•
Rating: "Yet," someone might think, glancing at the cover of this very 33, "I've seen this scene before." And rightly so: you've certainly seen it, and from the start, you'll have sensed something VAGUELY familiar. But there's also something unusual about the scene. Something doesn't quite add up...
...because in fact (come a bit closer) not everything is as it seems: instead of two distinguished gentlemen, we find none other than two shady brutes in dubious attire and hairstyles (a third is arriving by boat), and instead of the mysterious nude beauty (a puzzle for art critics for generations), we find a young lady with oriental features sitting on the grass and looking towards the lens. Also dressed in nothing, of course. A BREAKFAST even more ambiguous than the original from a century earlier, if possible.
The young lady was Annabella Lwin, a 15-YEAR-OLD (at the time of the shoot) Anglo-Burmese girl accidentally found in a laundromat who ended up becoming the frontwoman of a band... uh, one of the most talked-about "musical" GANGS of the '80s. Sounds like rock fable, yet it's pure reality.
But anyone listening for the first time now might ask: "and how did we get to that field...?" Heh heh... but if I were to immediately say WHO was behind it all, perhaps the picture would become clearer.
Malcolm McLaren. Him. The Brain. The Great Satan. The deus ex machina.
Or simply: THE GENIUS?
After the final collapse of the Pistols affair (and the painful legal aftermaths, obviously interpreted by Our man as a SYSTEM conspiracy against him), he had fled to Paris with the intent of breaking into the softcore world. Officially as a composer of soundtracks. More concretely, as an experimenter/explorer of various lewdness and obscenities - and a victim of an increasingly morbid interest, well beyond the limits of pedophilia, for the erotic exploits of the most uninhibited MINORS...
...but as often happened with him, and despite the thousand sordid projects flying through his mind, he accomplished very little. And when he returned to the banks of the Thames, he reinvented himself as a producer for Adam & The Ants, ambiguous missing links between the '70s glam and the new romantics who would make waves years later. "No good," the Evil Genius must have thought, "nothing gets done with these." Besides, McLaren hated anything reeking of New Wave, loathed Joy Division, despised art-school dropouts like Adam, nothing but effeminate traitors of the most brutish spirit of Rock'n'Roll. So let them go to hell.
But wait a minute... not all of these Ants were useless... Adam was, indeed, deadweight... but the bass and drums... BUT... that all-slap bassist, that drummer with that tribal, almost percussionist style...
...and he remembered when, in Paris, the rhythm and the BLACKNESS of sub-Saharan Africa had conquered him. Pure body language, wild vibration, damn EROTIC sounds for an irredeemable pervert of his level. The idea was irresistible.
And with Dave Barbarossa and Leigh Gorman (and Matthew Ashman on guitar) there remained only the problem of the voice, which Annabella solved. Indeed. They were Bow Wow Wow.
Malcolm's gang, the answer to the hollow faces of the new English Rock. The SUB-culture that was to overthrow the music industry, the subversive push that moved from trash (and basest instincts) and climbed the charts. The revenge of the depraved upon the committed and depressed intellectuals, of naked fifteen-year-olds upon twentysomethings dressed in black. There you go.
I'll let you guess whether these hopes were realized or not.
But the vandalistic and SIMIAN spirit (well summarized by the project's mile-long title), that which their creator was most proud of, well... that - they - never betrayed. Starting as an unlikely desk operation, not to mention a teenager (put there to sing quite titillating lyrics, you can imagine, and bigger than her in every sense), upon re-listening to "See Jungle!" you get the sensation that they had indeed become - if not a band with all the trappings, something that definitely HAD A PURPOSE.
In short, in some way the machine devised by Malcolm-Satan worked - even if it never really broke through, in the market, and for a simple reason: McLaren wanted a hodgepodge of Vivienne Westwood-clad puppets, not artists trying to move with their own minds - and thus, non-manipulatable. But "See Jungle!" is a burst of carefree spirit, color, and primitive vitality with few equals in its era - an explosion of tremendously infectious sounds, far beyond the vague project of "sexual subculture" envisioned by its creator.
Causing chaos, provoking, and having fun. Roaming untethered through the urban jungle. Nothing more. But all this is more than enough, if it's true that the killer refrain of "Jungle Boy" (irresistible) was perfectly equipped to make waves, and "Go Wild In The Country" exuded a sense of rhythm from the first to the last note, managing not to make you miss the more famous "I Want Candy" - Africa and post-punk in a single perfect blend. And the surf of "Orang-Outan," the exotic pulses of "King Kong" (apes in power...) and that "Golly! Golly! Go Buddy!" which seems played by a Zulu combo - did you still believe that Paul Simon invented anything with "Graceland"...?
An overdose of cave-like sensuality for modern specimens of Homo Habilis. From "Chihuahua" to "Elimination Dancing." Without asking too many questions. Moreover, the disenchanted "Hello Hello Daddy" states it plainly: "more body than soul." We are more akin to orangutans than to Aristotle.
And whoever wants to feel like an orangutan for a handful of minutes, less than 5 for this Record (in spite of objectivity and "artistic value" - Malcolm might hear you from the circle of the lustful...) could never give.
Loading comments slowly
