Once upon a time there was a boy named Scritti, and though this was a strange name, nobody teased him, for he had a beautiful voice, and a falsetto that was like honey injected into the veins. And he grew up with the desire to make jangly pop music woven from strands of romance, left politics, reggae, post-structuralist theory, black soul, and everything resting in the sentence, "the music of the Beatles and Bowie prepared me for every subsequent adventure, intellectually, politically, aesthetically, structurally."
One day a funny thing happened to Scritti, because funny things happen to everyone in history. As he was figuring out his jangly pop music and bringing discreet pleasure to several people, pop music itself became less jangly, in part because digital technology favored a sharper snap in general, and in part because it was part of a constellation that would eventually be called hip-hop. And Scritti liked this sound very much. He heard Michael Jackson and Run-DMC and it was good. So it came to pass that instead of giving this historical development the Heisman and insistently making a now-nostalgic jangle, Scritti made some romantic black-soul-loving pop music with digital snap, and brought indiscreet pleasure to many many people.
But this didn't make Scritti especially happy, and what's more, his headlong romantic leap into history's fastest pace meant that autumn would come as swiftly as summer, and before too long he found himself in a cool season with winter coming on. And so he retreated to the gloomy Usk Valley to spend a season drinking ale and thinking about what to do next.
A season turned into a few and then into many, as they tend to do when one is brooding in the gloomy Usk Valley, ancient kingdom of Gwent, where the coal miners mine coal and the years pass. And still Scritti puzzled over what to do next, or not. After a long while he came to an idea, and it grew and grew. His idea was that, though he had taken up the sonic snap that has so entranced him in the early Eighties, he had not truly taken up the hip-hop that he greatly loved.
And so it came to pass that Scritti walked out of the Usk Valley sometime near the end of the second millennium according to the Christian calendar, and released an album that featured his beautiful soul falsetto equally with several extremely minor pseudo-hip-hop characters, who had perhaps been chosen because they were open to nearly-forgotten intellectual Welsh pop singers with leftist leanings, and affordable by production budget of same, rather than because of their excellence. Though this strange brew had its moments, it was somewhat confusing to have pseudo-hip-hop songs which were also lovely falsetto parables involving Heloise and Abelard, and everyone was confused, Scritti not the least.
Perhaps the greatest confusion was the last song on the record, "Brushed With Oil, Dusted With Powder," which was the prettiest song but at the same time a ballad, and a remarkably gentle, soothing ballad at that, with no pseudo-hip-hop elements in the music, though the sweetly breathy lyrics did concern rides in police cars and, in some haunting manner, the song seemed to be taking place in the beauty of the Usk Valley and the scenario of American hip-hop at the same time. This was a true oddity and there was no way to make sense of it, but that seemed okay because it was the last song on the album and they are understood to be outside-the-work, and forgiven their incoherence, as a general rule.
After the last inconsequential song ended, some more years passed.
In those years a strange idea took hold in Scritti's mind. The idea was this: that the inconsequential, beautiful song was in fact the key to everything, or at least the key to his next album. He would make an entire record with no minor or even major hip-hop characters, but one charged with his love of early Eighties hip-hop, and his melancholy distance from it. But it would be an album of rock so soft that "soft rock" couldn't do it justice, and album that would make Quiet Storm radio formats feel like they might need to calm down a little and maybe attend a yoga class. It began with Scritti sighing "the boom boom bap...." But he did not sound like KRS-One, he sounded like Scritti but older, honey dipped in morphine on a slow drip.
It was like the dream of Brian Wilson that Brian himself could never really approach, of an easy listening album that was at the same time a work of genius. And if Scritti was occasionally compelled to murmur the the titles from an entire Run-DMC album in a distantly pretty bridge, or coo angelically to the effect that punks jump up to get beat down, sounding exactly as if he was blessing the beasts or inventing a lullaby for a child who had been dead for two decades, well, this was the sense of the album, though sense was not very much at stake. Something else was, though it was hard to be sure what, exactly, and this mystery was the album's greatness, or perhaps it was the invention of a previously unknown category of pop music, or the way a voice can trace its own history, and the relation of the individual to history, or how it felt to live in a beautiful and perfectly numb present, at the edge of a hole into which years and things one loved kept falling.
Posted by jane at October 27, 2006 09:22 AM | TrackBack