Basement Jaxx – Back 2 the Wild
Seapunk? Played out?
[Video][Website]
[5.14]
Anthony Easton: So much like a fashionable update of Bow Wow Wow, including the pleasures (the tight rhythms, the yelling vocals, those percussions) and the concerns (how racist is this exactly?).
[7]
Alfred Soto: A cross between Cartoon Network programming and Tom Tom Club, which fans of the former might argue is a redundancy.
[6]
Patrick St. Michel: Miss Emma Lee and Baby Chay, who provide the vocals for this song, seem to have no backstory whatsoever. It appears Basement Jaxx conjured them out of thin air solely for the purpose of “Back 2 The Wild.” Which is pretty unforgivable — not only is this song bad from the goofy-bongo get-go, but the Jaxx went and introduced a duo responsible for the worst sounding vocals I’ve heard anywhere in 2013. Maybe it’s a gag?
[0]
Brad Shoup: Tasteless isn’t quite the word, because this is really delicious: great bassline, ironic non sequiturs, a gleeful multiculti blendjob. Mostly that bassline, though. Damn.
[9]
Scott Mildenhall: As creators of one of the greatest albums since hyperbole began (that being The Singles), it comes as no surprise to discover that “Let’s Have A Kiki” is much more fun in the hands of Basement Jaxx than it was the Scissor Sisters. While they continually ironed out the creases that made them interesting in pursuit of success that accordingly became more and more elusive, Jaxx haven’t; this is as deranged and unabashedly joyful as anything they’ve ever done. If only they had a PR machine to rival that of Daft Punk, a band who surely can’t have many more songs recognisable to the general public than they do (perhaps even less), it might be number one right now instead of “Get Lucky”. (That might also require it being a bit more song-oriented and, well, better, but the point remains.)
[7]
Jonathan Bogart: It makes sense that the Jaxx would apply their brutal maximalist aesthetic to 1980s electro for this song, which wields as unselfconsciously retrograde a lyric as I’ve heard in some time. Sure, pop history is full of exoticized noble-savagery and idealized atavisms, but “Tarzan Boy” (or maybe “Jungle Love”) was about the last time you could get away with that shit even tongue in cheek. I don’t know how ironic they intend their wink to be, but the most depressing interpretation is that they don’t intend to wink at all.
[5]
Edward Okulicz: No smarter than any 80s teeny pop track that got politely tribal, but a hell of a lot more laboured, that is to say, overstuffed. Basement Jaxx are usually meticulous about having every detail work together to create a groove (even if it’s sometimes an annoying one) but nothing about this collage works together let alone works. When they’re great, they’re great, when they’re bad and putting bad guest vocalists on top…
[2]
So does this hold the record for highest controversy index?
Nope.
This is like a Yo Gabba Gabba song. I love it.
don’t watch yo gabba gabba but i’m with rebecca this is pretty great
Also…when I hear “back to the jungle” and “let’s get wild,” it evokes images of going back like, 1 million years to the era of early man. I dunno if I hear the noble-savagery in it … ??
Maybe I’m being dense, but if someone could point it out to me.
A little surprised that no one mentioned L’Trimm.
My problem is that white supremacist ideology has always supposed that present-day non-white people exist in a similar state to early man; whether that’s posited as a good thing or a bad thing depends on the particular white supremacist doctrine (pro-“civilization” vs. pro-“savagery”), but either way it equates tropicality with primitivism. A lot of artists of color have made really interesting art out of these ideas — but I’m not sure I trust Basement Jaxx to handle them with the necessary finesse.
And yeah, this isn’t necessarily my fight to fight. Maybe I’m just oversensitive to it because I grew up absorbing the racist doctrine of Tarzan novels and white hippies painting Native Americans as vanished shamans, and am still working to purge myself of all the shit that’s left over from growing up a Eurocentric fantasy dork. I’m not saying anyone else has to hear these echoes, but I do, and it kind of ruins the fun.
Why purge yourself of Eurocentrist fantasy? Better to reckon with it, as you are now.
This sounds like a claustrophobic cover/devolution of Go Bang! from Dinosaur L/Arthur Russell. It’s too cluttered to be any real fun.