Not sure I agree with Emmy Hennings here.
She’s painted 2006 with a mixtape and it’s a lovely thing. According to the liner notes her March was all about Massive Attack. Amongst the discussions of hauntology – a Derrida pun, basically, that’s been transposed into the world of dark pop music – Emmy says Tricky gets too much credit for handing the baton to Burial.
It’s not a particularly linear argument. That is to say the discussion on whether Burial is the greatest hauntology record since Maxinequaye has little to do with the musical progression that gave birth to those sounds, the bedroom studios or mega tracked panels, and the car-boot distribution. Burial’s bleak dubstep verging on dark ambience was last year’s top record for a lot of people. Whereas Tricky’s sultry and stark opus dropped a decade ago, itself a deconstruction of Massive Attack’s soul-drenched and paranoid dance music.
There’s a thematic progression definitely. A literal reading says Burial’s music is dubstep built on at least five years of 12 inch singles and nights at FWD>>. Before that: 2step and garage, drum’n'bass, jungle and so on. A slightly broader look takes in techno and dub as critical ingredients. Wider still you get garage producer Wookie’s connections with Soul II Soul and hence Massive Attack.
Music is a magpie though.
All that and I’ve said nothing about the ghosts. Hauntology sounds a little high falutin to me, I’m not clear what it really means.
Emmy: “It’s the bottomless, dark space at the music’s centre; a gravity so dense that it pulls every other sound to the edge of obliteration, making the whole mix taut and tense as a ghost story.”
That’s nice, but does it overstate the case? I’m looking forward to Emmy’s explanatory piece in the next issue of Cyclic Defrost.
Emmy Hennings: “There is something unsettling in Massive Attack’s precision, the way in which there is never a note or a beat out of place. It is as if each song is an exercise in total control, made out of the fear of losing it completely. ‘Safe From Harm’ is a distant cousin to Marvin Gaye’s ‘Inner City Blues (Make Me Wanna Holler)’: understated, crystalline, exuding an icy paranoia.â€
That quote brings it back for me. The thing that makes Tricky and Massive, as well as Marvin Gaye, so great for me is that above the music you get an insight into something deeper, something hurt or emotional, something that cuts through the perfection of the music. Being starved of heart is one of the reasons I was so disappointed by this Melbourne via Bristol producer Bassment. Burial’s emotional, but I’m still not sure he deserves a spot in that company either.
Oddly, Emmy’s February was fixated on the Style Council. A few months later I pulled out an effortless groove by that band – ‘The Long Hot Summer’ – for a DJ mix. It’s a haunting, lingering kind of song, just right for a chat about ghosts.
Talk to me