photo: Michael Halsband
| Voodoo Gurus | ||
| Brit B-boy Tricky and Atlanta rapper Witchdoctor are wizards, true stars, schooled in the black arts of organizing noise. by Chris Norris | ||
| 8 Tricky
Angels With Dirty Faces (Island) 7 Witchdoctor
|
10 A Classic
9 Near Perfect 8 Very Good 7 Worthy 6 Reasonably Good |
5 Marginal
4 Poor 3 Dud 2 Worthless 1 Vile |
| Those fingers
in your hair.. .that sly come-hither stare.. .that funky tapeloop snare:
It's witchcraft. How else to explain the risa in your nape hairs when the
killer riff hits, that delicious nausea when the nasty bass quivers? Let's
retire old, academicized terms like jazz," "funk," "hip-hop," and "nu-skool-intelligent-hard
step," shall we? Let's call this stuff what it is: black magic.
Here are two artists who would definitely second that motion. Each spinning a distinct brand of pomo-Afro mojo, our favorite U.K. B-boy, Tricky, and the Atlanta MC Witchdoctor step forth cloaked in the dark lineaments of the ghetto shaman. Both artists turn to magic as weaponry for the physically unimposing. Tricky, with his Sammy Davis, Jr., physique, hisses "My voodoo make 'em sick," while the 5'4" Erin "Witchdoctor" Johnson mixes potent potions to offset his status as "smallest predator on the Georgia plain." Yet for all his drug-game tales and freak-you-up boudoirisms, Witchdoctor is "a natural born healer," out to soothe with his spooky down-home funk - Maya Angelou by way of Too Short. Tricky, on the other hand, has spent the better part of three albums avenging and destabilizing, throwing a hex on your ass. And when the choice comes to curative vs. infection, I'll always take the latter. W.E.B. DuBois called Witchdoctor's 'hood the City of a Hundred Hills, "peering out from the shadows of the past into the promise of the future." And while there are both shadows and futurism in his fragrant hip-hop, Witchdoctor is mostly a product of the same deeply rooted, well-adjusted Southern soul that DuBois rhapsodized about. Abetted by Atlanta's avant-ish Organized Noize team, Witchdoctor definitely has his mojo working. The single |
"Holiday" is
a wonderfully creepy exercise in cyber-g-funk, a double-time rimshot rattle
over a mid-tempo groove - drum'n'bass-ish production by guests DJ Rob and
Emperor Searcy. Elsewhere, other techno gizmos mix in with the loose jingle
of handheld voodoo percussion and ambience-like twittering swamp cicadas.
But Witchdoctor is really more preacher than wizard. He envisions the Promised Land in "Heaven Comm'," shouts "Fuck the devil" and doesn't even mean Whitey. While occasionally bumpin', the songs tend to be moody and haunted, rather than exhortative - taking a Montell Jordan-worthy party chorus like "Every day we get down," and flipping it with the suffix "on our knees." It's hard to imagine a malevolent sorcerer admonishing, "You know so much about this rap shit, but you don't know nothin' about the Lord," and it's not much of a snap either. Significantly, Witchdoctor even ends the record in High Blues fashion with "Lil' Mama's Gone," laying aside his recording-studio magick and just singing, sweetly and to acoustic guitar, a sad song about, yes, a motherless child. Another motherless child, Tricky has also got the blues. But his reads as the angst of displacement and rootlessness, which is a rather more interesting malady in the late 90s. Tricky is a world citizen who on Angels With Dirty Faces dreams of Kurt Cobain's suicide along with ghetto shoot-outs who vibes off Porgy & Bess and Billie Holiday alongside Gary Numan and Joy Division. The unwitting trip-hop pioneer here expands his medicine bad to include much of New York's avant-jazz community - members of the Lounge Lizards and Steve Coleman's science-funk band - plus PJ Harvey and an entire gospel choir. Rather than the lush digital soundscapes of Maxinquaye |
| or the shimmering
desolation of Pre-Millennium Tension, Angels resounds with cellos, tremolo
guitars, and bass clarinets, as well as the usual electro-wheezes and shuddering
bass loops. Referencing the electric period of that other dark magus, Miles
Davis, Angels may be remembered as the album on which Tricky rediscovered
that ancient mystical implement known as "the
drummer." The organic instrumentation adds to the sense of relentless propulsion, while the static and skewed phrasing in both Tricky's loops and his vocals keep the music sexy, but in a dissipated, unhealthy way. As usual, his rhymes are mostly disjointed little notebook scrawls / rants like "Why do they keep making those guns?" and funny riffs like "The T to the R to the Icky." Recited quickly and off the beat, his raps become a flood of consonants, low in the mix, sounding literally like hushed incantations. Unfortunately, the spell is broken when Tricky's off-the-cuff methodology starts to show through. By the last third of the record, we've heard one too many breathless paranoid tales over racing funk beats and long for something as startlingly lovely as the Pre-Millennium Tension ballad "Makes Me Wanna Die." Although he's creator of one of the most distinctive sonic aesthetics of the decade, sometimes Tricky's |
action-painting
production style sounds simply lazy.
Tricky's spiritual home on this record is much closer to Witchdoctor's than their locales might suggest. Partially recorded in New Orleans, Angels seems to limn some dark territory of African-American past, offering lines such as "Cry me a bayou," evoking Negro spirituals with a choir, or putting singer Martina Topley-Bird's blues hollering through a compressed filter so she sounds like a distant field recording. In some sense, this is probably Tricky's most American record, but in a way that makes you imagine an Afro-Diasporic equivalent to Greil Marcus's "invisible republic," a Dark Continent of the soul's eye. It's in that mythic realm where Tricky and Witch- doctor meet. On "6 Minutes," Tricky hocus-pocuses indecipherably to a looped female moan, distorted funk guitar, and loose-limbed drumming - a mesmerizing, head-nodding performance that's part hip-hop, part "Revolution 9," Witchdoctor's moment is "The Ritual," where snares, brushes, and cymbals replicate drum'n'bass's skittering fascination, a Reznorian chill grips the air, and the MC chants bleak urban snapshots. For a few minutes, Erin Johnson is trembling with the black arts and not necessarily with your best interests at heart. Which, of course, rocks. |
photo: Michael Halsband