Scritti Politti-White Bread Black Beer

[schwenko]

from the NY Times:

The Man Behind Scritti Politti, Mellower Now, Has Found His Perfect Way

By BEN RATLIFF
Published: July 25, 2006

Green Gartside, the singer and the mind behind the band Scritti Politti, is still uptight about interviews. It’s not interviews per se, but rather, interviews as part of the whole mercantile go-round: re-enacting his songs, talking about them, locating his target audience.

You’ve heard this before: the skeptical artist. But Mr. Gartside’s truculence has seemed unnecessarily self-punishing. He is an unusually good talker, fluid and rigorous. He writes lovely pop songs, and sings them well. He is not insignificant: many remember his songs, like the early indie breakthrough “The Sweetest Girl” from 1981, the full-scale hits “Wood Beez” and “Perfect Way” from the mid-80’s. A small but devoted audience still venerates him for his earliest work, when Scritti Politti was a brainy, uneasy postpunk band, making songs that sounded like angry jigsaw puzzles. (The band’s name is a bowdlerization of the title of a book by the Italian Marxist thinker Antonio Gramsci.)

Scritti Politti — which is to say Mr. Gartside, alone in a home studio in London — recently made a new record, “White Bread Black Beer.” Released today, it is his best work in 20 years, remarkably beautiful: the sound of “pop” as in the Lennon-McCartney tradition, reconciled with “pop” as in the R & B and dance music he loves equally.

The record is subtle and exacting, with Mr. Gartside’s epicene vocals pushed up in the mix, sometimes multitracked into a one-man chorus. Lines like “You bet your petrococadollar that I won’t remember/ I’ve been in the marketplace since last July” he might have sung back in the 70’s, but you can see his mature focus on craft: it is in the precision of the phrasing and the sweetness of the melody. Last week the record was shortlisted for the Mercury Prize in Britain, alongside records by Thom Yorke and the Arctic Monkeys.

Mr. Gartside arrived for a lunch interview last week on edge. He had just had his first meeting with the heads of his American label, Nonesuch; it made him nervous, he said. Now 51, he resembles a slimmer, red-haired version of the actor Jeff Daniels. He drummed his fingers on the table. He had sworn off alcohol until he returned home to London. “It’s very unlike me,” he said, lofty and glum. “I normally have an appalling diet and drink heavily.”

“White Bread Black Beer” — the title refers to his starch-and-Guinness regimen, and to the notion of “white bread” pop, which he has often defended — prompts a facile question. If the band’s early work was about dismantling pop, and then the mid-80’s phase was the apotheosis of pop, then what’s the new album about?

Mr. Gartside drew a deep breath and shifted into theory. He spoke of the impossibility of free will and truth; of neo-pragmatism, the philosophy sometimes associated with the philosopher Richard Rorty; of the unfair critical “privileging” of rock over pop, and the ways in which truly popular music hasn’t answered the logic of late capitalism in the same predictable way that the indie-rock tradition has. One glimpsed the porcupine he must have been as a younger man: combative, sardonic, high-strung.

At this point, my tape recorder ate its cassette. He seemed strangely excited. “How good is your memory?” he asked. “I don’t mind being misquoted, you know.”

He’s much better than he once was. Before Mr. Gartside started playing gigs again this year, he had sworn off performing for 27 years. In 1979 he suffered an anxiety attack one night after a show in Brighton. He went home to Wales to recuperate for nine months.

Naturally, he chose a new course that would bring him the most agony possible: to repudiate the whole postpunk thing and become an international pop star. Ridiculous as it may sound, he seems to have gone about it according to theoretical principles: he was renouncing the postpunk, do-it-yourself musical culture as a decaying, false-founded construct, just a new set of restrictions. During his convalescence he wrote a long, unpublished screed on “the psychology and politics of rhythm.”

This is part of the reason Mr. Gartside became heroic to a certain type of bookish, leftist, English teenage boy, and why so many of those boys grew up proclaiming “The Sweetest Girl” to be the perfect pop song.

Suspicious as he may be of the critical advantages given to singer-songwriter-type music over commercial pop, he has been the beneficiary of it. Still, it’s hard to imagine him having any patience for hearing any song, even his own, called “perfect.”

Mr. Gartside studied fine arts at the University of Leeds in the late 70’s, but spent very little time as a studio artist, instead spending his time setting up lectures about politics and culture in rooms above local pubs. He had a special interest in philosophy and critical theory, and consequently, most of his songs open up questions about language and the meaning of truth.

One of many examples was “Wood Beez (Pray Like Aretha Franklin),” an effortless-sounding, funky, synthesizered-up song. At this point his aerated singing voice had lost its London accent and become what he calls trans-Atlantic. (Many wondered at the time why he suddenly sounded a bit like Michael Jackson. He might have given the philosophical response: Who is Michael Jackson to sound like Michael Jackson?) “Wood Beez” is a love song, and the lyrics form an epistemological game about “would bes”: there’s nothing he “wouldn’t be” to get closer to the song’s addressee. So then what is he, really?

The producer Arif Mardin, who died last month, heard Mr. Gartside’s demos in 1983, liked them and agreed to work with him in the United States. This was not long after the Human League’s hit “Don’t You Want Me,” and there was a desire among record labels for the next group that could mix English pop with glossy funk. Within seven years Mr. Gartside went from playing gigs alongside Gang of Four and consorting with the Art & Language group, the hard-core conceptual-art collaborative, to rehearsing with an elderly Manhattan vocal coach who had formerly worked with Liza Minnelli.

Mr. Gartside loved Mr. Mardin’s productions, especially the records he had made with Chaka Khan. (“They were clever and difficult,” he said.) He was finding out about black pop, of which he had known little during his childhood, and wanted to record his songs with the best studio musicians available: a weird ripple of confidence for someone who contends that he is not a great singer, and who had already been hospitalized twice for acute anxiety.

Remarkably, he did what he set out to do. Didn’t he feel a little justified by the success of “Perfect Way”? After all, the work, supported by his theories, won through.

“It was awful,” Mr. Gartside said. He had constructed a delicate critical distance on his pop stardom, which closed up, he said, as soon as he walked on the set of “American Bandstand.” The result was that he eventually spent much more time on Welsh retreats, doing little and living off his royalties.

For “White Bread Black Beer,” he trusted the instincts of Geoff Travis, the founder of Rough Trade, his English label, and also his manager: rather than enlist the help of studio musicians, he completed the whole thing by himself in his tiny home studio. And, with a group of musicians recruited from his local pub in Hackney, Mr. Gartside has started a Scritti Politti tour. (American dates are being arranged for the fall.)

Mr. Gartside seems to have given up his ambitions for reaching large numbers of people with his music: this is a record, after all, that labored under the working title of “Is Richard Rorty Right or Wrong?” He is trying to enjoy himself a little. He has grown up, calmed down and gotten married. The scale, finally, seems right.

After he had flown back home last week, I called Mr. Gartside on his cellphone. He was drinking stout and eating potato chips outside the pub and sounded much happier. I asked if I had misheard him: he really didn’t mind being misquoted?

“Oh, no!” he said effusively. Why — because there’s no absolute truth? “Something like that,” he said. “Also, the privileging that’s given to the quotation: the voice, the specific utterance, the signature. I’m steeped in a tradition that’s suspicious of all that.”

[My Aural Stimulator]

Thanks for that, schwenko. I really like Scritti Politti, and I've been looking forward to something new ever since he released his last album. I've found that I may not particularly enjoy his music, but I do like his lyrics.

I'm going to go look for the CD now.

[SwampThing]

[quote]..sounded a bit like Michael Jackson [/quote] I just sampled the "White Bread Black Beer" on iTunes. Voice does sound like Mr. Jackson's, I would consider that a liability.

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[Frau_Blucher]

[quote]Originally posted by schwenko
[br]Green Gartside, the singer and the mind behind the band Scritti Politti, is still uptight about interviews. It’s not interviews per se, but rather, interviews as part of the whole mercantile go-round: re-enacting his songs, talking about them, locating his target audience.
[/quote]
How very post-punk. [8D]

He did sound more melodic every since his Perfect Way days. I prefer his more bottled-up edge ala Skanc Bloc Bologna. Great read though. Thanks Schwenko.

[ApolloZero]

This is one of the coolest cds this year.. Not pop in the conventional way but interesting non the less.