Vice-president, Al Gore once described postmodernism as a ‘combination of narcissism and nihilism’. Umberto Eco went one further, describing it as the sense that the ‘past is restricting, smothering, blackmailing us’. So when you consider Blair’s zero-point agenda for change in Iraq please bear a little of this in mind, for that too was narcissistic, nihilistic and it too applied no small amount of cultural blackmail. The first strike in the first war of the first Post-modern century? You bet. No discernible enemy, no discernible cause and no discernible justification. Isn’t that what you get in all the best postmodernist fiction from ‘Neuromancer’ to ‘White Noise’, from ‘Fight Club’ to ‘The Wasteland’ and from to ‘The Prisoner’ to ‘Life On Mars’ ? Tortured, isolated anti-heroes, irrationality, simultaneous viewpoints, multiple perspectives, fractures, existential crisis, internal conflict, complicity and dissociation. No, I’m not trying to fox you with theory; I’m simply trying to make sense of ‘Stray Point Agenda’ – a similarly schizophrenic mix of chaos and conviction, crisis and faith, love and death – or, as the consciousness stirring voice of the album’s intro suggests, ‘a kingdom of the unreal – but also a higher state of being’. The stray point? The consequences and fallout of a zero-point agenda and the vacuum created around it. Isn’t that how ‘real life’ is? Love and Death? The endless deferral of peace? The individual locked in an endless cycle of revenge and retaliation? World without end?
First appearing in 2003 with their debut LP ‘Asylum’ and awarded ‘Best Group’ and ‘Best Single’ at the Lyric Pad UK Hip Hop Awards 2005, Foreign Beggars are a British hip-hop collective based in London, branching out from various geographical backgrounds yet consisting in the main of MCs Orifice Vulgatron and Metropolis, human beatboxer, Shlomo, producer, DagNabbit and DJ Nonames. Their music is tight, philosophical, existential, multi-faceted and in the case of ‘Stray Point’ at least, is blessed with no shortage of divisions and juxtapositions, heavy-beats, double-time spitting, dub elements, sci-fi horror, growling electro devices and complex, confusing sample-scapes. Subversive, politically conscious yet anchored squarely in the ‘thousand and one tears’ of human behaviour, ‘Stray Point Agenda’ morphs fluently from the sparse, minimal beats of logic to the choking orchestral smoke of a slowburn apocalypse. There are a million ways to die and the furious, double-time parable, ‘Confessions of A…’ and ‘To Be A Memory’ account for most of them. Let’s face it, in a world where the threat of having your vocal chords removed, your face ripped off, having both of arms broken, part of your heart choked and most of your arteries blocked, death offers you your only true freedom – choose safety and you embrace ‘safety in cages’ – which isn’t truly living at all. It’s the age-old existential dilemma: the only certitude in life is ‘death’ and our only freedom in life is choosing the way it happens: ‘death-squad, shoot gun, execution’. In the matrices and the dataspheres of computerized information, global corporations, rapid technology and hi-tech warfare, a peaceful, human death is about as much as we can hope for. Representing humanity and the force of nature on this record is the languid, retro fabric of tracks like, ‘On A Winter’s Day’ (featuring elements of Jose Feliciano’s ‘California Dreamin’) and the soulful grooves of ‘Interlude’ – a temporary lull before the storm and the full-on cyber onslaught of ‘Backdraft’, and ‘Hot Plate’.
It’s a beautifully paced record, celebrating the tissue of human emotions – good, bad, innovative but never indifferent – that equip the ghost at the heart of the machine, a ghost that is, for the most part, immobilised in cold war situation; a full-on Mexican Stand-Off between livin’and dying tryin’.
Fans of ‘The Private Press’, Subtle and Roots Manuva are likely to find this a very, very precious record indeed.