Tricky [The Wire - March 1995] http://www.moon-palace.de/tricky/wire95.

html

BLACK SECRET
TRICKNOLOGY
Tricky's debut album Maxinquaye is the most feted, discussed and misunderstood record of the
moment. Ian Penman steps back from the media feeding frenzy to consider a music that wreaks
havoc with our notions of sex, soul and technology

"Machine technology is a type of transformation"

- Martin Heidegger

"May I land my kinky machine?"

- Jimi Hendrix
TEXT: Ian Penman
Paul Gilroy prefaces his essay "Black Music And Last year, when I heard Tricky's astonishing debut
The Politics Of Authenticity" with a quote from single "Aftermath" (additional vocals: Mark
Kool G Rap: "My nationality is reality." Gilroy goes Stewart), I knew that conversation had somehow
on to speak of a (black) culture "anchored in a come home to roost.
continued proximity to the unspeakable terrors of
the slave experience." In the 70s/80s, Bob Marley, `There just aren't any real ones around' - but over
say, could sing a song like "Slave Driver" - and all the years, there have been certain landmarks. You
his songs of Redemption, Freedom, Liberation - and probably know the Wire[d] litany by now, but
it could still resonate for a generation near enough anyway: English (John Martyn, the early Roxy
to their own (or their parents') experience of Music of "Bogus Man" etc, Robert Wyatt's Rocky
Bottom, mid-period Eno, PiL's Metal Box, AR Kane
displacement for it to register a certain knottiness. A
et al); American (Sly, Miles, Sun Ra, Patti Smith,
lot has happened since then (all too little of it picked
up by the critical media) but if you wanted to sum Tim Buckley); and myriad Other points (dub, etc). It
up the seachange - between the anchored Then and seems to me that one could deconstruct Greil
the splintered Now - that quotation would have to Marcus's text in Fascist Bathroom as much by who
read: TECHNOLOGY IS MY REALITY. and what he leaves out as who and what he ticks off;
noticing how, for instance, dub is continually
Forget the centre: the margins are where the signals indexed as a purely supplementary presence. He
are coming from. Everything is velocity and writes about the crucial impact dub has on plodders
disappearance and mutation. And so, if here I set up like The Clash, but he cannot find the words to write
such oppositions as Marley vs Dub, Concrete Jungle about dub, as a force unto itself - and a far more
versus Jungle plastique, renewable technology unsettling one than any Rawk Groop. Dub is written
versus ossified pop worship, it is not some infernal of/off as if it were purely and simply a formal
plan to do away with the Human (the spirit, the musical device which can be lifted and appliquéd
voice) and replace it with the Technological. It is willy-nilly for the benefit of his (White)
rather to reclaim what is truly human (memory, lack, Vanquishing Heroes. But the way it sneaks into and
doubt, danger) through and in technology, when it speaks through a text like Marcus's - it echoes like a
otherwise threatens to evaporate in the blurry oasis phantom throughout - is proof in itself of the Other
of modern marketing. ways it has found to operate. Perhaps dub already
has an insidious logic all its own which escapes or

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exceeds this sort of totalising critical language.

In the last few weeks, alongside listening to Tricky's
phenomenal new album Maxinquaye, I also found What is left out of such an account - with its stress
myself preoccupied with Bob Marley (for another on the single white saviour, on the unifying
article), as well as (finally) reading through Greil spokesman, on some sweat-browed embodiment of
Marcus's In The Fascist Bathroom. Once again I rock's principa ethica - is the possibility that there
encountered the problem I invariably have with has always been this entirely Other politico-musical
Marcus. Much as I love his writing, the objects of discourse, in which there is no separation between
his adoration often baffle me, especially when it text and texture, human and technology: a music of
comes to his attempted negotiation of `politics' in eerie dis-embodiment, far more in keeping with the
music, specifically a certain strain of worthy, mood of the times.
invariably English avatar (Mekons, Gang Of Four,
Strummer, Costello; also Bruce Springsteen): a *
certain strain of spokesperson that some of us have
never been swayed by, distrusted as being way "For this site, calling to us from beyond memory, is
literal in its approach, texturally meagre. (At times, always elsewhere. The site is not the empirical and
reading Marcus's powerful reverence for such national Here of a territory. It is immemorial, and
people, I've almost felt guilty for preferring a John thus also a future".
Martyn or Kate Bush or Brian Eno as my prized - Jacques Derrida
definition of wayward Englishness.)
This Other tradition has always (sometimes bitterly)
Years ago I had a very earnest conversation with been suffused with an inherent (sometimes
The Pop Group's Mark Stewart after I criticised his crippling) sense of doubt: doubt that any `public'
group in print for their turn away from fevered pronouncement of oppositionality (such as Marcus
mysticism ("We Are All Prostitutes"). He said: but is fond of) had any real point; and that you rather
what should you do if you have a political had to find or reclaim a language of your own -
conscience and are engaged in the business of encoded, murky, stellar - from out of the sky or
making songs and want your songs to register this earth where you found yourself, from out of myriad
conscience? I said - I sketchily described - an Ideal `discredited' pasts or futures. In the 60s and 70s,
Song in which any political inclination could only Sci-fi shamen like Miles, Sly Stone and George
be registered as a trace of confusion or ambiguity; Clinton (taking some of their cues from writers like
that if politics was daily ruined for us by being dully Samuel Delaney and Ishmael Reed) choose this
ground out in the language of Authority then any option. If you were anyway going to be consigned to
counter-cultural motion must find an entirely new society's margins, then why not speak (in) a
language. He said: well, what examples do you have marginal tongue? Speak a language which people
of this? I had to say: none, really, because what I would have to come to on your terms, not theirs?
describe is a dreamed song, and there just aren't any
real ones around at the moment. Sorry.

One of the last lines on Maxinquaye may well Tricky (dis)solves such problems - the false
express this same idea; excepting/accepting that - oppositions set up between technology and
fittingly enough - it is hard to make out exactly what humanity, punk and funk - precisely by ignoring
words Tricky emits, although he does appear to them. What he (and others in Jungle, New
rhyme "From the margins" with "Lost our origins"... Electronica, etc) do cannot be described as a `retreat'

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into technology, because his generation has never

* been anywhere else.
"We're...not...HUMAN." For some of us the experience of reggae was far
- Patti Smith more unsettling than a mere alphabetised clutch of
Wailers LPs. People get warped by dub and reggae,
This buried, contrary, cabbalistic tradition - and they never recover. And there are reasons for
treknology, tricknology, tracknology - finds a this. But the mistake that all too many too-literal
demoniac flowering on Maxinquaye. Everything critics still make is to keep `music' and `theory'
Tricky has listened to in his (two?) years (PJ Harvey separate. `Theory' is still what the critic cooks up -
and Kate Bush, Prince and Public Enemy and later - out of the `raw' matter of the Song. But dub
Augustus Pablo) finds itself grafted onto a strange unsettles that whole schema.
and intoxicating bloom. (If you think Prince and
Kate Bush are rather lame advertisements for Dub's sub-sonic echo is no mere FX - it is the effect
Otherness, you haven't properly considered Prince's proper of a certain subjective view of the world: the
whole `Spooky Electric versus Lovesexy' crack-up, dark sonic mirror reflection of Rasta's phantasmal
and his transmutation from proper name into worldview. Dub versions are the shavings of(f) the
unspeakable symbol; or heard the irruption of certainty of (Western) technology as the unmediated
something like Bush's "Big Stripey Lie": in sum, reproduction of a singer's performance. Dub was a
how such shy, mild, almost malformed beings are breakthrough because the seam of its recording was
transformed into such maleficent creatures in the turned inside out for us to hear and exult in, when
crucible of the studio.) we had previously been used to the `re' of recording
being repressed, recessed, as though it really were
An olde-worlde flat-earth icon like Bob Marley fits just a re-presentation of something that already
too snugly into that modern pantheon which Greil existed in its own right. Dub messes big time with
Marcus loathes ("We Are The World" etc) but such notions of uncorrupted temporality. Wearing a
simultaneously reinstates by trying to set up an dubble face, neither future nor past, dub is
alternative pantheon of his own. It is a measured simultaneously a past and future trace: of music as
humanism which leaves little room for the uncanny both memory or futurity, authentic emotion and
in music; and if it does approach this abyssal sonic technological parasitism. Dub's tricknology is a
element (as I think Marcus does, fleetingly, when form of magic which does indeed make people
confronted by something like the terrifying amoral disappear, leaving behind only their context, their
howl of The Sex Pistols; the unassimilable oddness trace, their outline. (Where does the singer's voice
of The Slits; or the skewed polyvalence of Sly's go, when it is erased from the dub track?) It makes
Riot), it has to back off from the full implication, or of the voice not a self possession but a dispossession
surrender up the edifice of its working logic. - a `re'-possession by the studio, detoured through
the hidden circuits of the recording console.
There was a strange future-shock moment in the 70s
Maxinquaye is one magnificent flowering of this
when the polar opposites of reggae (earthed,
generational ingestion of the smoky logic of dub.
organic, worshipful) and punk (a self-consuming
fast white fire of nihilism) commingled. The "I've just been given a book which describes singers
suffocating logos of journalism tended to detour as people who string lines across geography and
around this troubling interface in favour of the history. What a marvellous way to think about what
iconisation of a Joe Strummer and/or a Marley: singers do."
perhaps it was more than coincidence that at a time - Rickie Lee Jones
of "I am an anti-Christ" the spectre of Godliness was
revived in the Jah/Bob nexus, as against a world of Tricky isn't stranded either side of any random
demand which was (frighteningly) posited as divide between archaic Song and neoteric Texture:
infinite, unconditional, absolute. on Maxinquaye both seem to come from the same
distant pulse. On "Black Steel" he shoves Public
Many of these unresolved and undiagnosed Enemy through a scree of PJ Harvey. On
yearnings have haunted the reception of black and "Ponderosa" he mixes gamelan and Special Brew.

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white musics in this country (especially with On "Hell Is Round The Corner" he sieves the whole
reference to indie's lager-loutish technophobia) ever so-called Bristol vibe through a healthy dose of
since. Some of the palest music in the world (One paranoia. On "Abbaon Fat Track" he injects
Dove, say) is more inherently in touch with the BritFunk with an unhealthy dose of Donald Goines's
black digitalised world of tricknology than the Dopefiend. On "Strugglin" he sounds like an
whole of the Face-cover/Talkin Loud/Jazzie B nexus African griot relayed through Tom Waits's more
of groovy One World vibery. And some of the Partched inscapes. On "Pumpkin" he jettisons
blackest music in the world (Public Enemy, say) had audible meaning altogether.
more in common with the overturnings of punk than
98 per cent of indie whining.

On Maxinquaye, Tricky sounds like ghosts from sings so: "I think ahead of you/I think instead of
another solar system. Not so much fear of a black you..." Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that
planet as fear of a planet left behind - fear of the Tricky is unwilling to S-P-E-L-L out to interviewers
space and silence out there, which is internalised stuff which he has already toiled long and hard to
into this odd, liminal, multi-layered music. Tricky find the correct way of saying on Maxinquaye.
whispers, he doesn't scream, and it's all the more Anyone with even a cursory knowledge of certain
unsettling (politically as well as aesthetically) for Gnostic, magickal and African traditions will know
that. He has adroitly staged his inaugural ceremony that it is considered foolhardy, dangerous even, to
as a disappearance, a mutation, a street-political spell out to one's inferiors things for which the
sideswipe and a polysexual put-on. maker has already found an effective formula.

When he appears, there are four of him, at least. He *

is a horseman, a pleasure tyrant, a thought thief, a
shapeshifter - his singing "I" dissolved and left to My brain thinks bomb like/Beware of our
float over troubled waters. Even the name is double appetite..."
or triple (it's his name - except when it isn't - as well - Tricky
as the group's) and no matter what the track, there is
always some Other voice (Martika, Mark Stewart) Maxinquaye is like an inventory (just as There's A
floating about as ballast. Riot Goin' On was before it) of what happens to a
revolutionary class when it subsumes or sublimates
All the pieces so far written about Tricky (and his or sublimes its `failure' into a kind of resplendent
close confreres Massive) tend to reproduce a certain sub-cultural closure. Spooky and frightened, sexy
quandary: to wit, how can such coarse, workaday and freaked-out -blood in the eyes, goat-pain on the
fellows be responsible for such unearthly beauty? breath - bullets start chasin', meanings start elidin'.
But this is to misunderstand the nature of both the The fear that permeates Maxinquaye is one side of a
Song and its technology. The Song is - via the mood the reverse of which is a poisonous revelry/
`kinky machine' of recording technology - a spell- reverie: with all the time in the world to kill, this
like concentration of wish, awe, loss and trouble: it `revolutionary class' succumbs to all the numb
is our modern magick: a means of invocation or repetition enchantments of music, drugs, sex, booze,
evocation, a malicious or heart-melting voodoo. On satellite/video; until the "I" becomes utterly
Maxinquaye Tricky has made (of) himself a dissolute; until you can no longer tell who you...
machine capable of projecting a whole galaxy/
Tricky adopts the same personae as the (g)riot Sly

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phalanx of contradictory personae. "And as I grow, I Stone: pimp, sadist, freak, struggler, seer. Truth be
grow collective..." told, maybe "nationality" never was such a sure
thing to hang a life on: it was always shaky, fragile,
* limned with the spectres of its own imminent
dissolution.
"Moreover, he is a channeler of contamination,
particularly when it comes to linguistic pollutants *
such as `cuss words'."
- Avital Ronnell "Strugglin'... with the remains."
- Tricky
The eroticism of Maxinquaye is startling. If most
rap (or `slack' DJ-ing) is stuck at a level of sexual The place where all this comes together most
projection which inevitably steers towards either evocatively is across the monumental expanse that
misogyny or frivolity, Maxinquaye balances out its is "Aftermath", with its encrypted meditation on a
askew extremities ("69 degrees/My head's between politics of aftermath. It is the LP's pivot in more
her knees") with a most un-rap-like polysexuality, ways than one, in which all voices become equal in
whereby Tricky (the rude bwoy) is always cancelled the endless replay/relay of the technological ether;
out by Martika or some other other. (Thus, in the in which anything can come back to haunt you, in
midst of Maxinquaye's filthiest, murkiest track we which anything can become haunted. Just as Voodoo
get what may well be the first recorded mention in redeploys harmless images of Catholic saints, so
such circles of "The pre-menstrual cycle".) If rap is Tricky plus Martika plus Mark Stewart use a David
sometimes all too present, Tricky stages a Cassidy lyric, no less, to essay ontological
disappearing Trick, and the shock of the words sung uncertainty: "How can I be sure? In a world... that's
becomes disassociated from their singer, who fades constantly changing?" And slip samples from Blade
away, leaving a stand-in persona or ghost to mouth Runner and David Sylvian/Japan into the mix.
them. You can't pin him down from song to song - David Cassidy, David Sylvian, Blade Runner all
he is a latterday Trickster figure, pulling our assume equal weight/lessness in the circuits of the
(signifying) chains. Taking the Michael. Having us night.
on.
The Blade Runner sample is particularly
"They guarded the knowledge of genealogies and noteworthy. In a song that may (or may not) be
the complex `praise names' attached to every about the relationship between mother and son (and
surname." therefore: legacy, continuity, memory) the decisive
- Entry on African `Jali' singers in The Rough Guide expression of this theme is the sampled quote from
To World Music Blade Runner. "Lemme tell you about my mother!"
Anyone who knows the scene from which this is
"And later on, maybe, I'll tell you my real name." lifted will already be aware of the `irony' (although
- Tricky that is too paltry a word for this staged
reverberation) at work here: the voice belongs to a
It is fairly obvious after a few spins through the replicant - half-man half-technology, and devoid of
infected micro-cosmos of Maxinquaye that Tricky memory (and thus legacy, continuity, memory...).
knows more than he is letting on. Knows, as in: a
secret knowledge he quite rightly fears to name. Is it merely coincidence that the Sylvian quote and
This silent discourse echoes around Maxinquaye as the Blade Runner lift converge in the same song?
a kind of rhythmic ebb or evaporation, voices "Ghosts"... Replicants? Electricity has made us all
trailing in and out, never settling on one definite angels. Technology (from psychoanalysis to
past or present: "Confused by different memories/ surveillance) has made us all ghosts. The replicant
Details of Asian remedies..." ("Your eyes resemble mine...") is a speaking void.
The scary thing about "Aftermath" is that it suggests
We may read that Tricky shies away from that nowadays, We All Are. Speaking voids, made
`theorising' about his work, but this may just be the up only of scraps and citations... contaminated by
sane response of a man suddenly confronted by the other people's memories... adrift...

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representatives of a music press desperate to slot

everything into its lazily reductive `Bristol as the Maxinquaye releases this ghost-talk of technology,
new Seattle' strap-line. Besides which, the the babble of the wires, plugs sex and drugs and
opposition won't stand: Maxinquaye is a work of future shock into the circuit... and lets the circuits
theory. There is nothing theory can say that is not sing. There's a whole new riot of meaning here, just
already embedded in this wily, uncanny text. (Tricky waiting to be heard.
even helpfully

photos: ???

You can see the digital edition here (but you have to pay to read it)

analyze me (Tricky)

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