[Bring the Noise deleted scene #5]

MANTRONIX, Music Madness (10 Records)
Melody Maker, December 6th 1986.

by Simon Reynolds


Mantronix don’t quite fit. Hip hop is getting to
be more and more of an assault, more and more hyper-compressed
and minimal in its search for harder and higher hits. But
Mantronix are loosening up their music, bringing in a suppleness
and textural luxury. Hip hop daily exceeds new levels of
megalomaniac viciousness. But Mantronix are gradually squeezing
the SELF out of their music, letting the music stand on
its own madness.

Compare what Mantronix are doing with a track that
represents some kind of zenith in current hip hop
trends--“The Manipulator” by Mixmaster Gee and The Turntable Orchestra
(off Electro 14). Here skill on the turntables becomes a
twisted, bloated metaphor for omnipotence. The voice shoves
itself RIGHT IN YOUR FACE--you can practically feel the spittle,
smell the breath. It’s a voice intoxicated with power, quaking with
rage. MC Tee from Mantronix, in comparison, has a refreshingly
adolescent voice, almost sweet--words are slurred, there’s the
tiniest suggestion of a lisp.

“Manipulator” style hip hop is given its impetus by being focused
on the tyrannical charisma of the rapper, but with Mantronix the
raps seem almost superfluous. There are several instrumentals. With most
hip hop the very sound of the music is a MASSIVE COCK waving about
in your face. Mantronix erase every trace of the pelvis, every last ditch of humanism in hip hop. Their music isn’t weighted down by the
heaviness of masculinity, but glides, skips, even frisks at times, rather
than thuggishly stomping us weaklings underfoot. Mantronix sound
disembodied, dislocated, out-of-it.

They are far out, a long way from firm ground. Mantronik marshals
a host of uprooted fragments and abducted ghosts into a dance. He
thieves indiscriminately, without prejudice, enlisting anything
from Benny Goodman to The Old Grey Whistle Test theme tune.
On “We Control the Dice” they even indulge in self-kleptomania (or perhaps
simple thrift is at work), re-using the bass motif from “Bassline”.

Their greatest influence, though, is European electropop--the
scrubbed, spruce, pristine textures and metronomic precision
of Kraftwerk and Martin Rushent’s Human League. While the brainy British
bands of the day dedicate themselves to noisy guitars, it’s up to Mantronix
(and House music) to uphold the spirit of 1981, to cherish the bass sound
and the electronic percussion of “Sound of the Crowd” as a lost future of pop.

They have moments close to wildness-“Big Band B-Boy” commandeers
a jungle of percussion--but I prefer it when Mantronix sound stealthy.
“Scream,” with its curiously muted delivery of a party-up lyric
(the word “scream” is almost whispered) is as eerie as Suicide lullabies
like “I Remember” or “Cheree”. The title track has a roaming, furtive
sense of space, the phrase “music madness” sampled, stretched and
melted into a series of beautiful belches. Best of all is the closing
“Megamix”, in which everything you’ve been listening to for the last
half-hour is regurgitated inside out and upside down, flashing before
your ears like a drowned, garbled life. Sublime pandemonium.

Music Madness is the kind of music you’d hoped The
Art of Noise would go on to make after “Close (to the Edit)”.
Fleshless, soulless, faceless and fantastic.

[Bring the Noise deleted scene #4]

Sick or Sweet: Hip Hop and Indie-Rock
New Statesman column November 1986


There’s a current left orthodoxy that assumes that black
music, because it’s the voice of ‘the street’, has some
kind of natural link with socialism. Hip hop is a problem for
this Red Wedge worldview. Here’s a black subculture that
confronts racism and economic oppression not with a redemptive
vision of solidarity, equality and humanity, but with a
survivalist mentality, a masculine self-sufficiency. Hip hop’s
community is based around a spectacle of pathological
individualism. Rappers strive to do each other down in a
strange caricature of capitalism’s war of all against all.

A good example is the solipstic masterpiece that
is the debut LP by Schoolly D (Rhythm King). Schooly D
inhabits a blank, nihilistic universe, where the only authority
is the self, where the only goals are making the “sucker-ass niggers”
feel small, and acquiring the status symbols of
‘sophistication’--gold, designer clothes, drugs, ‘fine ladies’.
Musically Schooly D and partner DJ Code Money take hip hop
beyond dance, to a point where the only comparisions are
with the brutality and minimalism of avant-garde groups
like Throbbing Gristle and Swans. Most rappers bully the
listener, but Schoolly is too cool for that, lets his voice swagger,
slurring the words in an intoxication of narcissism and
contempt. What’s the pleasure in submitting to all this?
There’s a vertiginous, vicarious sense of psychic extremity,
an appeal to something unpleasant in all of us…

Some would find it disturbing to realise that black male
youth doesn’t identify with wholesome, right-on singers like
Junior Giscombe, but with the likes of Run DMC, whose philosophy
is: “If I ain’t winning, if I ain’t right there at the top looking
down at the rest… I have to win.”More evidence: Mixmaster Gee’s
“The Manipulator” on Electro 14 (Streetsounds). Here prowess on the turntables is swollen into a sick, compelling fantasy of
omnipotence. The rappers sounds drunk with power. His voice
snarls right up in your face. The bass crushes you underfoot.
What kind of an entertainment is this? Simply, what’s being
sold is a megalomaniac fantasy, for the powerless.

A characteristic of modern black pop is its willingness
to be un-black, to thieve in all directions. Mantronix, on their
new LP Music Madness(10 Records) filch from sources as diverse
as Glenn Miller and The Old Grey Whistle Test theme tune.
Their greatest debt, though, is to the fleshless, soulless electropop of Kraftwerk, who are as pristinely metronomic as ever on Electric Café (EMI).

The Beastie Boys migrate in the opposite direction,
three white hardcore punks from Brooklyn who are infatuated
with B-boy slang and attitude. On Licensed To Ill (Def Jam)
they splice and dice beats and rap with Sabbath and Zeppelin riffs
to devastating effect. Of course, they’re obnoxious, loudmoth boors
(“some voices get treble/some voices got bass/we got the kind of voices
that are IN YOUR FACE”) and their objectionable lyrics revolve around beer and cursing and crack and grossing out on White Castle’s cheeseburgers
and disrepectin’ girls. But there’s a brattish exuberance and musical mischief that I’m not strict enough to shun. If I wanted to get pretentious
I could argue that this is a radical kind of vileness, I could talk
about the politics of the Slob, about how hip hop refuses yuppie health
and self-improvement, says ‘this is me in all my beastliness and bad habits’.
About how hip hop inverts values so that ‘treacherous’ and ‘ill’ and
‘chilly’ are good things to be. I could say all this, but that would be an ingenious and disingenuous way of rationalizing away shame.

The Beastie Boys are an exception. White rock grows ever more
inbred, mining the narrow seam of its own past. C86 (Rough Trade)
a New Musical Express compilation of new British
indiepop shows how the beatnik delinquency of influences
like The Velvet Underground, Byrds, Beefheart, has been
replaced by a stay-at-home Englishness. The common sensibility
seems to be a desire to reconstruct ‘innocence’--hence the obsession with childhood and with the Sixties. Best of this spindly breed are the
insolent Wolfhounds and all-girl group We’ve Got A Fuzzbox
And We’re Gonna Use it, whose tomboy boisterousness can also
be enjoyed on Love Is the Slug (WEA).

Indie groups tend to take the alienation and doubt of
adolescence as a kind of kind of ‘truth’ that’s lost in
adulthood’s selling-out to comfort and complacency and certainty.
The accusation leveled at The Smiths--of glamourising misery and failure--is gloriously true. Here are two more groups that succeed in
romanticizing dereliction of the soul. On Your Funeral… My Trial (Mute) Nick Cave reinvents downtrodden musics like blues and country,
finding in the Deep South an appropriate backdrop for
his tales of ruin and obsession and revenge. The Band of Holy Joy’s Who Snatched The Baby? (Flim Flam)is the latest in a series
of brilliantly lugubrious waltzes and shanties, folk music infected with a contemporary sense of rootlessness and disorientation.

And therein likes the difference between black and white pop.
White bohemian rock is downwardly-aspiring, looking to the past
for roots, for the lost ‘real’ of suffering. Black pop takes
conventional upwards aspirations, conventional sexual protocol,
and turns them into a cartoon utopia. There’s a vast chasm between
white rock and black pop, but if you’re schizophrenic enough you
can get something out of both.

SIMON REYNOLDS

[Bring the Noise deleted scene #3}


PARLIAMENT, Uncut Funk--the Bomb--the Best of Parliament(Club)
Melody Maker, Sept 6th 1986


From singing doowop on the streets of New York In the Fifties to this year’s electro-monstrous “Do Fries Go With That Shake” is some singular funk-odyssey. Everything Clintoon has touched in funk has been state-of-art AND out-on-a-limb. What he does is take funk’s already lurid cartoon vision of street swank and give it an extra acid-tinged dose of unreality.

The result is a dance music that manages to be indecently, lewdly visceral, and at the same time strangely disembodied, even spectral. With P-funk we see again that sex and dance--supposedly the most natural, realest things -- are really improbably, ludicrous, surreal activites.

P-Funk means pure funk, uncut with vanilla substances, but Parliament are far from the clipped minimalism, the simple good-times groove of a Kool & The Gang. The key to P-funk is that basic funk signals are scrambled into a funk-gibberish, but one that still makes perverted floor-sense. Or rather overloaded, cluttered with too many funky strands, draped with so many tangents, follies, flights of fancy, you fear the groove will collapse under the strain. But no, everything pushes forward, moves you.

Early Seventiest tracks like “Tear the Roof off the Sucker” are like warped Ohio Players, all kooky harmonies and loopy keyboards frolics. “Flashlight”, exemplary late Seventies Clinton, is all itchy, squitty synth squiggles and harmony backing as unhinged and eerie as Sun Ra. And Bootsy Collins (as much a genius as Clinton) is the Hendrix of his instrument. How his bass bulges, drools, clenches, strains, evacuates, folds in on itself, haemorrhages. From thorough to nimble, that bowel-deep feel hits you in your funky fundament.

The lyrics gibber too--a whole creed swollen from a single, slippery, elusive concept: funk. Funk as salvation, funk as epistemology, funk as revolutionary praxis. The nearest to articulation we get is: “a creative nuisance… the recognition of stupidity as a positive force.” P-Funk is BLENORRHOEA--a spurting of folly. Enrol in this madness today.

SIMON REYNOLDS