Fluffy Dub! Reasons to love Kelis’ “Trick Me”.
1/ Dancehall borrowings in R&B are a wonderful thing but lifting your groove from pop-reggae is more unusual and – yay! – more fun too.
2/ Kelis’ delivery of the line-drawing lyric is marvellously offhand, and nobody does offhand better than Kelis. It’s a strong lyric too – “Freedom to us has always been a trick / Freedom to you is whoever landed on your dick.”
3/ Noises noises noises! Hooks hooks hooks! The chicken-scratch guitar, the squelches, the “whoa-who”, and there’s still so much room in the track.
4/ The cute Pet Shop Boys reference!
5/ It reminds me of Norman Cook’s best record, “Dub Be Good To Me”, and in fact that whole turn-of-the-90s moment when ‘dub’ lost its fuggy cool for a moment and became just another pop buzzword, all fluffy and chart-friendly. Those Jah Wobble basslines on The Orb’s (so-called) “Ambient Dub” records, such a pleasurable, bubbling sound. It was around this time that people like Tiffany were putting “Dub Versions” on their B-Sides, too! It all went wrong when the Sabres Of Paradise’ “Wilmot” wasn’t a huge hit – on the LP it was all chopped and truncated, like Weatherall was suddenly a bit embarrassed by its cheesy skankiness. More fool him, it was terrific. And then the moment sort of passed.