Closer to God?

Why self-proclaimed superstar Tricky is ahead of his time

by Franklin Soults

Millions of American music lovers have never heard of England's 28-year-old self-proclaimed "superstar" Tricky, but if those millions include you, then you've probably wandered into this section of the paper on a lark. Stateside, Tricky hasn't conquered the sales charts or the airwaves (and his Paradise show last year drew only a middling crowd), but in the music press on both sides of the Atlantic he has been showered with as much adulation as any new artist in the last two years. His brand new album, Pre-Millennium Tension (Island), will doubtless turn up the glare of the rock critic's spotlight. On this side of the Atlantic, at least, you're sure to read its praises everywhere and hear it played nowhere.

Such a huge disparity between critical and commercial success is rarely seen these days, when "alternative music" has become so accepted by the mainstream that no one can use the term without ironic quotation marks. The obvious explanation for Tricky's failure to breach these shores is the same one that suggests why his music is such a critical smash: like British sensations Gang of Four or Joy Division or even the young David Bowie, his art is ahead of its time. His rejection by America's notoriously conservative music market only proves the point.

That explanation certainly would suit the artiste's brazen egotism, but it doesn't tell the whole story. In an attempt to have his fame and sneer at it too, Tricky has worked uncommonly hard over the past few years to maintain the fragile contradictions of a performer who seeks to win a huge audience while continuously challenging its limits. For starters, there's his oft-repeated dislike of the label "trip-hop." The term was coined in the early '90s to characterize the sound of various groups based in and around the western city of Bristol, like Portishead and Tricky's first crew, Massive Attack. In varying proportions, all these acts blended hip-hop, reggae, and cabaret-style Euro-rock for the most commercially viable and stylistically imaginative concoction ever to come out of the shifty subgenre that critic Robert Christgau has labeled "post-dance."

For Tricky, though, trip-hop was just a thin blueprint for something far darker. In the winter of 1994-'95, his solo debut, Maxinquaye (Island), revealed his full-blown vision: a post-dance album for post-apocalyptic England, one that traded soulful melancholy for alienation and claustrophobia. His sabotage of trip-hop came from all directions. Sometimes he inserted discordant sound effects under the style's smooth synth washes; elsewhere his delirious, half-mumbled raps mirrored the aggression of American hip-hop without imitating it. Most important, he introduced his great vocal foil and sometime lover, Martine, a 20-year-old beauty whose thin, untutored voice was essential for the cold bite of his casually cruel lyrics (the most quoted: "I fuck you in the ass just for a laugh"). The music was so subtly balanced it needed no getting used to -- it was instantly compelling on the very first spin of the record -- yet it wasn't quite like anything you'd ever heard before. Shuffle the album in your CD carousel, or choose a favorite track for a party tape, and its subtle ferocity could make every other recording around it sound crude and blundering, like a hopelessly dated oldie.

Maxinquaye landed on almost everyone's 1995 Top 10 list (mine included), but it was just the beginning of Tricky's manic ambition. In the scant year and a half since then, this scrawny scowler has produced, written and/or remixed songs for numerous admiring peers from Elvis Costello to Garbage, and he's released two collaborative side projects on his own brand-new label, Durban Productions: a full-length CD with famous friends like Björk and Neneh Cherry modestly titled Nearly God (released in conjunction with Island), and a five-song EP with budding New York rappers and R&B singers called Tricky Presents Grassroots (released with dance labels Payday and ffrr). Pre-Millennium Tension caps these projects, fulfilling a phase of his career that is as far from Maxinquaye as that album was from Massive Attack.

The hosannas have already been sung for the heavier of the two side projects, the throbbing, discordant, wandering Nearly God. By stripping Tricky's sound to bare essentials and then stripping it some more, the disc has been hailed for making "the bulk of Maxinquaye sound as non-threatening and comfortable as elevator music" (SPIN) and taking "the spirit of Maxinquaye to a new level of brilliantly splintered funk" (Details). Pre-Millennium Tension is slightly fuller and more focused -- it can make much of Nearly God sound like the impromptu jam session it surely was -- but it doggedly follows the same narrow path onto a barren ledge of clinical depression. Supported by his now ex-lover Martina (besides having borne their daughter over the interim, she seems to have traded her final "e" for an "a"), Tricky once again raps and murmurs about betrayal, failed love, egotism, and anomie in a set of caustic raps, sinister drones, and ghostly dirges. But instead of being fully developed riffs, many of the songs are built on two- or three-note ostinatos that reduce the groove to an insistent pulse; instead of lush synth textures, there are odd samples that grate like warped recordings of an Arabic wedding ceremony. Tricky laid out other mechanics of the album in an interview with Detour magazine: "I stripped it down, let the drums do a lot of the work. Instead of melodies, like on Maxinquaye, a lot of vocals are just da-da-da-da-da . . . That's why I kind of see it as more punk rock."

And that's where the problems start. Although a few cuts are every bit as captivating as anything from Maxinquaye, a lot are just more bitter, not better. Earphoned critics may proclaim Tricky's harder edge another Great Leap Forward, but I bet most average American music lovers would just shrug off his arid, taxing experiments as another example of post-dance detritus. In a way, this failure helps explain what was so good about Maxinquaye. Truth to tell, any no-talent misanthrope can make albums that remind you of life's empty, ugly side (RIP: G.G. Allin). Tricky's real trickiness lay in the way he smoothly alternated his nightmarish vision with blissfully lush and organic grooves. Without ever resorting to rote schlock or gratuitous shock, this self-professed hemp addict made anomie and despair feel as deeply satisfying as a smooth, solid buzz. The secret wasn't so much that Tricky was "ahead of his time," as if there were some great hidden rock-and-roll teleology waiting to be uncovered, as the way he embodied the full range of contradictions inherent in a musical style from a particular time and place.

You could see in all this the position of another "ahead-of-his-time" British sensation, John Lydon. One of the many little revelations I had at the Sex Pistols' reunion tour last summer was the thought that Lydon -- the creator of the history-bashing Johnny Rotten -- was once an Irish kid growing up in a very hostile part of London at the height of the Troubles. That fact was brought home by his farewell cry of "Good Night, Paddytown!" -- probably the moment I'll remember best in the whole show. Tricky's sizable achievements are due in part to some unfathomable genius, but, like Lydon's, they're due in part to a history he couldn't control. After the suicide of his mother and the flight of his father, Tricky was raised by various relations who lived in a neighborhood full of "Irish youth carrying knives and shotguns." Although he was constantly threatened by racist thugs, in time that "white ghetto" became as much a part of him as his black skin. When he befriended the DJs and MCs who would later become Massive Attack, he did so as a lover of both hip-hop and the Specials, both Bob Marley and David Bowie. Many of the other trip-hop pioneers had similar bi-racial roots. Few experienced the inherent contradictions so sharply.

As ever in America, it's Tricky's genes as much as his genius that make his music an impossible sale. He simply doesn't fit into the segregated categories so entrenched in the American music industry. And race is only the beginning of Tricky's radical blending and bending of styles and identities. At his best, he also slips around issues of class and gender, pleasure and disaffection, love and power. By stepping further from the trip-hop context of Maxinquaye, he's really just stepping away from the complex contradictions that are at the root of his arresting talent. It's no surprise that the music that works best on Pre-Millennium Tension appears when he grafts his post-dance anomie to other established styles, like the staccato rock-and-roll guitar of the opening three cuts, or the pseudo-jungle groove of "Sex Drive." Both his failures and his successes prove he's not nearly as close to God as he would like to believe. Then again, none of us is.