Synthetic, repetitive, claustrophobic, frozen, repressive, droning, soulless, sterile – In the world of music reviews, these adjectives represent the eight notes in the pejorative scale. But these are also the words I would reach for to describe one of my favorite albums: 100th Window by Massive Attack.
My mother thought of herself as eclectic, with a taste in music ranging from classical to baroque to romantic. My father was a fan of musicians as diverse as Bob Dylan or Electric Bob “Judas” Dylan. My open-minded friends in high school felt that the only rock worth discussing was indie and the only hip-hop worth exploring was socially conscious.
Yes, I grew up in the staid realm of High Art; a place Alice might have found in a dusty corner of Wonderland, where through the magic of anti-imagination, a closet could claim to be a cosmos. Where people are free to tap their toes to an unusual meter in 5/4 time and where everyone is free to run bare without the restriction of rhyming couplets, but where one could never, ever partake in the strange, forbidden notes of the pejorative scale.
Massive Attack will never free any hostages from this musical snobbery (for that, T- Pain is humanity’s last true hope), but the album 100th Window at least cured my Stockholm Syndrome.
Together with the group Portishead, Massive Attack led a stunted little sub-genre in the ‘90s known as trip-hop. The fans of this style of music were more pretentious than even the punk purists, and trip-hop collapsed before the Y2K bug had a chance to crash their electronic drum loops.
But for me, this is where the story got interesting. Once trip-hop ceased to be reliably profitable, several of the rotating members of Massive Attack jumped ship, leaving only Robert Del Naja to record any future albums and to turn out the lights when he was done.
The album Del Naja created was 100th Window. Gone were the world music influences or any of the warm and organic sounds from previous Massive Attack albums. It was as if Del Naja rolled down a window on the space station Mir before it limped into the Earth’s atmosphere.
The critics were bored and the fans were angry. Hell, even one of the former members of Massive Attack decided to return because he was unhappy with the “new sound.”
Maybe I’m just naturally attracted to this sort of drama, (I did tune into Jon and Kate only for the last season) but when I heard the pejorative scale rattling through the caverns of tracks like “Futureproof,” “Butterfly Caught” and my favorite, “Antistar”; I immediately and truly fell in love.
Perhaps this sounds like I’m playing devil’s advocate and this is all just the latest extrapolation of hipster madness. But for nearly a decade, the CD has consistently found its way into my car and my iPod. And if you still don’t believe, consider this: my first draft of this article was on a chick named Miley.
