About this Playlist
“Did you hear that Banksy is one of the guys from Massive Attack?”
I don’t remember who asked the question. I don’t even recall when it was asked. But I remember my first thought, “Great. Banksy is an asshole.”
To be fair, I don’t know if Banksy is an asshole. I’ve never met Banksy. For all I know, Banksy could be the reincarnation of Jesus Christ. But Massive Attack are all assholes in my book, or at least they were when they verbally accosted MuchMusic VJ Sook-Yin Lee on live TV.
It was the 90s—the late 90s—but my memory is a bit scratched and jumpy like the Massive Attack CDs I listened to repeatedly before that day. With unsympathetic eyes, Robert Del Naja leans back in his chair. “You’re boring,” he says.
I can still see Sook-Yin sitting uncomfortably (or maybe that was a projection of my discomfort) as Del Naja’s bandmate Grant Marshall, broadcasting the same contemptuous energy, slumped in the chair beside him and said nothing. Someone else was there. Andrew Vowles, maybe. I hope it wasn’t Tricky.
“Could you be less boring?”
Nearly thirty years later, I’m making this dialogue up as I go along because I can’t remember the exact conversation—not that there was much of one—but the word boring did drip out of Del Naja’s mouth ad nauseam because I remember thinking this asshole was mistaking his boredom for some kind of deep profundity.
Sook-Yin kept her professional composure even though the trio wouldn’t relent, mocking her for asking “dull questions” about their “art.” I was disappointed and angry. Massive Attack was the reason I watched the interview in the first place. I practically screamed at the TV screen, “Tell those misogynistic pricks to go fuck themselves!” Maybe they weren’t misogynists. I distinctly remember feeling they were, but that could have been the aftertaste of reading Camille Paglia’s “Sexual Personae.”
Fast-forward to now, and I’m tasked with writing a piece on trip-hop—a project of my own making. It slipped my mind that I’d have to mention Massive Attack when I decided to begin a style and genre project with trip-hop. The last time I bought an album was before that interview. I wasn’t interested in starting up again, not least because I don’t own a record or CD player. Besides, who buys albums anymore when streaming platforms are so readily available? I do pay for one of those.
Nevertheless, I’d have to listen to make a playlist. I’d also need to do some research because it’s not like I could just ignore the band’s contributions to trip-hop or impact on music overall. That would be like trying to ignore my ACL rupture (tennis is a dangerous sport, by the way). The fact is that sometimes great art comes from lousy people. Who was it that asked if we can separate art from the artist? Roland Barthes? T.S. Elliot? Whoever. Philosophical waxing won’t convince me to listen to certain artists, but Massive Attack’s only crime that day was rudeness, so…
I can get AI to write something.
“So I threw myself into researching their ‘impact’ – forcing myself to listen to their album Mezzanine on a continuous loop until the throbbing basslines and Del Naja’s distorted ramblings about ‘insect sex’ dissolved into sonic sewage flooding my brain.“
OK, maybe not. But it was worth trying for that alone. That and the phrase “spewing their mind virus.” I’ll have to use that someday.
I booted up some semblance of objectivity and began reading every article and book and watching every YouTube interview I could track down. I felt like I’d swallowed the red pill as image after image of Massive Attack confronted the memory and bias I’d held hostage for nearly three decades.
Had I been too harsh? Because 3D (Robert Del Naja) was much more polite and soft-spoken than I remember, and Daddy G (Grant Marshall) was infinitely more talkative and engaging. I didn’t know they’d been so actively involved with social justice and environmental issues. I hadn’t realized how much of their music I’d missed and how much I actually missed their music (even if “Teardrop” couldn’t be avoided). It’s a weird feeling, realizing this cognitive dissonance between the assholes I remember and the thoughtful artists I was discovering. Does it rewrite the past, or just confuse it?
I suddenly wanted to know if I’d remembered that decades-old MuchMusic interview correctly. I could only find one mention of it on the internet by someone calling themselves Sankou, “I’ll never forget Sook-Yin’s interview with Massive Attack …that was such a trainwreck, but fun to watch.“
Fun to watch? Also, an asshole. But then, everyone on the internet is an asshole at least once or twice. Even me. It’s the psalm of the 21st century: anonymity and a comment box.
Sook-Yin had answered my subliminal demand from the other side of the TV screen. She told the Massive Attack trio to fuck off and walked out of the live interview. I immediately wrote her an email, apologizing on behalf of the band and congratulating her on taking a stand. This much is fact, but memory is a tricky thing. I don’t remember the questions she asked the band, and each recollection overwrites the last, so I’m wondering what I’ve lost over time.
Of course, I haven’t thought much about it over the years, either, so my memory hasn’t been completely degraded. I simply stopped buying Massive Attack albums in protest. Although, when their music has popped up in movies or on TV, the word ‘assholes’ does flicker, however briefly, in my mind. As David Foster Wallace might have said, it’s the curse of cultural omnipresence: even the things we hate become part of our mental wallpaper.
I managed to get a first draft going. I didn’t care for it, but at least I exorcised some demons about internet ads and factless web stories posing as news, as well as my obvious distaste for how Massive Attack treated Sook-Yin years ago. But just as I was about to write a second draft, I made one last attempt at finding said interview. Sure enough, I was led to an article I missed called “Talking Shop with Sook-Yin Lee“:
“Interviewing Sook-Yin Lee is intense. I’m in Berlin, she’s in Toronto and we did an email interview. She refused my questions at first, calling them redundant—“
Seriously, Sook-Yin?! The irony wasn’t lost on me. But neither was the truth that had finally metastasized in my own lack of fucks to give about it all. There were more important things in the world to care about, like whether Banksy really is an asshole or the reincarnation of Jesus Christ.
And that’s something, isn’t it? The way we construct narratives — of assholes and geniuses, of heroes and villains — because reality is contradictory. Massive Attack can be both pricks and socially conscious artists. Sook-Yin can be both a victim of assholes and an ass herself. And I can simultaneously give two fucks and not give any.
In the end, as a friend put it on the way to or from a Pere Ubu gig back in the day, we can only be sure of our own contradiction. So, maybe I’m not really writing about Massive Attack, Sook-Yin Lee, or even Banksy, but rather the liminality of memory, where every glitch reveals our assumptions, biases, and unfinished sympathies. And in this liminal space, we’re all a little bit asshole, a little bit genius, a little bit boring, and endlessly human.
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A little thanks and shout out to Allegra Huston and James Navé of Imaginative Storm, whose book “Write What You Don’t Know” was inspiring.
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Massive Attacks Sook-Yin Lee is part of the forthcoming Style & Genre Collection
Playlist image by Matt Nelson on Unsplash
Track Listing
- Wrecking Heart – Sook-Yin Lee
- Redlight – Clark Remix – Massive Attack
- Tidal Pool – Conjure One
- Life Of The Party – The Weeknd
- I Get High – iskwē
- All the Candles in the World – Jane Siberry
- Re-Veil – Sook-Yin Lee
- I Against I – 2006 Digital Remaster – Massive Attack
- The Art of Love – Kelli Ali
- Chained – The xx
- Sandpaper Kisses – Martina Topley-Bird
- Snapper – Red Snapper
- Hourglass – Jooj
- Man Next Door – Massive Attack
- Hard Feelings – Jooj
- Ritual Spirit – Massive Attack
- In Between – Anja Garbarek
- Succubus – Jihae
- Ghost of Love (Onakabazien Remix) – Jooj
- Lucid – Witch Prophet
- Home of the Whale (Mayday Mix) – Massive Attack
- La Vita – Beverly Glenn-Copeland
