Portishead's Dummy (33 13) by RJ Wheaton

Author:RJ Wheaton [Wheaton, RJ]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Continuum US
Published: 2011-09-29T05:00:00+00:00

She told Ben Thompson in 1994 that:

The fun for me is finding a tone which goes with the backing track … when I’m singing “Numb,” to me that’s me trying to be a black soul singer. At other times I might be trying to be Neil Young or Tom Waits. That might make me false, but I think it’s more honest to admit it. I think if I just found one style and stuck to it, I’d get very bored. People who do that just end up imitating themselves.175

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There are some great subtleties of meaning. The refrain of “Sour Times” would be belted out by a lesser singer, but Gibbons’ restraint renders it instead with a breathy, insouciant delivery, suggesting the possibility of meeting the coldness of the world with an indifference and withdrawal on one’s own terms. In the same song, after the ghostly meandering of “Who am I? What, and why?” there is the assertion that “All I have left is my memories of yesterday.” The knife-edge pronunciation of “left” sounds almost calculating, which makes the peculiar frailty of the closing half of the line seem instead knowing, toying, coy, suggesting that she controls the disclosure of those memories. A poker player with the cards against her chest.

She is suspicious of given certainties. “This life ain’t fair,” she sings in “It Could be Sweet,” but the line is almost thrown away, more spoken than intoned; there is a delicious swoop through “You don’t get something for nothin’,” undercutting the glib certainty of the cliché. Elsewhere she uses tone to puncture aphorism — a hardness, a determination, creeping into “for time and again” in “It’s a Fire.” She is always multiplying meaning in this music. In “Pedestal,” after the line “You abandoned me” — the last syllable drawn into a deadspin of reverberation — there is just enough closeness, just enough softness on the following line — “how I suffer” — that for a second it is possible to hear in it some sarcasm.

The self in these lyrics is constantly under pressure from the world around it: “circumstance will decide,” she sings in “Sour Times.” Yet even at the moments of most painful self-abnegation, Gibbons finds a way of suggesting some control; of protecting a core of agency, of action; of withholding the possibility of self-assertion. That comes across in the most flagrant ironies in these lyrics, in the extended refrains of “Sour Times,” and “Glory Box.” But it is a level of complexity woven into the fabric of the album. Dummy offers in its approach — systematic, ironic, complex, and compromised — an examination and rejection of so many versions of the modern — female — self, that it makes of this music a protest album, a plea — a cry — for freedom from over-determination by the world outside.

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