Leftfield - 'Rhythm and Stealth'
No. 5 in our Top 100 Electronica Albums of the 1990s
Rhythm and Stealth is a brooding onslaught of electronic wizardry. From the streetwise raps of Roots Manuva on ‘Dusted’ to the Afrika Bambaata throwdown of ‘Afrika Shox’ to the spectral beauty of ‘Swords,’ this swan song from one of England’s techno supergroups is the final statement on 20th century electronica. Unlike 1995’s Leftism, Leftfield‘s popular first album, 1999’s Rhythm and Stealth was a jagged, and austere artifact in its first impressions. At its core was still Neil Barnes and Paul Daley’s unmistakable blend of thundering techno, dub science, hip hop beats, house rhythms and punk attitude. Yet their approach was now deeper in its studio precision, more beguiling in its sonic tricks, and in the end far more Detroit and Berlin, than Ibiza.
On the eve of the album’s release, while on a DJ tour in Amsterdam, the pair sat down with Keith Cameron for the New Musical Express. NME’s assessment of the sky-high expectations around Rhythm and Stealth described the stakes and contradictions at the heart of Leftfield’s success. Leftism had helped set the paradigm of ‘90s techno on the radio — its infectious melodies and grooves along with its collaborations with singers, reggae scatters, and poets, inspired a whole generation of producers. The term “progressive house” was first used to describe their style, their ‘Hard Hands’ remix of Barnes’ ‘Not Forgotten’ classic in particular. Was Leftism their peak?
“To 1993, when Leftfield’s steadily burgeoning reputation as two men forging a very modern and very British kind of house music — one both epic and ethnic, blissed and belligerent, cuckoo yet conscious — reached its apotheosis with ‘Open Up,’” Cameron wrote with an apt sense of drama — “the techno-punk crossover anthem to begin and end them all. Adding John Lydon’s apocalyptic caw to Barnes and Daley’s pounding trance know-how was the masterstroke that lifted the lid off clubland’s simmering pressure cooker and scalded the pop mainstream.”*
How indeed would they top it? Their answer was to flip it, taking them three years, including discarding almost a whole album’s worth of material as they searched for a new North Star, raising in the process a kind of shadow mountain. By removing, they kept the sound of the future moving, even if instead many could no longer see it. “We never really counted on the success of the first album,” Daley told NME. “I think that put a lot of pressure on us, dealing with that. Shit, all of a sudden we were famous! From being an underground thing into this mainstream world…It wasn’t a secret anymore…But you have to move on, and once you’ve done something you can’t change it back. You have to find a balance.”
That new balance loomed somewhere even deeper in their past, especially their love of electro hip hop specifically, and the darker synth punk of their youth — Barnes for example went to nearly every Joy Division concert in the late 1970s and early ‘80s. ‘Dusted’ is a perfect microcosm of this more stripped down fusion of the past and future. “It’s a hybrid we’re looking for,” Barnes explained. “That backing track for ‘Dusted’ is not like a hip-hop tune, the way it ended up. It’s a very strange, mad, distorted groove.” By going backward, they went forward. Under the shadow of success, they entered the paradox of time; by revisiting the history of their own rhythm, they cleaved the mountain open and slipped back into the night.
“This style is not free, this style is expensive alright!?” raps Roots to the rolling quaking groove of ‘Dusted.’ “Love of self I possess, through life to death…Face flat to the floor but I found the strength; To commence with a brand new sense of self; Euro-Zulu, comin' through; Tokyo train style, hip it to the crew!” — and the chorus swings to a snarling riff, “Down like dirt, man, we dusted, get up!” — back to the warping beat — “The choice is, there is no choice but to pursue it; Soul on the mind, mind on the soul; My struggle remains, but my inside grows…” It is electro for a righteous moment.
That opening maneuver is echoed by the album’s peak moment, ‘Afrika Shox,’ which features the godfather of electro himself; when they recorded ‘Afrika Shox,’ Bambaata showed up with his Zulu Nation crew, conjuring the heady birth of Bronx hip hop. But Leftfield asked him to come back alone, honing in on the trio-attack they wanted to sharpen together. “He’s the closest I could get to working with Sun Ra…I had to sit with him and tell him exactly what we wanted,” Barnes recounted, connecting dots going back to the free jazz pioneer, his concept of Afrofuturism, and classic sci-fi albums like Space Is the Place — he from Saturn and Bambaata from Planet Rock.
Reference points of style and place fail to convey the album’s full genius though, which is hard to crack, ranging from masterful experiments in the percussive warping of space-time, to 21st century songs that beam melodies through prisms of echo like zigzagging lasers: the single ‘Swords’ is perhaps the perfect hybrid, as understated as it is devastating — soul sojourner Nicole Willis singing with steely scythes, “Danger in every corner, I have become pure water…I wear my sword at my side!” — future pop tripping into eternity. ‘Chant of a Poorman’ — featuring the reggae MC Cheshire Cat, raps “Mek we beat the bingi drum, mek we chant down Babylon” — and ‘El Cid’ use reverbed drums and sharpshooting notes to excellent effect. Both drift in a sonic bayou — nocturnal dub submersed in shimmering tones and lit up by croaking, ricocheting zaps, deep in the peaty bog yet obliterating the trip hop fortress.
‘Afrika Shox’ — what Mixmag dubbed an “electro-stormbringer” of “club-bound blood and cirtcuitry” — takes a two-note bass pattern and reverses it, sucking it back up into a trap door, then looping its hypercube heartbeat into an assembly line of Zulu Nation dreams. Scrawls of lightning flash over the horizon, lassoing the mind into its electric prophecy: “Let's get electrofied,” beckons Bambaata, “Cities of angels…The world is on fire, can I take you higher?” ‘Phat Planet’ is a metallic storm of funky change-ups and slapping high-hats that whip the air so hard they almost light the darkness like white hot torch flames. When the track climaxes with a searing drum solo, the beat booms back slightly after the downbeat with wicked inflection — depth charges detonating under firecrackers — and resets the vector points of polyrhythm.
More quietly, tech-house tracks ‘Double Flash’ and ‘6/8 War’ battle it out to head-tripping time signatures while ‘Dub Gussett’ dunks the psyche in a churning mental magma. Like watching flares descend in the night sky, or the flash of light along the edge of a long blade, these meditative rinsers invited silence and stillness more than dance floor ecstasy. Such restraint runs all the way through the album. Closer ‘Rino’s Prayer’ starts quiet and rises to a simmering North African wail, a little goodwill before the epochal upsets of the coming years between East and West. Its sine waves build to a mountain peak with cymbal crashes bringing down the sky as Leftfield float us back down to a gentle throb, pondering their last prescient prayer for peace.
But the reception of that prayer was mixed. The urgency of Leftfield’s message, musically as well as lyrically, was artistically risky — it seemed to reflect their own sense that the rave tide had ebbed, but not their rave defiance. The Face described “jugular techno” and “wild-eyed millennial electro.” The writer Gareth Gundy called it “lunatic” and “bloody-minded.” The reviewer Toby Manning compared it unfavorably with The Phantom Menace. “There isn’t the focus,” complained Michael Bonner — “peters out” and “dull,” along with “epic,” “sexy” and “faultless.” Like the video for ‘Afrika Shox’ — where a homeless man breaks into tiny pieces — the contentious interplay of light and dark fractured Daley and Barnes’ partnership. Rhythm and Stealth was so on the edge, Leftfield broke like a sword blade in two. And yet, it provided a tantalizing vision of the future, one both bleak and bright — from the jihadist attacks of 9/11 to Barack Obama’s election, the blade remained in spirit.
Was the album then some kind of Jedi mind-trick, a Jidaigeki samurai drama of techno, a chambara “sword fight” in rave-land à la Akira Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai going out in a last stand? As Dom Phillips, the former editor of Mixmag during its early “rave is going global” days observed in a 1999 assignment for The Face, Leftfield had learned to “think the unthinkable.” And so they thought into a kind of open end as the ‘90s ended. “I think sometimes we don’t open up enough,” Barnes told Phillips, in an unconscious echo perhaps of Lydon’s Sex Pistols cri de coeur on Leftfield’s rave hit ‘Open Up’ — “When you work with someone so close for ten years you become like part of the family. Sometimes you take another person for granted,” Barnes said, indicating his respect for Daley. “We don’t have a shouting, screaming type of relationship. We have rows, but they blow over. And out of those rows comes movement in the music” — movements that can break open space and time.
“Recently I listened to Low by David Bowie, which I hadn’t listened to properly for years and I realized, ‘Fucking hell, that album really influenced me.’ That’s what I was listening to religiously in my bedroom every night when I was 15. So I have realized that subconsciously it had an effect on me, which is coming out years later in the music I’m making now. Perhaps not in a direct way, but I can hear it there,” Daley explained to journalist Michelle Park, connecting Leftfield’s own journey back to Bowie’s Berlin Trilogy days, the electronic slick and stark strings that Bowie, Brian Eno and Tony Visconti summoned in the cavernous Hansa Studios, its pre-World War hall of Meistersaal — an echo and a music that also divided the critics 20 years prior.
Right on the cusp of the next century, Rhythm and Stealth marked a new kind of psychic crackup — one instigated by thinking machines — liberating in the year 1990. If their music embodied London and the world’s Africa shock through the rave wave of techno shock, then as the great futurist Alvin Toffler had predicted in his books Future Shock (1970) and The Third Wave (1980) — the near sacred texts for Detroit techno’s Juan Atkins and his “techno-rebels” — by the year 1999, Leftfield were ahead of their time, and riding the “wave-front” of the Information Revolution, as Toffler envisioned, creating music with “a core of innovations” that have spread and “set the stage for future society.” Perhaps that was the stealth maneuver that Barnes and Daley had unconsciously rediscovered: to imagine and express the future as total darkness.
With its strikes of lightning on the horizon, Rhythm and Stealth flickers and burns. Adjacent to this monumental achievement was the tribal psychedelia of ‘Snake Blood,’ on Danny Boyle’s The Beach soundtrack, and their wily ‘Swords (Exit Mix),’ a perfect companion to the original stunner, with its delicious ethereal crunch. The pressure Leftfield was under would eventually break the band in two. It would take 12 years before Barnes returned with an acclaimed live show and album, Tourism. Then 16 years after Rhythm and Stealth, partnering with Adam Wren, Barnes would at last release a third album, Alternative Light Source, and in 2022, This Is What We Do.
The legend of Leftism, by many accounts, was that it was the perfect ur-dance conflagration — “burn, Hollywood, burn!” went its most famous single’s pop refrain — except while many ravers and writers came of age in the early '90s acid house heyday which Leftfield capped off, there was some cultural amnesia when it came to Rhythm and Stealth’s much longer game. In The Face, the “it” magazine of Britain, its future head editor Richard Benson gave Barnes and Daley a tepid reception in 1995. “Our role is to give technology feeling,” Daley told him, invoking his sense of hard hands contrast as a percussionist. Ironically, even though Leftfield had clearly delineated their willingness to test the masses, The Face were the first to whiff by swinging a sword too wide. “Sometimes it can be great for a record to have no feeling at all.”
A few years later on the doorstep of the next millennium, Benson would authorize, contribute, and feature a 20-page spread on George Lucas’ Star Wars prequel: the doomed Phantom Menace getting the ultimate hype in The Face, July 1999. Benson, now as former editor, ironically captured the contrast of the two returns — with Queen Padmé in her ornate Asiatic headdress on the issue cover, a sort of inverse echo of Rhythm and Stealth’s samurai armor on its album cover. But like a shadow warrior, Darth Vader even, the ghost behind the mask, asked a critical question: was the technological equation a little too inhuman? In a way, Daley’s “no feeling at all” comment to Benson echoed Lucas’ hollow digital monstrosity. However, what Leftfield’s warrior moves finely struck was the balance of light over darkness.
“The Thin White Duke,” Bowie that is, once described Leftfield as “craftsmen,” following their tasteful remixes of his ‘Jump They Say.’ And upon closer listen, their sequel paints with light as much as darkness, like the artisan armorer weaving metals, lacquer and leather into a samurai specter readying for battle. In the back of that same issue, Phillips, still an idealistic raver writer, chronicled in his story, “Leftfield’s Return: Pure Genius,” a duo who obsessed over every detail, crafting different edits, adding the subtlest sound effects, putting artistic integrity above commerce and their own well-being. “We had to disappear,” Daley explained of their resistance to fame and expectation in an honorable, heroic, almost neurotic commitment to the authentic.
“Our music has to take me down some kind of emotional development,” Barnes told Phillips. “It has to excite me, it has to make me feel sad. There’s a seriousness there — often we go, ‘It sounds like a graveyard what we’ve done here.’ But that’s just us.” But when you take songs from Leftism and you play them interspersed with songs from Rhythm and Stealth, like sliding a red lens over a blue lens, you get new colors — a stereo-vision of what rave was about and deep down still is — love, but also a self-sacrifice on some level, a survival of the spiritual beyond the material. Because the “graveyard” that Barnes imagined was also a kind of prelude to a resurrection, not Leftfield’s perhaps, but the world they had helped reach its most progressive and authentic articulation — an album as Phillips wrote that was “forcefully futuristic.”
Yet that force also left them more exposed, which keys into the enduring mystery surrounding Leftfield’s success and subsequent drift into obscurity. More dissonant at times, harder and more uncompromising — the post-Daley era has emerged more and more starkly as Barnes unplugged, showcasing his Kraftwerkian devotion with ‘City of Synths’ and his gnarly punk roots with Nottingham post-punk weirdos Sleaford Mods (‘Head and Shoulders’). Growers both, the post-millennial muddle of Leftfield’s later albums is best evinced by the brilliant ‘Universal Everything’ — its clearest bridge to Rhythm and Stealth — a light rising over the shadow mountain, and disappearing.**
Rhythm and Stealth was a conscious redrawing of the Leftfield brand. “We wanted something rawer and more minimal,” Barnes told Sean Bidder for Urb magazine, in 1999. “I think if you’re striving to do something different then you’re going to put a strain on yourself,” added Daley. “I think you have to do that ‘something’ to produce something good.” Cramped by imitators and sick of hearing Leftism derivatives on everything from café soundtracks to the 6 o’clock news, Rhythm and Stealth was Leftfield’s return to basics — throttling their studio mastery into an infinite insight.
And so, one has to listen differently to open its hidden doors. There was heavy weather and surging haywire to feel through before reaching its inner sea of beauty. About a year after they released Rhythm and Stealth, they performed two nights in Paris. On the second night, the journalist Dorian Lynskey captured the conundrum, Daley describing how the night before, he observed the cutting line close up front: “‘There was one couple the other night where she was at the front like that…’ — he pulls a pouty, unimpressed face,” Lynskey described of Daley’s impersonations, at once eliding the underground vs. overground as Leftfield’s set would crank up the horsepower. Daley continued his delight at the French couple’s own crackle at the scission, “— ‘…and he was like this’ — he waves his arms about in bug-eyed raver delirium. ‘He’d obviously taken her out on a date. Maybe he thought, I go and see Leftfield, maybe get ze shag. But I don’t think it worked.’” They had become pure water as the words in ‘Swords’ sings, staying true to rave’s long counter-mission.
For its meticulous mystic sound was just a ghost to most. It was so stealth, it didn’t even register on some radars, for its lack of obvious hooks and less than joyful mood. Even among many musicians and tastemakers who loved their first album, it became controversial, including its legacy with Daley’s departure and the mixed reception of Leftfield’s latter work clouding the horizon of its deep spirited sound. Yet despite its counterintuitive nature, for the discerning ear, or perhaps the ready ear, Daley and Barnes’ last work together is an endless blast of fresh air — the album’s greatest triumph, ‘Phat Planet,’ immortalized in a Guinness TV ad with old school surfers, stampeding horses, killer crashing waves, and allusions to Moby Dick’s Ahab, foreshadowed Leftfield’s greatest explosion, its implications still unfathomed.
“This was never going to be Leftism Part Two,“ Calvin Bush wrote in his review for Muzik magazine, splitting the difference. “In the duo’s recent interviews, one word keeps cropping up — ‘darker’ — and so it proves.…but there’s a nagging feeling that Barnes and Daley have sacrificed the big picture in favour of the tiniest digital details. Leftfield have proved that they’re still relevant. They’re just not as remarkable as they once were.” The expectations raging, it was as if Leftfield were running as silent as a submarine. Pointedly, hearing them tell it, Barnes and Daley were almost resigned to the fact that their revolutionary rave moment had passed, not into the past, but into the timeless. Even their music video for ‘Afrika Shox’ was a “bust.” But without its darker plot, the album would never have revealed all tomorrow’s future shock.***
”I was trying to think about things other than music and I thought I’d go shopping,” Daley explained to Lily Moayeri for Lotus Magazine, anticipating the box that many fans and critics would refuse to let them leave, dismissing Rhythm and Stealth as a disappointment or a musical sphinx that eschewed the faster easier joys of Leftism; if some receivers were scrambled by the new signal, then Leftfield were equally blocked. “I walked into the shop and they were playing Leftism, so I had to just get out,” he said. “Can’t get away from it, man.” Like a giant wave, decades on, its shadow haunts.
And yet, did they escape or did they not? Leftism still gets the most kudos from critics and fans alike. It captured the heady rave days from 1986 to 1996, and it was a chart smash. But its sequel is Leftfield’s true masterpiece — a flawless challenging work of art, built to outsmart the march of time. Listen closely and you’ll be hooked, never quite able to crack its bewitching code. The stealth of rhythm, and wisdom.
Track Listing:
1. Dusted
2. Phat Planet
3. Chant of a Poor Man
4. Double Flash
5. El Cid
6. Afrika Shox
7. Dub Gussett
8. Swords
9. 6/8 War
10. Rino’s Prayer
*“The floodgates were open,” continued Cameron. “Dance music, from being a thriving cult that still prompted the occasional question in the House, became a mass phenomenon, co-opted into advertising, films and sports jingles, assimilated into the subliminal hum of modern living.” It’s easy to forget now just how important the work of Leftfield was in ‘90s Britain, before Daft Punk and its “EDM” children.
The ferment of London, Manchester, Birmingham, Sheffield, Leeds, and Glasgow acted as the critical compression system that transformed and accelerated electronic music from the original blueprints of German krautrock and British synth pop, and the urban funks of New York, Chicago and Detroit, from disco and hip hop to house and techno, into its current unstoppable momentum by way of Ibiza, Los Angeles, Berlin and what now seems like every corner of the Earth, wherever moolah contends.
**Although some critics were kinder than many fans, there were certainly some serious detractors. One in particular wrote a two-page critique in Q Magazine, giving Rhythm and Stealth a three out of five star rating while Leftism in that review was held up as a peak in ‘90s electronic dance music with nowhere perhaps left to go. Except that review it turns out was by a fan to some degree more than an objective-minded critic. As Daley explained to Barry Glendenning, when he was asked about the imbalance between Leftism’s reception and its darker sequel, he relayed:
“I've a great story about that, actually. A friend of mine knows the journalist who wrote it, and the day after my friend read that review he said he saw the same bloke walking down Oxford Street wearing a Leftfield t-shirt! So, y'know, he can't dislike us too much. Then again, maybe all his other shirts were in the wash that day."
That journalist was none other than Andy Pemberton, who wrote several influential and often inventive articles for Mixmag in the early to mid ‘90s. His review in that September 1999 issue of Q Magazine, with Mel C of the Spice Girls on the cover, Alanis Morisette, R.E.M., The Offspring and other MTV regulars in its pages, has commercial company, which makes his competent yet crushed accounting a bit distorted in retrospect, for as Daley avers, there seemed a lack of objectivity.
“Leftfield have become victims of their own propaganda,” Pemberton charged. “By allowing themselves to be billed as the music of the future, they have nowhere to go now they sound too familiar. The future they once promised is now. And there’s no getting away from it, it just doesn’t sound like Leftfield.”
Elsewhere in the feature review, he notes that their original audience were bombed out of their minds “four years ago” and “are now paying off mortgages and listening to Dean Martin.” He also gets into the fissure that had emerged between Daley and Barnes during Rhythm and Stealth. “Daley kept fiddling while his hapless partner could only sit by and fume.” And yet, the difficulty of any artwork’s birth doesn’t precondition its outcome or mean it’s lesser. It can express the human struggle.
While I greatly respect Calvin Bush, who gave Rhythm and Stealth five stars out of five, while basically saying Leftfield couldn’t outdo Leftism, I find a similar “nagging” theme in his review as well. It’s the same for Andy Crysell’s review in New Musical Express where he argues that while Leftfield escaped the “infinite loop” of their Leftism sound with Rhythm and Stealth, nonetheless, he dislikes its discretion.
“Good things come to those who wait?” he wrote. “Well, a few good things, though not enough to warrant the wait. Leftfield might have escaped their infinite loop, but not without a loss of judgement. It wasn't specifically the 'newest' sounds we wanted. It was an album as angry, intense and emotional as Leftism. A task Rhythm & Stealth is up to periodically at best.” Unmoved, he gave it a much harsher six out of ten.
What I get from all of this is something of the immensity of Leftism as a crossover sensation that got a lot of UK critics as fans hopped up on the idea that it was the best of its kind. But while Leftism has many great songs and captures a moment in time, it also sounds more of its time and is thus less timeless from a greater remove.
In any case, when I reviewed Rhythm and Stealth for Lotus Magazine, it worked for me supremely well from my Californian context, headphones on, and little support for electronic music from radio or the press — at least nothing enduring or that was authentic. Rhythm and Stealth was punk and rebellious. And it still is.
As Daley noted in a different interview, “We knew the album was going to be more stark and electronic, it was the one thing we established early on. Kind of a reaction against Leftism. We wanted it to be different without losing our identity or changing into a different band.” For Leftfield, there was a bigger picture then…
A shadow would cometh in the form of 9/11, wars, plagues, and major economic and social disruptions. While the initial honeymoon of rave, the UK’s second “Summer of Love,” indicated a happier technological romance, in retrospect, was Leftism really the only answer? For me, this is why Rhythm and Stealth is resonant.
Like a black prism, it both captures and amplifies light — sonic light. For like the work of Jeff Mills or Underground Resistance, and Photek, the commitment to rhythm and drums (Barnes and Daley were both drummers) transforms space and time into something more warped and broken. No darkness. No light.
In all seriousness, there is something about Rhythm and Stealth’s album cover that deserves more consideration. Why samurai armor? Yes, there is the dangerous and patient aspect of the samurai. But maybe also Barnes or Daley read James Clavell’s Shōgun, or knew the history of Tokugawa Ieyasu.
That is, the stealth bit is not just some bullshit. There were many critics who got the message and greatly appreciated the restraint of Rhythm and Stealth. But Pemberton et al hammer Leftfield for not delivering the thrills in its denouement. He dismisses ‘Swords.’ But in truth it’s a quiet masterstroke.
I invoked Richard Benson’s iffy reception of Leftism in The Face because not everyone loved Leftism. But I also wanted to highlight his suspicion of its “ethnic” and reggae aesthetics — his sarcastic “Maan.” I think it helps illustrate our fickleness and how differently one can read artistic freedom.
In the story of Shōgun, the character Toranaga, modeled on Tokugawa, holds back and waits. He doesn’t run into battle. He doesn’t make the first move. He studies the wind. He wins by rhythm and stealth.
Because the rhythm was changing and had changed by 1999. Pemberton noted it himself. It was not Leftfield’s fault that the British government criminalized raves. Its joys receded. It was time for stealth.
***Even the nervy director Chris Cunningham was felled by its spell, foreswearing music videos after one delay, reshoot, and mishap after another for ‘Afrika Shox’ — real big picture bollocks in a way given the cross pressures. Cunningham, who had made a name for himself as the director behind music videos like the Aphex Twin’s ‘Come to Daddy’ and Bjork’s ‘All is Full of Love,’ would recede himself into the background as the mainstream re-absorbed big swaths of the underground.
The ‘Afrika Shox’ video in fact got little play in the US, where it was banned from MTV and most other stations over its dark sense of humor. “That video we made was like a dark comedy,” Daley explained to Glendenning. “It's not meant to be taken seriously. They sent us a list of reasons why they banned it: drug abuse, fear, loss of limbs, death, promotion of drugs, y'know.” Talking about stealth, he was committed.
To which Glendenning thankfully asked: were you surprised when it was banned? “No, we were expecting it, to be honest,” answered Daley in a devil may care kind of way — a theme that ironically runs throughout an album that was so obsessed over by trend watchers. “The first time I saw it I thought, ‘a lot of people aren't going to like this.’”
Even Afrika Bambaata’s appearance now has a mixed and troubled resonance. In 2016, former members of Zulu Nation publicly accused Bambaata of molesting them when they were minors. It has never been proven in a court of law and Bambaata has vehemently denied the allegations. Nonetheless, futurism is not what it used to be.
So in its own meta way, Rhythm and Stealth was a bust on many levels, and yet it was also “dusted,” checked, and tempered. That is, it was tough, dark, stark, and just as authentic as Leftism: but its shadow, its contrast, its truth. By 1999, the “party was over,” and the subsequent catastrophes of the early 21st century only proved it.
One can hearken back to their angry yet uplifting ‘21st Century Poem,’ but everyone learned that Lemn Sissay’s words were actually more true than most ravers imagined: our dreams “terrorized,” homes “set alight,” bridges and visions burned. Once the UK Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994 passed, its effects wore in by 1999.
Rhythm and Stealth was about survival, about doubling down for the long fight. Its album cover of samurai armor in retrospect predicted as much. One more thing. I allude to The Velvet Underground’s ‘All Tomorrow’s Parties’ with my play on Alvin Toffler’s concept of “future shock”:
‘All Tomorrow’s Parties’ was Andy Warhol’s favorite Velvet Underground song. It’s about his Factory party scene. It’s about the dark and sad side of it as much as it’s about its colorful and crazy side.
And “future shock” is the concept of people becoming paralyzed or overwhelmed by the pace and power of technological change. Following the ‘90s, this too has proved true in so many ways.