THE SWEETEST BOY-- unknown, 1988 SCRITTI POLITTI Reviewer: David Stubbs
"PROVISION"--perhaps a reference to the "provisional immorality" to which Green referred in his last Maker interview, his claim to be in a continual state of flux, ceaselessly slipping around. But "Provision" scarcely refracts the times, or offers a dispassionate, kaleidoscope moment of pop, in its endlessly altering states. As if by way of apology, Green said last week, "Great chunks of pop history come and go in the time it takes us to make a record." And sure enough, this album is another Scritti album in every sense, honing down still further the brilliantine sheen to which Green's applied his elbow since "The Sweetest Girl". Ignominiously, it is a continuation of Green's own musical biography, a "narrative" if ever there was one, with the same characters--David Gamson, Roger Troutman, Miles Davis--still in tow. On the opener, "Boom! There She Was", however, that's fine. It's impeccable aluminium funk, bristling and glistening with reflective self-adoration, its bolts undone by oozing brass and vocoder. Green's voice is deliciously unorganic, almost a hologram, and a hologram gazing at a shimmering, ecstatic mirage at that, Green, as ever, uses the conventional male gaze in pop and, literally, the "word girl" as a simple metaphor for the crisis of subject/object--Scritti boy and silent girl. But musically, this classy, sassy, glassy moment of unreality is the high point. "Overnite" isn't bad, but it sounds like a studied pastiche of the kind of filler ballad you're liable to find on side two of a Michael Jackson album. The single, "Oh Patti (Don't Feel Sorry For Loverboy)" is, frankly, wet, in spite of the presence of Miles Davis, floating across it like a moon, and no amount of lyrical undoing can really hope to do it up, while "Lovesick" is Wet Wet Wet, in spite of its interesting, paradoxical lyric (I should say, however, that the metaphysical poet Andrew Marvell was playing this game three centuries ago). With "Bam Salute", we're back at the state of play marked by the reggae twinges of "Asylums In Jerusalem". Everything else here is, in spite of a few funky frissons and layered twitches, essentially unremarkable. So that leaves us with Green's intentions as a deconstructionalist to see him through. Well, there are the customary chinks and elisions ("I'm gonna get that girl and show her the time of my life/I'm gonna get that girl a future that's hard to believe"--"All That We Are") but, as the albums and years pass, one is simply forced to shrug a "so what" at this increasingly smug verbal striptease. In fact, the dubiousness of the continued girl-as-object stance notwithstanding (will they get the joke in the wine bars?) dare I offer the suspicion that Green is indulging a subtle form of narcissism in these songs, in this genre he has created for himself, alone, to dwell in? The Sweetest Boy, with all his heroes assembled about him, caught in the middle of this sonic arrangement of shiny mirrors? Certainly, The Voce sounds more lost on "Provision", like a smog in a city, as opposed to rising clearly above the mix. It's increasingly difficult to make him out, and one senses that he's not really looking at "us" any more. He certainly doesn't undo me, and the Scritti sound seems to have frozen into an archaic irrelevancy. Funk isn't the radical gesture it once was in pop; it's been absorbed. But Green seems to be too absorbed himself to have taken on board salient points like that.
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