Ghetto Gothic is the fifth studio album by Melvin Van Peebles. Released in 1995, this album marks the second traditional music effort by Van Peebles, after What the....You Mean I Can't Sing?! Previously, Van Peebles released the experimental spoken word albums Brer Soul, Ain't Supposed To Die a Natural Death and As Serious as a Heart-Attack.
Ghetto Gothic sees Van Peebles embracing a modern production sound, while the music encompasses various music styles, including hip hop, reggae, blues and classical music.
Background
Following the release of Melvin Van Peebles' film Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song, he premiered two musicals on Broadway, Don't Play Us Cheap and Ain't Supposed To Die A Natural Death, deriving from earlier plays he had written in French. To express the ghetto's turmoil and pathos, Van Peebles used sprechgesang as a form he could tell stories in; he recorded three albums using this style, Brer Soul, Ain't Supposed To Die a Natural Death and As Serious as a Heart-Attack. The albums were categorized as spoken word at the time, but was later called a precursor to rapping and hip hop music.
After recording an album which utilized more traditional songwriting, What the....You Mean I Can't Sing?! (1974), Van Peebles did not record another album for 20 years. In 1993, Van Peebles recorded a new song, "Cruel Jim Crow", for his son Mario's film Posse. Melvin stated that he would not record a new album "until I could do it correctly."
Van Peebles turned down a large money offer from a record label that wanted him to perform his lyrics over samples of older recordings. Van Peebles said, "That's not what I do! The structures of my songs are more complicated and subtle than jingles or nursery rhymes, with music which helps carry the story along. The words aren't just shouted over some loop which repeats itself." Van Peebles later received an offer from Capitol Records and told the label "Here's the deal: Send money, and leave me alone. I'll send the tape. That's it. Just go away, and let the doorknob hit you where the good Lord split you." Capitol gave Van Peebles complete artistic control over the recording as a result, and he was satisfied with the business deal, as well as the finished album.
Music and lyrics
Ghetto Gothic contains some rerecordings of songs Van Peebles previously recorded for those projects. "My Love Belongs To You" and "There" first appeared on Van Peebles' What the....You Mean I Can't Sing?! The Ghetto Gothic version of "My Love Belongs To You" is modernized with a hip hop beat, and "There" incorporates chamber music, which Billboard writer Jim Bessman says "chillingly portrays an incident of spousal abuse." While it was an older song, Van Peebles felt it had a modern relevance, commenting "It could have been called 'The O. J. Story'. The juxtaposition of an elitist kind of music with my inner city voice takes it beyond the 'hood and shows that it's not just down-and-dirty people who beat their wives."
"Lilly Done The Zampoughi Everytime I Pulled Her Coatail" first appeared on Brer Soul, and "Just Don't Make No Sense" was previously recorded for As Serious as a Heart-Attack. "Quittin' Time" debuted in Van Peebles' 1972 production Don't Play Us Cheap, while "The Apple Stretching" first appeared in Van Peebles' 1982 production Waltz of the Stork, and was later covered by Grace Jones.
Many of Van Peebles' songs are delivered in sprechgesang. Allmusic writer Ed Hogan compares Van Peebles' vocals to "Louis Armstrong, the comedy albums of Bill Cosby from the '70s, and the wild antics of cartoon voice artists Mel Blanc and ". Another Allmusic writer, Thom Jurek, compared Van Peebles' delivery to that of Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen. Van Peebles describes his vocal style as "the old Southern style", which was influenced by protest singers he had heard growing up in South Chicago. Van Peebles also said that he was influenced by older forms of African-American music: "[...] people like Blind Lemon Jefferson and the field hollers. I was also influenced by spoken word song styles from Germany that I encountered when I lived in France."