623 Malcolm McLaren - Duck Rock (1983)

 623 Malcolm McLaren - Duck Rock (1983)

Studio Album - Hip Hop and World Music


About the Act:

Malcolm McLaren was an artist, fashion designer, manager, impresario and musician. He is most famous for managing (and pretty much creating) The Sex Pistols. To claim that he engineered the punk outbreak in the UK is not a crazy claim. He had come back to England after managing the New York Dolls, and started a clothing shop called Sex with Vivian Westwood, his then girlfriend. There is a whole lot of controversy about him, he courted scandal, and once said "I have been called many things: a charlatan, a con man, or, most flatteringly, the culprit responsible for turning British popular culture into nothing more than a cheap marketing gimmick. This is my chance to prove that these accusations are true."

After the punk thing, he recorded some albums. They are diverse in style and at times unusual.

About the Album:

This was his first album, and spawned two hit singles. It used a variety of musicians but included most of what was to become the sampling/noise rock outfit The Art of Noise.

My History with this Album:

I have definitely heard it before, but maybe only once. I know the hits: Buffalo Girls and Double Dutch.

Review:

Sometimes the juxtaposition of things in this list is curious. I have just written the review on the Go-Betweens' album and had little to say. For this album I don't know where to start, there is so much to say!

So, for a start, and not really relevant to this album, I deplored Malcolm McLaren's public persona in the punk period. I do think that accusations of him being cynically manipulative of the market for punk are well-founded. It was a surprise to me, when, a few years later, he re-emerged as a musician, and that what he was doing was interesting. I bought the next album after this, Fans, which is a blend of electronica/hip-hop and opera. However, that is a different album, and I should focus on this one.

Musically, this is a blend between early hip-hop and world music. Hip-hop was just breaking in the UK, with Grandmaster Flash and others. It was a phenomenon out of New York, and it seems that Malcolm had a handle on that. Trevor Horn, of The Buggles, Yes and The Art of Noise, who became producer for Frankie Goes To Hollywood and other, similar pop/disco/electronic acts was involved in producing this album, and the musicians include Anne Dudley and JJ Jeczalic who were also in The Art of Noise (apparently The Art of Noise were born from them recording stuff together in-between sessions for this album). There is some rapping and scratching, and early use of samplers. Blended with this there are several "world" styles - particularly South African Jangle Pop, of the kind Paul Simon used as backing on Graceland, and of people like Johnny Clegg, but also other African music, Latino music, and Square Dance Hoedown. The timing of this is on the forefront of a massive wave of interest in World Music, and as somebody who likes quite a bit of the World Music, I can attest that retrospectively, this is not a pseudo-borrowing of this stuff, but it holds up as the genuine article. All in all, this could have been a recipe for disaster, but it is not. It is skilfully blended like a good curry. It works.

Added to all this is a concept, there are intermissions between the tracks that purport to be phone-in snippets from a radio station, creating the conceit that what you are listening to is in fact a radio show. This habit of linking tracks with vignettes is now thoroughly endemic to Hip Hop to the extent that it is expected, but I have no knowledge of earlier albums that did this, at least not outside the concept albums of Prog Rock.

The end result is an album that works best as an album, and is bright, sunny and full of fun, a bit like the vibrant South African music used. It is unusual enough to be thought of as a novelty album, except for the fact that it's actually really good.

8/10 


Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/album/6S4f7yDtJlS0iQMEuCtIF0

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLlw1zJ0BjQ1xThx1n261QnoWpTF57h1l8

Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duck_Rock



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