed with their record label for eight years, poured their creative heart and thousands of their own dollars into recording an album, only to have the plug pulled just before its release.

The quietly spoken, southern-raised one-man band - who can come on like a low-tech Prince - now refers to the music industry as "glorified organised crime" and to his solo project as a "personal petition" against it.

His critically acclaimed The Headphone Masterpiece, recorded and produced in his bedroom, is a slow-fused double disc of sexed-up soul, stripped-back rock, loose dirty blues, 60s guitar pop, feedback and then some. An up-yours to the glossy, compressed concept of a studio album.

Fans of the the Roots will already be familiar with ChestnuTT's Lenny Kravitz-like velvet drawl and shameless Prince swagger - he wrote and sings The Seed on their latest album Phrenology. The song has been criticised for being sexually graphic, but ChestnuTT says the song is a reassertion of rock'n'roll as black music.

It's easy to misinterpret his lyrics, he says, and many have. He's been called sexist, an egomaniac and much worse.

"We're talking about satire. This whole album satirises what goes on in pop culture."

If it's satire, then ChestnuTT's lyrics on Masterpiece as well as tracks such as Boylife in America and Bitch I'm Broke worryingly capture the misogynist side of a post hip-hop world.

"I wanted to actually nail the spirit, the frustration, the warfare between man and woman, especially black men and women," he says, calmly. "I just wanted to capture it without any sugar-coating, I didn't want it to be nice, I didn't want it to be gentle or subtle."

It's not all doom and gloom - the album also has romantic ballads and heartfelt prayers. But where he does get serious he sees a world of degenerate relationships, money-hungry youth and dirty politics - and sings about it in the first person.

"Of course I been broke," he says in response to his comments against material wealth on Bitch I'm Broke, giving the impression he's been hard-done-by, and not just in his professional life.

But he also grew up with "nothing but love", in a big old house in Chestnut St, Georgia, Atlanta, that was always teeming with company. He spent a lot of time with his grandmother, her 14 children and their record collection - everything from Ella Fitzgerald and Burt Bacharach to Motown, Sly & the Family Stone, Otis Redding, Johnny Cash, the Rolling Stones, Kiss and the Commodores.

"You could be two blocks away and you'd hear the music from that house and everybody loved it because it was great music," he says. "It was like the central radio station for the whole community."

ChestnuTT is still a family man - happily married, a doting new father who studies the Bible, the scriptures and American history. The back of the album cover is a photograph of his enormous clan whom he thanks in the liner notes.

"My dear grandmother - she's passed on. And she wouldn't have liked those lyrics.

"She would probably drill me to the ground but I would tell her the same thing y'know: that's the type of environment I grew up with and this is the language and the conversations of the culture.

"Good or bad, this is what it has become. This is how insensitive we've become - not just black and not just hip-hop. I know women who call each other bitches more than men call women bitches.

"Have you ever called a woman a bitch? Be honest. We all know it exists, y'know? We're swimming in a huge pool of hypocrisy and all of us are guilty and want to get out of it but we don't know how. This is a mirror, this is a reflection of what it is."

Performance

* Who: Cody ChestnuTT

* Where: Galatos, Galatos St, Newton

* When: Saturday.

* Tickets: $45 Ticketek