Mark Morrison - Retun of the Mack....works its fucking magic!

I'm a bit obsessed of late with his 1997 mini-album Only God Can Judge Me (that's Verse I, Chapter II), mostly as a marooned time capsule of how MM was indeed UK tabloid notorious at the time, and was someone with five top ten hits - not just the one he's reduced to now. The record as such is both a victory lap to all this and was presumably intended as the prelude to his next stage in claiming an international audience - when all that happened was he lost the British one he already had and for various reasons never released anything again - bar one single - until the momentum had gone.

Nine tracks wheeze by in 23 minutes but there's only three actual new songs. The rest of it - that heady lost artefact effect in full swing - is an introductory collage of dramatically re-recorded news headlines calling him out over a hip hop beat (pre-Angels solo Robbie Williams and forgotten R&B boy band Damage get named), the Lord's Prayer being recited by a child and later a soul chorus, a lo-fi recording of him hyping up an arena audience in Birmingham by warning any present police officers that their presence is unwelcome, seguing into a Return of the Mack in Italy that is abruptly halted mid-verse, and then Radio 1 interview Lisa I'Anson on air addressing the issue of his feud with, again, fucking Damage ("Smash Hits Awards, they had their dressing room, you came in, saw their dressing room, liked their dressing room, so threw their stuff in the corridor..." His response: "The only damage that Damage is doing to themselves").

In 2023 it plays very opaquely or like some quasi-hauntological parody, which is a major point in its defence, this infallibly self-confident document of things that may have mattered once, or thought to have mattered once, whereas now the events are as obscure and buried as the album itself. As would have already been the case by 2000.