Punk Svengali Malcolm McClaren once described himself as “the most evil man in pop music”. I wouldn’t go that far (at least compared to some of the vile bigots and predators that I won’t mention here), but it’s fair to say that he was a thief, a plagiarist and an exploiter of other people’s talents. For this album he plundered from South African township bands, New York Hip Hop artists and traditional American folk music with not a credit or royalty to be seen (until he was sued and settled out of court for an undisclosed sum).
This is also a wildly uneven album with the two hits (clumsy yet catchy takes on line dancing and skipping) bookended by samples from a Hip Hop radio show and odd little electronic and ambient pieces. The latter pieces were from producer Trevor Horn and musicians Anne Dudley and JJ Jeckzalik who would later form the much more interesting group The Art of Noise.
Two stars for the original work on this and zero for Mr McClaren himself.
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