SFC : A Saved Man In the Jungle, by Bob Longman Jr. Originally run in
Nov/Dec '90 Notebored Magazine, used with permission.


In 1988, Broken Records decided that it should be getting into the rap
sounds they were hearing in the poor neighborhoods in California.
Their most important move was to pick up on a demonstration tape by a
rapper named *Chris 'Super C' Cooper*, operating with his friends as
SFC, Soldiers For Christ. A rough-and-tumble image, this soldier
stuff, but the rap inside was up to it. Now, Cooper/SFC stretches out
further and tougher and at times more humorously with 'A Saved Man (In
the Jungle)'.

It's a jungle out there, and Super C lives in it. The jam is his way
of telling us where he's at, and why. "It was going to be a slaved
man, with the 'L' crossed out. Before I was a saved man I was slaved,
man. A 'jungle' is what I call the ghetto. I can walk outside and
see fifty million things happen."

Cooper was raised in a broken household by his mother in which the
father expressed strong hatred for whites and what the white culture
had done to blacks and to him. "Anti-white, anti-everything that had
to do with whites, a follower of the Black Panthers. My dad was into
all this, so I'd seen all this, and followed something like in his
footsteps until about the 11th grade. I stepped back from it when he
got removed from his part of the Muslim movement, mainly over marrying
a white lady. That freaked me out; that's when I began to move away
from it. I started reading the Bible, and God started working on my
heart."

The Word has that effect on people. After thousands of years of
reading it, it still takes people by surprise. One reason is that we
come to it with cultural expectations. Cooper recalls: "The kind of
church I remember was twisted, phony, man-made. It's way out of what
I'm doing now. I picked it up, I read it up myself, and the things
that people were telling me about it weren't in there."

That era of his life was Super C-ded when, after searching the
Scriptures and listening up to what was happening around him, he rather
quietly put himself in Jesus' hands. So what happened right afterward
of a loud argument with someone. While trying to find the guy in
order to rearrange his face, Cooper was ambushed and the left side of
Cooper's face was smashed. He took it as a message about the price of
being violent, and he's quite thankful to God and to extensive
emergency surgery that he still has a left side. Now his rapping and
ministry work are his full-time occupation.

In most forms of street or underground culture, there is a shutting-
down process that starts when the underground people find out that the
goody-goodies are getting hep to their sounds. It has set in, to some
extent, in heavy metal, but not yet in rap. When it comes, Super C's
prepared. "What really trips them out is that I'm not coming in with
soft stuff. I'm coming with the same hard-hitting bass and snares and
samples and super stuff that the best of the world is coming with -- or
harder. You do have some who care, you know, but by and large, the
secular types, they just want money, you know ? The message is
something new to them."

In Cooper's rapping style, the lines of the raps overlap and
interconnect, so that one line flows into another, and the rhymes come
at places one would not expect them to come unless one was highly
familiar with the few practitioners of this kind of rap-writing. It
is an art, so long as one doesn't get high-falooting about it. A
prime example of this art is A Saved Man's opening track 'Whatever', a
barrage of juicy rapid-fire rhyme on a synth/bass track that's
repetitive so as to stay out of rhymes' way. Don't bother even trying
to follow what's being said unless your ears are well-adjusted to rapid
rap.

One of the great glories of rap is that you can tell almost immediately
what the MC is saying. Of course, there's two edges to that sword; a
less-creative rapper is quickly exposed as saying the same thing over
and over again. Rap has ruts. For instance, there are only so many
ways to brag about one's rhyming prowess, and most of them had been
used up long ago. Super Cooper is well aware of the challenge. "I
write about real life, so I try to get away from giving the repeated
message : get saved, get saved, get saved -- you know ? And I know a
lot of Christians are picking up [the album], too. So I wanted to put
in some issues for them to deal with, like 'Idiot Box', talking about
TV addiction. And, I hit the streets a lot, I read a lot, I pay
attention to what's happening. It's easy for me to get out of your
basic rhyming."

Hmm... real life, eh? But he's not above having fun. For instance,
twice on the album, he's heard ordering pizza. It has a point (about
how people appreciate real value and real listening, even in pizza
service), but it's pepperoni-slice-of-life fun. Then, there's "My
Alarm". It is a strange dream -- no, a *weird* dream, -- of spiritual
warfare, bound to strike a chord with fans of bands like A Tribe Called
Quest.

Cooper was raised with an awareness, tattered as it was, of himself as
a black male. And much more so now, with a new Christly pride and
with his rapping achievements. But he works among people who find no
reason inside themselves for valuing themselves or each other. Life
has beaten it out of them, or it was never put into them in the first
place. "There are few males who are standing up for their families",
notes Super C. "Too many are running around seeing how many women
they can have. Kids come up wild with no father figure and nothing to
look up to in what their dad did. A lot of these guys, their dads
were drug dealers, thieves, and they're still pushers, so their kids
come up pushers. I got six kids I'm working with, whose dads are
pushers, or even dead."

Cooper has a lot of hard missions work ahead of him. Inside the disk
jacket, there's a picture of a group that Cooper works with, called
S.W.A.T. -- Spiritual Warfare Attack Team. "They're 25 of us in this
street ministry", says Cooper. "We get dressed in military fatigues,
put the Bibles in our hands, and hit the streets at 11 at night, when
nobody but the hardest heads are out there. I'm involved in that in
my church [a charismatic Baptist church], and I'm also a youth
counselor."

"One of the things we do in the S.W.A.T. ministry", according to
Cooper, "is that we teach these guys self-esteem. You don't have to
be running around here killing each other, selling drugs and all."
The street folks have little awareness about the many blacks who
overcame the worst of situations to do great things; instead, they know
the blowhards, politicians, homewreckers and criminals. And what they
do know they do not believe applies to them, even if some of them can
talk up a good front. "They're coming up thinking that they're not
going to be anything", notes Cooper. "In school, they don't teach you
any of this black history. I can relate to these guys 'cause even
though I knew more of it, I came up basically the same way. I didn't
know the heavy [black history] they can get now."

Another primary concern of Cooper's is that of race relations. "That's
one of the reasons I did this jam called 'The Bomb'", says Cooper.
"One of the things that kept me out of the church for a long time was
the picture of a Jesus with blue eyes and long hair and European
complexion. When I was in the [black radical] movement, we had a
picture of a Black Jesus. What I'm saying is that Jesus was neither
white nor black, but he was a Jew. That's a tough thing for a white
racist or a black activist to take. I want to see us come together as
one. I respect your culture, you respect my culture, and let's work to
bring the people into the Kingdom of God. I want to see that happen,
because [racism]'s really heavy out here. The church I go to, one of
the things I like about it is that our youth pastor is white and a deacon
is white. They didn't hide from what's out here."

Neither does Super C. That's what makes the rap as strong and as
truthful as it is. And in this era of ever-bigger lies, we need the
truth (and the Truth) more than ever.

Robert Longman