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’.
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 le
arn 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’.
Energy Flash: A Journey Through Rave Music and Dance Culture Page 43