Now Concrete Is My Religion

Tricky & Martina Topley-Bird “Feed Me”

“Feed Me” has an odd sense of gravity to it. There’s a solid bass groove at the center, but the looped chimes sample seems as though it’s always drifting out of frame. It’s like being gently pulled in two different directions, with no sense of which of the two opposing forces is better. There’s a lot of implied distance between the musical elements here, so you feel this vast empty middle space where the vocals sit.

The music establishes a theme that’s further developed in the lyrics, of feeling unable to reconcile contradictions and ultimately embracing the incongruities. Creation and destruction, chaos and order, belonging and estrangement, love and hate, clarity and confusion – life is mostly lived somewhere along the spectrum between these binaries. “Feed Me” exists in some constantly shifting space between these poles, and that weird non-place feels like home.

Tricky and Martina Topley-Bird both seem serene in this song, as though they’ve unburdened themselves of the conflicts that informed all the preceding tracks on Maxinquaye. The primary tension through the record is the question of who’s the seducer and who’s the seduced, but here they come across like equals in a state of equilibrium. Martina recorded her lead vocal when she was still a teenager but she sounds remarkably lucid and sanguine while Tricky hangs in the back, mostly whisper-rapping but fully singing towards the end. She sounds weary but hopeful, wise yet uncertain. She sounds like someone who has figured out how to feel whole.

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