Consumer Guide Album

Tricky: Pre-Millennium Tension [Island, 1996]
Far from an anomaly, "Tricky Kid" is definitive here, exploiting two moderately odious cliches--the woes of stardom and I'm-Tricky-and-you're-not--as if they're OK because he's Tricky and you're not. Rubbing our face in shit is his specialty, after all, and since everything else depresses him, why shouldn't that extend to his own success and his own arrogance? Whether you go along depends on how compelling you find his decon job on a hip hop soundscape that's discernibly rawer and starker here than on Maxinquaye. I say his music comprehends and inhabits the dystopia of everyday life more radically than Wu-Tang could conceive. And acknowledge that on this evidence, his trick requires Martine and can't work forever. A−