Pop Group

After kicking off the "primitivist" movement with "Y" (1979), one of the masterpieces of British new wave, and after matching that peak with "For How Much Longer Do We Tolerate Mass Murder?" (slightly more orthodox in its funk rereading), Pop Group laid down their arms. However, its members chose not to stray too far from that first artistic experience: some sought more lighthearted outlets (like guitarist Waddington's Maximum Joy and bassist Underwood's Pig Bag), others leaned into the more exotic aspects and the peculiar "jazzy" fragrances of that phenomenal synthesis (like drummer Bruce Smith and saxophonist Gareth Sager's Rip Rig & Panic, authors of a breathtaking trilogy comprising "God" from 1981, "I Am Cold" from 1982 and "Attitude" from 1983).

Meanwhile, Mark Stewart, already leader and vocalist of that seminal band, found himself almost by chance alongside Maffia, a trio made up of Keith Leblanc, Doug Wimbish and Skip McDonald. Maffia were among the very first collectives devoted to experimenting with recording techniques within dance music. Stewart's passion for funk and, more broadly, for African-American music, combined with these new techniques, gave rise to one of the most gripping sagas in 80s rock. Pop Group's "primitivist" synthesis was "deconstructed" and subsequently broken down into its component parts. At its base lay a "funk" matrix (though filtered through a stinging violence of clearly "industrial" descent); on the surface, meanwhile, remained an infernal (and informal) magma of loops, particles of musique concrète, distorted or dismembered voices, tectonic tremors, dub nebulae and agit-prop declamations.

The "danceable" side of the tracks was heightened by the use of "break-beats" ("reinvented" in 1975 by Jamaican DJ Clive "Hercules" Campbell) and "scratching" (a technique discovered almost by chance, also in 1975, by a thirteen-year-old Black kid from the Bronx named Theodore "Grand Wizard" Livingstone). As the pioneers of the Sugarhill Gang had already shown starting in 1979 (the names? Kool Herc, Afrika Bambaataa and Grandmaster Flash), these techniques made it possible to link together all sorts of sound fragments (even very brief ones). It would then be mainly thanks to Grandmaster Flash alone that the game would truly get tough (read: "revolutionary"), so much so that it managed to break down boundaries of every kind (racial ones included), and so much so that it landed like a Pandora's box in the hands of certain white musicians who had always been in contact (via "dub") with that emerging scene. Another great influence was the "modern dance" of masters Pere Ubu: the alienating ritual of labor was reduced to a grotesque dance, also in the wake of the old theories of Russian "Feks", according to which man is by now reduced to an automaton that reacts only to external stimuli (post-industrial society, in our case) and takes no account of psychology. Following this logic, the sound material itself ends up becoming "alienating" and "alien" too. The dismantling of the psychological dimension of music was carried through with a harmonic destructuring often bordering on delirium and the most brutal chaos.

"Learning To Cope With Cowardice" (1983) is, very probably, the masterpiece of this highly peculiar quintet (producer Adrian Sherwood became a full-fledged member). It's an album that was terribly ahead of its time, one whose weight would be felt in full, above all, on what between the late 80s and early 90s would come to be called "trip-hop".

The opening title-track is symptomatic of how Stewart and co. manage to sketch, over African-American rhythms, a deviant mass of electronic abstractions, here interspersed with embroideries of synthetic trumpets. And yet, nothing here still hints at the sonic catastrophes to come. "Liberty City" is still stained with funk. A show-off sax periodically slips a jazz phrase in between Stewart's declamatory voice and the female choir acting as its "celestial" counterpoint. The aforementioned catastrophes finally take over in the following "Blessed Are Those Who Struggle", a genuine "montage of attractions" and, at the same time, an exercise in total, limitless "deconstructionism". The closest reference point is the ending of Pop Group's "We Are Time" (on "Y"): an ultra-cacophonous mass of manipulated sounds, mangled tapes and voices steeped in acid. And, as if that weren't enough, an unconventional use of "scratching" further ramps up the rate of harmonic decay.

One gets the sense of standing before a single, immense conveyor belt, along which musical events of every kind follow one another. "None Dare Call It A Conspiracy" continues the massacre. In the background stirs a funk dust cloud, repeatedly worn down by Dadaist streams of hisses, filtered voices and metallic tremors. Stewart's "agit-prop" agenda finds a terrifying aesthetic equivalent in the highly destabilizing use of sound manipulation. In essence, none of the tracks on "Learning To Cope With Cowardice" ever manage to settle into a definitive form. Indeed, the quintet is interested not so much in "form" as in the processes used to develop it. Later on, these processes are further "layered": the result is a sound that continually implodes upon itself.

Introduced by biblical trumpets (which recur at regular intervals throughout the track), "Don't You Ever Lay Down Your Arms" unleashes a powerful "dub" beat and the usual nerve-shredding sonic fractures. The track unfolds in fits and starts: voice, rhythm and electronic disturbances never carry the same sonic weight, but are each set up to dominate the others at certain moments. "Reggae" makes its grand entrance in the fanfare of "The Paranoia Of Power" (with a lavish display of polyrhythms). On "To Have The Vision", "reggae" undergoes a transfiguration made even more sinister by the tortures inflicted on Stewart's voice, at times demoted to a mere "chemical bubble". "Jerusalem" assembles crowd noise, howls streaked with blackness, "orchestral" samples and blazing percussion. The whole track is wrapped in a dreamlike spiral: a warped lens that always brings only the seemingly secondary elements into focus.

The album reaches its experimental peak in the 12 minutes of "The Wrong Name And The Wrong Number", without doubt one of their most devastating collages (the first name that comes to mind is America's Negativland). The compositional process closely recalls the one with which Grandmaster Flash crafted his legendary "Wheels Of Steel": except that, while in that latter case we're faced with a pile-up of "samples" from the most disparate songs (and the most disparate bands), with Stewart and co. every meta-musical reference is erased, since only "samples" of voices and "found" sounds are used, along with musical fragments specially created for the occasion. And so, in rapid succession, come samples of every kind (from city traffic to radio broadcasts), searingly acidic "scratches", electronic sirens, alien buzzing and noise pollution that most likely belongs to Red Crayola's "Arable Land". The random accumulation of heterogeneous sound materials is ultimately aimed at creating a summarizing thematic effect: as in the montage advocated by the Futurists, all that matters is the effect of "synthesis". Pop Group is by now very far away; but, deep down, the goals remain the same as ever: first and foremost, that of representing the neuroses and paranoias of the technological age.

On the final track, "High Ideals And Crazy Dreams", the chaos is entirely reshaped around jagged edges and a "dub" beat. The pace is heavy, mammoth. The vital explosion of "funk" is set against the hypnotic pulse of "dub": the result is a paradoxical effect of psychic dislocation. All things considered, then, the psychological dimension of the music is not so much dismantled as reorganized through dialectical oppositions. Here and there, industrial sirens circle desolate, icy urban spaces. Backlit, we see the England of the era under a relentless downpour of fears and hopes.

Just like "Y", this is an album of protest. Amid the exploded structures of the tracks, Stewart's political lyrics take on an even more subversive charge. And, in both cases, the assault on the system is reinforced by a tumultuous, and downright innovative, sonic mixture. Ultimately, "Learning To Cope With Cowardice" picks up right where "Y" left off. The course is set toward an ever more skeletal, brutal and, why not, "poetic" synthesis.

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12/11/2006