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Deltron 3030 (2000 – reissued 2008 )

PART TWO

“Mastermind” is kind of what He’s the DJ, I’m the Rapper would sound like in 1021 years – this is Del talking about how awesome his producer is, right? Ironically over one of the more conventional tracks on the record (which is also kind of the point), but it’s also Kid Koala’s showcase – he scratches the fuck out of this record, and whichever of them that dug out Aphrodite’s Child’s “Loud, Loud, Loud” pulls the coup and steals the record. This comes from the 666 album which at one point was going to be performed as a play under a massive tent covering most of Barcelona, directed by Salvador Dali that involved throwing live animals out of a plane at a church and full squads of men in Nazi uniform. It is Vangelis’ vision of the biblical apocalypse, and in this track the apocalypse is a blithe-sounding girl with a lisp talking about the day it all finally collapses. “The day the cars will lay in heaps”, the apocalypse is going to be an orgy of noise but it’s oracle is just someone who sounds bored. The way she’s speaking is not far off from Albarn at the top of the record – there’s some weight to her saying this, a gravity that she adds to a track might feel light in comparison to the rest of the album. But with her there – no this is still a world scarily on the brink of ending in fire and chaos, just like it is now, and taking time out to talk about music is a frivolous pointless act that still has to be done. “Automator, defy the laws of nature”. Don’t worry – after a commercial break, where we learn that our culture is awful and Strange Brew is consider high art from our time, and that nothing means nothing – we get to the heart of the album, it’s moral, musical, and technical center: “Madness”.

Rising spy movie strings, theramin, and Kid Koala’s trademark trumpet-scratch tension-building throb as Del lets loose with his best verse – until the Paul Simon sample lets some air into the proceedings. “I’m caught in the grip of the city, madness” repeating back and forth, a mantra. Del is downright dour here, oddly being self-confessional and taking the strange position of the introspective rapper. Which he’s a lot more successful than the two nutjobs who made it popular – he’s not nearly as artificial as Eminem or as self-sabotaging an egoist as Kanye – it’s not the kind of forced PR vulnerability or contradictory “i’m god/ i’m an asshole” raps. No it’s Del talking about how his ego makes him act like a dick at shows, act paranoid towards his friends, worries about corporate media, race and class( “Why should I hate you we ain’t that different, we may act different in some ways, but we still grouped together like a fucking survey”), his music becoming hollow, and thinking about killing himself ( “I’m glad I love music and life cuz it’s easy to see the pain and strife and end it all tonight”). Automator, in all his brilliance had figured out what to do on these confessional tracks in the middle of the album – to make these tracks the most evocative of the future. Del’s talking about some deep stuff but it has almost nothing to do with the future, even tangentially. Automator takes the Paul Simon line and uses it expand the scope of the song – in the specific lies the universal. Instead of Del’s confessional sounding exactly like what it is – now it’s a Del walking the streets of the future, soliloquizing Bug Jack Barron style. “Conquered, my sponsors are monsters and everyone feels like I’m on one”, it’s a man wrestling with his conscience, which is still the same damn thing a thousand years from now. Madness.

“Meet Cleofis Randolph the Patriarch” is clearly here just to break up the darkest tracks on the record, here’s probably one of the sponsors Del was just talking about – Paul Barman acting off-kilter even by his own standards. The kind of crazy person who would pay this guy to do what he does (former mech-soldier, now hacker/rapper? I think anyway). If cyberpunk has taught us anything its that the guy paying you is always crazy, no matter what you’re doing. “Time Keeps on Slipping” is so good they named the best episode of Futurama, in which time moves so fast the writers don’t have to write the funny parts of scenes, after it. Think of the Chatsubo scene at the opening of Neuromancer – Ratz behind the bar cleaning glasses with his pink robot arm, Case arguing with Lonny Zone, Damon Albarn’s time banker drinking himself to death right next to him, Deltron at an open mic-night rapping like he was in a battle but there’s no one there but him. It’s 4 in the afternoon. Albarn’s voice kind of sails over the song, melodica notes drifting underneath him. He’s singing his own song independent of the track, it just works together so well. Del’s rap is a goddamn assault (“let my lasers clap at you”), leavened by a kind of sunken-in weariness of this voice. Del’s going to destroy your moonbase, he says – practicing for the Fantabulous Rap Extravaganza but tearing it up, “gamma gramma far from B.A.M.A.” – he must be on the west coast. It has to be the microsoft-owned new program is in spanish. The rap cuts off mid song as Albarn leaves, singing to himself as he wanders out into the noise and sunlight.

“I envision turbulence and murder since it’s an everyday occurrence”, Del’s on the pure Spider Jerusalem rant here – angrily explicating the class system of the future as discordant blocks of string samples scrape over the stutter-start beat. “Aliens landed said our planet wasn’t worth invading”. It’s pure gonzo journalism of the future – he’s even drunk in a hovercraft. He sounds alternately like a raving paranoid buying bad drugs without ever letting go of his gun and a man speaking the truth. Turns out it’s both. Poor kids options being brainless factory workers or criminals/bounty hunters. Only the rich get to learn about tech, Diamond Age style. Back to  caste system, the media is nothing but propaganda, the rich live in their own sectioned off homes, the constitution has been circumvented, people modify the hell out of their bodies flamboyantly because they have no control over anything else, curfews are enforced, religion is used as a tool of control, dissidents are raped by cops or lobotomized, and natural resources don’t exist anymore. Yeah so… that’s pretty much just watching BBC news and reading the internet for a couple days. He forgot the pandemics, I just sat through a guest lecture in my english class about communicable disease and then had to ride a bus so crowded people were standing in the aisles. One kid was coughing.

Be there for the rap battle! In outer space! First rounds is on Mercury! Oh yeah in between the songs, Del saved the planet, but he’s still got to pay the registration fee, because who cares about earth anyway. Play-by-play of a rap battle in the future where weapons are totally okay. He’s fighting creatures from outer space – a Plutonian sentient shadow, a Mercurian death squad leader, an eight-armed spider monster who lives in the space-port from Galaxy Express 999 – dueling his way around the cosmos. I’m sure if he’d recorded an album of just this, Del would a living legend. The idea of a rap battle as something that could kill you – either from being blasted by death rays or running out of oxygen in the middle of a rhyme – that’s exactly the kind of thing that could make battle rapping exciting again now that Eight Mile has destroyed the concept forever. The idea that the only thing that could save your life is an a capella, that’s entertainment, the track ends with Del tearing the spider’s brain out of his skull, and the next song starts off with him counting out his prize winnings. “Love Story” is Del in his downtime – he goes home to arctic Oakland, gets high, reads comics from the 20th century and Cosmopolitian, and misses a day at the Galactic Rhyme Federation. He renews his passport, loses his job goes freelance like Spike Speigal, and signs autographs for fans. He gets distracted by a fine alien woman, and sends an android duplicate of himself to hit on her. It’s a day in the life of a rap superstar/ hacker/ world saviour. “Memory Loss” is the big snap back to reality, the superstar fantasia of the past few tracks really just fun while he’s got some proper points to make before he wraps this up. He reminds everyone that Oakland is the founding home of the Black Panthers, and he’ll whup you; that you need to grow the fuck and treat the kids right; to be yourself on some real shit; know your history; know that you are not shit in the scheme of the universe; SING. “Looking up the sky is red, city’s burning overhead, you can make the best of this, in this post-apocalypse” Sean Lennon sings. That’s all you need to know, all you ever need to know. The world is going to be like this, that doesn’t have to change you.

The album closes out on a circle – Albarn’s back, this time identified as “The Assman 640″, on a tape reciting the same speech as he gave at the start of the album, pretty much the same way that Automator and DJ Shadow used the Prince of Darkness samples on Endtroducing. It’s time, it’s cyclical. The man says it himself “we came back, we were always coming back”.  This album isn’t a groundbreaking masterpiece, it’s not a game-changer. But it is something that opened up my head about what could be done with science fiction, and how mutable it is as a genre. It was a game changer for me personally, a whole universe built out of concepts I understood and used to say something personal. “I’ll raid your grave, anything to save the day.” It’s a personal and political album. It’s a lot like your story, but it’s more interesting because it has robots.  Like all great science fiction – it tricks you into thinking by distracting you with cool shit, and it’s biggest flaws aren’t really flaws at all, just time where it does it so well it distracts itself. What I love about Deltron 3030 is the same thing I love about Paul Pope, Burning Chrome, A Clockwork Orange and 2046 – it uses the future to talk about today, and uses the trappings of a genre to say something bigger (and smaller) than the fucking Heroes Journey, techie shit that scifi has long been associated.  It’s music  to listen to as the world burns, nod your head.

(Special thanks to Jared – for turning me onto the record in the first place, for the kind words, and because  I honestly I can’t remember which one of us had the idea of Time Keeps on Slipping as a bar scene. I know one of us did and the other expanded on it, but this was years ago.)