Tricky's Maxinquaye: Rhizomes, rap and the resuscitation of the Blues

Abstract

Generic markers today continue to organize Black Atlantic music into various received categories and traditions. However much postcolonialist thinkers rhapsodize about the syncretism of black dance music in general, the connoisseurs of particular scenes continue to take a protective attitude towards the object of their affection, and grow guarded about innovation or the prospect of making contact with other generic fields. Yet this process of segmentation, encouraged by a music industry for which genres and customer profiles go hand in hand, can only simplify our response to such radical works as Tricky's Maxinquaye. For although Tricky himself placed Maxinquaye firmly in the Rap lineage, such bald positioning effectively saluted some of his album's sources at the expense of others, presenting it as a limited work that comfortably inhabits an existing genre rather than challenging the very idea of categorisation. Only by consulting less circumscribed visions of cultural tradition, such as Deleuze and Guattari's A Thousand Plateaus and the journalist Dorian Lynskey's map of pop genealogy Rock Underground, can we arrive at a more fluid position from which to assimilate the full range of genres on which Maxinquaye draws as well as the tension in which it holds them. In particular, Dorian Lynskey's decision to disassociate Maxinquaye from Hip Hop encourages the suspicion that Tricky overstated his identification with US rap, and that it masked a more potent love that he felt for a foregoing Blues tradition more willing to grasp the song as an opportunity to lament social pain. Via close lyrical readings, then, this article concludes that Maxinquaye aspires to the genre of Hip Hop yet cannot achieve this ambition because it cannot fight off the feelings of alienation that lure it back into the arms of this earlier songwriting tradition.

Keywords:

• Tricky
• Blues
• Hip Hop
• rhizome
• Black Atlantic
• genre

Notes

1. Ahmad accuses Said of “Auerbachean High Humanism” in In Theory, 166. Huggan provides a careful consideration of this charge in “(Not) Reading Orientalism,” 131–2.

2. Spivak, “Harlem,” 126.

3. Gilroy, There Ain't No Black, 199; Gilroy, Between Camps , 342.

4. Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 207.

5. Larkin, Jazz Writings, 133; Ellison, Shadow and Act, 230.

6. Smith, Music on My Mind, 241.

7. Baraka, “The Changing Same,” 113.

8. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 10-14.

9. See “An Interview with Paul Oliver,” 6. As Oliver suggests, “the adulation for Robert Johnson, the perception of Robert Johnson as being the grandfather of rock, has led to a peculiar kind of history, […] which channels everything from Mississippi through a very narrow group of people […]. I feel that […] its lineage [is] […] altogether too limited.”

10. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 15.

11. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 14.

12. Bryson, Notes from a Small Island, 54 (Emphasis in original).

13. Reynolds, Generation Ecstasy, 332.

14. Besant, All Sorts and Conditions of Men, iii. Of course, the Victorian binary opposition that notoriously split London between a leisurely West End and a hardworking East enjoyed a revival in the 1980s as a result of Margaret Thatcher's brutal policies. Not only the Pet Shop Boys but also BBC programme makers gratefully redeployed a basically unchanged Manichaeism in which (as Besant puts it) those of the West End “do not look pressed, or in a hurry, or task-mastered” while “in the East End, on the other hand, there are no strollers” and all are “driven by the invisible scourge of necessity,” 62. Mile End thus makes sense because, as I am arguing in these pages, Tricky is on the side of the drones.

15. Tricky, “Feed Me,” Maxinquaye.

16. Quoted in Reynolds, Generation Ecstasy, 328.

17. Original tracks feature, respectively, on Public Enemy's It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back and Eric B and Rakim's Follow the Leader.

18. The claim that Sonnet 138 inspires Maxinquaye's “Suffocated Love” rests on the four words it steals from the second line of Shakespare's poem: “I know she lies.” Meanwhile, as one of the best tracks on the uneven Pre-Millennium Tension (1996), “Christiansands” revolves around a lyric (“it means we'll manage ∣ I'll master your language ∣ And in the meantime I'll create my own”) that surely alludes to Caliban's renowned rebuke to Prospero: “You taught me language, and my profit on't ∣ Is, I know how to curse”; see The Tempest, act 1, scene 2.

19. Tricky, “Suffocated Love,” Maxinquaye.

20. Tricky, “Hell is Round the Corner,” Maxinquaye.

21. Reynolds, Generation Ecstasy, 327.

22. Tricky, “Feed Me,” Maxinquaye.

23. Ellison, “Richard Wright's Blues,” 1539.

24. Stubbs, “Slack Magic.”

25. Beard, “Review of Aspects of British Music,” 166.

26. Cypress Hill, “I Wanna Get High,” Black Sunday.

27. Snoop Doggy Dogg, “For all my Niggaz & Bitches,” Doggystyle.

28. Tricky, “Vent,” Pre-Millennium Tension.

29. Gilroy, After Empire , 105.

30. Public Enemy, “Terminator X to the Edge of Panic,” It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold us Back.

31. Rose, Black Noise, 94.

32. Nostalgic samples of Sly and the Family Stone appear on at least four tracks on Public Enemy's seminal Fear of a Black Planet: “Brothers Gonna Work it Out,” “Fight the Power,” “Power to the People” and “Who Stole the Soul?.” The Roots have more recently used Sly and the Family Stone to similar effect, a sample of “Everybody is a Star” introducing their 2004 breakthrough album The Tipping Point. Meanwhile, a sample of Bob Marley and the Wailers’ “Get Up, Stand Up” graces Eric B and Rakim's “Eric B Never Scared” (from Follow the Leader) as well as Public Enemy's “Party for Your Right to Fight” (from It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back). None of these albums feature Blues samples.

33. Sanchez, “liberation/poem” in We A BaddDDD People, 54.

34. Public Enemy, “Brothers Gonna Work it Out,” Fear of a Black Planet.

35. Thus, on Maxinquaye, “Hell is Round the Corner” samples Isaac Hayes’ “Ike's Rap II” (Black Moses, 1971) while “Pumpkin,” as its title suggests, lifts its drumbeat from the Smashing Pumpkins’ “Suffer” (Gish, 1991). More contentiously, “Brand New You're Retro” takes its rhythm from an accelerated sample of Michael Jackson's “Bad” (Bad, 1987). “Aftermath,” Tricky's moving elegy to his mother, meanwhile features Harrison Ford uttering a telling line from Blade Runner's screenplay: “let me tell you about my mother.”

36. Ellison, “Richard Wright's Blues,” 129.

37. Gussow, Seems Like Murder in Here, 3.

38. “Inside Barack Obama's iPod,” Rolling Stone, June 2008.

39. Obama, Dreams from My Father, 92.

40. For the full transcript of Obama's acceptance speech, see The Guardian, November 5 2008 http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/nov/05/uselections2008-barackobama. Songs cited here are: Howlin’ Wolf, “I Asked for Water” on Live in Cambridge, 1966 (1992);Billie Holiday, “My Sweet Hunk O’ Trash” on That Ole Devil Called Love (2000); Sam Cooke, “A Change is Gonna Come” on Ain't that Good News (1963); and A Tribe Called Quest, “Can I Kick It?” on People's Instinctive Travels and the Paths of Rhythm (1990).