Black Secret Tricknology

"Machine technology is a type of transformation"
- Martin Heidegger

"May I land my kinky machine?"
- Jimi Hendrix

Paul Gilroy prefaces his essay "Black Music And The Politics Of Authenticity" with a quote from Kool G Rap: "My nationality is reality." Gilroy goes on to speak of a (black) culture "anchored in a continued proximity to the unspeakable terrors of the slave experience." In the 70s/80s, Bob Marley, say, could sing a song like "Slave Driver" - and all his songs of Redemption, Freedom, Liberation - and it could still resonate for a generation near enough to their own (or their parents') experience of displacement for it to register a certain knottiness. A lot has happened since then (all too little of it picked up by the critical media) but if you wanted to sum up the seachange - between the anchored Then and the splintered Now - that quotation would have to read: TECHNOLOGY IS MY REALITY.

Forget the centre: the margins are where the signals are coming from. Everything is velocity and disappearance and mutation. And so, if here I set up such oppositions as Marley vs Dub, Concrete Jungle versus Jungle plastique, renewable technology versus ossified pop worship, it is not some infernal plan to do away with the Human (the spirit, the voice) and replace it with the Technological. It is rather to reclaim what is truly human (memory, lack, doubt, danger) through and in technology, when it otherwise threatens to evaporate in the blurry oasis of modern marketing.

In the last few weeks, alongside listening to Tricky's phenomenal new album Maxinquaye, I also found myself preoccupied with Bob Marley (for another article), as well as (finally) reading through Greil Marcus's In The Fascist Bathroom. Once again I encountered the problem I invariably have with Marcus. Much as I love his writing, the objects of his adoration often baffle me, especially when it comes to his attempted negotiation of `politics' in music, specifically a certain strain of worthy, invariably English avatar (Mekons, Gang Of Four, Strummer, Costello; also Bruce Springsteen): a certain strain of spokesperson that some of us have never been swayed by, distrusted as being way literal in its approach, texturally meagre. (At times, reading Marcus's powerful reverence for such people, I've almost felt guilty for preferring a John Martyn or Kate Bush or Brian Eno as my prized definition of wayward Englishness.)

Years ago I had a very earnest conversation with The Pop Group's Mark Stewart after I criticised his group in print for their turn away from fevered mysticism ("We Are All Prostitutes"). He said: but what should you do if you have a political conscience and are engaged in the business of making songs and want your songs to register this conscience? I said - I sketchily described - an Ideal Song in which any political inclination could only be registered as a trace of confusion or ambiguity; that if politics was daily ruined for us by being dully ground out in the language of Authority then any counter-cultural motion must find an entirely new language. He said: well, what examples do you have of this? I had to say: none, really, because what I describe is a dreamed song, and there just aren't any real ones around at the moment. Sorry.