Year: 1997/98
Label: iF?
Genre: Electronica, Hip Hop, Jungle, House
The Jim Jarmusch retrospective on SBS this month has reminded me just how much influence Dead Man had on shaping my adolescent perception of the world. It gave me an existential netherworld through which I could escape the struggles of high school, puberty and teen angst. What greater gift can culture give us but a complete and completely pervasive world in which to escape and dream?
I think Andrez Bergen understands this concept. He's an Australian ex-pat, originally based in Melbourne, now living in Japan I believe. As Little Nobody he released this collection of tracks on his own if? imprint in the late nineties. It was clearly a self-released affair. The artwork for this baby is nothing more than a colour photocopy. And, as a self-released and therefore somewhat obscure album it also flew under the radar of copyright infringement issues, as it samples from a number of pre-existing sources, including Jarmusch's Dead Man. That was what hooked me on this record.
The first part of this album is (I believe) lifted from an EP of the same name - the rest are tracks from Little Nobody's debut album Pop Tarts. There's a distinct difference between the material that comprises each. The first part was the part I fell in love with. Back when I picked this up I was only just starting to get into electronic music via the indie-crossover of the trip hop sound and a friend who was into techno. The first five tracks here are sample heavy excursions into dreamy hip hop - heavy on atmosphere thanks to their liberal use of film samples. Over blunted beats Bergen throws minimal melodies, ambient textures and some of my favourite movie quotes. I loved the fact that I recognised the samples from Dead Man, with Gary Farmer whispering "Nobody will observe" on the track Nobody's Driving perfectly capping off a broken instrumental hip hop piece. Elsewhere Johnny Depp is sampled in Fear and Loathing In Las Vegas, and there's a chopper sound that I liked to think was taken from Short Cuts - another favourite at the time.
The second track, entitled Old School Gangsta Slap features an extended poem from an unidentified source (I still have no idea where it's from). Over a dreamy, nay, downright gorgeous ambient synth texture comes a distant voice intoning the words:
Its a voice from heaven while I'm riding down the freeway
He say that gangsta sound is dead and gone
He say that nasty groove is something to prove
That getting your face and leaving an angry taste
Get you up in arms about the disgrace and make you shake it all over the place
He say that's been here and now it's gone
It's time for the wise to move on
He talking bout some new kinda sound with a different view
We used a hammer, a golf club will do
If the machine gun lyrics just fire blanks
Get out of the trenches - put on those pink checkered pants
He say it don't matter what you say, it's what they see that'll win the day
They change your name from six to four
You'll win the game if you knew much more
For me this piece (which I suspect is yet another film sample) predates the likes of Saul Williams, Kool Keith or MF Doom and their anti-gangsta rapping styles. There's something deeply aspirational and soulful about that piece. Something that tapped into my adolescent yearning to transcend my situation, to ascend to some new form of consciousness, some new way of being, of existing. Even though it was clearly about black gangsta culture, as a middle class white kid I could relate to its plea for cultural and social evolution. There's that existential, metaphysical stuff again. It was what I needed at the time, and listening to it now it brings back the loneliness, the self-reliance and the melancholy that comes with figuring out your place in the world.
As the album moves past its initial hip hop indulgence it veers into almost every other form of electronic dance music of note in the mid nineties - big beat, house, trance, drum'n'bass - it was almost a grab bag of styles - an attempt to cover all the bases. Around track nine the sound moves into dubbier, trancier territory - riding heavier, faster grooves for more sustained periods. For the most part these tracks bored me at the time, and listening to it again the whole thing has dated slightly. The foray into jungle, entitled ... and more still carries a distinct atmosphere that I'm fond of, but for me this collection was all about that dreamy, blurry, trippy first section.
As a streamlined investigation of hip hop sonics and cinematmospherics, Little Nobody, through the use of a cleverly chosen mystery sample, and a bunch I knew and loved, captured my imagination and offered me dreamy, cascading sonic respite from the dramas of adolescence. Bless him for that.
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