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.
Throughout Maxinquaye, Tricky’s words are as smeared and raggedly enunciated as his textures. For much of the album, he hides behind his lover Martina, either ceding the spotlight to her or literally shadowing her voice, lurking low in the mix and repeating the words in a slurred mumble, just a little out of synch. When he does take the centre stage, Tricky talks in forked-tongues, drifts, dodges definition.
When people go on about how ‘sexy’ Maxinquaye is, I sometimes wonder if their ears ever penetrate through the sensuous sonic murk and Martina’s luscious mumble to the desperation and dread-of-intimacy in the lyrics. As a seduction soundtrack, ‘Overcome’ and ‘Suffocated Love’ aren’t exactly amorous or arousing. The songs could be two sides of the same ‘not exactly lovers’ affair. Kissing, as symbol of intimacy-kept-at-arms-length, figures in both ‘Overcome’ and ‘Suffocated’, with the former’s ‘never been properly kissed,’ and the latter’s ‘I keep her warm but we never kiss’. On ‘Overcome’, Martina’s voice – which seems to crumble in her mouth like shortcake – is at its most wanly seductive even as she demarcates her boundaries: ‘Emotional ties, they stay severed’. On the surface, ‘Suffocated Love’ sounds more upful than the clammy, baleful ‘Overcome’. But Tricky’s gloating, poisonous delivery, plus a love/hate lyric so conflicted and contradiction-riven you feel nauseous, place it up there with the Sex Pistols’ ‘Sub-Mission’ and Nirvana’s ‘Heart-Shaped Box’ as a song about the dread of female engulfment. ‘Abbaon Fat Tracks’ is even more unnerving. One minute, Martina’s promising ‘fuck you in, tuck you in, suck you in’, the next she’s threatening ‘fuck you in the ass, just for a laugh’ – and all in the same bloodless, crumpled ghost-croon, framed by hobbled guitar that’s like the missing link between Isaac Hayes ‘Shaft’ and PiL’s ‘Poptones’.
Suck or be sucked: Maxinquaye is all about voracious, oral need, about just how far people will go to fill that void. A couplet like ‘my brain thinks bomb-like / beware of our appetite’ seems to testify to a limitless craving that can easily erupt into violence, just as in the middle of ‘Suffocated Love’ Tricky abruptly lashes from horny reverie to Cypress Hill’s catchphrase ‘I could just kill a man’. For the most part, though, Tricky directs his rage against himself. ‘Ponderosa’ is a grim tale of alcohol and the demon weed, of addiction as a descent through ‘different levels of the Devil’s company’. Over clanking, lurching percussion redolent of Tom Waits’s SwordfishTrombones, Martina intones black-humorous wordplay – ‘underneath the weeping willow, lies a weeping wino’ – while Tricky supplies stoned grunts and bleary exhalations in the background.
‘Ponderosa’ and other Maxinquaye songs like ‘Strugglin” are based on real depression, says Tricky, ‘but not through something terrible happening to you, which is what most people think causes depression. It’s easy to get a depression, if you don’t have a job, don’t have a passion, don’t exercise your brain. After working on Blue Lines I was getting a wage into a bank but not actually working. Massive were paying me, so I had money, and that was the worst thing, ’cause it enabled me to have weed and drink. All I did was smoke and drink, hang around in town, kill time in bars. And go to clubs, from Wednesday to Sunday.’ This two year weekender-bender nearly drove Tricky round the bend. After the party, utterly wasted, he’d contemplate the waste of his life, until, in his weed-distorted paranoia, all that killed time would assume the grotesque shape of a spectre. He’d see demons in his sitting room. Out of this wasteland eventually emerged a dark magus, a sonic wizard conjuring up the paranoiascapes of Maxinquaye.
As with the East Coast horrorcore rappers, Tricky’s blunted anxiety detaches itself from the particular and swells into cosmic, millenarian dread. Hence ‘Hell Is Round The Corner’, where the looped lushness of an Isaac Hayes orchestral arrangement is hollowed out by a vocal sample slowed to a languishing 16 r.p.m. basso-profundissimo, impossibly black-and-blue. And hence ‘Aftermath’, which trumps the morbid vision of the Gravediggaz with what Tricky de
scribed as an attempt to see through the eyes of the dead. Pivoting around a pained flicker of wah-wah guitar and a wraith-like flute, Tricky’s post-apocalyptic panorama harks back to the orphaned drift of The Temptations’ ‘Papa Was A Rolling Stone’.
Where ‘Aftermath’ seems to find a serene, spectral beauty in the depopulated, devastated cityscape, ‘Strugglin” is grimmer because it refuses the lure of entropy, won’t succumb to death-wish. Sonically, ‘Strugglin” sounds like Public Enemy if they’d somehow lost a grip on the ‘black steel’ of their ideology and hit rock bottom. Its fitful, stumbling beat – whose sampled components comprise a creaking door and the bloodcurdling click of a clip being loaded into a gun – make ‘Strugglin” the most disorientating track on a relentlessly experimental record. But it’s Tricky’s words – confessing how he’s harried by ‘mystical shadows, fraught with no meaning’ – and his voice, as fatigued and eroded as Sly Stone on ‘Thank You For Talking To Me, Africa’, that are most disturbing. ‘They label me insane, but I think I’m more normal than most,’ he sniggers at the end, then collapses into mirthless, wheezing laughter.
Dub Wisdom
Although there’s nothing literally dub-wize on the record – no heavy echo or reggae basslines – it’s clear that the influence of dub permeates Maxinquaye. The way Tricky works – fucking around with sounds on the sampler until his sources are ghosts of their former selves; composing music and words spontaneously in the studio; mixing tracks live as they’re recorded; retaining the glitches and inspired errors, the hiss and crackle – is strikingly akin to early seventies dubmeisters like King Tubby. And of course there’s also the fact that Tricky breathes sensimilla fumes like they’re oxygen.
When it comes to the organization of sound, Tricky’s only rivals are artcore junglists like Dillinja. More than the shared roots in hip hop and dub sound-system culture, Tricky and the junglists share a mood, a worldview even. There’s a palpable aura of the demonic pervading both Maxinquaye and darkest drum and bass tracks like Dillinja’s ‘Warrior’ and ‘The Angels Fell’: a clammy-palmed apprehension that we’re living through Armagideon Time, Babylon’s last days.
‘Sometimes, I think everything is going to fall apart,’ says Tricky. ‘When I had the psychic reading, this woman was really positive, she was “No, the world isn’t in trouble, we’re all going to be all right.” Sorry, I just don’t feel that. I can’t see how things are gonna get better. Sometimes I feel this is the living hell. Look at the conditions we’re living in. Living in a city can’t be healthy . . . I think we’ve all got a touch of psychosis. In a city, you’ve got all this energy of people who ain’t quite normal; that abnormal energy just reflects off everything and pushes us further down the path.’
The difference between a Rastafarian worldview and Tricky’s is that for the natty dread, the evil is out there. Through their dress and rituals, Rastas exempt themselves from a Fallen World; being ‘pure’, they are destined for Zion. East Coast rappers similarly like to imagine themselves holy warriors or ‘killah priests’. Hence the appeal of Oriental forms of ‘spiritual combat’; hence their peculiar open-minded interest in the conspiracy theories of America’s Christian Right militias (despite the fact that these white supremacists regard African-Americans, alongside Jews, Hispanics and Asians, as subhuman ‘mudpeople’). Unlike all these believers, Tricky doesn’t distance himself from Babylon, from the system or shit-stem (as some Rastafarians call it). Tricky is on intimate terms with evil. In his words and his music, Tricky opens the (l)id and lets all this contamination and corruption speak itself, in its own vernacular as opposed to the cut-and-dried polarities of the message-mongering ‘political’ songwriter (who also imagines himself ‘clean’). ‘I’m part of this fuckin’ psychic pollution. I’m just as negative as the next person. I think we have to destroy everything and start again. I think everything has to end before it gets any better. And it’s not going to happen in our lifetimes. Everything needs to burn and be rebuilt.’
Lines like ‘we’re hungry . . . beware of our appetite’ implicate Tricky as part of the problem, as someone convulsed by the same voracious will-to-power that’s ruining the world. ‘It’s like, I can be as greedy as you, I want money, I want cars. I’m conditioned to want that, and the conditioned part of me says “yeah, I’m gonna go out and make money, and build an empire. I’m going to rule my own little kingdom.” But part of me knows that’s bullshit. But I am hungry, and you have to watch out for someone who’s hungry.’
‘An ’ungry man is an angry man’ – so sayeth dub prophet Prince Far I. In black music, it sometimes seems that everyone’s searching for the kingdom, the kingdom of heaven. Some want it now, and they will not wait: the gangsta tries to build that kingdom on earth, makes a deal with Satan (who himself decided ‘ ’tis better to rule in hell than serve in heaven’). Trouble is, there’s always a bigger king out there, to make you his slave. So the smarter rude boys turn ‘conscious’ and dream of the lost kingdom of the righteous, calling it Zion, or the Black Nation – the pot of gold at the end of Time’s Rainbow. Other black mystics – Hendrix, Sun Ra, George Clinton – dub this lost paradise Atlantis, or Saturn, or the Mothership Connection.
Tricky has come up with his own proper name for Zion – Maxinquaye. Ever the slippery trickster, he’s presented two versions of the genesis of that evocative title. ‘“Quaye”, that’s this race of people in Africa, and “Maxin”, that’s my mum’s name, Maxine, and I’ve just taken the E off,’ he told me. Elsewhere, he’s said that Quaye was his mother’s surname. I prefer the first version because it makes ‘Maxinquaye’ into a sort of place name: the lost Motherland.
Tricky has described ‘Aftermath’ as a song about ‘the end of the world’ and about his mother. Given her death when he was four, it’s easy to see why Tricky might feel like ‘sorrow’s native son’ (to steal a line from Morrissey), a stranger in a strange land. It’s this ‘primal narcissistic wound’ (Julia Kristeva) that makes him morbidly sensitive to the currents of anguish and fear in the culture. Like that other mama’s boy, Kurt Cobain, he seems to have no defences, no skin. And being an aerial-for-angst is taxing.
‘It takes up a lot of energy, it ends up sapping me sometimes. I do soak it all up. I was in Paris doing a photo session and there was this old lady, and she looked very old and very sad. Now, that catches my eye, and it really, really hurts me. I don’t like feeling like that. But it’s something I can’t control. It hurts me to such an extent that it confuses me. See, if some geezer comes up to me on the street and starts asking me for money, I get an instant rage. When someone comes up to me and I see this person ain’t got a life, my emotions get confused. No one likes seeing that, ’cause that could be you or me. It’s too scary. It’s like a mirror almost.’
Cheap Thrills
‘Don’t Dabble In Drugs. It Is A Social Evil and Crime.’
– Signpost depicted on the CD booklet of Maxinquaye
Alongside everything else that it contains, Maxinquaye is an inventory of the psychic costs of Britain’s recreational drug culture. Tricky is the conduit for the cloudy, contaminated consciousness of a smashed, blocked generation. ‘Blocked’, because it lacks any constructive outlet for its idealism, ‘smashed’ because it can find its provisional utopias only through self-poisoning/self-medication.
Where a lot of groups glamorize drugs, Tricky raps lines – ‘I roll the blue bills / I snort the cheap thrills’, ‘brainwashed by the cheapest’ – which seem to attest to a healthy quotient of shame. ‘Cocaine is the cheapest thrill I’ve ever experienced in my life, the lowest, lowest thing.’Cause it’s totally unreal. You feel so good about yourself, but you’ve done nothing to deserve it. The times I’ve took it is with other artists, and you stand there and say loads of bullshit, how you respect them, love their lyrics, and you pat each other on the back all fucking night. E is just as bad: I like loads of nice things being said to me, and you say loads of nice things back, and you get all deep.’
Any old stupor will do so long as it blunts an intellect otherwise too sharply conscious of the impasses and dead-ends that constitute the present. It’s the revolutionary impulse turned back against the self, imploded – just as Marianne Faithful talked of addiction as an alternative to the explosive release of terrorism, both being forms of perverted utopianism. Damp down those fires; it’s better to fade away than go out in a blaze of vainglory. Like Maxinquaye’s cover art – metal surfaces mottled with rust, an abandoned car overgrown with brambles, flaking paint – Tricky’s music makes cultural entropy picturesque. But this corrosion is costly; rust never sleeps.
‘We’re all fucking lost,’ says Tricky, giggling. ‘I can’t pretend I’ve got all the answers. Bob Marley, he could write songs about freedom and love. I’m just telling the truth that I’m confused, I’m paranoid, I’m scared, I’m vicious, I’m fucking spiteful.’
Hollowlands, stranded limbos, aftermath zones, desertshores: Tricky’s songs are the mindscapes of a generation that has lost the capacity to imagine ‘a better place’. His music’s nowhere-vastness externalizes the inner void left when the utopian imagination withers and dies. And yet Maxinquaye’s last song, the unspeakably beautiful ‘Feed Me’, seems to hold out a cruel glimmer of hope – a dream of the promised land, or lost motherland (Maxinquaye itself?) A place ‘where we’re taught to grow strong / Strongly sensitive.’ The song is tentative, almost taunting – like a mirage.
‘Unreal, yeah,’ Tricky mutters.
Energy Flash: A Journey Through Rave Music and Dance Culture Page 44
