PROFILE: Tricky, Part Two

unfinished

I'm going to head this post off with the article that has shaped much of my thinking about it. This post is a synthesis of that article and my own thoughts on Tricky. Which is exactly what, to me, that article says I should be writing. I'm cloaking my opening paragraph in subjectivity because there's no other way to approach Tricky in a way that respects him as a human being and artist. You could say this about just about any musician or band I suppose, but few others have been buffeted by the consensus mentality, the objectivity fetish, so much as Tricky, who has slipped between our fingers just as we sought to grasp him the tightest. Tricky's place in musical history is a structuring absence, the photograph of a haunted house, an image swollen with the weight of the ghosts inside. He's there but we can't see him, because he exists beyond our comprehension. And I don't say this to attribute supernatural powers to him, or even some kind of noble business savvy, but because of the blindsight we ourselves use in examining him.

I recapped Tricky's biography in my first post on him as an exercise in futility. It's easy enough to trace his locations and doings, maybe even his motivations, as he geared up to create his mysterious debut album, and even as you listen to it, you will automatically highlight points of data that ground it in cultural, musical, and personal history. But can you, can I, can anyone explain the power of these 'reference points,' as we might call them? To back briefly up into the Film Quarterly piece, one debater notes that Marker's A Grin Without A Cat "reject[s] textbook history" and "instead offers op-ed, montage, jokes, questions, a chorus of voices." What a perfect little analogy to Tricky's project. But of course that's not a thorough enough description through which to understand Maxinquaye, or Tricky. I merely want to make sure we're approaching Maxinquaye with enough distance before we delve deeply into it.

The other debater goes on to characterize some critical voices as similar to those of children discussing Pokemon cards. A wayward Pokemon enthusiast, I found this very funny indeed. But the point is an important one to consider when we engage with critical discourse, and it's one I freely admit to struggling with as I sharpen my own analytic skills. Gathering the facts and watching them bounce off one another is a joy in which I've partaken for much of my life, whether it was memorizing dinosaur facts, Pokemon facts, bird facts, video game facts, music facts, movie facts, and now cultural 'facts.' The more you know, the more the things you know will interact, and that potentially chaotic movement has been the animating force behind my thinking and my creativity for most of my life. But if wisdom were as simple as gathering knowledge, education would provide us with a linear path to it. You've probably heard that notion expressed as an aphorism at some point or another, but what are we to make of cultural critics who utilize the Pokemon card mentality we claim to disdain?

In movies, my deepest passion (so far!), lesser cultural critics masquerading as filmmakers will often line up chunks of predetermined significance, thinking they've created that linear path from ignorance to enlightenment. This thing I'm showing you explains why Person/Organization X performed Action Y, which produced Event Z. Even if you were to accept the claims of significance of these data points at face value, any seemingly logical progression from one to the other necessarily irons over the interceding influences that shaped the route from Point A to B. I can't tell you anything about the unknowability of history that you don't already know, but I can tell you how refreshing Mark Sinker's reading of Marker's juxtaposition of the New Left and rock concert attendees was. This is the unique power of film, the collision of filmed motion (to say nothing of the color, camera angles, sound, voices, faces, etc. that compose the images of those shots) to create new meaning (in this case, the comparison of the slow deaths of both Rock and Leftism).

I think Tricky likes juxtaposition too. In fact I think he likes it a lot, if the name of his fifth album is anything to go by. But why? Or, what can I tell you about that enjoyment that will help you understand Tricky? Tricky prides himself on producing layered soundscapes built from conflicting influences, including two false binaries he's happy to repeatedly violate: male and female, black and white. Within the beings of male and female and black and white lie certain prescribed modes of conduct that constrict our behavior and, for Tricky, our music. This is why his chaotic utilization of culture and self confuses so many people. He cannot be easily defined because he is too complex to be adequately summed up or 'known.' Tricky refuses to be known as only a black male, because he is white in addition to black and, I think, female in addition to male. His femaleness is tricky to properly assert, because he has never admitted to personal gender/sexual identity confusion. And I won't be the one to remove the ambiguity for you. But I can say that I see a lot of myself in him and his irritation with men, his easy intimacy with the women in his life. Being male is not enough for me, and though I identify as a heterosexual male, I have always had an innate attraction to all things labelled feminine. I love beauty, emotions, fashion, sharing, pop music, playfulness, spontaneity, and any other number of things considered off-limits to men. My identity as a human being cannot be contained by the label of 'male,' and though I cannot tell you the extent of it, I suspect the same is true of Tricky.

To express the ambivalence Tricky feels toward competing aspects of himself, he presents us with staples of white identity, black identity, male and female identity. On Maxinquaye, his lyrics are frequently sung by his friend, lover, and artistic companion Martina Topley-Bird. Sometimes the two duet, sometimes they sing the same words in unison, and sometimes they talk on top of each other. This might be easier to parse if it weren't for the fact that Tricky asserts that Martina is not really representing herself, so much as embodying the feelings expressed by his own lyrics. This confusion only deepens on a song like Aftermath, which I and others have read as being from the point-of-view of Tricky's departed mother ("your eyes resemble mine" "so many things I need to tell you, things you need to hear" "let tell you about my mother"). And even then Tricky himself is the voice of some of those lyrics in addition to Martina, so we can't even call it a call-and-response between mother and son. Rock, hip-hop, pop, and reggae and strange noises combine in ways previously unimaginable, their blackness or whiteness becoming just as entangled as Tricky's own racial heritage.

To what end? We quickly grasp that Tricky is a complicated and talented individual, but what does disavowing all easy comparisons actually do for us? Tricky has only one thing to tell us, and he's said it many times since the ecstatic reception of Maxinquaye. His music is him expressing himself, which tells us everything and nothing. Analysis is futile. Because even if we can say this or that aspect of Maxinquaye is white black male or female, we would still be left trying to understand why the unsettling drone of Overcome, the still-astounding hell-hop of Strugglin', or the spoken word interlude of Black Steel affect our understanding of the songs' meanings, let alone how they affect us. What can I tell you about the dread I feel listening to that unexpected drum break early in Feed Me? I can tell you that it catches me offguard just as I'm sinking into the swirling chimes, the sampled whisper, and Martina's ghostly laments. I can tell you that it goes on just long enough to seem disruptive, that the mood it generates is somehow both distinct from and compatible with what comes before it. Anything more, though, would hurt your perception of it as well as my own. Per Film Quarterly: "To be right -- to solve a problem, to clarify a tangled history, to note an error -- is to remove something also: your own lived puzzlement; your spur, the source of your energy and focus." That passage of sound resonates deeply inside me, and I don't need to figure out why or if Tricky intended that or not. I think this is where most people stumble with Tricky, because they don't understand why they react to his music the way they do or why Tricky does what he does. Maxinquaye gave away just enough to be enticing, whereas Tricky's later music would be frustratingly opaque.

But where most argued that Tricky was stubbornly embracing obscurity for obscurity's sake, the answer is actually much easier than one might suspect on diving into his fractured artistic output. Tricky simply wants us to see him as he is, and the only way to do that is to remove all preconceptions of him and his music before we attempt to do so. It would be dishonest of him to pretend there is nothing white and nothing female in him, and that he doesn't feel rage, fear, weakness, or confusion. It's all right there, if we just let ourselves hear everything instead of what we want to hear.