Energy Flash: A Journey Through Rave Music and Dance Culture (57 page)

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Authors: Simon Reynolds

BOOK: Energy Flash: A Journey Through Rave Music and Dance Culture
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In British record shops, Mo Wax and Ninja Tune tracks are sometimes filed in a category called ‘blunted beatz’. While all music sounds more vivid when the listener is stoned (it’s like instantly upgrading your hi-fi), trip hop is explicitly designed to enhance the effects of marijuana. The torpid tempos suit the way marijuana slows down time and expands the present moment. During normal consciousness, the mind is partly preoccupied by thoughts of the past and plans for the future; marijuana diminishes both memory and anticipation, thereby promoting a fully-in-the-now ‘pure awareness’. In such a mind-state, the ‘horizontal’ development of the music (its narrative progression, the sense that it’s going somewhere) is less important than the ‘vertical’ organization of sound. Stoned, there can be no so such thing as too many layers; perception of texture and timbre is intensified, so that the rustle and glisten of a hi-hat is endlessly absorbing. But extreme minimalism – just bass and drums, for instance – is equally satisfying, because you can focus on what normally bypasses the ear: all the different elements of the drum kit, the gooey consistency of the bass, and so forth.
With higher doses or stronger weed like ‘hydroponic’, other effects come into play: free association, flights of fancy, synaesthetic confusion of the senses (‘seeing’ the music), mild hallucinations (hearing ‘voices’ in the percussion, say). It’s at this point that the free-floating reverie and perceptual distortions induced by the trip hop/pot combination can tip over into a darker disorientation. You can hear this crepuscular gloom in
USSR Repertoire (The Theory of Verticality)
by DJ Vadim, by far the best Ninja Tune artist. Minimal to the point of emaciation, Vadim’s locked grooves and ultra-vivid, up-close sample-textures create a feeling of entropy and dislocation. Slipping outside the schedules of normal temporal consciousness into an overwhelmingly intensified ‘now’ can instil foreboding rather than bliss. Paranoia is one of marijuana’s under-remarked side-effects, but it’s critical for any understanding of music in the nineties.
Prophets of Loss
 
‘ “Let us sing him,” said one of the fiends to the other, “the lullaby of Hell” ’.
– Fitz Hugh Ludlow,
The Hasheesh Eater: being passages
from The Life of a Pythagorean
, 1857
 
 
If ‘blunted’ literally means without edge (and is therefore a good description for too much trip hop), in American rap slang it has come to evoke a particular kind of marijuana mind-state in which delusions of grandeur alternate with a mystical apprehension of impending doom. Weed’s free-associational effect, refracted through the dark prism of paranoia, lends itself to a certain kind of conspiracy consciousness: the perception of malign patterns within the chaos, a supersiti-tious belief that history is steered by sinister secret societies. In the nineties, Christian Right militia men and hardcore rappers found a bizarre common ground in what critic Michael Kelly dubbed ‘fusion paranoia’: a syncretic mish-mash of conspiracy theories, whose sources range from Nostradamus and ‘The Revelation of Saint John the Divine’ to science fiction like Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson’s
The Illuminatus! Trilogy
, from black nationalist sect the Five Per Cent Nation to white supremacist tracts such as William Cooper’s
Behold a Pale Horse
and Ralph Emerson’s
The New World Order
and
The Unseen Hand
.
And so Busta Rhymez claims ‘we got five years left’ on ‘Everything Remains Raw’, while Onyx’s ‘Last Dayz’ proclaims ‘we all ready for these wars’. ‘What’s coming in the future is Armaggeddon,’ Onyx’s Sticky Fingaz declared in 1993. ‘And we startin’ an army: all the children, age one to ten. We’re training them at a young age, ’cos right now the army is in jail . . . 1999, the year before the End, is going to be chaos . . . People say “save the world”, but it’s too late for that . . . You know what I wanna do, man, swear to God, I wanna rule the fucking world. That’s why we’re building this army of kids.’
Wu-Tang Clan and its extended family of solo artists (Method Man, Ol Dirty Bastard, Genius/GZA, Killah Priest and Raekwon) pioneered the blend of B-boy warrior stance and Doomsday vision that currently dominates East Coast rap. The Clan’s 1993 debut album
Enter The Wu-Tang (36 Chambers)
begins with a sample from a martial arts movie about ‘Shaolin shadow-boxing and the Wu-Tang sword’. Then there’s the challenge ‘En garde!’ and the clashing of blades as combat commences. Wu-Tang’s shaolin obsession renders explicit the latent medievalism of hip hop. In the terrordome of capitalist anarchy, the underclass can only survive by taking on the mobilization techniques and the psychology of warfare – forming blood-brotherhoods and warrior-clans (like the overtly neo-medieval Latin Kings), and individually, by transforming the self into a fortress, a one-man army on perpetual red alert. (Hence the hip-hop vogue for Machiavelli and Sun Tzu’s
The Art Of War
.) The medievalism also comes through in the biblical language and superstitious imagery (ghosts, fiends, devils) employed by these rappers. What is conspiracy theory if not twentieth-century demonology, with phantasmic organizations like the Trilateral Commission, the CIA and the Masons standing in for Satan?
Listen to the Wu-Tang’s raps, or those of allies like Gravediggaz, Sunz of Man and Mobb Deep, and you’re swept up in a delirium of grandiose delusions and fantastical revenges, a paranoid stream-of-consciousness whose imagistic bluster seems like your classic defensive-formation against the spectre of emasculation. For the Clan, words are ‘liquid swords’ (as Genius’s album title put it). The Wu’s febrile rhyme-schemes are riddled with imagery of pre-emptive strikes, massive retaliation and deterrence-through-overkill: ‘New recruits, I’m fucking up MC troops’; ‘Wu-Tang’s coming through with full metal jackets’; ‘call me the rap assassinator’; ‘merciless like a terrorist’.
Hallucinatory and cinematic, Wu-style hip hop – sometimes called ‘horrorcore’ or Gothic rap – is a sonic simulation of the city as combat zone, a treacherous terrain of snipers, man-traps and ambushes. In Wu-Tang producer The RZA’s murky mix-scapes, it seems like ‘fiends are lurking’, as Raekwon and Ghostface Killer put it on ‘Verbal Intercourse’. Melody is shunned in favour of a frictive mesh of unresolved motifs – a hair-raising horror-movie piano trill, a hair-trigger guitar tic – which interlock to instil suspense and foreboding. Usually, the looped breakbeats don’t change, there’s no bridges or tempo shifts, which increases the sense of non-narrative limbo. The self-same locked-groove repetition that works in British trip hop as a blissful disengagement from reality becomes, in American horrorcore, a metaphor for the dead ends and death-traps of ghetto life.
How is it that a very similar mixture – ‘computers and dope’, basically – has such radically different results on opposing sides of the Atlantic? Freed of American rap’s fiercely felt duty to ‘represent’ the ‘real’ through lyrics, British trip hop can happily evade the questions – of class, race, the crisis of masculinity, the social and psychic costs of drug culture – that literally
bedevil
contemporary hip hop. Only one English trip hopper has confronted this dark matter: Tricky.
It’s no coincidence that of all the trip hoppers, Tricky is the most committed to verbal expression (he described Public Enemy’s Chuck D as ‘my Shakespeare’). Moreover, he’s made the biggest effort to build bridges between British and American B-boy culture. In 1995, he followed his debut album
Maxinquaye
with the ‘Hell EP’, credited to Tricky Vs The Gravediggaz and featuring two collaborations with that most Gothic of the RZA’s side projects. The best is ‘Psychosis’, a febrile mire of mushy bass-sound which sounds like it’s composed of death-rattles, groans and gasps, over which loops a sickly voice intoning the doom-struck phrase ‘falling . . . slowly falling’. It’s an aural depiction of Dante’s Inferno, a seething pit of demons. In the lyrics, Tricky notes that his given name, Adrian, is the same as the Anti-Christ’s, and concludes: ‘so it seems I’m the Devil’s Son / Out of breath and on the run’.
The parallels between Tricky and his East Coast American brethren are striking: Jeru The Damaja recorded ‘Can’t Stop The Prophet’; Tricky wrote ‘I Be The Prophet’. Method Man named an album after the local slang term for marijuana, ‘tical’; Tricky called his sub-label Durban Poison, in homage to a particularly potent breed of weed. But where Tricky has the edge over the horrorcore rappers is that he lets himself surrender to the psychic disintegration that the American hip-hop ego so zealously fortifies itself against. American rap is all about mobilizing for battle; Tricky’s music is all about entropy, dissipation. He’s brave enough to stare defeat in the face.
Tricky Kid
 
June, 1995: I meet Tricky in his New York hotel, and learn all about the genesis of ‘I Be The Prophet’. ‘I had this psychic drawing done,’ says Tricky, sucking greedily on the first of the four joints he’s to consume in the next hour. ‘See, I wanted to know where all this silver was coming from, ’cause lately I’ve been wearing loads of silver,’ he continues. ‘And the psychic woman told me it symbolizes Mercury, the messenger God. She gives you a massage and each different muscle tells different stories. She wrote that I came to this Earth too quick, I wasn’t ready, but I said “Fuck it, c’mon, let’s go.” And she wrote “When he lands, there shall be peace.” Mad, innit?’
Inspired by this psychic’s analysis, Tricky wrote and recorded ‘I Be The Prophet’ in a New York studio during a few days off between gigs. Tricky plays it for me on his portable DAT-Walkman. It’s an uncanny feeling, listening through the headphones to Tricky’s eerie rasp, then glancing up and looking straight into his eyes. The music – eventually released as a single under the name Starving Souls and later as an album track on the Nearly God LP – is diffuse and denuded, reminiscent of the Raincoats’ post-punk experimental classic
Odyshape
and the brittle Orientalism of David Sylvian/Ryuichi Sakamoto’s ‘Bamboo Music’.
Tricky as prophet? That might be going too far. Tricky himself exhibits a healthy scepticism: ‘I’ll believe anything! I’ll pay you eighty dollars, you can tell me a story and I’ll believe it. It provides me with material!’ And yet there’s a sense in which Tricky
is
an aerial tuned into the frequencies of anguish and dread emanating from a jilted generation. He talks of the origins of his lyrics in such terms: ‘Something
passes through me
, and I don’t know what it is.’
Who is Tricky? A Sly Stone for the post-rave generation (the
Maxinquaye/There’s A Riot Goin’ On
analogy is a critical commonplace). Public Enemy’s Chuck D without the dream of a Black Nation to hold his fragile self together. The greatest poet of England’s ‘political unconscious’ since John Lydon circa
Metal Box
. Roxy Music’s Brian and Bryan compressed into one wiry body, Eno-esque soundscape gardener
and
Ferry-like lizard of love/hate. The ‘black Bowie’.
The latter fits because Tricky’s gender-bending imagery is reminiscent of nothing so much as the video for ‘Boys Keep Swinging’, where Bowie impersonated an array of female stereotypes. On the cover of the ‘Overcome’ EP Tricky’s wearing a wedding dress and clutching a pistol in each hand. For the sleeve of ‘Black Steel’ he’s a diva, grotesquely caked in mascara and lipstick, mouth contorted somewhere between pucker and screwface. The song itself is Tricky’s most confounding gender/genre twist of all, transforming Public Enemy’s ‘Black Steel in the Hour Of Chaos’ into indie noise-rock, with singer Martina’s frayed/’fraid voice uncaging Chuck D’s suppressed ‘feminine side’.
There really aren’t too many black artists who cross-dress (it’s hard to imagine Ice Cube in a mini-skirt, high heels and false eyelashes, for instance). This shows the extent to which Tricky belongs as much in a British art-rock tradition (Japan, Kate Bush, Bowie, early Roxy, Gary Numan) as to the more obvious hip-hop lineage. But it’s also yet another indice of the compulsive, almost pathological nature of the man’s creativity; like Courtney Love’s
kinder
-whore image, Tricky’s transvestitism proclaims ‘something’s not right here’. Especially as cross-dressing isn’t a marketing gimmick or jape, but something he’s done since he was a fifteen-year-old kid running around town with his ruffneck bredren in the Bristol ghetto Knowle West.
‘All my mates thought I was mad anyway,’ he says. ‘I don’t know what my grandma felt, though – she never ever said a word, even when I walked out the door with a dress on. I was really lucky, I had mates around me who said “He’s mad, leave him alone . . .” ’
Although his extended family was full of ‘hard men’, Tricky was brought up by women. After his mum died when he was only four, Tricky was brought up by his grandma; she became convinced that he was the reincarnation of his own dead mother, and would spook out the child by staring at him intensely for hours. There’s a theory that the sartorial flamboyance and effeminacy of the ‘dandy’ constitute a form of symbolic allegiance to the mother, a perverse attempt to assume her subordinate position in the patriarchal order. In Tricky’s case, it could be both a homage to the mother he barely knew, and a way of proclaiming himself an alien even amongst the B-boy band of outsiders he ran with, his surrogate family.
Can’t Get No Satisfaction
 
‘You say “what is this?” / Mind ya bizness!’ So Tricky taunts the listener two thirds of the way through
Maxinquaye
. He’s actually rubbing your nose in the perplexity aroused by the strange relationship described in ‘Suffocated Love’, but it could serve as an emblem for the entire album, a statement of malign intent. Racially, stylistically, sexually, Tricky is one slippery fellow.
Maxinquaye
is an unclassifiable hybrid of club music and bedroom music, black and white, rap and melody, song and atmospherics, sampladelic textures and real-time instrumentation. It sucks you into the poly-sexual, trans-generic, mongrelized mindspace inside Tricky’s skull. How did he get into such a state? It’s the drugs/ technology interface – boundary-blurring, connection-facilitating, but also fucking with stable identity, letting the id come out to play.

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