Portishead - Dummy

No idea why, but today i want to listen to Dummy, the debut album from Portishead. Sadly, my copy is visibly grotesque and the disc has a crack in it, so we're slum-tubing it today. That's fine actually, they famously put records on the floor and walked on them before sampling/scratching the hell out of them.

I'm always confused when people call it somber or heavy or overwrought, like that's surprising. Of course it is, this was the age of full-frontal sarcasm. This is an album about intensely emotional femininity under the umbrella of an entendre, make it a double. 

We won't go full abstract, we'll keep it in the context of Beth singing inside the dark, intertextually sampled, and heavily manipulated musical world that Adrian and Geoff create. A world where the only outlet for intense emotion comes from the way in which all these quotations and allusions are presented; it's the act of speaking the ideas that matters more than the specific content/context. All the way through it's presented as "i'm such a dummy for continuing to fall in love and trying to make these relationships work," but the twist, the sucker punch, the double of the entendere is Glory Box. Do i really have to tell you out loud that's a Vagina Monologues worthy euphemism? The M. Beth Shyamalan kick to the groin is "no, Dummy, i'm tired of trying to make you love me, i want you to give me a reason to be a woman." 

Such a good album.