No Urge To Please
Once again, I let the random selection function on Discogs decide what to write about. It came up with this one. Two reactions. One: great choice. Two: damn, that’s a hard one.
“100th Window” is one of those albums that bring up a whole bundle of diverging thoughts, impressions and emotions. It all depends on the angle of approach. There’s the one where you put it next to its predecessor, “Mezzanine”. See what they do to each other. There’s the one where you look at the time when it was published, compared to where the world is right now, and how the album is related to both of these points in time. And there’s the one where you look at the protagonists and what the album says about them, what it does to you, and how the album changes the impression you have of the artists.
The first angle is the most obvious one. Simply because “Mezzanine” is such a giant. One of the best albums ever, never aging and forever keeping Massive Attack within a tiny circle of artists that were able to create something truly unique. It would be ludicrous to try and do that twice in a row. No point in trying anyway. It’s not like “Mezzanine” had been planned to achieve this monolithic status.
Still, it’s there. So, what do you do? You created this awesome monster, and people keep pointing at it all the time, with that look of expectation in their eyes. An album that shaped a reality of you that you never aimed for. This is much more than just that good old follow-up-album-curse.
I try to look back at how I reacted to the album when I listened to it the first time. But I can’t remember it. The same is true for “Heligoland”, the album that followed seven years later. It’s a little weird. Usually, when the time I am spending listening to an artist decreases, their relevance in my music world is receding as well. This isn’t true in this case though. I keep regarding them as a singular phenomenon, regardless of how much I am listening to their music. To a certain extent, the artists have emancipated themselves from their work, and so has my perception of them.
The project has long transitioned from being about music to something like a platform that pairs their music with messages that are important to its members – and their audience. “100th Window” is the album that documents the early stages of this transition, and the Massive Attack that we witness on stage today, and even more prominently on social media, are very clear and vocal about issues like the crimes against humanity in Gaza, about who is sponsoring which festival or concert, and about the impact these events have on the climate.
I remember the months after the Hamas attack on Israel in October 2023, when it became increasingly evident that the retaliation of the government of Israel was not restricted to Hamas. Artists like Massive Attack and Brian Eno were starting to speak up – meeting extremely harsh criticism from every direction. I must admit that in the early stages of their protest I was wondering how I should look at all of it. Now, more than a year later, with the whole Gaza strip having been turned into rubble and 60.000 Palestinians having died as a consequence, I am no longer wondering, and the criticism that Massive Attack are still facing has long left fact-based territories.
All of this probably couldn’t have been expected in 2003. Sure, the planet was showing signs of turning into something we might not like very much. The world not being the same anymore, after 9-11. The war in Iraq with all the lies that pushed for it. The fake evidence in front of the UN which now looks like an eerie forerunner of a post-factual era – there were plenty of reasons to feel a certain amount of unease. But still… The last thing we had heard was “Mezzanine”. Nothing could have prepared us for “100th Window”.
From what I have read about what was going on within Massive Attack during the production of this album, it seems obvious that things weren’t at ease there either. Reduced to a duo, and then practically reduced to more or less a Del Naja solo project when Daddy G prioritized being a father over being a member of Massive Attack, things inevitably took a different direction – one that reflected what was going on in Del Naja’s head.
It was a strange time, the early 2000s. But were we really concerned? Worried? Seeing signs of the world heading for more serious trouble? Not really. I, for one, was primarily pissed off at Saddam Hussein for messing up my wedding plans. And the whole war thing was over after a few weeks, with no one caring all too much about what would follow. War over, thank you, can I have a cup of tea please.
No, we weren’t ready for this. Part of the music press wasn’t either. Too bleak, too depressing, some felt, literally not getting the message. They only listened to the music, and were “underwhelmed”.
Maybe a little misled too. That’s another tricky thing, because “Mezzanine” is always present in your mind when you drop the needle. And it will let you look for things that are similar. Like the opening track, “Future Proof”. If you ask me I will immediately point towards “Risingson”. Or when you listen to the percussive elements of “What Your Soul Sings”. Isn’t that kind of a cousin of the incredible “Teardrop” beat?
Without stopping to think, we’re already consuming the album the way we consumed “Mezzanine”. We’re fans, and we feel almost entitled to another round of our favorite album. I remember someone shaking his head, wondering why on earth anyone would exchange Elizabeth Fraser for Sinéad O’Connor, and why Damon Albarn, and so on. Duh.
In the logic of “100th Window” and its reason for being, Fraser simply wouldn’t have been a fitting choice, let alone a Soul vocalist like Shara Nelson. The succession of female vocalists over the course of the four albums is enough to understand which direction things were taking. But again. We couldn’t have seen that coming. All we saw was the name, Sinéad O’Connor, and some people scratched their heads.
She was perfect though. Not only because she’s a gifted singer. Think about the controversy that arose in the mid-90s when she was pointing her finger at the Catholic Church, saying that sexual abuse in families was rooted in the way the church was dealing with the subject. Well – Del Naja wasn’t the only one that was ahead of his time with the choice of topics he felt needed to be addressed – the decades that followed were full of proof that linked the Catholic Church with the topic of sexual abuse, worldwide.
It doesn’t make for an easily digestible mix though. This is a different kind of beauty. “Special Cases” for example. A track inducing a creeping sense of things not being right, and sure enough, here’s Sinéad O’Connor singing “Take a look around the world / You see such mad things happening / There are many good men / Ask yourself, is he one of them?” The video adds another discomforting dimension. They used stock video footage to assemble a story about companies creating genetically modified humans, and those modified humans having children. Large corporations doing questionable things, science being used for questionable projects, available media used to create a fictional story that looks like a documentary, and O’Connor saying that there are very few good men, “Thank your lucky stars that he’s one of them”. It was produced by H5, the company that gained its reputation by designing some of the most iconic covers of the French Filter House era, their first project having been the design for Etienne de Crécy’s “Super Discount”. And while we’re discussing difficult topics here – H5 should reconsider advertising their work for Ye a.k.a. Kanye West. Not a helpful reference anymore.
“Butterfly Caught”. Those lyrics. Do I want to dig deeper when I listen to them? Do I need to? Fair skin, freckles, darkened skin, opened lips, uncut teeth. Kneeling like a supplicant. Keep smiling for me. No, I really don’t need more than that, and the video is a perfect translation anyway. Desolation, isolation, a cold room in cold neon light, moths caught by the light, forever fluttering, not understanding that the light can’t be caught, that it’s the other way round, Del Naja’s skin darkened by a growing web of tattoos, with a skull on his back, standing in front of an anonymous skyline.
Just imagine all of those people that were so in love with the “Teardrop” video, eagerly waiting for a new inspiration coming from their heroes, and then discovering these two eerie masterpieces. I am able to sit in appreciation, my mind is more than just tickled, I love creative concept as much as masterful implementations such as these videos. But… let’s put it this way: Massive Attack had earned mass appeal, and these two songs and the accompanying videos will have narrowed down the target audience. Or sharpened it. Or even corrected something that might have been lucrative, but unintended.
The discomfort that we feel about the world of today started growing in the early 2000s. We didn’t sense it, we didn’t recognize it, and it was easy to brush any presentiments aside. “100th Window” is full of it. And the title should have been enough of a reason to look closer and not just seek aural enjoyment. It took 20 years to fully appreciate the greatness of this album. Still far from easy listening, and yet the foundation of what Massive Attack is today.
Musicians are increasingly following their example. They’re not just in it for the money. Look at what is happening at Sónar this year. More than 50 artists withdrawing from the festival because the investors of the company running the festival have a deplorable position regarding Gaza. Artists saying goodbye to Spotify because the owner is taking the profits to heavily invest in companies developing AI for weapons of war. Massive Attack banning all Barclay’s logos and messaging from the arenas they play at, calling them a “profoundly unethical corporate identity”, and refusing to play at the Black Sea Arena in Georgia because it’s state-owned, translating into owned by people that function as Putin’s puppets.
It’s not important whether we share this criticism. Whether we want to act in a similar way. But don’t we all feel an increasing unease about the products we buy, the companies that produce them, the people that finance them? What do you feel when your car comes to a stop behind a Tesla at the traffic light? What do you feel when you hear that Spotify is creating AI-generated bands to promote them heavily and suck even more money out of the pockets of listeners and artists?
The unease is there. We all feel it. Massive Attack saw it creeping up on us, more than twenty years ago.
Release for review:
MASSIVE ATTACK – 100TH WINDOW – VIRGIN – 724358123913