Ignore the video; I chose this basically because it’s how I feel today, at the end of a marathon of working. But it’s not a total loss; this was a song I was obsessed with back in… 1995, I think? Perhaps 1996, but it was around about the same time I was discovering Portishead and the whole Trip Hop thing, and this was somewhere close to that in my head. Justin Warfield’s pop-culture-laden rapping, I’ve covered before, and its appeal then is still the case here, but just listening to this again right now, it strikes me that this song is all about the bassline, which unfurls slowly and somewhat scuzzily. There’s something seductive about it, but also something dirty, somehow. Back when I was twenty-one, that kind of thing was fascinating to me, because I didn’t understand why that would be, and what would make that kind of thing attractive. Now, I just hear it and think, “Yeah, there’s that bass again…”
366 Songs 166: Bug Powder Dust
As far as I’m concerned, this remains one of the greatest rap tracks ever recorded: Justin Warfield’s hilarious, pop-culture-reference filled rap (“Top of the Pops, like the Lulu show/I take a walk on Abbey Road/With my shoes off, so”) in a track with such an insanely unforgiving bass sample (from this free jazz song, which makes me think of little as much as the jingles that played between sketches on Sesame Street), topped with the William S. Burroughs inspired title? Seriously, how anyone could resist, I have no idea.
After this song, both Warfield and Bomb The Bass kind of disappeared, as if their jobs were done. The BTB album that followed this track, Clear, was a great one with all manner of guests (including novelist Will Self) and a sound that sounded like dirtier trip-hop, but the next album didn’t appear for another thirteen years, and with a significantly different sound. Warfield, too, put out an album that followed this (with early remixed by David Holmes, of all people) before disappearing from view and reappearing as the lead singer of She Wants Revenge, sounding like this:
Let’s just say that “Bug Powder Dust” may have broken everyone involved, shall we?