There is no finer delivery system for pleasure than a good pop song. Sadly, this power is left mostly unexploited in Massive Attack’s multi-media concert/collaboration with documentary filmmaker Adam Curtis at the Armory. The Drill Hall is majestically transformed, with a small stage for the musicians at the center, wrapped with a giant U-shaped field of video screens. Curtis’ film, which traces, compellingly, western social culture from the 1960’s to the present by laying critical speech and text over archival news footage, flickers across them simultaneously. And Massive Attack becomes, for the evening, a cover band, performing songs relevant to moments in the film’s narration, most of them written by other artists. In following along so literally the band don’t do justice to their own dense, textured, enveloping sound, or to the film’s political verve. The show becomes another pop video, serving up music alongside imagery without engaging it incisively.
The film gives moments of astounding political clarity, as when clips from Jane Fonda’s iconic exercise tape, unnervingly glossy, illustrate how American culture collapsed in the 1980’s from shaping the world to shaping its body. There are moments of pop magic too, like when the growling vocals to Karmacona start up and the band breaks into its signature hypnotic torrents. But nothing is as enthusiastically received as their cover of Sugar Sugar, which is meant to illustrate the enforced jolliness of postwar, pre-Beatles pop culture. The accompanying film shows us minstrel shows, dog shows, dance contests, and other inanities, but we don’t feel them ironically; instead we surrender to the sweet, stupid power of the song. Throughout the 90-minute show the music and film move at different paces, overlapping at moments literally but rarely viscerally. What if the sonic and visual forces, both potent, were fully fused, the entire show choreographed thematically with original music from the band, so that it became charged with the sting of the film’s righteous, deeply troubling politics? We would accept both, ecstatically.
Image courtesy of Massive Attack.