Track-By-Track: O/B #10 (Guest post by Bleimann)
Today's guest post comes from Madrid-based party starter and long-time friend Bleimann.
Every so often you encounter a track which is so utterly Your Kind of Thing that it feels like it was made exactly for you. That’s what “Boom! There She Was”, and golden era Scritti Politti in general, are for me.
The Scritti Politti trajectory is one of my favourites in music history. Green Gartside started out deconstructing the amorous tropes of pop music within a Marxist framework. In a spectacular left turn, on 'Cupid & Psyche 85', he ditched his former collaborators to form a partnership with David Gamson, with whom he shared a deep obsession with R&B, soul, and funk. The shift was to analyse pop from the inside, not from a safe distance. To make, essentially, a version of pop which was so extremely pop that it becomes unheimlich, at once familiar and completely, utterly, bizarre.
'Boom! There She Was' is the endpoint of that particular strand of Scritti Politti-thought. It’s hard to put the sound world it works within into words. It’s the most quantized music ever made. It’s the funk within the MIDI sequencer. Lyrically and sonically, there’s no attempt to create something coherent out of the barrage of different elements. None of that 80s echo which smooths over the joints, but instead an almost aggressive and jagged cleanness. Every sound with the Attack turned up to levels which sound like they could potentially damage your hearing. A kind of lyrical glossolalia where fragments of Derrida and love songs mix with conspicuous consumerism.
It is also, obviously, a massive banger, and maybe the purest expression of the Scritti philosophy: critique the excess of 80s capitalism and the emptiness of pop tropes through the most excessive, joyous, blissful engagement with that world. And when I think, “what makes this so archetypally MY kind of music?”, I think it’s that: a sense reveling in the over-the-top, in being really far too much, all things considered, within a perfectly honed and finessed structure.
Incidentally, the parent album 'Provision' is the starting point of a personal reading of music history of mine which comes dangerously close to a conspiracy theory. One strand leads to Max Tundra (compare 'Sugar and Spice' to the sounds he would explore on 'Parallax Error Beheads You'); another, to PC Music (itself born out of the previous label Gamsonite, presumably named after the Scritti member, and influenced by Tundra’s work). Gamson himself would go on to co-produce 'Stephen' (Kesha’s best song! [and itself remixed by A.G. Cook of PC Music!!]) and would be drafted in to work on 'Femmebot' by Charli XCX. In any case, I think there’s something about the particular investigation into pop, and the postmodern explosion of its dynamics, which seems more prescient with every passing year.
Scritti Politti - Boom! There She Was (feat. Roger Troutman) (Virgin, 1988)
(Discogs)
Note: this is an entry in the Track-By-Track series for my mix for O/B.
Track-By-Track is a series that looks back at records you will have heard in my mixes, one by one in the order they were played. Who made them, and when? How did I come across them? And what do they make me feel?