Paranoia on the airwaves
While Parklife was Blur’s technicolour pop explosion, Trouble in the Message Centre is the half-broken neon sign in the corner, uneasy, throbbing. Midway through their classic 1994 album, it’s the song that murmured where the group was truly heading while everyone else was still singing about mockneys and marrowfat peas. This is paranoia encased in drum loops and analogue dust, not Britpop with a pint and a wink.
From the first frigid synth throb, you recognize you are no longer in Camden. While Alex James locks onto a bassline part dub echo, part urban heartbeat, Graham Coxon’s guitar slices dissonant and far off. Half broadcast, half breakdown, saturated in distortion like he’s phoning it in from the basement of a collapsing telecom tower, Damon Albarn’s vocal performance. Perhaps he is, too. The words, disjointed and resigned, depict a scene of misunderstanding in the information age. Blur were already tired of the signal before we even understood what going viral meant.
One can readily forget how rebellious this song sounded back in 1994. Although Britpop was mostly busy resurrecting the ghosts of The Kinks and The Beatles, Blur, always somewhat wiser and more strange than their colleagues, were already listening to Wire, Kraftwerk and Public Image Ltd. Trouble in the Message Centre is what results from passing that post-punk fear through the filter of mid-90s Britpop’s bloat. It is chilly, taut, twitchy.
Blur have made a record that’s both a brilliant pop album and a sharp, witty snapshot of British life in 1995.
(John Harris, NME, 1995)
Once referring to the song as being about “the gulf between human connection and synthetic noise,” Albarn felt that conflict in every mechanical thump and digital sigh. Here there is neither catharsis nor a choir set for a singalong. Only the gradual disintegration of a system that is sending too many communications and understanding none of them. It is dial-up modem alienation.
Trouble in the Message Centre was spot on as a marker. Miles from the pub and the park bench, Blur would be well into 13 within a few years writing songs about heroin withdrawal and existential anguish. Dashboard’s warning light was this track. And all these years later, it still flashes, uneasy, bright, and almost prophetic.
