Lizzy Mercier Descloux
Mambo Nassau

"The world moves on a woman's hips, the world moves and it bounces and hops"...

...I don't know how, but when I first listened to "Mambo Nassau" I instinctively remembered these lines, and they relentlessly started chasing each other inside my head. I thought OF THE RECORD, of course, from which those same lines originated. I thought of David Byrne. I thought of Brian Eno. I thought of Jon Hassell, Nona Hendryx, Adrian Belew. Of all of them, a little bit. And as the vibrations of this "mambo" I was listening to (the reason for the quotation marks will become clear to you later) began to remote-control me, to take possession of me...

...I realized that Mr. David Byrne understood everything. He managed to condense the concept of RHYTHM in those two lines alone. The sense of tribal Africa, of primeval pulsations, of the original instinct of the primate-Man to MOVE. I thought we all come from Africa and that, yes, I had heard this truth repeated to me so many times almost to the point of mistaking it for an obviousness, yet I had never grasped it in its essence until that moment. David Byrne and Lizzy Mercier Descloux had both, and almost at the same time, undertaken the same journey - a journey of RETURN - to the prime roots of Funk. But they did it in very, very different ways.

On one side: the more intellectual New York, the collaboration with Eno, Jon Hassell's Fourth World. On the other: the irreverent deconstruction of all genres brought by the New Wave, by the iconoclasts of Rock, by those who DENY and question everything. By those who reconstruct from fragments, instead of designing a uniform project a priori. Lizzy Mercier was a Genius, no doubt about it. I would love to talk about her still in the present, if only we had her among us. A total artist, intimate with Richard Hell and Patti Smith as well as with Chet Baker, an author and protagonist of an unfinished Musical History (just like her life), with sensational traits.

A History that cannot be told - ALL - on this page.

Think of her cover of "Fire" by the Demon Arthur Brown - on "Press Color", the album right before this one. With that cover, an epochal passage was marked, in that revisitation to the most alienating Mutant-Disco rhythm, the very sense of COVER was rewritten - as Devo did with "Satisfaction", and even more than the Talking Heads with "Take Me To The River". Or think, still on that album, of the "stripped" Lalo Schifrin of "Jim On The Move" - if you prefer. Think of how the "Mission Impossible" theme was TREATED...

Like "Remain In Light," "Mambo Nassau" is an orgy of Afro-Funk-Punk to the rhythm of the early '80s, the years that musically suit me the most: polyrhythms, dissected beats, overdubs, rhythmic guitars, exotic percussion, post-punk drumming, and a Bass (that of Philippe Le Mongne) traveling between Parliament, the Joe Jackson of "Beat Crazy", a No-Manhattan intent on "reviewing" the foundations of Funk, and, indeed, the Talking Heads. And Lizzy's Vocality indulges in everything, because everything (and its opposite) is allowed when residing in the Lower East Side and recording for ZE Records. And when taking a flight to the Bahamas (the Compass Point Studios in Nassau, SURPRISE...) and behind the console sits a certain Steve Stanley (Grace Jones, Tom Tom Club, B-52's...).

Let's add: Wally Badarou, "shadow man" of Level 42 and the deus ex machina of the Prophet 5.

Being plunged into the dense tropical soup of "Lady O'Kpele" produces the same sense of disorientation that one experiences when "Born Under Punches" begins. It's a jungle of sounds and (tribal) voices. And you end up getting lost - or rather, blending with the rhythm, becoming part of it without understanding all its components. "Room Mate" flutters between guitar geometries, slapped bass strings, and Lizzy's over-the-top interpretation, which effectively invents - heedless of meaning - everything needed to fill the barely three minutes of the track. "Payola" and "Sports Spootnick" almost border on fusion, in terms of rhythmic base complexity, with - on the latter - a drum and metallophone weave that leaves one in awe, with interludes where synths and bass find themselves dialoguing beneath the (reverberated) voice of the Frenchwoman - "ahaha cha-cha-cha" is the most, let’s say... "committed" line of the text...

Then for a moment, you find yourself in De Sica's Rome, and you'd think it's a hallucination, if suddenly you didn't hear singing in Italian "drink more milk, the milk pays" over the famous jingle composed by Nino Rota for "Boccaccio 70". This is the interlude "Milk Sheik", where "sheik" should in theory stand for "shake" - only it's distorted, just like in the name of a SHEIK of ZAPPIAN memory (!!!)... no no, I'm not delirious. It's all true.

And the beauty - or the madness, but precisely for this reason beautiful - is that from Nino Rota you seamlessly transition to "Funky Stuff" by Kool & The Gang (well, after all, all Music is a Country...), in an irresistible PROMISCUITY of choral voices and metropolitan groove. And after the "mutant" reggae of "Slipped Disc", you even have time to wonder how the Lounge Lizards would have sounded in the Caribbean instead of in the Big Apple, and "It's You Sort Of" gives you a demonstration (pure chance, that Mademoiselle Lizzy crossed paths more than once with my friend Arto...? Uhm...): it's a ramshackle jazz made of little organs and rebellious drumming in a crash of cymbals, accompanying a "chanteuse" with a not exactly orthodox style... 

In all this (but you will have figured it out by now), the term "mambo" is to be taken literally only for "Five Troubles Mambo" - which yes, a mambo it actually is, but still to be taken with a grain of salt...

A RECORD LIGHT YEARS AHEAD, in times when definitions like "world music" were little more than fashionable whims to define something with very unclear outlines. At the end of this brief half hour, you will wonder how an Artist of this caliber can still not be celebrated as deserved.

And perhaps to these rhythms, you'll feel the world bouncing on a woman's hips, just like (the Great) David Byrne. 

Never forgotten, Lizzy. Never.