Three Things: Underworld - Born Slippy (Nuxx)
Synthesized, Sequenced, and Sublime
As part of therapy, I've been tasked to write more, specifically about
music. This particular task was to write three things I love about a
piece of music I deeply enjoy.
The opening moments of synthesized reflection and calm on Born Slippy take me immediately to 1995 (H.G. Wells is dancing a jig knowing music is a time machine). That 42 seconds or so borders on meditative, before the surge of berserk drum machines accelerates us through the next six and a half minutes. It’s the type of music that accompanies a plaintive moment in a film as our lead is staring out over a body of water, AND it can complement a moment of peace. As you can tell from the first sentence, I consider it reflective and calm. Ask me next week and it’s likely I’ll have a different answer. This is ambidextrous music. Because it’s impossible for me (and a few hundred thousand others I presume) to separate Born Slippy from Trainspotting, the revelatory 1996 film, Born Slippy is the moment of betrayal that leads to freedom.
The lyrics swing between prime Marc Bolan-style boogie (Drive boy, dog boy, dirty numb angel boy) and numbskull dumb, and I’m here for it all, including and especially the ridiculous “Talking the most blonde I ever met shouting ‘Lager, lager, lager, lager.’” If all those years of devouring the seemingly endless stream of Beat Generation words taught me anything, it’s that we’re capable of an astonishing dichotomy. We’re each of us angelheaded hipsters, barstool poets, and shithouse philosophers.
Born Slippy was born kinetic, custom-made to take charge of all your limbs at once and send your entire body careening in all directions. Invented if not for a body in hyperdrive on a British dancefloor in the middle ‘90s, then almost certainly to pinball off the walls inside your mind. The beat, the beat, the BIG BEAT driving toward a destination of folly or joy, or because we’re capable of that beautifully absurd dichotomy, both. All at once.