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“Jesus”

And that’s the way the song starts, leaving a man-god hanging as an insistent but quiet guitar chisels rythmically in the background. All the more potent for the Scottish accent blunting the edges of the singer’s troubled voice.

“Is just a Spanish boy’s name”

And that’s the bit when the chisel breaks off a large bit of stone, and the artist looks to see if his/her aim was true, or whether it’s back to the starting block. It’s all good, and work on the song can continue - it’s the moment when there’s no turning back, this simple stone is changed and will end up as either art or rubble.

And that’s the point of this song - it’s momentum. Everything is relatively simple (including the opening declaration, which isn’t going to win any prizes for deductive logic, but will surely woo anyone with an drop of rock n’ roll in their veins), but each step takes you closer to the whole, to the point when the song ends and you think ‘yes’ as you reach for the rewind button (or should that be icon, these days). 

There are, of course, different ways to approach any work of art, and there’ll be the snide souls who sniff archly at the big sound, at the celtic-ness of it all, spitting out names like Big Country, Simple Minds, and U2 as if they were universally accepted bywords for kitsch. Fuck’em. Take the better elements of those big sounding bands, and mix them with more credible (and usually American) sources like Iron and Wine or Bonnie Prince Billy, and you’ll start getting the picture. 

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.