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Richmond, VA Culture & Politics Since 2005

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Petersburg’s Trussel Still Injecting the Funk After 40 Years

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In the summer of 1979, Petersburg funk band Trussel made it to the #23 spot on the Billboard charts with their song, “Love Injection,” an infectious disco groove that became a national hit. The song was especially popular in gay bars in New York City, like Paradise Garage and The Loft, where pioneering DJ Larry Levan made it a nightclub staple.

It was the first song released from their 1980 album of the same name, and Trussel’s first release on major label Elektra records. “Love Injection” showcases the band’s ability to lock in on a disco break and grind it out for eight sweaty minutes. It’s one of the few purely disco numbers that the band recorded in its short-lived existence; the rest of their discography is rooted primarily in the style of 1970s funk and soul.

Trussel was formed in 1973 by a cadre of Virginia State University students. The group formed their own record label in 1975 called Bridge the Gap Records, and released their first two singles on the imprint. Their first single, “Bicentennial Boogie,” helped boost their profile regionally. The B-side, “How Many Tricks in 1976,” was a political song that expressed the undercurrent of paranoia in the United States at the time. It was released in the fallout of Watergate, and just after the fall of Saigon, when trust in American politicians was at an all-time low.

The band caught a break shortly after the release of their second single. They were tapped to be the backing band for 17-year-old Evelyn ‘Champagne’ King, who would go on to release the disco hit “Shame” in 1977, which reached #9 on the US billboard charts. She would become an even bigger star in the 1980s with her albums I’m in Love and Get Loose. The band performed with her shortly before her breakout in 1977.

Trussel was then signed to Elektra in 1978 and released three singles and a full-length record on the label, but declined the label’s offer for a second album. The band had wanted the cover of Love Injection to feature a picture of the band but Elektra refused, opting instead for a drawing of a butterfly and a flower, presumably because the label didn’t want black faces on the cover of the record. This led to a dispute that prompted the band to leave Elektra shortly after the release of Love Injection.

Trussel broke up in the early 80s, and “Love Injection” remains their standalone hit, but their legacy as a regional powerhouse lives on today. Their DIY ethic and quality songwriting is strongly representative of the Richmond region’s reputation for producing outstanding musicians.

The will to create culture where there is none has been a consistent feature of the area’s arts landscape, and musicians and artists routinely produce high quality work with scarce resources. Almost 40 years later, Trussel remains one of the regions best known exports.

Music Sponsored By Graduate Richmond

Petersburg Overturns 1950s Motion that Preserved Segregation of Wilcox Lake

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After more than half a century, Petersburg City Council has approved a motion to reopen Wilcox Lake, which was previously closed in 1958 to prevent desegregation in the area. City Councilwoman Treska Wilson-Smith brought the motion forward this year, after previously attempting to pass it five years prior.

“The council of 1958 made a decision to close the lake so as to prevent African Americans from swimming with others,” Wilson-Smith said. “Something was in our book that upheld racism. I feel that I must do what I can to preserve the history of the African-American in Petersburg.”

Sixty years ago, Wilcox Lake was a popular recreational swimming facility – but only for white people. In 1958, some of Petersburg’s African-American residents wanted to open the lake up recreationally to everyone. In response, the city council (which at the time was all-white), closed the lake and the entire swimming facility down. Wilcox Lake has been closed to the public ever since, preserving the area’s segregated past well into the 21st century.

June 19 marks the date Petersburg City Council approved the lake’s reopening. The date holds an extra amount of weight, coinciding as the date commemorating the emancipation of the last remaining slaves in the U.S., nicknamed “Juneteenth.”

“Juneteenth is the celebration of the end of slavery,” Wilson-Smith said. “And this motion is the end of a segregated act by [Petersburg City Council].”

Despite overturning the previous 1958 motion in a “monumental” decision last week, the present-day Wilcox Lake might not be much more than a pretty view. Petersburg spokeswoman Joanne Williams told NBC12 “the lake will probably never be open for swimming because of the liability to the city.”

Even though it may not reopen as a full-blown swimming facility again, the decision to reestablish Wilcox Lake as a public recreational area is a step in the right direction for Petersburg.

The 1958 decision to close down Wilcox Lake was not too surprising, given the racial tension that existed in Petersburg at the time. The New York Times reported, “Petersburg had full-dress segregation into the 1960’s, including separate Bibles in courtrooms and separate entrances and reading rooms in the library.” The city did not integrate schools until nearly 15 years after the crucial Brown v. Board of Education decision in favor of desegregation – quite the opposite of the call for racial integration with “all deliberate speed” in the 1955 Brown v. Board of Education II decision.  

Despite “integrating,” Petersburg implemented “freedom of choice” plans like many other school districts at the time, giving students the right to choose to attend white or black schools. The policy kept schools naturally segregated, as most students chose to stay at the schools they already attended.

We’d all like to think desegregation is a problem of the past, and that all there is left to do is overturn outdated motions like that of Wilcox Lake. However, the Richmond-Petersburg area still has a major problem with isolation of certain racial groups – most prominently in education. A 2013 report conducted by the The Civil Rights Project at UCLA found nearly 20% of all schools in the Richmond and Petersburg districts were “intensely segregated,” and 40% were “stably segregated” in 2010.

The lines of segregation see overlap in race and economic status; the report found that the average black student attended schools where low-income students made up more than half of the school’s enrollment. Meanwhile, their white counterparts attended schools where low-income students only made up a quarter of the school’s enrollment. Virginia’s major metropolitan regions have experienced surges in multi-racial diversity, but the CRP report found school districts across the state lacking in integration of their African-American and Latino populations.

Regardless of the long-overdue desegregation of Wilcox Lake, where race relations in central Virginia are concerned, there’s a lot of work left to do. Still, it’s nice to see Petersburg working to heal the wounds left by the city’s legacy of racism.

VSU Collective Troubled Empire Drop New Video, ‘Notice’

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An up and coming hip hop/ R&B collective at Virginia State University has recently come across our radar, but the group of singers, rappers, and other creatives have been making waves in Petersburg, and in the area for quite a while.

Troubled Empire, was founded by Troubled Mal, and features fellow VSU students and artists Blue Bynum, Don Juan, DJ Wake, Lorenzo Cheatham, Brenten Layne, and Derrick Wilson. The collective has been getting their name out with performances at VSU’s homecoming alongside Playboi Carter and 21 Savage, along with the Square Festival in New York and the Manchester Gallery, and most recently, the group dropped a video for their song called, “Notice”. And from the lyrics, to the beat, to the message,  its one that grabs your attention for sure.

“Basically we’re trying to wake people up, take off their blindfolds per say. We’re trying to wake them up to all the propaganda they’re fed daily,” said fellow member Blue Bynum, whose real name is Devin Bynum. “Not just focus on politics, this is based on music that people hear, from television to the radio. All that stuff, all the propaganda that people are fed, we’re here to help them ‘notice,’ pun intended, that they need to wake up and we’re going to be the ones to do that.”  

Mal, whose real name is Malcolm Pinckney, added they also want to use the song as a way to introduce new audiences to their group.

“We also want people to wake up to Troubled Empire as well, it’s our time now. I’m saying it’s our time, not only from the perspective of Troubled Empire but as people as well,” he said.

“Notice,” hooks you in from the beginning with four young people with red blindfolds on nodding their heads while they watch the news, to a lecture hall where a professor is talking with a slide that reads “Trump is the Next Martin Luther King” behind him. The beat and Bynum’s swift rhymes pull you in from there with him trying to wake his fellow classmates up to what’s going on around them.

The video was directed by Ryan Dickerson and produced and edited by Shamir Tyner. Be on the lookout for more from this group as we can continue to follow them.