Great Moments on Video №18: Portishead - Glory Box

(Roseland Ballroom, New York City, July 24, 1997)

Great Moments on Video №18: Portishead - Glory Box

(Roseland Ballroom, New York City, July 24, 1997)

One thing that, in retrospect, I have come to strongly respect about the 1990s is that it was really the last decade, I think, in which artists could arise within a certain formulaic musical style and then transcend it by means of their individual artistic vision — not cross over to a different genre, which is quite another thing, and more often follows commercial than artistic purposes, but actually bend the rules of the game and sort of implode it from within. Radiohead are, of course, the most classic example, having bent the rules of grunge / alt-rock to obey their vision, rather than vice versa — but there are many others, like My Bloody Valentine turning generic shoegaze into majestic rock nirvana, or Ween growing from irreverent iconococlastic pranksters into the epitome of a post-modern rock band blurring the lines between soul and sarcasm.

However, ever since I really started to catch up on significant musical developments in that decade, it’s always seemed to me that the textbook example for this phenomenon of transcending would still have to be Portishead’s debut album — which, for my money, they would never be able to top again (and maybe it explains why they only had two more records in all). Dummy is always formally classified as «trip-hop», but comparing it with contemporary Massive Attack or Tricky shows that, essentially, it respects the standard purposes of «trip-hop» to more or less the same degree as Chopin’s waltzes and mazurkas, or Bach’s gigues and minuets respect the standard purposes of aristocratic ballroom dancing. Not only is the music, roughly speaking, far more trip than it is hop, but it incorporates such a miriad of artistic influences — all the way from Peggy Lee to Henry Mancini to Funkadelic to The Cure — and processes them in such a unique and totally meaningful and totally modern manner, that the rhythmic and technical foundation on which the music stands becomes more of a «Nineties’ brand» for the songs than the main carrier of the musical message itself. Important, but not defining.

And not only is Dummy one of the greatest albums ever to be so firmly tied to its time and place and simultaneously feel as if it absolutely transcended time, but it is also at the center of one of the most memorable video experience of the Nineties — Portishead joining with a symphonic orchestra to commemorate their sound and vision in mid-1997, right at the same time that OK Computer was on its merry-melancholic way to becoming the album of the decade. For that matter, the ambitions of Dummy were more modest — it is much more intimate, personal, singer-songwriter-ish than OK Computer’s summarize-the-whole-world ambitions — but it is precisely because it works so well on the «micro-» rather than «macro»-level that when the band is at their best, it cuts far deeper than any song on OK Computer.

Just about any performance from the Roseland is golden, and there’s a good, respectable reason why ‘Roads’ is usually singled out as the untouchable standard (as of this moment, the ‘Roads’ video on YT has 68 million views, which is several times as much as all the others put together). However, I think that in (fairly subjective, of course) terms of «iconicity», ‘Glory Box’, which originally closed out the main set of the show, is a better audio and visual illustration of what made Portishead so outstanding as a musical collective, rather than just a supporting vehicle for the power of Beth Gibbons. On ‘Glory Box’, she is still the main star of the show, but she shares some of that power with everybody else — and comes out even more «empowered» in the process.

I won’t go too much into the chilly awesomeness of ‘Glory Box’ on its own — other than state that I actually did make the effort to listen to most of the other songs that sample Isaac Hayes’ ‘Ike’s Rap II’ as well, and not a single one of them, from Tricky to Alessia Cara to whoever else, is able to make as much personal use of that bass and those strings as Portishead do. (For the record, I have never been dismissive of the use of sampling in general, as long as sampling treats the original composition as a sort of «foundation» for additional, logically and emotionally fitting pieces of the puzzle — the same way, I guess, that we admire a Scrabble player for aesthetically completing another player’s word). My original gushing review of Dummy must still be out there somewhere, and my opinion on the album and on this particular song as a Nineties’ masterpiece has only solidified with time, anyway.

But the live performance, even if, as Beth humbly apologizes at the end, it gets "a bit dodgy in places" (not sure which exact places she meant), adds a wonderful visual layer that, like the song itself, is very much of its own time — and keeps reminding me what a cool time it was. First and foremost, it is appropriately colored for what I nowadays like to call The Brown Decade. Think back on it and you’ll remember just how much everything was brown, really. The photo tints. The movies. The club scene. The sweaters. ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’. Dirt by Alice In Chains. Ween’s favorite color. A sort of natural backlash, too, to the glammy colors and futuristic lights of the Eighties — we all sort of went back to Mother Earth for a while, whose natural elements are soil and shit, and guess which color they are. Brown, brown, brown, sometimes depressively so. Look at the video and its overriding pattern. Any of today’s equivalents of Beth Gibbons and her pals would probably flash around every living color in the world.

Then there’s the addition of a full orchestra. Specifically for ‘Glory Box’, one could always argue that there is hardly any sense in hiring a full orchestra to just play that one sampled phrase over and over again (although they do add a new and unique ‘Day In The Life’-like tinge with the crescendo during the final bridge section). But the orchestra is more of an imposing symbolic presence here — a final (or initial?) link in a chain that stretches out from the «classical» era to the jazz and rock era (as represented by Adrian Utley, the guitar player) to the hip hop era (as represented by Geoff Barrow, manning the turntables): the past, the present, and the future (?) of music thus united as one, with the one looking for A Reason To Be A Woman on top.

It’s kinda hard to notice all that, of course, seeing just how much everybody’s attention is always drawn to Beth Gibbons. Like most of the best representatives of her generation (I’d like to say my generation, but she’s still more than ten years older than me), she’s the perfect «anti-glam star», looking, singing, and moving in all the opposite ways to established practices and coming out the winner each time. Patti Smith and Kate Bush are pretty conventional next to her — the former with her predictably maniacal rock’n’roll energy and the latter with her predictably extravagant art-pop paraphernalia. Beth Gibbons makes her move with a brown sweater (of course), a lit cigarette, a stuttery shuffle, and a microphone that she hangs on to as if it were her only magical protection from all those scary people around.

Funny how the camera does not properly dare to zoom in on her until a thousand flowers could bloom in the second verse; instead, it just hovers around the orchestra and the audience, gives us broad panoramic shots, or intentionally puts the singer out of focus. Perhaps this somehow reflects the «flat», lo-fi start of the song, which meant for the lyrical heroine of the song to first announce her presence as a sexy, but soulless android before finding her human self in the chorus — something Beth beautifully recreates onstage even without any studio effects. When the camera does finally disclose her secret, it’s pretty hard to tear away from her face, whose transformations mirror the song’s own drift from bittercold irony to sentimental tenderness to tearful desperation. Then, of course, there’s always the cigarette, which functions both as a regular magic talisman and a symbolic link to the mystery of the classic age of pre-war divas: from Marlene Dietrich to Billie Holiday, there’s a little bit of everyone imprinted on Beth Gibbons’ style and image.

Special honorable mention should, of course, go to Adrian, who, with his burly stature, simple jacket, and chewing gum, rather resembles a dock work overseer than a musician, yet ends up giving us an even more expressive (if, predictably, sonically less polished) guitar solo than the original version — this time, his little guitar inferno plays a couple more cat-and-mouse bars with you before dragging you down with it, and not a single exaggerated guitar face pulled along with the strings. I dunno, it’s kinda cool when here you are laying down one of the greatest guitar solos ever composed by mankind and you’re just... chewing gum along with it. Perhaps Prince should have tried something like that. (Then again, I have a really hard time imagining Prince embracing the «brown side» of the Nineties’ aesthetics).

The true nature of the song’s, and of this particular performance’s, greatness is that whenever I end up mesmerized by it — and this happens almost every time — it seems to be for all the wrong reasons. People like to cling on to the give me a reason to be a woman line and hail the song as a feminist, or post-feminist, or quasi-meta-neo-post-feminist anthem, all of which it may very well be. Or they gush over its formal «trip-hoppiness» and go all Amazon on us: "if you like this, you’ll also like Massive Attack, Tricky, Funky Porcini, and Baby Fox", which is more of a generative AI than a properly human line of thinking. Or, at best, they call it "sad and sexy", which kinda works if you don’t have too many other words at your disposal — surely, though, "sad and sexy" does not cover its extra-dimensional, Angelo-Badalamenti-on-much-heavier-drugs flavor. There’s lots of magic here that still requires explanation, and I remain puzzled at why none of the acclaimed art-pop personas from the 21st century have ever come close to plumbing the same depths. Perhaps they simply need a little more brown in their lives?..