The identifiably black vocal samples from hip hop and dancehall songs that Pollard uses -- none of which is credited -- reverberate with a rawness that's exacerbated by their repetition within his relentlessly pounding tunes. Pollard builds his edgy "Down With the Technics/Don't Sweat the Scene" out of gun clicks and a vocal "pow" taken from a dialogue in which one black male cautions another who's playing with a gun. He sprinkles the distorted keyboards on his electro-funky "Hooked on Ebonics" with spliced vocal samples of words like "black," "bitch," "money," and "Benz." And for his charmingly titled, straight-ahead gabba tune "I Hate Your Fucking Face," you're left wondering what's more unnerving: Bobby Digital's abject tune "Domestic Violence" or Pollard's looping of an abusively misogynistic line from it.
Widespread sampling introduced the theory that if you can lift sounds from any recording, cultural context becomes flexible -- any sound is fair game for use by anyone of any color. Indeed in the early '90s, both black and white jungle producers in London spiced their tunes with "gun man" vocal samples from dancehall records. But that died down after enough inner-city jungle raves were shot up, literally. Hopefully, neither Pollard's largely middle-class global gabba circuit nor the expanded audience afforded him by an album on Tigerbeat6 will experience any consequences of the literal rage he digitally flogs on the undeniably exciting Rockstopper. And hopefully, Pollard has thought about where that rage comes from.
