Like a Glucose Overdose: Scritti Politti & the Invention of Self-Aware Pop

Scritti Politti’s Cupid & Psyche 85 belongs to a select body of albums whose titles include the year of release, among them Talking Heads’ 77 and Van Halen’s 1984. In Cupid’s case, the date stamp makes total sense: Everything about the sound — exquisitely intricate machine-funk — screams mid-Eighties state of the art. The title of the album’s big Billboard smash “Perfect Way” also seems self-reflexive, a nod to the music’s crisp precision and polished glisten. “I’ve got a perfect way to make the girls go crazy,” sings Scritti mainman Green Gartside — self-preening that doubles as boast about his seduction skills, and celebration of the flawless hit single built by his crack squad of session players and technicians.

But if the soon-to-be-reissued Cupid & Psyche’s high-gloss surfaces and hi-tech grooves typified mid-Eighties dance pop, in other respects this was far from standard chart fare. There’s the first bit of the title, for starters. Drawn from Greek and Roman mythology, the fraught romance of Cupid and Psyche is a convoluted and fantastical story whose moral, Gartside believed, was that the more you know someone, the less you love them. That erroneous notion inspired the album’s gorgeous ballad “A Little Knowledge.” Elsewhere, ideas from French theorists Jacques Lacan and Jacques Derrida lurk within songs like “The Word Girl” and “Absolute.” The latter, a stunning U.K. hit in 1984, laments the void of meaning caused by the collapse of values and beliefs, a postmodern predicament that left fretful intellectuals like Gartside helplessly adrift and hopelessly longing for “a principle/to make your heart invincible.”

Not your usual dancefloor fodder, then! How Scritti ended up in the Top 20 on both sides of the Atlantic involves a journey almost as winding and peculiar as the saga of Psyche and Cupid. The group began in 1977 as a Clash-inspired punk outfit called the Against, then almost instantly mutated into a radically experimental collective renamed after Scritti Politici, an anthology of “political writings” by the Marxist thinker Antonio Gramsci. After a single and two EPs of fraught and fractured post-punk — later compiled as Early — that made them the doyens of the U.K.’s DIY underground, Gartside decided that the overground was where the real action was: no point in critiquing for the predisposed, time to take your ideas to the masses. So Scritti transplanted their lyrical perplexities into more lusciously palatable styles like soul, funk and lovers-rock reggae. But when singles such as ‘The “Sweetest Girl”’ stumbled at the edge of the U.K. Top 40, Gartside concluded that a more drastic reinvention was required. Jettisoning his original comrades, he hooked up with New York producer/programmer David Gamson and drummer Fred Maher. Together they set to work building a totally modern Scritti sound using the most advanced machinery available: Synclavier and Fairlight samplers, drum machines made by Oberheim, Linn and Roland. 

Starting with the 1984 U.K. hit single “Wood Beez (Pray Like Aretha Franklin),” Scritti jumped into the middle of a conversation underway in Black music, as producers like Leon Sylvers and Jimmy Jam & Terry Lewis competed to extract new potentials of funk from the latest equipment. Producer of post-disco acts like the Whispers and Shalamar, Sylvers spoke of how his ideal was “to have the whole record sing, to work on the music tracks so they take on the same character as the vocals.” Cupid & Psyche likewise is crammed with hooks and hyper-syncopations — glancing synth-vamps and rhythm-guitar glints — that mesh together like the cogs inside “a Swiss watch,” as Gamson put it.

Most of the album consists of brisk electro-funk like “Small Talk” and “Hypnotize.” But “The Word Girl,” Scritti’s biggest U.K. hit, opens Cupid with a mellow skank of romantic reggae midway between Gregory Isaacs and Ace of Base. It’s lovers rock, but with a lyric that unpicks the mystifications of love. The idea came to Gartside when he noticed how often he used the word “girl” in his songs. That got him musing on the gulf between impossible ideal and flawed reality, and the way that as individuals and as a culture we’re addicted to fantasies of happy endings, everlasting love, “finding the one.” Which sounds coldhearted, but you only have to hear the swoony way Gartside sings lines like “Oh how your flesh-and-blood became the Word” to know that he’s still in love with love songs — listening to them, writing them.

Super-slick mid-Eighties production has enjoyed a retro vogue in the last decade. Fastidiously recreating the era’s jittery chitters of guitar, canned-sounding reverbs and Yamaha DX7 keyboard chimes, Haim’s Days Are Gone harked back to the sound pioneered by Scritti and their Black peers, then adopted by adult-oriented rock stars like Fleetwood Mac looking to claw their way back onto the radio. But if there’s a true successor to Scritti’s oblique strategy of infiltration via simulation, it might be PC Music and the hyperpop genre that followed. Take ericdoa’s recent single “Fantasize,” a modern R&B jam in the Jeremih/Chris Brown style, but so frosted with Auto-Tune and production sheen you almost have to shield your ears from the dazzle. With other hyperpop artists like 100 gecs and glaive, the connection to Cupid-era Scritti is not so much the precise sonic coordinates as the pursuit of an utterly denatured sound whose processed brightness elevates your mood like a glucose overdose. Forgoing conventional underground strategies like noise and dissonance, hyperpop recognizes that the sheer melodic prettiness of commercial music can contain its own kind of excess and extremism. As Gartside once put it himself: “There is a dirt, a criminality if you like, in sweetness itself.”