Scritti Politti
It’s not an illusion: everything really does happen faster in the Information Age. And though it’s nice in theory to be able to access untold resources with the click of a mouse, faster is not always better. The Renaissance man has been swamped by a sea of unlimited, unsorted information–our sense that there’s just too much to know and do out there seems to have dwarfed our drive to be well-rounded. It may even have created a new breed of impotence: the inability to create or share information in a timely fashion can bring on dread, guilt, and even creative paralysis–in a word, anomie.
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In pop music, the casualties are numerous, but My Bloody Valentine is one of the most notable: circa 1991, unable or unwilling to innovate at the pace their devotees had come to expect over five dauntingly prolific years, they pretty much went into hiding. Other groundbreaking pop artists, like Beck or Cornershop’s Tjinder Singh, have avoided the same fate via quirky detours that don’t carry the same pressure as a new album: Singh’s side project Clinton, Beck’s Mutations. Yet others have tried to beat time at its own game, summing up their careers before they’ve even had them: with its second disc of remixes and dog scraps, Roni Size’s New Forms certainly had that feel to it, and the recent debut from self-conscious dance producers the Boomtang Boys is titled Greatest Hits Volume One.
The most peculiar thing about it is how outrageously unambitious it feels. It’s chock-full of guest musicians, which in itself is nothing new: Miles Davis and New York guitarist Robert Quine provided brief, hilariously tossed-off commentary on Gartside’s “Oh Patti” and “Don’t Work That Hard,” respectively, in the 80s. But the two most prominent guests on Anomie & Bonhomie, Me’shell Ndegeocello and Mos Def, sometimes seem more prominent than Gartside himself. There are a few sops to Scritti fans of old: “First Goodbye” and “Born to Be” are bittersweet slow burns in the vein of Cupid’s “A Little Knowledge,” and “Mystic Handyman” proves Gartside can do sunny with a live band. But for the most part–and especially on ghostly numbers like “Tinseltown to the Boogiedown” and “Die Alone”–he’s the one providing the hilariously tossed-off commentary.
