Sixx maniacs

Sixx of one, half a dozen of the other...

Here's a really interesting piece by Vivien Goldman about Rebel Sixx and what she calls "Bad Mind"  - a musical mood of desolation and distrust emanating from Jamaica and Trinidad & Tobago. The feature is informed by her decades-long relationship with the Caribbean and its music, including a recent spell living in Jamaica.  Along with a rich sense of the economic realities of the region, the piece involves on-the-ground research into the rivalries between different garrison communities, territorialized conflicts that played out in music, in gang strife, and in politics. It draws parallels between the attempted assassination of Bob Marley and the murder of Sixx. 

Until reading this long piece, everything I knew about Rebel Sixx was from Kit Mackintosh's Neon Screams, where his music is extravagantly celebrated in the chapter on trap dancehall and "Trinibad".

What struck me reading Goldman's piece is the huge gulf between the ways in which she and Mackintosh respond to the music of Sixx and similar 21st Century dancehall artists. Which is perhaps not that odd given that a couple of generations separate them. Still, it's surprising that there's almost zero overlap, no point of contiguity between the two sensibilities. 

Mackintosh is a young man intoxicated by the surfaces of the sound, giving himself and his prose over fully to the ecstasies of vocal psychedelia: the unearthly transmutation of the human voice through Auto-Tune, Harmony Engine, and other processing technologies pushed to the extreme. 

A lifelong lover of  and critical champion for Caribbean music, Goldman hears through the surface to the social text. Indeed she finds the songs and singing of Rebel Sixx (and others like Shane-O and Rygin King) haunting "despite its excessive use of vocoder".

Kit Mackintosh on Rebel Sixx: 

"Rebel Sixx... perpetually phases and fluctuates between multiversal realities in his tracks. He's forever suspended in the slipstreams of quantum superposition as he manages to simultaneously manifest in every form imaginable. Like the hall of mirrors visual distortions observers experience near neutron stars and black holes - multiple-imaging, the wavelengths of light stretching and squashing - Rebel Sixx's vocal timbre shifts at every turn.

"In his tracks - like "Evil Me Dweet', 'Quick Evil Pt. 2', 'Dem Know', 'Evilous', Parliament', 'Rifle War', and 'Looney'- Rebel's voice will be shattered and fractal in one moment, then squished and squeaky in the next, but then bulbous and bubble-shaped immediately afterwards as successive layers of multi-tracking, pitch-shifting, reverbs, choruses and fuck knows what else are interfaced with his Auto-Tune. His voice will sound like anything from the radiant curvature of sunshine around the Earth's atmosphere to the jagged layers of off-centre red and blue you see when you view 3-D images without the special glasses on. Rebel Sixx's music is an exercise in bending, refracting and contorting synaesthetic light.....

"To understand Trinibad is to wander through the desolate corridors of abandoned cognition; it has no memories and no associations. The music doesn't harken back to anything, nor does it fill in the blanks. Rather it leaves you suspended in a perpetual year zero... Listening to it you hallucinate states of consciousness but not colours or shapes or places or people.... Nothing really exists in it. Nothing's quite experienced."

Vivien Goldman on Rebel Sixx: 

" A wry intelligence in his voice first drew me in. The way Rebel Sixx sang it, bloody images became a sad seduction, leading to contemplation; his sweet and sour sound poetically, cynically, recounting brutality with a honeyed soprano and heavenly timing.

"He was a musical original, and I had no idea when I first heard his music that he was dead, let alone the circumstances. When I fell for Rebel like any fangirl, I assumed he was Jamaican as he was so popular there. During that year I spent back on the island, his songs were everywhere—the bleak delicacy of his and Travis World’s “No Trust No Love,” and “Rifle War,” “Ghetto Prophet,” “Message to the Heart.” As I adjusted to the feel of this music, oddly bass-free and with an alarming emphasis on the evils of Bad Mind, realizing my favorites were by one artist helped me to absorb and understand the new sound.

"Among the phrases Rebel spread was “Fully Dunce,” a backhanded compliment. When the expression wound up on bookbags and t-shirts, Rebel was accused of spreading anti-intellectualism—whereas he was always encouraging youth to keep studying. His sardonic throwaway had been enough to start a craze and a controversy. His early death disturbed me so deeply, I needed to find out what had happened.

"It was, I soon learned, a direct hit. Two masked men broke in at 11:45 PM on Sunday, July 5, 2020, and shot him 20 times at close range at his home in Bon Air Gardens, Arouca, outside Port of Spain; Rebel hadn’t heard them enter as he was on his Playstation with headphones. Obviously Rebel had upset some people badly – but his music sang so implicitly of humanity with all our foibles! Why would people want Rebel killed, even as his art was deepening?"

I'm from the generation in between Viv and Kit - so it makes sense that I'd be equally attracted to both ways of feeling the music. I'd go further than that, though - where I want to be, critically, is exactly that zone between ecstatic surface and social reality.  I'm interested in the membrane between the mythopoeic sound-shapes and the lifeworld that effuses them.  Roots and future, content and form, truth and illusion:  I wouldn't tip the balance to one side or the other. 

Tommy Lee Sparta, another totemic / talismanic figure in Neon Screams, also crops up quite a bit in Goldman's "Bad Mind Music" piece.