What is the name of the person who later said "I'm part of this fuckin' psychic pollution"?
While songs such as "Overcome" and "Suffocated Love" dealt with themes of "sexual paranoia and male dread of intimacy", the rest of Maxinquaye explored the psychological tolls of the British recreational drug culture, which Reynolds said served as a "temporary utopia" for a generation of users who otherwise lacked a "constructive outlet for its idealism". He felt the album's cover art, featuring rusting metal surfaces, represented the cultural decline explored in the music's themes. Tricky drew on Rastafarian ideas about end time for the record, although unlike adherents to that movement he did not disassociate himself from "Babylon", or the degenerate qualities of Western society, writing lyrics such as "my brain thinks bomb-like/beware of our appetite" on "Hell Is Round the Corner". He later told Reynolds, "I'm part of this fuckin' psychic pollution ... It's like, I can be as greedy as you. The conditioned part of me says 'yeah, I'm gonna go out and make money, I'm going to rule my own little kingdom.'" Christgau deemed the album's songs "audioramas of someone who's signed on to work for the wages of sin and lived to cash the check", while O'Hagan said Tricky's "impressionistic prose poems" were written from the deviant perspective of the urban hedonist: "Maxinquaye is the sound of blunted Britain, paranoid and obsessive ... This was the inner-city blues, Bristol style".The songs "Ponderosa", "Strugglin'", and "Hell Is Round the Corner" were inspired by Tricky's experiences with marijuana, alcohol, cocaine, and ecstasy, particularly a two-year binge and consequent state of despondency while on Massive Attack's payroll after the completion of Blue Lines. His stream-of-consciousness lyrics on Maxinquaye explore the delirious, despondent, and emotionally unstable state associated with drug use while offering a pessimistic view of the drug culture, as Tricky viewed the high of cocaine undeserved and the depth of thought achieved through ecstasy unsubstantial. In Reynolds' opinion, Tricky's experiences with drug-induced paranoia, anxiety, and visions of spectres and demons were represented in the production of songs such as "Aftermath" and "Hell Is Round the Corner". For the latter track, he altered and slowed down a vocal sample to give it a wounded basso profondo sound, while channelling it through a loop of an orchestral Isaac Hayes recording, "Ike's Rap II". On "Strugglin'", which sampled sounds of a creaking door and the click of a gun being loaded, Tricky's lyrics made explicit reference to his visions of "mystical shadows, fraught with no meaning".
Tricky