parlando

scritti politti, "skank bloc bologna" (1978)

Posted on February 16th, 2007 by Scraps.
Categories: Music, Songs.

Song Project #12

The 1980 Rough Trade singles compilation Wanna Buy a Bridge? had a bigger impact on my musical taste than any album ever. I still think it's the greatest single-disc compilation I've ever heard, both because of the greatness of the songs and because it captured a revolution while it was happening: no historical compilation can have the same impact. The sounds of a dozen popular bands and a hundred indie bands find at least part of their roots in one or two or five songs on Wanna Buy a Bridge? So far as I know, it was only ever released in the U.S.*, and has never appeared on cd, though virtually every band on it has been reissued, albeit in some cases after languishing out of print for more than twenty years.

* (When, at eighteen, I became the import buyer at the chain record store I worked at -- because no one else cared -- I scored Rough Trade compilations from Germany, Italy, and Japan, with (so far as I can remember) no overlap. They had This Heat and Zounds and Red Krayola and Pere Ubu and three different songs by the Fall and.... Well, those albums are gone now, never to be recovered. Sigh.)

Wanna Buy a Bridge? would be dear to me if all it had done was introduce me to Young Marble Giants; but there was also Swell Maps, the Raincoats, Robert Wyatt, Delta 5, Essential Logic, Kleenex (aka Liliput), Television Personalities, Stiff Little Fingers, Cabaret Voltaire, the Slits. There was no uniformity of sound or style -- the ramshackle clatter of Swell Maps and the eerily beautiful clockwork of Young Marble Giants barely sound like they come from the same culture, let alone the same scene and time -- just a similarity of approach to the forms of pop music that never acquired any more precise name than "post-punk".

Scritti Politti would in time become more popular than any other band on Wanna Buy a Bridge? I don't care for the slick mid-eighties pop they made their (brief) mark with, though there are those who swear by their influence. There's certainly no other band on the album whose subsequent work would move so far from where it started. I read somewhere that Green Gartside, the songwriter who basically is Scritti Politti, later disowned "Skank Bloc Bologna" and his other work from this time. Too bad.

This is Skank Bloc Bologna.

The harsh chop-chop-chop guitar that opens the song and carries the chords through the verse and chorus parts is one of the stylistic markers of the Gang of Four style of post-punk, and is probably post-punk's most enduring legacy to rock music. I love that kind of face-scrunching sound. In the chorus (which I'm identifying as the part that begins at 1:09), the guitar just chops once to identify each chord; from 1:38 to 2:05 -- which I guess is a bridge, though you could hear it as a second part to the chorus -- is the only time the guitar carries the melody (this part comes by again at 3:29 and 5:20, where the song goes out). And the first time through this part is the only time the guitar does so by itself. The choppy chords played through the sung verse are even more scrunchy than the instrumental part that precedes it: those chords are one of the first things I would point to as an example of the things that opened up the possbilities of rock music for me.

The bass carries the melody through most of the song (along with the vocal when it comes in), through the instrumental verse (which opens the song) and the verse proper. When the guitar grabs the melody, the bass drops back to play the chords with one deep rolling note each; then the bass joins the melody for the transition (at 1:50 and 3:40) before the guitar starts chopping the chords again at the top of the instrumental verse.

But the best thing about the song is the percussion. It's dominated by cymbals, with the rhythm being kept by high hats. The high hats come in a beat early at 0:45, leading into the sung verse; now periodically the high hats start playing around the beat, along with sticks (or blocks?). (Just one little detail I love among many: the half-beat early block hit at 1:23.) With the bridge, the guitar keeps the beat as well as the melody while the percussion, starting with a quick block-bass drum hit (I think) is hitting on the unemphasized parts of the beat, coloring their rhythm, and at 1:45 they double up, just before the glockenspiel (I think) appears for the first time at 1:50. This paragraph needs help! The unresolved rising progression the glockenspiel plays is a gorgeous counterpoint to the abrasiveness of the guitar and the tension of the chords; that transition comes by for the third time at the end but doesn't go back into the verse, just lets the glockenspiel lift the song into the aether. If I could change anything about the song, it would be to let that figure repeat about eight more times while fading.

Incidentally, while I like the vocals, I've never been able to decipher some of it and I have no idea what the song's about.

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