How Scritti Politti Went From Communism to Commercialism

A hard fact of popular music: Sometimes, selling out results in better art.

Take Scritti Politti, the scrappy communist punk band turned synthpop hitmakers. Green Gartside, then a student at Leeds Polytechnic, decided to start a band (like so many others) after seeing Sex Pistols live — along with The Damned and The Heartbreakers. He formed Scritti Politti (named in reference to Scritti politici, a collection of writings from Italian Marxist philosopher Antonio Gramsci) with two friends, bassist Nial Jinks and drummer Tom Morley, and the three moved to London in 1977. They signed with with Rough Trade, the hotbed for DIY punk and post-punk.

After collapsing from a panic attack in 1980, Gartside returned to his parents’ home in Wales to recuperate. He’d begun listening to music he normally hadn’t — Black American music, specifically. He began to reevaluate his aesthetic values, coming to the conclusion that making pop music wasn’t antithetical to his politics. To convince his reluctant bandmates of the new direction, he did what any good communist does: He wrote pages upon pages of theory about the politics of pop music.

While the idea of a DIY punk band going pop will always raise eyebrows, Scritti Polliti’s transition into a synthesizer band got results. As art, anyway. “The ‘Sweetest Girl’” was an absolute gem, their best song by that point easily.

Their debut album, 1981’s Songs to Remember, was certainly flawed; the backing vocals, especially, date it considerably. But it did confirm Gartside’s theory that his politics and his desire for making pop music didn’t have to contradict each other. If anything, a song named after philosopher Jacques Derrida with lyrics like “To err is to be human/To forgive is too divine/I was like an industry/Depressed and in decline” is more radical and transgressive in a polished synthpop setting than in lo-fi punk, where it would be expected.

The album, and “The ‘Sweetest Girl’” especially, should have been easy commercial hits. But Rough Trade wasn’t equipped to make hits (though eventually they would be, with The Smiths especially). So they moved Virgin Records, a bigger label that could give Scritti Politti a production budget fit for Gartside’s ambitions.

Though, did they move to the major label, or did he? By 1985, Scritti Politti was barely a band anymore, with both of Gartside’s original bandmates leaving around the time of their second album, the 1985 pop masterpiece Cupid & Psyche 85. It became, effectively, a solo project, with Gartside linking up with David Gamson, who shared his vision, as his primary collaborator. (Hyperpop producer A. G. Cook would later work with Gamson, specifically citing Cupid & Psyche 85 as inspiration for his “extreme pop music” — “a really beautiful balance of great hooks, rhythms and sounds.”)

Cupid & Psyche 85 has aged significantly better than the album that came before it, though it isn’t perfect either. The part of it that’s aged the worst is, arguably, the opening track, “The Word Girl,” a hooky and terrifically crafted pop song that just happens to have a synth-lovers rock sound that hits my ears wrong. Thankfully, it’s followed immediately by “Small Talk,” a highlight where you can really hear with Cook was talking about with the extreme pop description, as plucky synthesizers, distorted guitar, and steel drum are all thrown in together, creating a disorienting sort of new wave-funk fusion. The lyrics, meanwhile, take inspiration from World War II-era propaganda, with lyrics like, “We’re tired of prophesying/We heard the world was good, but it’s stupefying.”

“A Little Knowledge” is another highlight, a duet with backup singer B.J. Nelson that corrects the previous album’s dated backing vocals by bringing them to the forefront and embracing them, making for a heartbreak ballad that’s eerier than it is mournful — a song about how terrifying it is to be alone after someone has left.

“Don’t Work That Hard” sounds like the song that Gartside had hoped to make when he decided to start mixing his Marxist post-punk with his love of Chic and The Jackson 5. It’s a funk masterpiece, and it also excels at lyrical ambiguity, with its title (“for love,” he finishes) and words like “I submit for approval/Got the upper hand” finding a middle-ground between romance and political hierarchies. “Don’t Work That Hard,” for love, or capitalism, or whatever. But against Gartside’s demands, bassist Marcus Miller is putting the fucking work in, like he always does.

VIDEO: Scritti Politti “Perfect Way”

“Perfect Way” was only the fifth single released from the album, but it’s the one that took off in the U.S., reaching  No. 11 on the Hot 100 despite not even making the top 40 on the U.K. charts and being outperformed by three other singles there (including “The Word Girl,” proving that British taste in African-American-adjacent pop will always be questionable). “Perfect Way” is a great pop single, but on an album that so constantly delivers heat, it doesn’t stand out as a hit any more than “Small Talk,” “A Little Knowledge” or “Don’t Work That Hard” (the three out of nine songs that weren’t released as singles anywhere, somehow). Also, based on the piano solo, it would seem that Scritti Politti wrote the Super Mario World overworld theme.

From there, we get the greatest pop song to ever feature the word hermeneutic, the greatest pop song to ever feature the word intravenous —based around the hook “Each time I go to bed, I pray like Aretha Franklin” (I pray like Dionne Warwick personally, but to each their own) — and “Hypnotize,” the groovy closing track, which declares, “How could your nothings be so sweet?/You left your love letters incomplete.”

“Oh, let’s forget the taboo now sugar,” Gartside sings, and forgetting taboos was his specialty, scandalizing both pop listeners and leftist punks by throwing their worlds together in a blender. From that, he got one truly superb album, and from there? An underwhelming follow-up with 1988’s Provisions, which failed to even make the top 100 on the U.S. albums chart, followed by an almost decade-long hiatus which ended in 1999 that brought two new albums — notably 2006’s White Bread Black Beer, their second best LP, which bridges the gap between the project’s avant-Marxism and Gartside’s pop instincts more than ever.

Scritti Politti never conquered the world the way they deserved to. But why would Gartside want to, anti-imperialist that he was?

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Melody Esme

Melody Esme is a writer and filmmaker based in Portland, OR. She has previously written for Film Inquiry, Maura Magazine, and NO CINEMA!

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