Tricky / Blowback / 2001
Excess
weary, paranoid, incantatory
A fragmented, dub-inflected litany in which Tricky and guest vocalists catalogue what they 'believe in' — not doctrine but the raw facts of human behavior, from lying and dying to breathing and surviving. The song works less as narrative than as incantation, piling up short clauses until exhaustion itself becomes the point.
survival amid chaos identity and anonymity exhaustion and endurance distrust of sameness/conformity belief stripped of religion
Who's speaking
Tricky speaks in fragmented first person, half-sung half-muttered, addressing an unspecified 'you' that seems to stand for the public or the music industry; a second voice (Stephanie McKay) echoes and completes his thought, suggesting a call-and-response rather than a single reliable narrator.
What happens
The song doesn't tell a story so much as accumulate a mood: it opens with clipped, almost nonsensical internal rhymes about belief and deception, drifts into complaints about anonymity and fatigue, then expands the 'I believe in' refrain into a bleak inventory of human constants — lying, dying, warring, disease — before settling into a mantra of simply continuing to live.
How it's built
Built on repetition and refrain rather than verse-chorus logic; short rhyming fragments give way to extended anaphoric lists ('I believe in...') that function as the song's emotional engine, with a spoken-word counter-melody threaded underneath like a second track bleeding through.
Section by section
Opening verse
The internal rhyme scheme here is almost nursery-rhyme simple, but the content—belief, deceit, curses, death—establishes an unstable tone from the first lines, as if sincerity and performance are already tangled together.
Identity complaint
“you all sound the same”
This section pivots to a more direct grievance about being indistinguishable from others despite being unknown personally, a recurring Tricky preoccupation with being misread or homogenized by an industry or audience.
First 'I believe in' refrain
The refrain's content shifts from abstract to human behavior—lying, dying, trying, crying—suggesting belief as simple observation of human nature rather than faith or hope.
Stress/mess bridge
The interjected spoken fragments about fictional stories and daily routine function like radio static bleeding into the main vocal, reinforcing the sense of fragmented attention and overlapping noise characteristic of the album's production.
Escalation to violence
“diseases coming”
The belief list darkens considerably, moving from personal to global ills—bombing, warring, disease—culminating in the admission of running, which reframes the earlier exhaustion as literal flight from catastrophe rather than metaphorical fatigue.
Closing mantra
“keep living”
The song ends not on resolution but on bare persistence, a minimal imperative that functions as both resignation and quiet defiance.
Craft
- anaphora
- The repeated 'I believe in' structure turns the song into a litany, flattening good and bad (dying, trying, breathing) into the same grammatical weight, implying a worldview where everything is simply accepted as given.
- fragmentation/collage
- Short, often broken phrases and interpolated spoken asides create a disorienting, overheard quality, as if multiple broadcasts or thoughts are colliding, mirroring the record's dub production.
- paradox
- The declaration of belief in lying, dying, and warring alongside breathing and being undercuts the word 'believe' as faith, redefining it as mere acknowledgment of existence.
- repetition as erosion
- Phrases like the claim that everyone sounds the same but doesn't know the speaker's name recur to stress isolation within sameness, reinforcing the theme of anonymity.
Reading it
The most persuasive reading treats the song as a meditation on endurance in a world where belief has been reduced to accepting whatever is—violence, disease, anonymity, deceit—without claiming any of it is good. The 'I believe in' structure borrows the cadence of creed or prayer but hollows it out, implying that survival itself has replaced faith. An alternative reading could frame the catalogue as a critique of media saturation—belief as something dictated by constant broadcast noise (reinforced by the layered spoken interjections)—where the speaker is numbly reciting what he's told to believe rather than affirming personal conviction.
Context
Blowback (2001) was recorded in Los Angeles and features a roster of outside collaborators, including Stephanie McKay and a credited but unverified appearance tied to Alanis Morissette in the lyric transcription; Tricky was by this point known for restless genre-blending and paranoid, murmured vocal style rooted in Bristol trip-hop. I don't have confirmed details about the specific recording circumstances or intent behind this particular track beyond what the lyrics suggest.
Listen for
- The contrast between Tricky's low, muttering delivery and the brighter guest vocals
- How the spoken-word fragments seem to interrupt rather than support the main lyric
- The shift in tone when the 'I believe in' list moves from personal to global catastrophe
- The way repetition flattens emotional weight, making violence and breathing sound equally matter-of-fact
- The closing repetition of 'keep living' as a deflated resolution rather than a triumphant one
About Tricky
Adrian Nicholas Matthews Thaws, better known by his stage name Tricky, is an English musician, record producer, vocalist and rapper. He was born and raised in Bristol, in southwest England.
b. 1968 / United Kingdom
Full biography and catalogue