Energy Flash: A Journey Through Rave Music and Dance Culture (56 page)

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Authors: Simon Reynolds

BOOK: Energy Flash: A Journey Through Rave Music and Dance Culture
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Blue Lines
was a landmark in British club culture, a dance music equivalent to Miles Davis’s
Kind of Blue
, marking a shift towards a more interior, meditational sound. The songs on
Blue Lines
run at ‘spliff’ tempos – from a mellow, moonwalking 90 b.p.m. (exactly midway between reggae and hip hop) down to a positively torpid 67 b.p.m. Massive Attack make music you nod your head to, rather than dance. ‘Right from the start, we never made music in line with the tempos that were required in clubs,’ Daddy G told me in 1994. ‘Our music’s more like something to . . . eat your food to, y’know. It’s made for after clubs, when you want to chill out, learn how to breathe again.’
Distancing themselves from the party-minded functionalism of dance culture, Massive Attack cited instead conceptualist, album-oriented artists bands across the spectrum, from progressive rock (Pink Floyd) to post-punk experimentalism (Public Image Limited), from fusion (Herbie Hancock) to symphonic soul (Isaac Hayes). Hayes’s influence came through on string-laden, mournful epics like ‘Safe From Harm’ and ‘Unfinished Sympathy’, both of which were hit singles in Britain. But Massive Attack’s real originality lay in more tranquil tracks like ‘One Love’, with its mesmerizing clockwork rhythm and jazzy, electric piano pulsations. On ‘Daydreaming’, 3D and Tricky drift on a stream of consciousness, quoting from
Fiddler On Roof
and The Beatles and floating ‘like helium’ above the hyperactive ‘trouble and strife’ of everyday life. Expounding a Zen-like philosophy of sublime passivity and disengagement from the ‘real’, they rap of ‘living in my headphones’.
Victims of ‘Bristol time’, Massive Attack took three years to record the sequel to
Blue Lines
. The title track of
Protection
and the album’s downtempo despondency reiterated the basic Massive Attack anti-stance: the longing for refuge and sanctuary from external chaos, music as healing force and balm for the troubled soul. But in 1994, Massive were dramatically upstaged and outshone by two of their protégés, whose different takes on Bristol’s ‘hip hop blues’ were more eerie and experimental (Tricky, about whom more later) and more seductively sepulchral (Portishead).
Throughout Portishead’s debut
Dummy
, singer Beth Gibbons sounds like she’s buried alive in the blues.
Dummy
is like eavesdropping on the cold-turkey torment of a love-junkie; her lyrics are riddled with imagery of bereavement, betrayal and disenchantment. ‘Biscuit’ is at once the album’s aesthetic highpoint and emotional abyss. Through one of Geoff Barrow’s dankest, most lugubrious palls of hip hop
noir
, Gibbons intones a litany of lyric-fragments, disconnected shards of anguish. ‘I’m scared / got hurt a long time ago . . . at last, relief / a mother’s son has left me sheer.’ Compounding the faltering, fragmentary quality of this abandoned lover’s discourse, ‘Biscuits’ pivots around a lurching stuck-needle sample of Johnny Ray singing ‘never fall in love again’, which runs at a grotesquely lachrymose 16 r.p.m., so that it sounds like the Nabob of Sob is literally drowning in tears.
Throughout
Dummy
, Barrow expertly frames Gibbons’ torched-songs with sombre soundscapes whose jaundiced desolation is steeped in the influence of film
noir
and sixties spy-movies. ‘I like soundtrack music, ’cos of the kind of sounds they use to create suspense,’ he says. ‘Modern soundtracks, they’re too digital and synthesizer-based, whereas the stuff I like involves orchestras and acoustic instruments.’ Perhaps in an attempt to ward off the cliché applied to their kind of impressionistic, evocative music – ‘a soundtrack to a non-existent movie’ – Portishead went ahead and made an, er, existent film to accompany the single ‘Sour Times’. Entitled
To Kill A Dead Man
, the ten minute short aspires to a Cold War feel, in homage to seedy espionage movies like
The Ipcress File
(starring Michael Caine). The thing about that particular cinematic genre which fits Portishead’s bleaker-than-thou mood is that there’s never a happy ending.
Mind-Movies
 
The influence of soundtrack music is a common denominator running through trip hop. Take DJ Shadow, a white B-boy from Davis, California, who’s one of the very few American exponents of the genre. Shadow cites film-score composers John Williams and Jerry Goldsmith as particular favourites; his long suites of sample-woven atmospheres and spoken-word soundbites are designed to encourage people to drift off into reverie and generate their own cinematic mind’s eye imagery. ‘I like the music to take me places. I want people to just space out for a while,’ Shadow says. Pinpointing the difference between his rap-free take on hip hop and current American hip hop, he says that he prefers to be ‘the director rather than the star’.
Shadow’s music offers the listener what some call ‘deep time’ – the kind of tranquil, spellbound immersion that you experience as a child when you’re lost in a book, and which is becoming harder and harder to recover in the age of channel-surfing and blip culture. Shadow’s music isn’t social (he’s said many times that he’s not making music for the dancefloor), nor is it anti-social (as with gangsta rap), it’s asocial: an aural sanctuary from the hurly-burly, music that hushes your soul.
‘Ever been in a car, hanging out with people, and a song comes on, and even though everyone may be in a particular mood, really hyped up, but then the song comes on and the mood changes? Everyone starts looking out the window, staring into space, or just gets quiet. Nobody will admit that it’s because of the music, but it’ll affect everyone the same. There’s a lot of power in that. I don’t understand how it happens, but I’m trying to figure it out.’
After early efforts on his own imprint Solesides, Shadow first grabbed attention when he hooked up with London’s Mo Wax label. First, there was the twelve minute epic ‘In/Flux’, a panoramic early seventies groovescape whose disconsolate strings, lachrymose wah-wah and fusion flute recalls both the orchestral soul of The Temptations’ ‘Papa Was a Rollin’ Stone’ and Miles Davis’s elegy for Duke Ellington ‘He Loved Him Madly’. These two early seventies classics captured that era’s sense of ‘slippin’ into darkness’. With its ghostly shards of liberation rhetoric drifting by on the breeze – ‘people’s power’, ‘it’s only a matter of time’, ‘FREEDOM!’ – ‘Influx’ is at once an elegy for the lost ideals of the sixties and an evocation of the nineties’ own gloom and millennial trepidation.
Throughout ‘In/Flux’ and its sequels ‘Lost and Found’ and ‘What Does Your Soul Look Like?’ Shadow’s mastery of sampling makes him seem like a conductor, orchestrating a supergroup of stellar jazz and funk sidemen. Shadow’s sources are far broader than the American hip hop norm: ‘Lost and Found’ offsets tentative dejection (a mournful keyboard figure from Fleetwood Mac’s ‘Brown Eyes’, Christine McVie’s ballad off 1979’s
Tusk
) against resilient determination (a martial drumbeat plucked from U2’s ‘Sunday Bloody Sunday’), in order to dramatize a kind of internal battle for psychic survival in a world gone crazy.
With the release of his 1996 debut
Endtroducing
, Shadow was garlanded with acclaim by American rock critics. But he remains virtually unknown in the US rap scene. What happened to hip hop in the nineties that it has no place for a visionary like Shadow? For understandable reasons, the American rap community wanted to reaffirm the music’s blackness in the face of its commercial breakthrough and subsequent ‘vanilla’ misappropriations. This back-to-black-lash took the form of an obsession with keeping it ‘real’. The emphasis shifted away from production to the verbals – street-life storytelling, rhymin’ skills, the rapper’s larger-than-life ‘Big Willie’ persona. These elements increased in importance because, by pertaining to specifically African-American experience, they reinforce rap’s inclusion/exclusion effect (‘it’s a black thing, you wouldn’t understand’). Simultaneously, some hip-hop producers abandoned samples-and-loops in favour of live musicianship, because of the legal and financial hassles with sample clearance.
‘What sparked me back when I was growing up was the combination of music and lyrics,’ says Shadow. ‘But as the lyrics started to get more important, I came to feel they were confining, too specific. I wanted to mess around with breaks, like Steinski or Curtis Mantronik did, and try to do new things with samples. Mantronix albums were about 50 per cent instrumentals, and even when they weren’t, MC Tee’s voice was more like texture. Sometimes I think what I do is just “sample music”, an entirely different genre from hip hop. Like some people aspire to be the best at guitar, I want to be constantly doing new things with the sampler. Prince Paul, Mantronik and Steinski were doing it – these were guys who had a stack of records behind them and just let their imaginations take over. That’s my lineage, that’s the tradition I want to contribute to.’
The parallel between Jimi Hendrix, who fled R & B constrictions for psychedelic London, and Shadow, a refugee from ‘hip-hop pressure’, is striking. In Britain, hip hop never assumed the political, counter-cultural role it did in America, but was just one of many imports (soul, jazz-funk, dub, Chicago house, Detroit techno) to take its place in the spectrum of ‘street beats’. Race is rarely the crucial determinant of unity in British dance scenes (exceptions include swingbeat and dancehall reggae, both of which are based almost entirely around imported African-American and Afro-Caribbean tracks). Instead, what counts is a shared openness to technology and to drugs. And so trip hop and jungle are full of multiracial crews and black/white duos; all-white practitioners don’t have to
justify
themselves like their rare American equivalents do.
From a different vantage point – that of the hip-hop ‘patriot’ – trip hop’s racial politics look less like colour-blind utopianism and more like an evasion of tricky issues. Some have argued that trip hop simply provides white liberals a chance to experience some of hip hop’s flavour without confronting any of its discomfiting aspects (ghettocentric rage, what KRS1 called ‘niggativity’). With their veneration of old skool hip hop (Grandmaster Flash, electro, Ultramagnetic MCs) and their relative indifference towards contemporary rap, British labels like Mo Wax and Ninja Tune arguably belong to a tradition of white art school Brit-bohemians who renovate and adapt black music styles only when their cultural life is over. In the sixties and early seventies, it was blues guitar, in the nineties it’s scratching and ‘turntablizm’. According to this critique, trip hop is merely a form of gentrification, a case of middle-class whites moving in when the underclass blacks have moved on, or been moved out.
Rebirth of the Cool
 
Not ‘real’ rap, not proper jazz, trip hop is in some ways a nineties update of fusion. But with a crucial difference; despite its fondness for jazzy flavour and blue keys, trip hop isn’t based around real-time improvisation but home-studio techniques like sampling and sequencing. DJ Krush’s ‘Slow Chase’, for instance, is cold-sweat paranoia-funk with an implosive wah-wah trumpet solo that recalls Miles Davis’s lost-in-inner-space coked-out delirium circa
On The Corner
and
Dark Magus
. With its psychedelic edge, this era of ‘electric Miles’ deserves the moniker ‘acid jazz’. Unfortunately, that term was invented by an early nineties London scene – labels like Talkin’ Loud and Dorado, bands like the Brand New Heavies and D-Note – to describe a much milder vision of fusion, inspired by the fluency of Lonnie Liston Smith rather than the fever-dreams of Miles.
Punning on acid house, acid jazz was a riposte to rave culture, signalling a Luddite retreat to live musicianship and the resurrection of the idea of clubland as a metropolitan élite (as opposed to rave’s suburban populism). Trip hop has historical links with acid jazz. Mo Wax founder James Lavelle started out writing for the jazz-revival magazine
Straight No Chaser
. And much of the output of Mo Wax, Ninja Tune and similar labels like Pork and Pussyfoot, is basically acid jazz gone digital. Sampling is resorted to not for its radically anti-naturalistic potential, but as a cut-price means of making a seamless neo-fusion without actually hiring live musicians. Too often, the result is a tasteful but insipid composite of connoisseur musics like jazz-funk, rare groove and ‘conscious’ rap (A Tribe Called Quest, The Jungle Brothers).
The guiding ethos of this ‘good music society’ is
cool
. All the energies that galvanize rave music – derangement, a submission to technology, underclass desperation, emotionalism – are shunned, in the belief that ‘mellow’ = ‘mature’, that headnodding contemplation is superior to sweaty physical abandon. Accompanying this spiritually goateed (sometimes
literally
goateed) hipster ethos is a sort of drug ethic: Ecstasy is unseemly, plebeian, but marijuana is sophisticated, bohemian. The sensibility of labels like Mo Wax and Ninja Tune is what you might call
break-beatnik
.
The problem is that too little of the output of these labels lives up to the psychedelic evocations of the term ‘trip hop’. Instead, what you get is muzak for pot smokers. Trip hop rhetoric promises the ultimate in fucked up, anything-goes, neo-B-boy abstraction, but too often delivers a half-assed sequencing of borrowed bits and bobs, and a mood spectrum ranging from pale blue to cheesy affability. Ninja Tune’s brand of ‘funkjazzticaltricknology’ – as purveyed by its roster of DJ Food, Funky Porcini, The Herbaliser and Up Bustle and Out – is a prime example of such spot-the-sample whimsy. The label was founded by those late eighties DJ-record bricolage pioneers Coldcut, whose Matt Black told
The Wire
in 1996: ‘I’m interested in the similarities between playing music, playing with toys and playing a game. It’s the same word, so at best, we’re aiming to be a synthesis of those three things.’ Drawing on the conventions of E-Z listening, soundtrack themes and incidental music, the Ninja Tune artists take this kitsch and synch it up to looped grooves; the result, on tracks like Funky Porcini’s ‘Venus’, is a densely referential melange of motifs and textures – vibes, brush-on-cymbal percussion, ‘stalking’ upright bass – that triggers the listener’s received images of ‘relaxation’ and ‘sophistication’.

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