Ninja Tune’ roster has always impressed me, they have held my ears captive for so long and I have implicitly trusted their judgment. If you take the label notion as a meta-dj act then releases on the label would as a matter of course meld with your trust of the selector’ view(s) of the landscape of sound/time/ideas.
So why does The Bug just fall off the radar of sensibility for me? Let me try to explain, it isn’ that the beats aren’ bass heavy, they are and extra warm would it be on the dance floor, wondrous body mashing effects that put the body into electronic body music, so to speak. It isn’ that the sophistication of the beats, excellent multi- layered structure, well honed effects and for a generally vocal album Bug holds the vocals skillfully in the mix not stepping over them nor over emphasizing. If we can see the dubstep style as the logical inheritor of the rave/dub/hardcore then this is definitely an example of the sound. And form for forms sake is as reasonable an act as any other is it not? If so why does it need to hang it’s hat on such lyrics?
It is the sheer savagery and naïve hypocrisy of the vocals that ring the alarm bells. Vocals if we take them to be a form of poetry in the sense presented, as “message’, instruction to youth on a correct way of life, and concerns itself with “resistance’, “righteousness’, “Jah’ and the “wrongness of the world’. At one point it is proclaiming peace, another righteous anger, at another that only the good survive, at another smoking pot, at another Rastarfarianism (remember Haile Selassie {Ras Tafari} died in 1975), at another that everyone is going insane, at another a list of enemies(fuckaz). It comes across as incoherent and deliberately contradictory and chooses to read biblical text as literal and fundamental rather than as allegorical or poetic. I never thought I would live to hear a fundamentalist Rastafarian message, despite the seriousness it has always held for me a lightness of feel and poetic beauty which is missing here.
Yes Bug you may rally against (“Haters, Biters, Bigots, Music Industry sharks, Sheep, Racists, Vampires, Dollar Suckas, Fame Fuckers, The uncommitted, The Average, The Mediocre, The innocent bystanders, the anglo-american war machine and the international elite’) but truly you are an elite of hate. Your product is bile.
If people could get beyond themselves to see that people who do not hold their views are not necessarily wrong or mad then it is quite possible that they would not always end in a dark place as a result of this peculiar solipsism. Prescient is the sentiment of You and Me which tails off “… into darkness we goâ€.
You could just read them as advanced tropes of the reggae dub genre meet activist mindset and the terminally dissident. The Bug under this reading would just be part of a continuing narrative as the latest incarnation of the “sound carrier’ of the messages from these arenas. As such the album could be seen to be a manifestation of the interests of the communities who have their cultural lives “invested’ in these specific tropes. If dissent in the cultural political equals dissonance and anger in sound then this equation could explain London Zoo to an extent. (Even the idea London Zoo (too closely akin to Zoo York) has the sense of encaged, outraged prisoners, born to be wild, screaming their jungle roar to their jailers. It is almost a cartoon. ) Dissonance as sound form has never rung true, although it may ring true to those who live in the bleak house and to teenagers “oppressed by authority’ quite willing replicate this structure ad infinitum until it makes them sick. An alternative society of complaint does not make a sustainable community.
It is too easy to sell dissent to teenagers, yes Bug the cash registers ring at every cry of wrong; another sale is chalked up amongst the disaffected. The identification factor, seeing within your message the mirror of their world, as well as a reflection of the personal, is too easy a lure for the musical fisherman puts out to the sea. It is harder to give the conceptual and linguistic poetry that would enable the listeners to overcome this sense of disaffection and enable them within life. Dissent is too easy. Chomsky-lite for toddlers.
Innerversitysound
