WHY shouldn't Massive Attack's lyricist and singer, 3-D, be "pissed off"? At least three of last year's most popular albums - Tricky's Maxinquaye, Timeless by Goldie and Dummy by Portishead - are similar to Massive Attack's work since the late 1980s, especially their quite magnificent album, Blue Lines, but their pioneering work often goes unrecognised.
How does 3 D respond when he sees dance culture's neo Nearly God, Tricky, glance back at his days with Massive Attack and claim, in Vox magazine: "I think we've gone totally separate ways. When we did Daydreaming people said it was groundbreaking, but I don't see how we could push it any further. It's almost too safe. I'm not saying that's bad, but I can't keep still for too long. Massive Attack's working process seems alien to me now. I don't want to be in a vocal booth all day; I want to smoke a spliff and get it done."
By the way, 3-D, seeing that Tricky has brought up the subject of spliffs, is Massive Attack's music so doggedly three dimensional and free form, with lyrics that are similarly free associational, imply because you are totally stoned, while recording?
"I'll plead the fifth amendment on the last part of that question," says 3-D laughing, on the phone from his home in Bristol. He also laughs off Tricky's recent probably true observation that "too much spliff and you get devil complexes and Jesus complexes.
"That's just Tricky being his usual dramatic self. I'd rather keep the drama for the bedroom, with my girlfriend, y'know what I mean, man," 3 D says. "But as for our music being too safe, that's bulls..t. We've got stuff on tape, from 1982, which sounds darker than the s..t he's done. We were messing around with drum machines and those darker chords years ago, especially because me and Daddy G were into punk, and all that. So for Tricky to say that is just more cannon fodder for Vox.
That said, 3-D himself suggests that Massive Attack's last album, Protection "was a little too slick" and promises that the next, "probably in 1997", will be "more raw, with more rap, punky things on it, more jamming in the studio stuff." But let's step back, rather than forward, and scrutinise some rather grandiloquent claims that in the past three years Massive Attack have watched the music they created "take over the world". And that they are "the quintessential 1990s pop group, a collective inspired by rap, dub and club culture, taking all those reference points and forging a music that opened up a whole new range of aural possibilities . . . " - according to their own press release. Does 3-D agree that such wild assertions probably relate to the influence Massive Attack have had on other purveyors of what the band loosely describe as "slow motion hip hop blues"?
"That kind of quote is a little over the top," he says."But there are a lot of bands out there doing things we were messing with in Bristol, as I say, more than 10 years ago, particularly, in terms of the whole concept of putting music together. I could run off a list of bands who have taken the vibe. Tricky and Portishead are obvious, but also David Holmes, and, on a more commercial level, on both sides of the Atlantic, bands like Garbage. Though when people say our sound is a "Bristol sound" that doesn't mean anything to me.
"I see Massive Attack more as the sum of influences we draw from all over the place. So it is rap, reggae, punk, jazz, classical music, the whole dread, dub and graffiti scene, whatever. It's the same with regard to the views the band express, in songs, in interviews. We all come from different places. That's what makes us what we are.
WHAT'S even more mega about Massive Attack is the fact that these ever floating spaces are for ever changing, with their earliest music, such as the hit single, Unfinished Sympathy, reflecting a pre lounge, strings soaked influence and largely defined by the gospel based vocal power of Shara Nelson. Yet all of this, of course, brings up the thorny, and yes, I'm afraid, tricky question of whether or not featured female vocalists get due credit for their musical input into Massive Attack. Or if they are properly rewarded, financially.
Speaking to' me three years ago, Shara Nelson claimed: "Too often you have bands who have a front singer who normally is black, and nobody seems to realise that the singer may have had more to do with the overall musical vision of that group than is immediately obvious. There has to be more to being a musical artist than fronting a band."
Asked to be more specific, Shara suggested she "didn't get tee opportunity to live any kind of `great lifestyle' with Massive Attack" and that this was part of the reason she left, feeling she was "being exploited, in this sense, by the band." So, yo, 3-D, answer these relatively heavy accusations, like, now, man.
No problem, he says, with just a trace of irritation. "That's absolute rubbish. We'd signed our first deal at the time and had some money in the bank, but Shara hadn't signed. And I can guarantee you that when she got her manager she did sign a big deal, getting a big advance for her solo career. So the point is that she got paid from the first record that was sold, while we're still paying off our advances on Blue Lines.
"She got a lot more money out of the first album than we did. And she got all the right splits, and credit. But Shara was very quiet at the time and never got her thoughts across because, well, with us three guys together, it is very much a male thing and sometimes it's difficult for the girls to work with us. Yet, as for her being exploited, that is crap. Look at her contracts, look at her bank balance."
Just for the hell of it, let's add yet another angle to this debate. Discussing their overall use of singers in Massive Attack 3-D's buddy, Daddy G, once claimed, "we don't need the focal point of a singer, so we don't get that egotistical overexposure" - a sentiment with which 3-D "totally agrees", adding, "it gets a bit silly, doesn't it, how we all gravitate towards the lead singer in a band, assuming that the lead singer is somehow of more interest, which just isn't the case. With us, the idea of having a star in the group is bollox, and has nothing to do with the music we make."
So, now you know. And even more delicious, on a broader, sociological level, is the fact that dance culture clearly democratised the post Hollywood star system based pop ethos in this sense, at least attempting to ensure that all members of bands get relatively equal billing. The growing success of acts like Massive Attack also epitomises the move from rock band based pop culture to dance, though, obviously, the `Britpop' pack, including Blur, Oasis and Pulp, are currently clawing back the territory for rockers and making ridiculously premature all those reports of rock's demise.
"I think there's room for us all," 3-D asserts, suggesting that this form of dance to rock band and back hybridisation may be just a highlight of the future of popular music as we move into a new century. "That definitely could be the case," he says. "And there sure is more of a band feel to what we do now, than when we started out with the whole Sound System, club vibe thing, before rave became so popular. But then, this is what makes gigs so exciting to us and gives us a chance to stretch things, experiment.
"We don't want to just re thread the music from a record, we want to redefine it. So, in that sense, playing Cork should be cool, to show people where we're at right now and likely to go in the future."
