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Let’s come right out and say it: that whole fad for sloppily mashing together several musical genres—heavy-metal-meets-hip-hop-cum-jazz funk, aboriginal-throat-gurgling-with-a-dash-of-sweet-swiss-mountain-yodeling indie pop, or, in sum, Limp Bizkit—looked a lot better (with all its hyphens) than it ever sounded. Assuming you can attract more listeners by repackaging every thinkable genre into some audio-Frankenstein is just as effective as McCain was in trying to gain votes by adding a nubile hillbilly to his Presidential ticket. Which is to say, not very.

If, however, you are going to look at a model for success, I’d go with the brown guy. The B-Side Players (the B of course stands for Brown) hail from the California-Mexico border and their multi-layered sound works because at their core, they’re story-tellers—music is just the medium. They’ll tell of revolution through bold and escalating horns, celebrate culture through festive and equatorial clatter of cumbia and congas, and chase down oppression with syncopated tribal chants and Latin Afro-beat. An arsenal of genres rather than an accumulation of them, B-Side Players’ narrative blurs the point where one category begins and another ends.

The Movement (2001), a call to the Souldier in all of us, is rife with a procession of drum, horn and guitar solos, and is their most unabashed and technically impressive record to date. It’s fast paced rock, full of funky Isaac Hayes-esque bass lines, and simultaneously makes me want to salsa and burn a spliff for freedom (my salsa could use some improvement). Their second EP, Fire in the Youth (2007), may hit a little heavy on the didactic tick, but it does justice to the old Marley formula of Roots-Revolt-Reggae, laying down incendiary lyrics only to be picked up by hopeful upstrums and smooth island rhythms.

Occasionally, the band does fall short. Both records have cohesive flow and a distinct attitude, but there are still two or three songs that you end up skipping—either for being too repetitive, too saccharine, or just plain cloying. But more often than not, the message strings everything together. From How You Want:

We lock up the kids in school with weapons
How you want to blame our own reflections
Four hundred years of cultural castration
How you want roots with no foundation?
>
We are not illegals, we are not aliens
How you wanna keep us behind a wall and fence
If you want one love, one world, one race
How you want to change yourself?
By changing channels on your favorite lazy-boy reclining chair?

We’re a month into this new presidency. We’ve had ample time to nurse that hanging hope-over. But, if this band can be a reminder, this revolution isn’t over yet. It’s time we had a party of our own.