When famed post-punks the Pop Group disbanded at the start of the 1980s, barely-legal frontman Mark Stewart joined forces with Adrian Sherwood, a white Briton dedicated to going where no dub reggae producer had gone before. The first album of this union, Learning to Cope With Cowardice, is still a proudly, profoundly disorienting act of oblique cold war criticism. Oh, and it's as funky as the early hip-hop Stewart was clearly digging as an import. "The Wrong Name and the Wrong Number", a bonus track included on this reissue, is listed as a "DJ battle" and sounds like it's cutting up Cheryl Lynn's "Got to Be Real" with the Funky 4+1's "It's the Joint". On the other hand, no Bronx block party was rocked by this much distortion, even through the crappiest speakers. And that's not to mention the samples of froggy doomsayer William S. Burroughs and a hysterical Stewart shouting "This is a restricted area!" when you least expect it.
As Stewart groans like a boy in the corner of his own songs-- much like his future friend Tricky later would-- and the drums pop like they're being dropped into a pot of hot oil, the zombie female backing vocals and vaguely Ethiopian saxophones on tracks like "Liberty City" and "The Paranoia of Power" twist roots reggae's trappings of earth-mother security into a hall-of-mirrors horror. And in Sherwood's hands, reggae steppers rhythms and American funk grooves-- played by members of bands like African Headcharge and Creation Rebel, who orbited Sherwood's On U Sound label-- lurched drunkenly through the hazy vale of dub's purposeful obfuscation. Throughout Cowardice Sherwood EQ's Stewart's voice into a thousand shades of fucked up, raises and lowers the volume level on the mix with a near-sadistic inexplicableness, phases everything until it curls like palm fronds, or blasts it mercilessly with grating noise.
But even obscured, the political ambitions of Stewart's lyrics are implicit in the album's title. "Let's storm the citadels!" he shrieks from nowhere on "The Paranoia of Power", except his mocking delivery (and the instability of Sherwood's mix) feels like a satire of such easily-stenciled politico slogans. On Cowardice, Stewart rejected both the easy-to-swallow, Day-Glo pop tranquilizers of the 80s and the bluntness that came to characterize the Pop Group's final records for wracked, ambiguous protest music. So who better to turn to for lyrics than a possible madman and authority-critiquing refusenik that was marginalized in his own time, only to later be viewed as a seer? On Cowardice's version of William Blake's own wracked, proto-"the-personal-is-political" English portrait "Jerusalem", the poet's mania becomes manifest as Sherwood mixes the drums as if your ear is laying on the snare and places Stewart's voice as if he's on the other side of a warehouse shouting through a megaphone that keeps shorting out, a taped orchestral version of the hymn wobbling triumphantly behind him.
"Jerusalem" has come to be seen by many as Stewart's defining moment, like hearing one English visionary stretched through another, and it is undoubtedly the most psychedelic (and weirdly beautiful) moment to come out of post-punk. Unfortunately, the bulk of Learning to Cope With Cowardice lacks the power "Jerusalem" comes by through its unearthly mix of the pastoral and the terrible. And as with the crumbling basslines and unspooling tape effects of the Pop Group's 1978 half-masterpiece Y, Cowardice's sonic instability can be infuriating if you hate it when a good groove gets poked full of holes. When it comes together, however, the disorientation feels right on time for reissue in an era of renewed nuclear hostilities, as protesters clash at the G8 summit and we continue to drug ourselves on reality TV shenanigans and celebrity weddings.
