By Jeff Chang

THE NAME OF Green Gartside's recording project means "political writing" in Italian street slang. But it may as well mean "unlikely career."

Scritti Politti was formed by the Gramsci devotee and signed to postpunk indie Rough Trade more than 21 years ago. One fine day Gartside became enamored of Michael Jackson's Off the Wall. He dumped his band and ran to New York to record with R&B; producer Arif Mardin, releasing Cupid and Psyche 85 and climbing the charts with the sparkling synth-pop hits "Wood Beez (Pray like Aretha Franklin)" and "Perfect Way."

Miles Davis covered the latter, and they teamed up on Gartside's next album, 1988's Provision. Then Gartside disappeared, heading up to a cottage in a small Welsh village where he played darts for several years. Now on the other side of 40, he finds himself in the midst of a startling comeback, championed by none other than the notoriously hard-to-please hip-hop underground.

Anomie and Bonhomie's title evokes blinkered philosophical tracts, but its beats and rhymes — done with collaborators such as Mos Def, Lee Majors, Me'Shell Ndegéocello, E.U. drummer JuJu House, and Scritti alum David Gamson — are a new kind of hip-pop: raw and elegant, streetwise and mysterious. Gartside has accomplished cold fusion. Imagine the bastard child of DMX and XTC and you're almost there.

The Bay Guardian caught up with the ridiculously smart Gartside after he chased out a BBC film crew doing a documentary on his life. They could conceivably file the videotapes under "unsolved mysteries" and be right on point.

Bay Guardian: The BBC thing turned out OK?

Green Gartside: I don't know. They're gone at least. But at the end of the month they're going to Paris to interview this philosopher Jacques Derrida, and I'm supposed to go along for that too.

BG: Are you excited?

GG: It's a pretty extraordinary thing. I wrote to him and said, "Would you be interested in [appearing in] a film about me?" And he wrote this really sweet reply saying he would love the opportunity. Which is a bit fucking nuts, really!

I met him just once years ago. The French radio were doing a profile on him, and I was one of the people that he wanted to speak to. So we did the interview, which was absolutely terrifying. I mean, this is one of the smartest guys in the world. So it's difficult just to sit and chat over dinner with someone [who has] that reputation.

BG: What did you guys talk about?

GG: Oh, music!

BG: Does he follow pop?

GG: As I remember, he likes jazz, which was pretty neat 'cause I had it in me to ask him some things. Half-jokingly, I said, "Well, isn't it true that jazz is valued for its spontaneity and improvisation, the idea that it represents the moment of self-present expression and meaning? But isn't that all somewhat suspect?"

BG: Derrida helped you understand Michael Jackson's music, helped justify your love for pop at a certain point.

GG: I think so. I sort of foolishly graduated from just listening to and enjoying pop music to reading the NME. And [at the time] ideas of purity, immediacy, expressivity [were central]. If black music was talked about at all in Britain, it was kind of marginalized. It's a very essentialist thing — [black music is supposedly] not cerebral, it's emotional, it's beauty expressive, it's unmediated. I think Derrida's arguments were pretty useful against all those presuppositions. And it was important when trying to challenge ideas of avant-gardism or counterhegemonic music. You just had to unbrick some of that metaphysical bullshit about where music comes from.

Green's party I BLUSH 16 times when listening to "Smith N Slappy," and that's just the sheer-fun track of Scritti Politti's Anomie and Bonhomie. Its other fallout moments express serious romantic philosophies; they intone the heartache of passion and the thrill of desire. But "Smith N Slappy" ''s caprice ("Come and shock me now / Come and teach the teacher how") revitalizes Scritti Politti's now obscure, cult reputation for clever, erudite-N-silly pop tunes. The British group's cult (which began with its late-'70s angular postpunk sound) is, actually, anyone who ever swooned to a hit record but could never articulate why. Anomie and Bonhomie'sexplanation is ideal. Vocalist and conceptualizer Green Gartside's continuing commitment to dissecting the heart of pop music includes sex-role feints ("Umm") and emotional surprises (the classic "First Goodbye"). Behind it all is an egotist's exquisite fear for his own sanity, but what makes Gartside's musings worthy rather than solipsistic is that he understands how even the most frivolous pop appeals to that most compelling preoccupation. You could write a thesis on his cover art alone: a soda bottle top printed with the CD's title and logo but crushed in the center, its secrets uncorked, its content already ingested. Gartside knows that pop music is a commodity in which passion is conveniently seduced and sold. He unearths this phenomenon by riskily contrasting pop's different voices and rhythms. Always seeking a white-black pop union, Scritti redeems hip-hop's craven guest-artist syndrome. Green's party may be the only way to tolerate Me'Shell Ndegéocello's sullen drawl; she's blessedly interwoven with more authentic pop utterances like Mos Def's worldly spunk, Lee Majors's youthful timbre, and Gartside's own androgynous falsetto — a heady mix of grains, textures, and psyches. These adventures in pop aesthetics investigate sexuality by verse and chorus and chord changes and sweet harmonies. It's intellectual pop whether referencing Héloïse and Abelard or swinging from midtempo vamp ("Mystic Handyman") to impudent jam ("Die Alone"). Men and women enjoying the frisson of boys' and girls' music. One gorgeous track after another offers a treasury of pop tropes and soulful feeling. The theory behind this is utopian: "Maybe I could double all the negatives we know / Oh-oh" ("Here Come July"). Bringing despair together with bliss, Gartside recognizes life's abundance. He combines penurious rap spiels with wistful pop odes ("Prince among Men") or floats a romantic cloud with dread images and orchestral bliss ("Brushed with Oil, Dusted with Powder"). Gartside's love songs-analyses create what Jean-Luc Godard once phrased as "a hard conversation on a soft subject." Producer David Gamson gives Anomie and Bonhomie a more spontaneous Scritti sound that warms Gartside's once icy intellection. That meticulous lyricism reflects a period when pop culture — the coming together of lefty radicalism, structural anthropology, and romantic freedom — confidently sought the answer to political and emotional conflict. Now gone, it inspired Scritti's only American hit, "Perfect Way," with its catchy couplet: "I've got a perfect way to make a certain a maybe / I've got a perfect way to make the girls go crazy." Only on the surface was Gartside singing about making a pop record. In other words, in 1985 he told the world what the Backstreet Boys are only just learning. Welcome pop's conscience back to the marketplace. Armond White

Back in those days I kinda shared a house with a lot of people, one of whom was an NME journalist and a bunch of whom were in the Young Communist League. We lived in a big squat in London. The way we whiled away the hours on occasion was to get drunk and talk politics, talk theory, talk music, and all the rest. You had to defend your position in those days. And when I wanted to stop making the kind of music that we were making, I did have to account for myself to the other two members of the band. [So] we talked about why we should stop carrying on like another band on Rough Trade and why it would be interesting to go to America and try something else. As it happens, I won the argument, but —

BG: You lost your band.

GG: Well, I lost my friends! Recently I've seen some of them again for the purposes of this BBC film, and it's been very nice. Along the way, I seem to make a point of severing ties with people, or it happens to me accidentally. I don't know what that says about me. I kind of always leave people and places and things behind me fairly abruptly.

BG: Is that what led you to retreat from doing music for so many years?

GG: [After making Provision] I just hated the industry so badly. I grew to kind of despise myself for being in it. So I just stopped. I still don't know whether that's a weakness or a strength or whatever. It was what I did, and I have no regrets about that.

BG: What made you decide to return?

GG: I did sever ties with all these people, and I wouldn't make music. But I would listen, and I'd always enjoyed East Coast hip-hop. Principally, I remember DJ Premier's work was getting more and more interesting. Listening to Pete Rock and Erick Sermon's production, the beats! It was the beats. In the cottage that I had up in the country, I had the technology. I had Akai samplers and sequencers. And I loved [hip-hop] so much. I would just play it loud, and I really just wanted to know what it felt like to make beats. So I just started chopping up some old Meters records, to get some old kicks and hats and snares.

BG: That's where everybody starts!

GG: It just was the biggest blast. A good Primo cut is such a divine, divine thing. It was just so exciting. All the stuff that was happening in the U.K. was anything from Britpop to Manchester baggie to all that nasty house and garage stuff that I didn't really like. The music room I had I'd never want to go in. It just reminded me of all the bad old shit. But as soon as [I] got in there and started chopping up the Meters records and making beats, I went from never going in that studio to rarely leaving it.

Jazz samples, horn samples, were being used then, and I didn't have any of that in my record collection. So I would start making little bits of songs up and record them onto cassette. I would sample myself, like two seconds of a song that didn't exist. That's what got me back into playing the guitar and writing songs. And then I just wanted to make an album again, and make it full of different influences, and that's what we did. A long time ago now! It was recorded, what, two and a half years ago.

BG: Does it feel like the past to you now?

GG: I never listen to it. I haven't listened to it since I made it. I never listen to my own music. I'd rather dig pins in my eyes.

BG: So you're not going on the road anytime soon?

GG: No, we're talking about that! But what I really want to be doing is some new tunes. Did you hear the thing I did with Defari and Tash and DJ Revolution? I liked that so much that I've persuaded the record company to let me go in and do some more things.

I was reading some book about the Beatles. Back in the day, when they had an idea for a song, they could go in the studio and do it, whereas nowadays everybody goes in to do an album, really. And it's all the big schedule, the big budget, the whole thing. Perhaps it's like the case of independent labels in hip-hop: you can just go in and do a couple of tunes.

BG: Five or six years ago up in the cottage in Wales, did you imagine that you'd be hanging out with hip-hop intelligentsia?

GG: No! I don't think about the future too much. Had I known, I would have been so scared at the prospect that I would have bottled out, as we say in London, meaning I would have quit. But no, it's extraordinary, it's fantastic. I'm just a very lucky man. Jesus Christ, someone of my background and my age? I feel very privileged and fascinated.

BG: That's what animates the record in so many ways, this sort of cross-cultural speaking, this dialogue that's obviously happening between you and the other artists.

GG: There kind of are tensions. It really is stuff banged up against stuff. Sometimes David [Gamson] would say to me, maybe we could make it more "organic." And I'm kind of mistrustful of "organic." I'm not gonna pretend to be down or anything. I just do my bit and make spaces for people I respect and bang one thing up against another and see what you get at the end.

BG: Describe some of the tensions you were talking about in regards to the making of the record.

GG: There weren't tensions on a personal level, apart from some early [moments] in the rehearsal rooms with Me'Shell. Quite rightly, there was a bit of finding some room around playing specific bass lines. We just had to get over that. It wasn't difficult to make the record. In fact it was a great deal of fun to make the record. But the tensions are in whether things fit well or fit uneasily alongside each other.

And you know, when I first sit in a room with Mos Def, there's just no getting away from the fact that we come from different worlds. We gotta make something work or not. I'm not pretending to be someone I'm not on this record. I'm not fronting, I'm just being me.

BG: In the past, love has been a dominant subject of your music, but on this album there seems to be more metaphorical social commentary.

GG: David tells me I should try and drop some lyrics that make sense to somebody. He's quite right, they are really twisted, some of them. But that never troubled me. The music that I like, I like difficulty with lyrics.

BG: Well, let me throw this at you. "Brushed with Oil, Dusted with Powder": I could be way off, but the way I heard the song was as an outlaw narrative. It made me think of Tupac and Biggie's deaths on one level, and it also made me think of how outlaws are received. People consume them like fried fish — brushed with oil, dusted with powder.

GG: Yeah! There's a crime implicit, exactly what it is isn't clear, and that's important. That whole thing came to me in one chunk, as it were, words and music. That was one of those peculiar visions. You sit down and you start playing the guitar, and half an hour later you've got something like that on a cassette, and you think, Where the fuck did that come from?

BG: What was it inspired by?

GG: Being in Los Angeles. But you know, oh god, it's just a very weird song. You're closer than I am to putting a meaning to it. It's kind of a song about decadence, a decline, decay, and morality. It's about morality — whose morality constitutes and to what end.

BG: I just had a picture of Tupac in a Lexus in Las Vegas, happy to be there, but about to get shot.

GG: That makes sense to me, even though I never even rationalized it to that extent. Even where Biggie was shot is not far from here. I go past that Auto Museum a lot.

It just goes in your head, and it comes out like you're saying. And you either police yourself — you say, right, well, no one's gonna understand this, or they're never gonna play this on the radio, so I need to make it more clear. And then another part of your voice says none of this shit is clear. It's not even clear to you. Other times I think I need to strive to make some things more clear next time.

BG: After jumping headlong into this project, what's changed in your head about the way you see the world?

GG: Oh shit! It's changed an awful lot. What I'm made aware of and what I'm going to have to think about are the kind of obstacles to following through and exploring and exploiting questions [I'm most concerned with]. There's clearly lots of questions about meaning, about ideology, about power, about racism, about America, about people from my background and how it can all work.

But the big thing that militates against it is, record companies really don't want you to go there. They don't want you to go there, and they'll give you a hundred good reasons why not. You won't sell this in stores. No one's gonna wanna hear this, no one's gonna play this. It's too this, it's too that. That's the battle that's foremost at the moment in my mind: to develop some connections further and some dialogues. Spend more time with people like Harry Allen, Mos Def, Defari, and just do some work.

PHOTO: EDDIE MONSOON

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