Portishead's Dummy (2011)

This entry by R.J. Wheaton in the 33-1/3 series is nearly twice as long as most of them. At first it annoyed me a little because one of the best things about these books is their brevity. Longer than even a long album review they are still short enough to be over before you know it. I don't know much about Wheaton but he felt like a studio hand. That might have been the research, which is deep. He dissects the songs down to the second, calling attention to this at 0:12 and that at 1:21. There's a lot of information about the recording of this album, which was an intricate process, so eventually I made my peace with the length. Wheaton is not exactly prolix but he often seems to be thinking out loud, in sentence fragments, as if orienting himself. Then he sprints into description. But it's a hard album for most to write about—exotic, mysterious, alien, unique. Wheaton has the sense of it as a generational marker and sees himself square in the right place. His older (UK) brothers and sisters listened to The Stone Roses, Pills 'n' Thrills and Bellyaches, and Screamadelica. But perhaps Wheaton's best point about Portishead and Dummy has nothing to do with generations: "It is not music that we hear and say 'I want to be part of that'; instead: 'that music is part of me.'" I was 39 when Dummy came out and that's what I heard too. There's nothing else quite like Portishead. Wheaton's other great insight is what drives most of the book: "the album was built—built, not recorded" (his italics). There's a lot of good detail on the construction and a fair sense of the music, along with more glancing insights that can be surprising in their penetration. "[T]he music is only a pretext for the non-communication, the solitude, and the silence imposed by the sound volume," he writes, discussing the intimacies and alienations of live music. "Loud music makes us strangers to ourselves, intimates to others. It becomes a social lubricant." But I must say I am suspicious when these little books run to 100 or more footnotes and this one pushes toward 300. Goodness. Most of the time, as in this case, a bibliography should take care of it. Perhaps the most interesting fact about the album, and I learned it here, is that it was a big hit commercially, selling some 3.6 million units by 2011. So multiplatinum, yet it also flatters our indie underground impulses—win-win. This book's a good one for fans of the album and/or Portishead.

In case the library is closed due to pandemic.