Scritti Politti: White Bread Black Beer

CML call number: CD/POPULAR/Scritti
Sasha Frere-Jones wrote in the New Yorker: "[Green] Gartside's career has been marked by unlikely turns. In 1985, at the height of his popularity, he looked like the other pretty blond boys on MTV, except that he cited Wittgenstein in magazine interviews. Seven years earlier, when he formed Scritti Politti, a musical collective of autodidacts who took their name from a book by the political theorist Antono Gramsci, he was living in a Camden Town squat without a bathroom. Now, twenty-one years after becoming an American pop star, Gartside has released 'White Bread, Black Beer,' Scritti Politti's fifth album, though Gartside made it entirely by himself, in his home in Hackney. The record bears little relation to the ramshackle singles that Scritti Politti released in 1978, or to the obsessively polished R. & B. that made its lead singer famous. Gartside, who is fifty-one, has created an astonishingly mellifluous and coherent album, which is indebted to the sixties pop he heard as a child on BBC Radio 1 in Wales, where he was born. … Even 'Dr. Abernathy,' a potentially cynical song, is sweet, in an oblique way" ("Lovestruck," 7/24/06).