One Great Cover looks at the greatest cover songs ever, and how they got to be that way.
I got a letter from the government the other day
I opened and read it. It said they were suckers
They wanted me for their army or whatever
Picture me giving a damn, I said never.Public Enemy, “Black Steel in the Hour of Chaos,” 1988
Tricky was doing what no one else was doing musically in 1994, as he was pretty much most other years. His audacity (or complete naivete) as an artist knew no bounds, being largely how he got female vocalist Martina Topley-Bird to sing Chuck D’s none-more-Chuck D rap lyrics from Public Enemy’s “Black Steel in the Hour of Chaos” over an exhilarating rock-dance backing. Which she did in her uniquely seductive tones, bringing melody and wispiness to words that once seemed inseparable from the hip-hop frontman’s testosterone-pumped New York baritone, so renowned for emanating righteous anger in the face of injustice and prejudice.
It was consequently hard to know what the oft-called “trip-hop pioneer” from Bristol UK had, in fact, delivered in the track he simply called “Black Steel” – but there was no doubt it made for one of the most original and exciting singles of the times. No doubt too that it made, in an unprecedented way, for one great cover.
“Unprecedented” because covers of rap tracks simply weren’t a thing in the mid ’90s, and still aren’t (just try searching for anything of the kind here at Cover Me!). Maverick that he was, though, Tricky was determined to make Public Enemy’s incarceration-themed track, off the seminal It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back album, work for him. And he wasn’t going to be derailed by hip-hop notions of authenticity to the effect that: rappers write about themselves so don’t mess with their words!; or rappers’ rhymes are the essence of their very beings, sanctified by their personas, their beats, and their samples. He was nevertheless affected by the apparent stigma surrounding his endeavor, as he commented in 2023: “I got frustrated back in the day because the lyrics of rappers like Rakim, Slick Rick and Chuck D were so good yet they got put in their box because they were rappers.”
The good that Tricky saw in Chuck D’s “Black Steel” lyrics, particularly, had much to do with lines that simply leapt out at you. “I got a letter from the government the other day,” is some opening because, really, it can only mean bad news. Then there’s: “Here is a land that never gave a damn about a brother like myself,” and “They could not understand that I’m a Black man, and I could never be a veteran.” Tricky found in such lines the powerful first-person narrative of an African-American planning a jailbreak after being put behind bars on a “raw deal” by the same US authorities that were, laughably, trying to co-opt him into the US military. More than that, he was able to adopt them as lines that weren’t personal to Chuck D, but rather in the spirit of hard-line political protest inherited from the Black Panthers and Malcolm X. They indeed made for a message song that conveyed the under-siege reality of daily existence for many Black people in the so-called “Land of the Free.”
It’s easy to suppose Tricky related to Chuck D’s message in his decision to “cover” the track, as easy as it is to accept he was “for real” in doing so. “Where I come from, a lot of people are either on drugs, in prison or dead,” he said, as a Black artist from Knowle West, one of the most deprived areas of Bristol. His own experience was one of being raised by his grandmother after his mother Maxine Quaye committed suicide and his father abandoned him, with no opportunities other than to enter into crime at an early age. He joined a gang that specialized in car theft, burglary, and drugs; and he earned the nickname “Tricky Kid.” He also spent time in prison at aged 17, for buying forged £50 banknotes from a friend.
Tricky was acquainted with deprivation and prison bars, then, though unshackled in his approach to music during the sessions for his first solo album, Maxinquaye, out of which “Black Steel” emerged. He’d been a member of the Wild Bunch in the mid-1980s, a sound-system collective on Bristol’s smoky club scene that integrated elements of hip-hop, reggae, funk and R&B, and morphed into Massive Attack in 1988. Furthermore, despite rapping on the first Massive album in 1991, he’d acquired zero recording experience so as to retain the belief that there was nothing on record that could not be sampled, spliced together, or tampered with. It was therefore upon signing to Island and hastily getting a studio assembled in Kilburn, London, in 1994, that he proved a somewhat challenging prospect to the producer he chose to collaborate with: Mark Saunders. With vinyl covering the floor, he ensured the studio professional, admired for his work with The Cure, embarked upon what Saunders himself termed “a complete un-learning experience.”
Tricky indeed seemed the musical equivalent of Sid, Andy’s neighbor in Toy Story, in making Maxinquaye, mangling and contorting sounds the way the abusive boy twists his toys into grotesque and sinister shapes. He invariably worked them up, with Saunders and Topley-Bird, into tracks that were slow, grainy, and messed-up, in the manner most associated with trip-hop. But he had no clue that “Black Steel” would end up an altogether faster, harder and more industrial beast. Featuring musicians. All he knew at the outset was that he “wanted Martina, a female, to sing it to show my appreciation.” That, as well as the use of a scratchily recorded drum loop from AR Rahman’s soundtrack to 1992 Indian movie Roja – specifically, the track “Rukkumani Rukkumani.”
Somehow, but obviously with the inestimable aid of Saunders, a backwards guitar riff was added to the drum loop. And somehow a sublime Topley-Bird vocal made its appearance. The 19-year-old singer, then Tricky’s girlfriend and similarly inexperienced in the studio, took the rapper’s hand-written lyrics of the first few of Chuck D’s verses (he couldn’t be bothered to write them all out), and laid down her vocal without even hearing the backing. She did it in one take. She conceived the melody instinctively. And she incited Saunders to call her “one of the quietest singers I’ve ever recorded.” Quiet, maybe, but possessed of deafening swagger, cool, and attitude.
Yet there was one more ingredient to add: a techno-rock band by the name of FTV, who Tricky met at a gig and vaguely invited to record with him while finishing Maxinquaye at Eastcote Studios in London. He and Saunders didn’t really know how their punk-techno vibe would fit in, but, seeing how drummer Samuel Briant played like a drum machine and dispensed the most outrageous fills on the toms, he was most emphatically given space on “Black Steel.” Even if he didn’t know it at the time. The beefed-up sound, with additional snarling guitar, further inspired Tricky to record himself saying “Many switch in, switch on, switch off” as a sort of bridge for the track, in that minimalist way of his.
The result of all this was that Tricky released the single of his life in “Black Steel” in March 1995, following the February release of Maxinquaye. It reached #28 on the UK singles chart and sent the album into overdrive, especially with the rapper and Topley-Bird performing it brilliantly on TV shows from The Word to The Beat. The former was always a still and menacing presence onstage, and the latter, her eyes invariably closed, a still and intense one.
Sad, then, that the singer retained some bitterness towards Tricky over her contribution to the track long after the event, commenting in 2021 of the whole of Maxinquaye: “I don’t actually have any written credit for those vocal melodies.” That’s not as much as Briant retained, though, who called Tricky a “waste of time in the studio,” accusing him of being “off his face and incapable of holding a conversation.” The drummer complained that FTV was “under the impression that we had created an original piece of music,” not aware that the rapper would put “someone else’s lyrics over the top of an originally created track.”
But, you know, it’s hard to believe that the track would be the great record it is without Topley-Bird breathing new life into Chuck D’s lyrics–lyrics that she was seemingly born to sing. Tricky’s thinking was sound: what she did with the words proved the basis of the electrifying mashup of a ride that is “Black Steel.” One we most certainly give a damn about.