Tricky

How can I be sure

In a world that’s constantly changing?

(Tricky, "Aftermath")

Tomorrow is never certain, as we all know. Anything can happen, including (and especially) the most obvious things. First and foremost, that a glorious past can be downsized, wrapped up in existential doubts, prone to the fear of not having properly marked the passing of events. It happened to britpop, to grunge, to jungle, to the wave of lounge revivalism distilled by the cocktail generation — so it's no surprise that trip-hop got caught up in it too. And so it went: from "next big thing" to museum fossil, from the sound of the future to background music for tasteful upper-class parties; ultimately a distinctive marker of a past that struggles to gain access to our present, unable (aside from the scraps of the "low-slung beat" that resurface, every spring solstice, in the dubstep cauldron) to leap over the shadow line separating what's still evolving from its own reflection.

A handful of illustrious names have managed to escape this fate and present themselves, freshly shaven, before the mirror of the new millennium, but for every resurrected Portishead reinvented as a shrewd indie icon, there are dozens of burnt-out Luke Viberts and Dj Shadows who, at best, wander among us like ghosts: greenhouse plants once thriving, now pitifully withered. Things went a little better for symbolic labels like Mo' Wax or Ninja Tune, which were indeed forced to diversify their output (the same happened to Sub Pop in the wake of the gunshot that effectively closed the "grunge era"), but at least managed not to sacrifice the uniqueness of their vision, the sonic/conceptual glue binding together the output of the predatory minds behind Dj Krush and Dj Vadim, Funki Porcini and Dj Food. And it's no coincidence we talk of "heads," since trip-hop remains above all a mental affair, a new psychedelic purgative for expelling the toxins of reality and sending neurons drifting on the intoxicating fumes of marijuana.

Beyond its various manifestations, it has indeed become standard practice to frame the genre as a soporific, abstract and druggy mutation of hip-hop: the hip-hop that the electric Miles Davis of "Get Up With It" might have played, or that the Grateful Dead might have conjured at the hallucinogenic climax of "Dark Star"; hip-hop stripped of its social concerns, in which semantics bend to the purposes of the "trip" and the atmospheres float in a limbo that, when needed, can turn into a (rare) glimpse of paradise or a psychic concentration camp. Yes, all of this is fairly true. Just as it's true that its sound, likewise nourished by soul, by the least fake strains of jazz-fusion and by space-age vertigo, outstrips on the left many limp American hip-hop offerings of the '90s, years marked by the theater of West Coast crime and commercially dominated by "gangsta" supremacy. In fact, one could argue that hip-hop arrived at its most "experimental" contemporary drifts precisely by absorbing certain principles worked out by the ranks of trip-hoppers, who were themselves inspired by cut-and-paste masters like Kurtis Mantronik and Prince Paul: the complex layering of the sound, the care taken in crafting the beats, the skill in blending real-playing and samples.

The distinctive trait of trip-hop lies, if anything, in the fact that, in both its instrumental manifestations and its more pop-oriented ones, it remains predominantly ambient music (and for this reason too, akin to the "electronic" drifts of the era), music of escape — though not in the common sense of the term. What's being radicalized, in fact, isn't so much the flight from reality as the dissociation from it. Numbness, losing oneself in the stunned chaos of "feeling in slow motion": these are the weapons used to become estranged from a context of uprooting/cultural annihilation passively accepted as an unchangeable given. An elitist attitude, but deep down a resigned one, which refuses to fight and surrenders instead to the vacant stare of the hyper-fragile Beth Gibbons, or to the toxic smoke rings that Tricky puffs, brain on autopilot, from that toad-like mouth of his. Coma as a way of life. Ataraxia in downtempo.

So be it, Tricky. That is, the Bristolian Adrian Thaws, born 1968, mixed African, Irish and Jamaican blood running through his veins. "Let me tell you about my mother" runs a sinister sample in "Aftermath," a withered brain-child pressed onto vinyl and released as a single back in 1993: once again it's his mother — Maxine Quaye was her name, who took her own life when little Adrian was just four — who represents the wound that never healed, a benevolent spirit invoked on more than one occasion. After a childhood spent in the suburbs of Knowle West (a Bristol neighborhood) with his maternal grandmother, and an adolescence spent between petty theft, weed and a brief stint in prison, Adrian met Massive Attack. At just eighteen, they took him on as a rapper within the Wild Bunch circuit, rechristened him "Tricky Kid" and even paid him a generous weekly wage — which he'd blow on alcohol and drugs of every kind — to do absolutely nothing except mumble a few minutes of rhymes on the landmark "Blue Lines" (1991), a joint in one hand and his Ventolin inhaler in the other.

It was during this period that he began experimenting with keyboards and samplers: "I learned to program keyboards by messing one up way beyond its limits. I love sounds, so I tried to make my own. Sound engineers say I work backwards, but that's only because I don't understand what it means to do things the 'right' way. I can't read sheet music, and the last thing I need is to learn how. I mean, who's to say what's right or wrong in music? Come on, that's ridiculous."

Also in 1991, he met Martina Topley-Bird, only fifteen at the time. In the course of things, she let slip that she could sing. Bad move: the shady character immediately put her to the test, under the supervision of Mark Stewart (a whole book could be written on this man alone, please), in the session that would give birth to precisely "Aftermath," rejected by Massive Attack and subsequently released by Fourth & Broadway, an Island subsidiary. Then came the "Hell" EP with Gravediggaz, sealing the bond with hip-hop from across the ocean and lending horrorcore splendor to the disquieting 6:39 minutes of "Psychosis," a shapeless Bosch-like nightmare, a crucible of demons and spells stitched together in loops.

Meanwhile, three singles come out so out-of-this-world that the press starts pressuring the dark elf to hurry up and capitalize on them with an LP (people still say that, right?).

Said and done. Recorded in London, while jungle was busy hogging pirate radio frequencies and redrawing urban tension into syncopations of creeping stasis, "Maxinquaye" (Island) hits the shops, landing at number three on the British charts (number ten in the US). It's April 1995. Within a year Tricky will become so famous that many of his peers will fall over themselves to secure his services as producer or remixer (Bjork, Madonna, Damon Albarn, Garbage etc.). Everyone will seek him out, everyone will want him. He'll show up, often reluctantly.

Rightly hailed as the heir to the entropic disorder of Sly Stone, Tricky, whatever anyone says today, remains a pivotal node in last century's music. If the Massive Attack aura hovered in the ether as a dreamy sound-system hypothesis, and Portishead confined their work of "active recycling" to lounge-jazz, soul and spy-movie soundtracks, Tricky is the black hole, the emotional-semiotic dumping ground of an entire sonic civilization. The ideal point of contact between dub, hip-hop, funk, electro, blues, gothic (check out the cover of "Tattoo" by the Banshees on "Nearly God"), synth-pop, indie-rock and much more. A devilish cherub who mocks labels and delights in keeping one foot in each camp ("high" art and pop culture, noise and melody). An isolated and otherwise unimaginable case of the "isolationist" b-boy. The most avant-garde "thing" ever spawned by the Bristol trip-hop scene.

On "Maxinquaye", Tricky proves (un)pleasantly obsessed with the typically dub processes (King Tubby and Bunny Lee, the "Kingstonians", would have approved) of filtering and manipulating the most disparate material, elevated into a conduit between the collective unconscious and the creation of a new subjectivity. Hence Isaac Hayes's baritone resurfacing, slowed down and dehumanized, on "Hell Is Round The Corner", a retro-futurist music box coated in 78-rpm rust, cruelly tortured by industrial presses and synths that corrode structures whose disintegration we can hear happening in real time (very Basinski-like, I'd say). Hence a lazy Smashing Pumpkins drum line, sampled and set as the backbone of the raga-hop track "Pumpkin", with Alison Goldfrapp's voice fluttering above it like a dragonfly. Hence an unrecognizable fragment of "Bad" (Michael Jackson) compressed into "Brand New You're Retro", a kaleidoscopic tirade punctuated by pulsing gears and cartoonish effects, pure hip-pop tailor-made for the dancehall. The ultimate outcome of this process, as one can easily imagine, is the sheer, unadorned accumulation of sonic events: "Strugglin'", quite possibly the most alienating 6:38 ever produced within trip-hop. The ingredients? A dizzyingly slow loop, judgment-day trumpets so blown-out they sound like bagpipes, Rhodes keys reduced to a paste of sludge flavored with nerve gas, textbook horrorcore sound effects (a creaking door, police sirens, the "click" of a bullet chambering, a dripping tap, the ticking of a timer...). Sharpen and heat up the rhythm section a bit and you'll find yourself facing a kind of murky dubstep avant la lettre (listening to it before Kode9's revisitation of "Ghost Town" is illuminating).

Despite the exclusivity of his vision, Tricky is not alone on his antisocial trip. Keeping him company, besides co-producer Mark Saunders (who had already been behind the mixing desk for Neneh Cherry's 1989 "Raw Like Sushi", which in some ways served as trip-hop's dress rehearsal), is vocalist Martina, a necessary extension needed to charge the conflict between opposite poles and the gender confusion that underpins his finest pages. This reversal of sexual perspective finds its fullest expression in the "reconstruction" of Public Enemy's "Black Steel In The Hour Of Chaos", in which the singer takes the place of the "macho" Chuck D and leads a noise-rock dance of sulfurous guitars and sped-up ragga jolts. On the cover of the offending single, Tricky struts about like a true diva: a "Black Bowie" ("If there's anyone I'd want to be friends with it would be him. Bowie broke down barriers, he changed forever the way I understand music"), complete with pale blue lipstick and eyeshadow, captured in an expression somewhere between a pout and a sly little smirk.

Without Martina, Tricky's music simply wouldn't exist. And indeed it never did again, from the very moment the two went their separate ways. A slender voice, bluesy phrasing, a hint of huskiness that occasionally peeks through in her delivery: her timbre seems to be born from/spread through an artificial void, the mitral valve of a muscle that has never been so complex. Where Gibbons offers herself up as a final, aching banner of humanity to set against the overwhelming power of machines, Martina's is a trance-chant for anesthetized souls (hear it on "Aftermath", a toxic wasteland frozen in a still frame, barely redeemed by an enchanting flute, wah-wah guitar and the grain of the breakbeat), a shadow zone in which every breath takes on an outsized weight ("Overcome" and its lunar, mechanized cadence, another dark masterpiece of the Bristol sound).

Conversely, Tricky's own rap has neither the cadence nor the accents of rap, even as it retains traces of slang and shared verbal codes; it resembles more a voiceless gurgle, a sludge of free verse creeping into the background between the grooves, reduced to a mere detail of the soundscape. It's the union of these two extremes (the wheezing bloke and the emaciated girl) that forms the true voice of "Maxinquaye". Sometimes it's Tricky who sketches out a lyric first, leaving the woman the task of reading, through vocal cords worn to shreds, a musical stave of light and darkness (listen to "I Be The Prophet" on "Nearly God", one of the high points of their interplay); more often the two sing in unison, blurring into a single cavernous body, like hemispheres tuned to the same wavelength but at different frequencies. Such is the case with "Ponderosa", built entirely around Polynesian percussion and remarkably effective "atmospheric" touches (intermittent ambient carpets, mysterious vocal samples, even a little keyboard that hints at ragtime in the finale...), a slippery, dripping specter of paranoia and liquid sensuality.

Sensuality that in "Abbaon Fat Tracks" fades into a Ballardian pornography of pain, of two "stoners" caught writhing in front of the television, their dialogue evaporating into blurred perception, into the psychological distortion of their surroundings. But it's in the already-mentioned "Strugglin'" that the alchemy reaches almost unbearable levels of paranoia: as Tricky blindly wanders the corridors of a mind now reduced to a "red desert" ("In hell I'll be lost in the layers of weakness/ All around the surface, brainwashed with the cheapest"), Martina follows him, scattering hoarse, orgasmic vocals, like a catatonic angel unable to redeem her tormented companion ("Please, tell me what I want to hear", he begs her, at his lowest point).

After such a concentrate of negativity, it's rather curious that the album ends with an unspeakable "Feed Me", all translucent reflections and amethyst placenta, the echo of Mother Africa pleading — just this once — for catharsis and rebirth. But anyone hoping for a happy ending is mistaken, since any attempt to cut the umbilical cord chaining one to the concrete jungle of the shitstem is futile: "Extract from crystal though nothing is clear/ I despise you, damn you, dream you, I love you/ but still nothing's clear/ I think of when I found you/ keep on singin' while I'm drowning, down into that two-tone vision/ I've been raised in this place and now concrete is my religion".

The reference to 2-Tone's poetics shouldn't come as a surprise: just as the ska revival wave straddling the '70s and '80s served as the soundtrack to a peripheral England, populated by people with no future and thus vainly clinging to a glorious past, so "Maxinquaye" transfigures the emotional, social and intellectual barrenness of its era into post-atomic ruins and deserts. The beauty of it is that Tricky has no purity to claim for himself: he is "part of the problem", not some active agent set on shaking consciences awake. "As you grow up, all your dreams get killed, one by one", he says. "I'd like to get back what I lost of my adolescence. I'd like to fall in love the way I did when I was fifteen. I'd like purity back, to be 'clean' again, but I can't because I too got sucked in." The music of "Maxinquaye" gives voice to this absence, externalizing the "awareness of loss" and the resulting inner void it leaves behind. It's the sound of utopia silently caving in under the axe-blows of daily life, the endless convalescence of a generation that has burned through every chance of redemption.

"Pre-Millennium Tension" (1997) will pour salt into the wound, short-circuiting every neuron, thickening every bitterness, flattening out into a monolithic, depressed, paranoid sound (and it's from these very cavernous crevices that a certain strain of dubstep will take its cue). An album after which there can be nothing left but the (un)conscious wait for the end. It might be cowardly, but sometimes that remains the only reasonable option.

(© Storiadellamusica)

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21/03/2010