If we are to take Pitchfork’s sage advice, James Blake is the newest representative of something called ‘post-dub’. Thankfully, judging from this track, the term isn’t another way of summarizing the laddish inanity of dubstep’s ‘bow-bow-DROPPPPPP-duh-duh-dujj’ format; it refers to a new, smart subgenre.
The name ‘CMYK’ implies a boring minimalism, but in Blake’s deception lies his genius. Blake slots a manically sped-up sample from Kelis’s ‘Caught Out There’ into the negative space of Aaliyah’s ‘Are You That Somebody?’, creating a sonic whirlwind of opposition.
While Kelis cusses her boy for betraying her (‘Look I found her red coat/Look I found her’), Aaliyah and Timbaland engage in a breathy back-and-forth, setting the stage for seduction. Blake has a sense of humour – he transforms Aaliyah’s relatively low voice into a pipsqueak and Timbaland’s into a Barry White baritone – but he also knows how to structure a song. He uses the highly gendered vocal spectrum he creates with the Aaliyah sample as the underlying anchor of the track, to which he interjects the Kelis’s anger and sense of empowerment.
Blake fuses the highs and lows of love, betrayal, and hate to construct a modern narrative about a timeless relationship. Not only has the producer made 90s RnB cool again, he’s created his own unique brand of electronica. It doesn’t really matter what you call it, for just as ‘CMYK’ transcends its disparate parts, Blake transcends categorization.
