The Michigan Daily - Tuesday, April 24, 1990 -- Pagew9 reaction. The bigger the beat, the more frantic the dance. What grunge usually does not mean is sampling The Last Poets. Or covering Funkadelic. Not if you consider a guitar band that utilizes the power of funk without exploiting it. Lead singer and frontman for Big Chief Barry Henssler is not the loud- est guy - just turn the record up, he'd tell you. On the last release, he was funking it up - or attempting to scat, at least. Now he's gargling his own bile as the rest of the band does a death-and-destruction rompus. Although the first release was better at swinging the groove, the change- ups on "Double Check" are just great. There's another sample at the beginning of this one, too - I haven't figured it out yet. Big Chief have the good sense not to fall into regurgitation or mas- turbation in their gutfests. On pre- 'cious wax, their production values are very clean, while their live shows are examples of the beauty of brute force. The difference between them and say, the Meat Puppets is their willingness to jam. The differ- ence between them and oh, the Stone Roses is their funk subtlety. The character that O'Brien voices his bass with as "Ordeal" kicks off. The attention to time that Mike Danner pounds his skins with. Someone tell Big Chief not to stick with Sub Pop. -Forrest "pretentious" Green III Mission U.K. Carved in Sand Mercury/Polygram Records This is angry music. Mission U.K.'s latest release features loud drums and blaring guitars pitted against Wayne Hussey's merciless screaming. The third time around, these Brits have decided to use a so- cially conscious approach as the BOOKS Continued from page 8 the Left in Britain for so many years. There's a resentment of middle class liberals who romanticize the workers and of Trotskyists who ped- dle the doctrinal simplifications of the Party; anybody with too much faith in faith itself is fair target for Kureishi's garrulous poison pen. Karim fends his way through the social cobwebs of suburbia and the London theater, satiating his lust for drugs, girls and boys and becoming more and more confident. London is a place of endless possibility. After having an incomplete education and no purpose in life other than having sex with as many people as possi- ble, Karim finds some sort of cre- ative outlet in the theater; he devel- ops an ambitious streak. Even this is undermined, however, by Kureishi, who never completely lets his characters off the hook. Karim is cast as Mowgli in a sparse, tactile production of The Jungle Book, for which he's forced to wear a loin cloth and brown make-up to make him darker. Karim's dad sums up the production: "That bloody fucker Mr. Kipling pretending to whity he knew+ something about India! And an aw- ful performance by my boy looking like a Black and White Minstrel." The actors refer to the play as "The Jungle Bunny Book." Though he attacks middle class liberals/artistes and white racists, Kureishi takes pains not to idealize the Indian community either. Reli- gious fundamentalism takes the shape of Karim's Uncle Anwar, who goes on hunger strike when his daughter Jamila refuses to have an arranged marriage. Karim's father concedes, "We old Indians come to like this England less and less and we return to an imagined India." At their most vulnerable in racist Eng- land, Anwar and Haroon transform the Bombay of yesteryear into Bri- gadoon. Karim points out his difficulties with Indian morals and mores but he does feel a solidarity with his peo- ple. He finally accepts the two halves of himself, his double con- sciousness as an Englishman and an Indian. By the end of the novel, Karim has arrived at some contin- gent self-revelation about his iden- tity. I began to wonder why I was strong - what it was that held me together. I thought it was that I'd inherited from Dad a strong survival instinct. Dad had always felt superior to the British: this was the legacy of his Indian childhood - political anger turning into scorn and contempt. For him in India, the British were ridiculous, stiff, unconfident, rule-bound. And he'd made me feel that we couldn't allow ourselves the shame of failure in front of these people. You couldn't let the ex-colonialists see you on your knees, for that was where they expected you to be; they were exhausted now; their Empire was gone; their day was done and it was our turn. The Buddha of Suburbia im- merses itself in the smells and sounds of the Asian community as well as the hustle and bustle of Lon- don life. Kureishi has a real love for the capital city and the dynamics of its protean popular culture. London rocks to the sounds of reggae, ca- lypso, bhangra music and all the pop records that Karim has swimming in his head: the Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan, the Soft Machine. Kureishi even recounts in fictional (and myth- ical) terms the birth of punk in the Nashville pub, West Kensington, when a carrotty-haired youth with bad teeth named Johnny Rotten first took to the stage with the Sex Pis- tols. An ear for London and Asian ver- nacular gives the comedy a rambunc- tious energy. As in his other works, Kureishi relishes his characters hav- ing sex in as many different ways and situations as they- possibly can. Though somewhat gratuitous on oc- casion (Kureishi wrote pornography as a student), the sexual adventures and lavatorial humour (a particularly English strength) give this tale deal- ing with the "big" issues of race, class and gender an irreverent face. The Buddha of the Suburbs is finally a welcome palliative to all that terri- bly middle class, polite, well crafted but tedious, empty and very subur- ban English fiction by the likes of Anita Brookner and Penelope Lively. -Nabeel Zuberi MEAD THE DAILY CLASSIFIEDS The members of Mission U.K. look like they're cooperating well in this picture but they don't seem to gel so well on vinyl. Cool gothic set-up, though. background for much of the album's material. "Amelia" tells the story of a young girl's sexual abuse, and though the band's intentions are pos- itive, the message is actually blunt- and painfully overstated. "Grapes of Wrath" is an unsatisfying mono- logue detailing the difficulties of the lower class which falls quite a bit short of the mark. The first single released, "Deliverance," is a solid hard rock offering that is so loud it's almost good. Almost. The one shining moment for Hussey is the ballad "Butterfly On A Wheel." His rough, cutting voice handles the slow, flowing lyrics in a way that is beautifully reminiscent of Psych Furs' Richard Butler in his better days. "Sea of Love" recalls the wiry, reverberating guitar of "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds," and its equally surreal lyrics manage to carry the song well. "Paradise," one of the last songs on the album, has a strong guitar line and good backing keyboards, but somehow Hussey's voice seems to get in the way. This is what is most unsatisfying about Carved in Sand: the band rarely works together. Ei- ther Hussey is competing with the amplifiers, or the guitars seem to strangle the keyboards. The result is that Mission U.K. goes nowhere, and the listener is left covering his. or her ears, trying to remember whatever happened to those old Sis- ters of Mercy albums. They were around here somewhere... -Scott Kirkwood #I I sevicewhenyou isita Coeric 0k wq SHIT BRING IN YOUR STUDENT ID AND GET $7.00 OFF YOUR MOVE IN ON ANY SIZE. 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