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There may be some artistic value hidden deep in the mix, but the prime concern with 99% of hip-hop collaborations is marketing ’synergy’.  Like fancy fashion houses developing perfumes, the important thing is establishing the logo, and then attaching it to as many different markets/products as possible. Naomi Klein’s ground-breaking  No Logo may have established its thesis examining big name brands like Nike and Tommy Hilfigger,  but the system it exposed is equally valid for the business empires of Jay-Z, 50 Cent, Beyonce etc.

The genesis of the Judgement Night soundtrack was presumably no different. Take a list of big name hip-hop artists and put them together with big name rock acts, and you’re bound to get a ‘crossover’ hit (the same principle behind the Jay-Z Linkin Park album Collision Course). 

The brand in this case, though, wasn’t sufficiently robust to do anyone any good. The movie sucked, and the soundtrack album while recieving decent reviews and a reasonable amount of airplay, hardly set the world on fire.

Marketing synergy is ironic when it comes to the collaboration between Teenage Fanclub and De La Soul, fallin, that features on the album and is without doubt the best of these thrown together products (neither of the bands had met before the recording). The two bands are forever dismissed - with some reason - as slackers. Groups that should have been huge, but though filled with talent lacked the fire in the belly required for any world-class brand. 

The song breaks all the rules for this type of thing, and is all the better for it:

1) Since the days of Run DMC and Aerosmith the rule is that hip-hop goes with rock (the harder the better).  Even De La Soul seem in agreement, when recently they talked of doing another similar collaboration but with someone like Linkin Park or Korn

2) When two brands meet you have to push the bravado all the way. These slackers base a song not around bling, or pheremones, but about falling flat on your face -  a washed up rapper (’and the teenage fans are heat’). Both groups need a serious lesson in self-promotion from a guru like P.Diddy ( How about a drive-by for starters? There’s seven of you involved, so we can afford to lose one - and it’ll create great publicity)

The song is glorious though, based around laid back guitars, a Tom Petty sample, and De La Soul’s characteristically sloping light-hearted rhymes. It wins the Monkey Tunes award for laidbackness, even though all involved sound like they’re firing on all cylinders, particularly at the end when the groove takes off. 

In the same year that Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel topped the album charts with Bridge over troubled waters, Gil Scott Heron recorded his debut album A New Black Poet - Small Talk at 125th and Lenox.  The difference couldn’t be more stark, both in terms of outlook and reception.

Simon and Garfunkel were at the height of their career, recording their fifth studio album and tensions were rife. The duo argued during the sessions and, despite being vocal politically at various points of their career, as a result opted not to include the only overtly political song of the recordings Cuba si Nixon no. They were repaid with an album that spawned (though I balk at its use, it seems to me that ’spawned’ is more than appropriate here) a number of huge hit singles that meant everything and nothing to millions of people.

Gil Scott Heron, on the other hand was recording his first album - a live recording in a nightclub with the small group of David Barnes on percussion and vocals, Charlie Suanders and Eddie Knowles on percussion, and Scott Heron himself singing and playing guitar and piano. It’s as intimate as S&G’s album was polished and spacious. It’s also about as political as you’re ever going to get, while still staying on the side of art as opposed to preaching or propoganda.

The album’s most famous track is, justifiably,  The Revolution will not be televised - a template for Scott Heron’s socio-political raps that would influence so heavily african-american music later. I want, though, to recommend to you a different track. One that’s  more traditional in terms of its structure -which probably accounts for its relative obscurity - but one that packs no less powerful a punch.

The song opens with Scott Heron introduction “Who’ll pay reparations on my soul?”, his voice rich and questioning. Thereafter it’s as taut, angry, and beautifully melodic as any protest song can be. The guitar and percussion start off at breakneck speed (for an acoustic song, let’s be clear) and Scott Heron and Barnes singing push and pull each other  through America’s troubled history, chiming together repeatedly ‘but who’ll pay reparations on my soul?’.

Scott Heron has been criminally neglected, and criminally targeted in the intervening years, going in and out of jail on drug possesion charges (and apparently becoming H.I.V. positive in the process) most recently being paroled in 2007.  It would seem that there’s a clear answer to the song for him personally - the only person picking up the tab for Scott Heron has been himself. He is, according to sources on Wikipedia, back recording and writing now - something we should all be grateful for.

On a wider scale, the song remains as relevant, angry, and unanswered as ever - as we head in to an election campaign where Barak Obama’s race is something that needs to be discussed.

“What about the red man
Who met you at the coast?
You never dig sharing;
Always had to have the most.
And what about Mississippi,
The boundary of old? 
Tell me,
Who’ll pay reparations on my soul?”

I’m a fence-sitter (as painful as that may be, literally and metaphorically) when it comes to the dread argument about Politics in music. Like most things in life, it all depends on how it’s done. When you forget the primacy of the song, whilst evangelising, you’d be better off - and equally effective, which is to say not very - handing out Socialist Worker Party flyers on a wet and windy afternoon in any given Northern city. When you feel obliged, as M.I.A. (the artist otherwise known as Maya Arulpragasam ) has a number of times, to declare your politics over and above the structure of the song you’re singing, then you need to be judged not on aesthetic grounds but according to ideology, and precious few songwriters have ever been accused of effecting social change through their MTV delivered tracts.

But, on the other hand, I take exception to the rule that great tunes need to have a lyrical content equal-to-but-not-exceeding ‘Sugar, honey-honey, you are my candy girl, and you’ve got me wanting you’. It’s a question of starting points - and M.I.A.’s starting point on Boyz is revolutionary, first and foremost in the sounds used. Listen to the opening beats, and tell me you’ve heard something like it before, and I’ll call you a liar. THe closest touchpoint you can have for it is her previous work, on her debut album Arular’s Bucky done gun, but this is a huge leap forward. Before M.I.A. was undoubtedly interesting, now she’s indispensable.

The musical force behind the song is a mash-up of rythms and musical cultures. At the forefront is the urumi drum, a traditional drum played (usually by untouchables) in the Tamil Nadu state of India and in Sri Lanka, from where M.I.A’s family emigrated to London. Mix that in with some Trinidad ‘Soca’ style, and you have a world-beat that’s less to do with the worthy sounds of Manu Chao & co. and more to do with calypso clashing with, well, the clash.

So, on a musical level, this is in itself political - without bragging about it. It calls into question the rythmic and melodic mores that dominate the global music industry - where the only ‘third-world’ nation allowed to break out of ‘world music’ boredom is Jamaica with its reggae and dancehall cultures. In a culture where innovative sampling simply means finding a ’70s tune that had middling success first time around, and rapping over it, M.I.A.’s sampling of musical cultures is art.

The lyrics take on a stock-standard hip-hop call out and turn it on it’s head.

“HOw many boyz are crazy
How many boyz are raw
HOw many boyz are rowdy
How many start a war”

Brash, sexy, and not just a little bit sexist - but, when the oppressed turns on the oppressed and makes them dance at the same time, then, to recall Lenon’s revolution, you can count me in.

Rolling Stone nominated this #9 in their list of the 100 top songs of 2007 - an oversight, considering they had the likes of Rhianna and her vapid bubblegum Umbrella at #3 (not that it’s a bad song, when done right - check out the Biffy Clyro version that’s doing the rounds). Nobody, for this monkey, has done anything as remotely innovative or catchy as this in a long time - or political, for that matter.