Rev. Gary Davis Singing “Hallelujah, I belong to the band—HALLELUJAH”

Green Gartside of Scritti Politti has spent a lot of time getting wasted. This makes plenty of sense to me. He made White Bread, Black Beer alone; the process of enlightenment self-reliance finally complete after 20 years. Recovery, for some, is about submission—it’s why AA is sort of like church but dirtier and with folding chairs. But the gesture is always kinda misguided or incomplete; I so vividly remember going to AA and thinking that sitting around listening to people talk tirelessly about their humble, wonderful lives under god was only slightly more pitiably self-indulgent than regularly getting trashed.

Plenty of people drink to relieve themselves from their own thoughts and it usually doesn’t work. Prayer is its own submission and gospel is primarily about transcendence; tropes of “leaving” things to god, lifting burdens, joining the choir, etc., speak to collectivity over individuality. Scritti’s “Wood Beez,” from 1985’s Cupid & Pysche 85, is—I know, Gartside, bookworm, theory hound, master of emotional detachment—a song about envy. What he envies is faith and conviction; his spirit is so logged down by his natural tendency towards irony that religion becomes an idealized promise of delivering himself from his intellect. If only he could believe the way Aretha Franklin does. (Also, I only realized recently that Gartside says, “There’s nothing I wouldn’t be / Oh that’s the gift of schizo”—I was caught up in Daniel Johnston’s conviction a few months ago)

In “After Six,” from the new Scritti Politti album, White Bread, Black Beer, Green Gartside plays a young, hairless deist cooing over a pre-programmed “swing” patch on a keyboard. And why does this fuck me up? While plenty of WB, BB sounds exceptionally plastic, even toy-like, “After Six” plays at being gospel—the grail, the rillest of reals. Granted, the fetishization of soul and gospel—of black music in general—by British musicians has a long history (and heaps of discourse), and one that Gartside has been apart of for 20 years now anyway.

But the lyrics to “After Six” are really nasty: “Jesus, keep your love away from me.” Garside is for: truth, justice; Gartside is against: wisdom, mercy. Wisdom and mercy are things mammies daub on when you come running through the screen door, weeping on a broken heart; he’s afraid to surrender to the choir because it makes him feel like less of a person—weakness is human, to a point, but humans are evolved, humans are intelligent. Humans (okay, humans born under Western ideals) don’t run in packs.

Numero Group’s new compilation of Gospel Funk caused a temporary brown-out in my brain. And I’m still listening to Washington Phillips and fanning out into other classic gospel stuff. And I really like the new TV on the Radio record, which, in its own way, is gospel, or at least has gospel flourishes, and not just gospel-as-genre, but as spirit—the same way I think that Animal Collective is essentially a gospel group. Gospel lapses into tongues, so does the Animal Collective. They used to wear masks; trying to cover your own identity is the first step to self-effacement and submission; once they got ahold of the spirit, they took the masks off. TVotR has started using a lot more group vocal and big drum techniques. I’m not sure that a gospel choir is all that different from a drum circle of voices, at least in intent. It’s a threat to blah conventions of individual expression and band-hood (Gartside might participate in the former, but at least he problematizes).

I grew up in the suburbs and liked indie rock, so I’m predisposed not to transcend, but to just think about it a lot. Sorry.