Bring the Noise

2011-03-13T21:22:00.001-07:00

a feature package at literary webzine The Nervous Breakdown on me and Bring the Noise, which is out imminently in the US on Soft Skull... elements include excerpts from BtN on the voice in pop music and on crunk, plus an auto-interview about changes in pop criticism during the 25 years since I started doing it and getting paid

2011-03-01T11:33:00.000-08:00

The US edition, with some bonus material added, out next month on Soft Skull.

2009-03-10T12:25:00.000-07:00

The Italian translation of Bring the Noise published by Isbn Edizioni.

2008-12-31T08:18:00.000-08:00

2008-10-05T13:17:00.000-07:00

The Italian edition of Bring the Noise is published on October 9th under the title HIP-HOP-ROCK: 1985-2008 and translated by Michele Piumini. More information at the publisher ISBN Edizioni's website. Check out (click-to-enlarge) the striking cover, which is styled -- as with ISBN's Rip It Up translation -- around the book's index. Like the forthcoming German and French editions, the Italian version contains extra material from the last couple of years to bring BtN (whose inclusions end in early 2006) up to date.

Italian readers can also check out any day now a profile of me in the first edition of newspaperIL SOLE 24 ORE's new monthly magazine, and a two-part series of excerpts from Hip-Hop-Rock in another Italian newspaper, IL MANIFESTO.

2008-04-26T19:28:00.000-07:00

[Bring the Noise deleted scene #74]

KANYE WEST
Late Registration (Roc-A-Fella)
Uncut, autumn 2005

by Simon Reynolds

Last year, Kanye West cut through rap’s standard-issue one-dimensional personae with some refreshing complexity. Neither “conscious” nor a bad-boy chasing bling and bitches, he was a little of both: a hungry soul (“Jesus Walks”) trapped in a body prey to venality (“All Falls Down”). Kanye can pull off the occasional highminded lyric without risking sanctimony, because he’s clearly the sort of preacher who gets caught with call-girls.

Late Registration’s core of mixed emotion clusters around four songs that deal with themes of worldly wealth versus gold-of-the-spirit. “Diamonds From Sierra Leone” starts where College Dropout finished (“Last Call”). It’s another paean to Roc-A-Fella, the label that signed West where other A&Rs scoffed at his deceptively sloppy flow. The giddy ascending chorus “forever ever ever EVER ever” pledges fealty to Jay-Z’s dynasty, which rescued him from the parlous times when “I couldn’t afford/A Ford Escort.” But when West chants “throw your diamonds in the air,” he’s not really showing off his new status symbols so much as his aesthetic riches, the genius-visionary’s “power to make a diamond with his bare hands.” The song lives up to this boast and then some. Nobody deploys vocal samples better than West, and here it’s Shirley Bassey’s “Diamonds Are Forever” that gets shook down for hidden hooks and latent meanings. The glittering production, laced with harpsichords and strings, matches the lines about “Vegas on acid/Seen through Yves St Laurent glasses”. But what about the title’s reference to “Sierra Leone”? That just got tacked on after the fact, to fit the video, an expose of child-slavery in African diamond mines, and has absolutely nowt to do with the lyrics!

It would have been cool if “Gold Digger” sampled “Goldfinger”. Instead, a Ray Charles loop powers this gritty groove, while (cute touch) Jamie Foxx kicks it off with a faux-blues whinge about a “triflin’ bitch” who sucks up his money and weed. West wryly observes “I ain’t saying she’s a gold digger/But she aint’ messin’ with no broke niggas!” “Addicted” offers a far fresher angle on exploitative heterosex. “Why everything that’s supposed to be bad/Make me feel so good?” ponders West, before launching into a rueful account of a mutually degrading affair that interwines sex and drugs. The admission “and I keep coming over” is shivered with a hiccup of pained ecstasy, hinting at the double meaning of “come”. The song’s exquisite arrangement lends poignancy to this tale of male weakness and shame: a glisten of Amnesiac guitar, filtered hi-hats, a sampled chanteuse crooning “you make me smile with my heart” (a line from “My Funny Valentine”). “Crack Music” disconcertingly equates the analgesic powers of drugs and music, with Kanye and The Game chanting the chorus--“That’s that crack music, nigga/That real black music, nigga”--over an impossibly crisp military beat. If Black Americans traffic in the best pain-killers around, the song implies, it’s because Black America has the most pain to kill.

It could be that Kanye West’s “honest confusion” anti-stance will become its own kind of shtick eventually. But judging by the mostly-brilliant Late Registration that won’t be happening for a while yet. He might even make it unscathed to the end of the quintology of conceptually-linked albums of which this album is merely instalment #2.

2008-04-26T19:19:00.000-07:00

[Bring the Noise deleted scene #73]

YING YANG TWINS
U.S.A. (United State of Atlanta)
Blender, late summer 2005

by Simon Reynolds

“Wait” is, no contest, 2005’s most striking single. The track’s radically emaciated structure--just that four-note sequence of 808 bass-thud, a few fingersnaps, and a faint rustle of hi-hat--eclipses even previous pinnacles of minimalism like the Neptunes-produced “Grindin’”. Yet many who dig the Ying Yang sound recoil from the words as mere sexual-harassment-with-a-beat. You don’t have to be prudish or PC to flinch at lines like “I’m gonna beat that pussy up”--less a would-be seducer’s come-on murmured into a lady’s delicate shell-like than the boast of a schoolyard bully about to go on a nerd-crushing rampage, surely?

If “Wait” pushes beyond your personal comfort zone, prepare to be outright traumatized by “Pull My Hair”, the stand-out track on the Ying Yang Twins’ fourth album. Built, like the bulk of U.S.A., by the Atlanta duo’s audio-svengali Mr. Collipark, the track is absolutely stunning, from its low growling bassline and spare snare-clicks to the eerie spatial placement of the vocals, whose sculptural vividness verges on psychedelic. What comes out of D-Roc and Kaine’s mouths ain’t pretty, though: “look, bitch/you’ve been talking a whole lotta shit/but wait ‘til you see my dick… your ass is in trouble… fuck you ‘til you crack”. Creepier still, the album implies that domination and degradation is what women “really want” by framing “Wait” and “Pull” with “Sex Therapy” skits, in which female callers tell a radio host how they like to be approached (“step up with swagger… and take control with me”) and what turns them on (“I can’t lie--I likes its rough”). Forming a triple-X trilogy with “Wait” and “Pull”, “Bedroom Boom” is more softcore, all caressing harpsichord ripples and baby-oil vocals from Avant. But clunker lines like “spread your legs like a bald eagle” show the Twins have got some ways to go before they truly master the Keith Sweat mode.

Just as you’re thinking that D-Roc and Kaine should go get lessons in love-making from Al Green, “Long Time” turns up, its gorgeous chorus borrowed from the Reverend’s “Belle.” Gospel-crunk featuring neo-soul singer Anthony Hamilton, the track is U.S.A.’s only song of devotion, but tellingly, the object of adoration here is masculine (the Almighty Lord). “My Brother’s Keeper” likewise reserves its tenderness for man-to-man relationships, wrapping the lyrics (about fraternal loyalty in the face of adversity) in a dreamy swirl of sound that recalls Michael Jackson’s “Human Nature”. But U.S.A. does spare a scrap of empathy for Womankind on “Live Again”, an uncharacteristically compassionate portrait of a single mom stripper struggling to escape the clubs. Maroon 5’s Adam Levine (fresh from cameoing on Kanye’s new LP, he’s clearly the new Michael McDonald, the whiteboy rated “soulful” by African-Americans) croons sweet’n’sad about how the girl's existence is as confined as “a little box”. As these gestures toward depth and range suggest, Ying Yang Twins also chafe at the fetters of genre. But soon they’re back toiling at the crunk grindstone, rasping out song after song in praise of ass, thongs, and female compliance. It may not feed the soul, but it clearly pays the bills.

2008-04-26T19:15:00.000-07:00

[Bring the Noise deleted scene #72]

KANO
Home Sweet Home
Uncut, late summer 2005

by Simon Reynolds

Grime has reached a crossroads. Everyone agrees that this is the year it’s going to blow, but nobody knows for sure how to make that happen. One strategy is for grime to simply be its in-yer-face self. Another involves toning it down just a tad. This is what Kano, one of the scene’s top MCs, does on his long-awaited debut: downplay’s grime’s adrenalin-jolting, abrasively avant-garde aspects in favour of midtempo grooves and listener-friendly gloss. In Kano’s case, though, this shift suits the exquisite poise and panache of his delivery. Unlike the aggy bluster of most grime MCs, it’s easy to imagine him winning over Jay-Z fans with the slick sinuousness of lines like “I’m trying to perfect my flow/So my dough grows loads/Like Pinocchio’s nose.”

Kano understands that uncut grime can get wearing over the length of an album. So he and his handlers’ solution is to pull together a well-sequenced smorgasbord of faintly calculated versatility, ranging from turgid metal (“Typical Me”) to the deliciously frivolous “Remember Me”, a samba novelty similar to Roll Deep’s hilarious “Shake A Leg”. Ripping the monster riff and drum rolls from Sabbath’s “War Pigs” and adding scratching and cowbell, “I Don’t Know Why” comes off as an awesome Def Jam tribute, right down to the nasal, Beasties-like tang to Kano’s vocal. “Signs in Life,” meanwhile, offers stirring orchestration and semi-conscious lyrics about maintaining a steady course despite the slings and arrows.

Unsurprisingly, the most exciting cuts on the record are the grimiest. The fogeyish (for a 19 year old!) whinge “Nobody Don’t Dance No More” cuts from sexy, swingin’
2step to bombastic, ungroovy grime to illustrate how kids today nod their heads to the MC’s words rather than shake booty to the DJ’s beats. Equally scene-reflexive, “Reload It” in contrast celebrates the MC’s ascent to supremacy, noting how crowds today demand that DJs rewind a track to hear favorite rhymes, as opposed to the tune's breakdown or intro. Pivoting around a phased riff and live-sounding drums that recall the Experience’s Mitch Mitchell as much as peak-era jungle, “Reload It” is a pure rush of energy and euphoria.

Yet the best track on Home turns out to be the most subdued one. “Sometimes” compellingly captures a moment of precariousness and self-doubt in the young MC’s upward arc. “I know I’ve got far/Is it too far to turn back?” he muses over a sad-eyed glide of synth-and-violin. Poised in limbo between the fickle streets and a potentially unswayed mainstream, Kano’s reverie serves as a poignant allegory for grime’s own crossover dilemma.

INTERVIEW WITH KANO

The grime cliché is the ravenously hungry MC for whom music is the only escape route from ghetto life. But it seems like you were spoiled for choice, with career opportunities ranging from university to professional football. In “9 to 5” you rap about not letting “my laziness ruin” your MC prospects like it did with soccer.

“I used to play for Norwich, the schoolboys team. But it was far away and I was quite young, to be doing all that travel. I wasn’t feeling it. So that faded out. It wasn’t a conscious choice between football and music, though, it was like different stages of my life.”

Exemplifed by the classic early single “Boys Love Girls,” a bonus track on the album, your songs have a rather cold-hearted attitude to romance. Even on the rhythm-and-grime track “Brown Eyes,” you’re besotted, but the chorus still insists “I don’t want to fall in love”.

“I ain’t really a romantic person. I’ve had experience with girls, but not that much experience with relationships. My view on them is that I don’t really want to get involved. ”

2008-04-26T19:12:00.000-07:00

[Bring the Noise deleted scene #71]

LETHAL BIZZLE
Against All Oddz
Observer Music Monthly, July 17, 2005

by Simon Reynolds

Lethal Bizzle has the distinction of scoring grime’s two biggest hits. Last Christmas, his solo debut “Pow” peaked just outside the Top 10, but two years earlier Bizzle and his group More Fire did even better with the number eight smash “Oi!”. In between these highs, though, came an ego-crushing career crash: More Fire’s album totally flopped. Bizzle’s response was impressive: he gradually clawed his way back, rebuilding his street rep with implacable determination and hard graft.

Hardly surprising, then, that keynotes of defiance and vindication are sounded repeatedly on this album, over adrenalin-pumping carousel-like grooves modeled on “Pow”, such as the mad-catchy “Uh Oh (I’m Back)!”. You can forgive Bizzle for gloating just a bit, as he does on “Hitman” and “The Truth,” the latter jousting with rival crew Roll Deep, pointing to the poor sales of Wiley’s own solo album and advising Riko that “there’s plenty of nine-to-fives out there”. But by far the best thing here stems from the Bizzle’s long dark night of the soul after More Fire were dropped by their label. Closer to spoken word than rap, the title track has the MC describing feeling like he was “finished, no one” over a haunting mid-tempo synth-strumental (originally titled “Funeral Vibez” and built by guest producer Plasticman).

What’s unsettling about “Against All Oddz” is how Bizzle seems just as
headfucked by his career resurrection, by the phone that won’t stop ringing and the “Beyonce look-alikes” looking to bed him. “When you’re hype everyone cares,” he intones mournfully. “But leave me alone… This world is so strange.”

Ice T once declared “don’t hate the player, hate the game.” On “Against All Oddz” Bizzle almost sees right through the game, apprehending the hollowness of triumph within a system (hip hop, a/k/a capitalism) where winners take all, but most will be losers.

2008-04-26T18:01:00.000-07:00

[Bring the Noise deleted scene #70]

GRIME: A Primer
director's cut, The Wire, April 2005

by Simon Reynolds

Grime emerged from London’s pirate radio underground. Its immediate precursor was 2step (a/k/a UK garage), which at the turn of the millennium broke into the UK pop mainstream in a massive way. 2step had been shaped by the “feminine pressure” for singalong melodies and wind-your-waist grooviness. Grime arose as a backlash against this crossover sound, a violent swing in the scene’s inner gender-pendulum from yin to yang. Out went 2step’s high-pitched diva vocals, sensual swing, and sexed-up amorousness; in came gruff rapping, stiff electro-influenced beats, and raucous aggression.

MCs have been part of the pirate radio tradition for at least fifteen years, going back through garage and jungle to the early days of hardcore rave. By the end of the Nineties, however, the MCs were moving beyond their customary restricted role as party “hosts” and sidekicks to the DJ. Instead of gimmicky vocal licks and praise-the-selector exhortations, they began to rap actual verses: initially, extended takes on traditional boasts about their own mic’ skills, but soon getting into narrative, complicated metaphors and rhyme schemes, vicious dissing of rivals, and even introspective soliloquies. The MC’s rise swiftly eclipsed the DJ, hitherto the most prominent figure on rave flyers or the main designated artist on record releases. 2001 was the turning point, when MCs shunted selectors out of the spotlight. So Solid Crew broke into the pop charts, and the underground seethed with similar collectives modeled on the clan/dynasty structures that prevail in American hip hop and Jamaican dancehall.

Emerging from the transitional sound known as “garage rap,” grime really defined itself as a distinct genre when the first tracks appeared that were designed purely as “MC tools”--riddims for rappers to ride. These grimestrumentals were largely sourced in the electro diaspora-- post-“Sleng Teng” ragga, Miami bass, New Orleans bounce, Dirty South crunk, and “street rap” producers like Swizz Beats. Like these genres, grime doesn’t go in much for sampling but prefers synths, typically with cheap ’n’ nasty timbres that vaguely evoke the Eighties and often seem to be influenced by pulp-movie video soundtracks, videogame musik, and even mobile phone ring-tones. But in grime’s textured beats and complex programming you can also hear the imprint of the jungle that most of these late teens/early twenties producers grew up on, alongside folk-memory traces of gabba and techno. Sometimes, listening, you might imagine you can hear uncanny echoes of postpunk-era electro-primitivists such as The Normal, DAF, Cabaret Voltaire, or the calligraphic exquisiteness of Japan, Thomas Leer, and The Residents.

Inherited from the period when 2step ruled the Top 10, but also inspired by enviously watching the living-large of American rap superstars, Grime feels a powerful drive to invade the mainstream and get “paid in full.” Pirate radio, a broadcast medium with a potentially vast audience, encourages this grandiosity. One peculiar byproduct of grime’s ambition is the scene’s craze for DVD releases, like Risky Roadz and Lord of the Mic, containing documentary material with live footage. It’s as if the scene is DIY-ing the sort of TV coverage it feels it deserves but isn’t getting. Yet while some of top MCs are being groomed for stardom by major label-owned boutique labels, the day-to-day reality of grime is grafting to get by in a narrowcast culture. Selling 500 copies of a track is considered a good result. The way Grime operates--small-run vinyl-only pressings and CD-R "mix-tapes", often sold directly to specialist stores--has a surprising amount in common with the micro-cultures familiar in the pages of The Wire *, such as noise, free folk, improv, and extreme metal. Like these genres, grime is what Chris Cutler would call an “engaged” culture, with a high ratio of performers to consumers. These aspiring MCs, DJs and producers have a deeper understanding of what constitutes skill and innovation in their scene. Grime even has an improv element with its freestyles and MC battles. There’s a glorious ephemerality to the way MCs riff off-the-cuff lyrics during pirate sessions, although fans have always tape-recorded the shows and some are now getting archived on the web.

Unlike those globally dispersed micro-cultures, Grime is geographically concentrated. It’s popular across London and has outposts in other multiracial UK cities, but its absolute heartland consists of a few square miles in that part of East London not served by the Tube. In truth, it’s a parochial scene, obsessed with a sense of place, riven by internecine conflicts and territorial rivalries (the intense competitiveness being one reason grime’s so creative). Still, despite this insularity, Grime has never been easier for “outsiders” to investigate, thanks to 1xtra (the BBC’s digital radio station for UK “urban” music, http://www.bbc.co.uk/1xtra/garage/; check especially the weekly shows by Cameo and Richie Vibe Vee), the trend for pirates like Rinse FM to go online as well broadcast terrestrially, mail-order via companies like Rhythm Division (http://www.rhythmdivision.co.uk/home.asp) and Independance (http://www.independance-records.co.uk/ug.htm), and the swarm of blogs covering the scene.

SO SOLID CREW
"DILEMMA"
(SO SOLID 1999)
OXIDE & NEUTRINO
"BOUND 4 DA RELOAD (CASUALTY)"
(EAST WEST 2000)

So Solid are famous as the first MC crew to crossover big-time--they hit #1 with “21 Seconds”--and infamous for their frequent brushes with the law. In grime terms, though, their single most influential track is this instrumental, which replaced 2step’s sultry swing with an electro-derived coldness and rigour. This new starkness was a timely move given that 2step had reached the inevitable “over-ripe” phase that afflicts all dance genres, its beats becoming cluttered and fussy. With its hard-angled drum machine snares and single-note sustained bassdrone veering upward in pitch, “Dilemma” rediscovered the Kraftwerk principle: inflexibility can sometimes be more funky than suppleness. So solid, indeed: “Dilemma” is like a huge block of ice in the middle of the dancefloor, a real vibe-chiller.

So Solid affiliates DJ Oxide and MC Neutrino also scored a #1 UK hit
with “Bound 4 Da Reload”. Initially a pirate radio anthem through 1999, “Reload” created a massive rift in the garage scene: older types loathed it, young ‘uns loved it. Today’s grime heads would probably disown their teenage favorite as a mere novelty track. Which it certainly was, from the Casualty TV theme sample to the “can everyone stop getting shot?” soundbite from Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels. Gimmicks aside, Oxide’s production is heavy, from the ice-stab pizzicato violins (“strings of death,” perhaps, given the track’s allusions to the rising blood-tide of violence on London’s streets) to the doom-boom of sub-bass to the morgue-chilly echo swathing much of the record. Probably equally repellent to 2step fans was the nagging, nasal insistence of Neutrino’s rapping, which is remorselessly unmelodic but horribly catchy. Instantly transforming 2step from “the sound of now” to its current nostalgia-night status as “old skool,” “Reload” has strong claims to being the first Grime tune.

PAY AS U GO KARTEL
"KNOW WE"
(SOLID CITY 2001)
WILEY AND ROLL DEEP
"TERRIBLE"
(SOLID CITY 2001)

Circulating on dubplate as early as 1999, “Know We” was in constant pirate rotation by the time of its 2001 release, alongside chip-off-the-same-block track “Terrible”. Both are back-to-basics affairs: simple programmed beats, in each case adorned with the solitary hook of a violin flourish, functioning purely as a vehicle for the MCs. Another striking shared characteristic is the use of the first person plural. Each MC bigs up himself when it’s his turn on the mic, but at the chorus individualism is subsumed in a collective thrust for prestige. “Now we’re going on terrible,” promise/threaten Roll Deep, and they don’t mean they’re about to give a weak performance. “Roll deep” itself meaning marauding around town as a mob. But there’s a hint of precariousness to Pay As U Go’s assertions of universal reknown. The sense of grandeur is latent; they’re not stars yet. What does come through loud and clear on both tracks is the hunger. “Terrible” starts with a Puff Daddy soundbite: “sometimes I don’t think you motherfuckers understand where I’m coming from, where I’m trying to get to.” Both the PAUG and Roll Deep tracks were produced by a young prodigy named Wiley, whose catchphrase back then was “they call me William/I’m gonna make a million”. Roll Deep are grime’s NWA (its ranks have included such luminaries as Dizzee Rascal, Riko, Flow Dan, Trim, and Danny Weed), with Wiley as its Dr Dre. If he’s yet to make that first million, this human dynamo must surely have released close to that number of tracks these last four years.

GENIUS CRU
"COURSE BRUV"
(KRONIK 2001)

The gangsta rap comparison isn’t an idle one. PAUG and Roll Deep pioneered criminal-minded lyrics. Taking them literally isn’t always advisable, as the imagery of “slewing” and “merking” is often purely metaphorical, signifying the destruction of rival MCs in verbal combat, the maiming of egos rather than bodies. Still, the genre wasn’t always so relentlessly hostile. Just before the grimy era, “garage rap” outfits like Heartless Crew and Genius Cru exuded playful bonhomie. The follow-up to their #12 pop hit “Boom Selection,” Genius’ “Course Bruv” talks about spreading “nuff love” in the club and stresses that they “still don’t wanna hurt nobody.” The chorus even celebrates the rave-era ritual of sharing your soft drinks with complete strangers, the “course bruv” being Genius’s gracious acquiescence to “can I have a sip of that?” Producer Capone weaves an effervescent merry-go-round groove of chiming bass-melody and giddy looped strings, while the MCs hypnotize with the sheer bubbling fluidity of their chat. The verses are deliberately preposterous playa wish-fulfillment: “Number one breadwinner” Keflon claims he’s “invested in many shares, many many stocks” while Fizzy purports to date “celeb chicks,” “ballerinas” and even have “hot chicks as my household cleaners”.

PLATINUM 45 featuring MORE FIRE
"OI!"
(GO BEAT 2002)

Pirate radio culture evolves in small increments, month by month. The onset of one genre or sub-flava overlaps with the twilight of its predecessor. There are rarely clean breaks. Still, every so often a track comes along that yells “IT’S THE NEW STYLE!!!!” in your face. “Oi!” was one of them. Drawing on the most anti-pop, street vanguard elements in black music history--ragga’s twitch ‘n’ lurch, electro’s
(f)rigidity, jump-up jungle’s bruising bass-blows --producer Platinum 45 created a most unlikely #7 hit. Factor in the barely-decipherable jabber of More Fire’s Lethal B, Ozzie B, and Neeko, and the result was one of the most abrasively alien Top of the Pops appearances ever. The tune’s pogo-like hard-bounce bass and uncouth Cockney-goes-ragga chants mean that “Oi!” has more in common with Cockney Rejects-style punk than you’d imagine. “Oi!”, then--grime’s biggest hit to date, before the genre even had a name.

MUSICAL MOB
"PULSE X (VIP Mix)"
(INSPIRED SOUNDS RECORDS 2002)

Widely regarded at the time as UK garage’s absolute nadir, “Pulse X” is actually a pivotal track: the scene’s first purpose-built MC tool. Locating a new rhythm at the exact intersection of electro and gabba. “Pulse” is virtually unlistenable--those dead-eyed claps, those numbly concussive kicks--on its own. But in combination with a great MC, the skeletal riddim becomes an instant and massive intravenal jolt of pure adrenalin. It’s not just the headbanging energy, though, it’s the track’s very structure that is radical. “Pulse X” was the first 8-bar tune, so-called because the rhythm switches every eight bars, thereby enabling MCs to take turns to drop 16 bars of rhymes using both beat-patterns. Far from being UK garage’s death-rattle, “Pulse X” rescued the scene, rudderless and demoralized after
2step’s pop bubble burst. The sheer phallomorphic rigour of “Pulse X” gave the scene a spine, a forward direction.

DIZZEE RASCAL
"I LUV U" / "VEXED"
(XL 2003)

Circulating as a white label from summer 2002 onwards, “I Luv U” turned London pirate culture around as much as “Pulse X”. Legendarily creating the track in a single afternoon during a school music class, Dizzee took the same sort of sounds Musical Mob used--gabba-like distorted kickdrums, shearing-metal claps--and turned them into actual music. Add a teenage MC genius desperate to announce himself to the world, and you have grime’s “Anarchy in the UK.” The punk parallel applies because of the harsh Englishness of Dizzee’s vocal timbre and the lovelessness of the lyric, which depicts the pitfalls of the, er, dating game from the p.o.v of too-much-too-young 16 year olds whose hearts have been calloused into premature cynicism. Dizzee’s snotty derision is almost eclipsed by the come-back from female MC Jeannie Jacques, who throws “that girl’s some bitch yunno” back in his face with the equally corrosive “that boy’s some prick yunno.” The original white label featured the “Luv U” instrumental, but tossed away on the XL rerelease’s B-side is the classic “Vexed”: Dizzee’s stressed delivery makes you picture steam coming out of his ears and the music--beats like ice-floes cracking, shrill synth-tingles--renders obsolete the entire previous half-decade of retro-electro in one foul swoop.

WILEY
"ESKIMO"
(WILEY KAT RECORDINGS 2002)
"ICE RINK"
(WILEY KAT RECORDINGS 2003)

Ex-PAUG but at this point still Rolling Deep, Wiley invented a entire mini-genre of low-key, emaciated instrumentals: asymmetrically structured grooves based around sidewinder B-lines that “Slinky downstairs” (as DJ Paul Kennedy put it), and glinting, fragmentary melodies. From his legion of imitators, these tended to be strictly MC-funktional beats, but in Wiley’s case, more often than not the tracks are highly listenable stand-alone aesthetic objects even without rhyming. The first in an ongoing series of ice-themed tunes (“Igloo”, “Frostbite,” “Snowkat”, et al). “Eskimo” was the blueprint for this dinky-yet-creepy micro-genre (which Wiley dubbed “Eskibeat”). “Ice Rink” took the concept of MC tool to the next level. Instead of just being sold as an instrumental for MCs to use, it was released in some eight versions featuring different MCS. Spread across two 12 inches, ‘Ice Rink” constituted a de facto riddim album. Dizzee’s turn is the stand-out, his scrawny voice oozing the impudence of someone at the top of his game, as he invites all haters to plant their lips upon his posterior: “kiss from the left to the right/kiss ‘til my black bum-cheeks turn white”. Wiley’s palsy of gated doorslam kicks and mercury-splash blips jostles with Dizzee for your attention.

JAMMER
"WEED MAN"
(HOT SOUND 2003)
JAMMER featuring D DOUBLE E
"BIRDS IN THE SKY"
(HOT SOUND 2003)

2003 saw a slew of 8-bar instrumentals suffused with cod-Oriental exoticism. As incongruous as a pagoda plopped smack dab in the centre of Bow, “Weed Man” is the supreme example of “sinogrime,” Hyperdub webzine’s term for this micro-genre. Produced by Nasty Crew’s Jammer, the track is dedicated to “all the marijuana smokers” and appropriately the tempo is torpid to a trip hop-like degree. The loping, sprained rhythm flashes back to Sylvian-Sakomoto’s “Bamboo Music” while the ceremonial bassline and breathy flute conjure mind’s eye imagery of Zen gardens and temples. But where Wiley’s similar excursions Eastwards were fueled by record-buying trips to Sterns, Jammer mostly likely derived his notion of Oriental mystery from videogame muzik and martial arts movie soundtracks.

“Birds In the Sky” has a similarly Medieval atmosphere but, apart from the plucky twang of some kind of stringed Far Eastern instrument, is less obviously an ethnological forgery. The solo debut of one of grime’s greatest MCs, D Double E, “Birds” has a brooding meditational aura. The lyric pivots around the bizarre trope of a verbal drive-by, the MC firing off word-bullets that are also “like birds in the sky/hit one of your bredren’s in the eye”. Double muses on his motivations--“why?/cos I’m an evil guy”--then emits his signature vocal-licks, the pain-pleasure groan of “oooh-oooh” and the mouth-mangled “it’s me, me”, which sounds more like “mwui-mwui”.

RIKO AND TARGET
"CHOSEN ONE"
(AIM HIGH 2004)
RUFF SQWAD
"LETHAL INJECTION"
(WHITE LABEL 2004)

Former PAUG stalwart and man behind the ace Aim High compilations, Target here creates one of Grime’s most stirringly cinematic epics, placing a heart-tugging orchestral refrain amid a strange decentered drum-track whose flurries of claps and kicks seem to trip over themselves. This groove’s sensation of impeded yet steadfast forward-motion totally fits the lyric’s theme of determination and destiny. In his smoky, patois-tinged baritone, Riko (another PAUG alumnus) counsels calmness and composure to all those struggling, whether they’re aspiring MCs striving to make it or regular folk trying to make it through everyday strife: “Use your head to battle through/cos you are the chosen one.” The synth swells favoured by Ruff Sqwad also have a cinematic grandeur, like gangsta Vangelis. “Lethal Injection”, though, is one of their more minimal efforts, consisting of a wibbly keyboard line, the boom of a heavily echoed kick drum, and the Sqwad’s rapid-fire jabber, swathed in a susurrating shroud of reverb and background chat. Not a tear-jerker like “Chosen One,” but incredibly atmospheric.

TERROR DANJAH
INDUSTRY STANDARD EP
(AFTERSHOCK 2003)
VARIOUS ARTISTS
PAY BACK EP (THE REMIX)
(AFTERSHOCK 2003)

Judging by Industry Standard, you could justly describe Terror Danjah as one of the most accomplished electronic musicians currently active. On tracks like “Juggling” and “Sneak Attack,” the intricate syncopation, texturized beats, spatialized production, and “abstracty sounds” (Danjah’s own phrase) makes this “headphone grime”--not something that could be claimed for too many operators on the scene. Yet all this finesse is marshaled in service of a fanatically doomy and monolithic mood, Gothic in the original barbarian invader meaning. The atmosphere of domineering darkness is distilled in Danjah’s audio-logo, a demonic cackle that resembles some jeering, leering cyborg death-dwarf, which appears in all of his productions and remixes. “Creep Crawler,” the first tune on Industry Standard, and its sister track “Frontline (Creepy Crawler Mix),” which kicks off Pay Back, are Danjah’s sound at its most pungently oppressive. “Creep Crawler” begins with the producer smirking aloud (“‘heh-heh, they’re gonna hate me now”), then a bonecrusher beat stomps everything in its path, while ominous horn-blasts pummel in the lower mid-range and synths wince like the onset of migraine. From its opening something-wicked-this-way-comes note-sequence onwards, Big E.D.’s original “Frontline” was hair-raising already. Danjah’s remix of his acolyte’s monstertune essentially merges it with “Creep Crawler,” deploying the same astringent synth-dissonance and trademark bass-blare fanfares (filtered to create a weird sensation of suppressed bombast) but to even more intimidating and shudder-inducing effect.

MARK ONE VERSUS PLASTICMAN
"HARD GRAFT 1" / "HARD GRAFT 2"
(CONTAGIOUS 2003)
LOEFAH
"BOMBAY SQUAD"
(on GRIME 2, REPHLEX COMPILATION, 2004)

If you hadn’t already guessed from the name, grime inverts values. Dutty, stinkin’, even disgustin’--all are positive attributes in grime parlance. So when I say “Hard Graft” is utterly dismal, you’ll know this is the thumbs up. Grime often represents itself as gutter music. Mark One and Plasticman go further, or deeper, with this track, and seem to plunge into the sewage system. Full of clanking beats, septic gurglings, eerie echoes and scuttling percussion, “Hard Graft” makes you imagine pipes, storm drains, dank chambers.

Mark One, Plasticman and their cohorts constitute not so much a subgenre of grime as a side-genre, running adjacent to the scene proper. The sound is techy, MC-free, and more danceable than grime. Although a number of black producers are involved, you could fairly describe this style’s sonic coding as whiter than grime, and situate it on a Euro continuum running through Belgian industrial techno (Meng Syndicate, 80 Aum) through the cold technoid end of rave (Nebula II) to No U Turn’s techstep and Photek-style neurofunk (the beats on “Hard Graft” sometimes recall his “Ni Ten Ichi Ryu”). Plasticman’s nomenclative proximity to the Richie Hawtin alias seems telling.

The black component to this genre-without-a-satisfactory-name is dub (indeed its precursor was a UK garage micro-genre known as dubstep). Loefah’s clanking skank connects to a lineage of industrial-but-rootical UK music: On U, bleep’n’bass (Ability II’s “Pressure”, say), The Orb, Techno-Animal. “Bombay Squad” is built around what feels like a half-finished, or partially erased, groove: massive echo-laden snare-cracks, a liquid pitter of tablas situated in a localized corner of the mix, and… that’s it, apart from the dark river of sub-bass that propels the track forward. The title’s intertextual traces include Public Enemy’s producers and 2 Bad Mice’s rave anthem “Bombscare,” but actually allude to the track’s sole coloration, the plaintive ululation of a Bollywood diva.

WONDER
"WHAT"
(DUMPVALVE 2004)
SLK
"HYPE! HYPE! (DJ WONDER REFIX)"
(SMOOVE/MINISTRY OF SOUND 2005)

Wonder works on the cusp between grime proper and the Plasticman/Mark One/Loefah sound. “What” makes something compellingly atmospheric out of the most meagre components: a beat dragging like a wounded leg, sub-bass yawning ominously like a portal into the underworld, a dejected one-finger-melody suggestive of an autistic desultorily toying with a xylophone, occasional dank blips of electronics. Overall, the audio mise-en-scene is something like “twilight falls on the battle-scarred moon.” Also vaguely redolent of The Mover’s gloomy brand of ambient gabba, Wonder’s remix of “Hype! Hype!” replaces the perky original backing track (produced by the great Sticky) with a groan-drone of sick technoise. This
catastrophe-in-slow-mo makes a marvelously incongruous backdrop for the roaring vocal hook chanted by North West London crew SLK.

JAMMER featuring KANO
"BOYS LOVE GIRLS"
(HOT SOUND 2003)
WONDER featuring KANO
"WHAT HAVE YOU DONE"
(NEW ERA 2004)
TERROR DANJAH featuring KANO and SADIE
"SO SURE"
(AFTERSHOCK 2004)

The backing tracks are fabulous--Jammer’s frenetic snare-roll clatter, Wonder’s tonally harrowed synths, Danjah’s aching ripples of idyllic electronics--but it’s the MC who really shines. With some grime rhymesters, the flow resembles an involuntary discharge (D Double E being the ultimate exponent of MCing as automatic poetry). But even at his most hectic, as on “Boys Love Girls,” Kano always sounds in complete control. All poise and deliberation, Kano invariably sounds like he’s weighing up the angles, calculating his moves, calibrating which outcomes serve his interests. That’s blatant on “Boys” and “What Have You Done”, both cold-hearted takes on modern romance that depict sex in transactional terms, a ledger of positives and minuses, credits and debits; a war of the genders in which keeping your feelings checked and maintaining distance is strategically crucial. But it comes through even in the gorgeous ballad “So Sure,” on which Kano blurs the border between loverman and soldier drawing up plans for conquest: “ain’t got time to be one of them guys just watching you and wasting time/next time I’m clocking you I’m stopping you to make you mine.” As much as the acutely observed lyrical details, it’s the timbre of Kano’s voice that’s enthralling: slick yet grainy, like varnished wood, and knotty with halting cadences that convince you he’s thinking these thoughts aloud for the very first time.

DAVINCHE
"DIRTY CANVAS EP"
(PAPERCHASE RECORDINGS 2004)
ESSENTIALS
"HEADQUARTERS"
(WHITE LABEL, 2004)

“So Sure” is an example of the burgeoning subgenre R&G, basically a transparent attempt to lure the ladies back onto the floor, after they’d been turned off by the testosterone-heavy vibe of tracks more suitable for moshing than sexy dancing. As the name R&G, short for rhythm-and-grime, suggests, the mini-genre replicates 2step’s original move of copping American R&B’s luxurious arrangements and diva-melisma. Alongside Terror Danjah, Davinche pioneered R&G with tunes like “Leave Me Alone”. Too often these attempts at Brit-Beyonce fall short owing to a lack of grounding in songcraft and the studio art of mic’ing vocalists, and end up sounding slightly thin and shabby. So I prefer Davinche’s instrumental efforts like the Dirty Canvas EP series. The quasi-soundtrack orchestration of “Stinger”--flurrying strings, decaying tones from a softly-struck gong--are designed to swathe any MC who rhymes over it with an aura of slightly-harried majesty. Built out of similar pizzicato elements meshed to a beat like a clockwork contraption gone haywire, “Madness,” I’d wager, drew inspiration from the paranoia zone reached after one toke too many on a spliff: racing thoughts, pounding heart, jangled nerves, the suspicion that you might just be losing your mind.

Grime is synonomous with East London, but other parts of the city are starting to get a look-in. Essentials, Davinche‘s crew, operate out of South. This powerful sense of territoriality is integral to the concept of “Headquarters,” which draws on the talents of a veritable battalion of MCs, some guests and some from Essentials’ own barracks. At each chorus, a drill sergeant barks questions at the MC who’s stepping up for his mic’ turn: “state your name, soldier”, “state your location” (usually “East” or “South,” sometimes a specific postal district), “who you reppin’” (usually a crew, like Essentials, N.A.S.T.Y, Aftershock, but sometimes just “myself”). Then the sergeant orders each recruit to get down and “give me sixteen”--not press-ups, but 16 bars of rhymes. The amazing production seals the conceptual deal, the chorus being accompanied by cello-like instrumentation that’s been digitally contorted into an unearthly wraith-like whinny, or a cyberwolf howling at the moon.

LETHAL B featuring FUMIN, D DOUBLE E, NAPPA, JAMAKABI, NEEKO, FLOW DAN, OZZI B, FORCER, DEMON, & HOT SHOT
"POW (FORWARD)"
(RELENTLESS 2004)

Following a failed mainstream-bid album, More Fire looked all washed up in 2003, but Lethal B rebuilt their street rep from the ground up. In 2004, his “Forward” riddim became the scene’s biggest anthem. Renamed “Pow” on account of its main vocal hook, it ultimately barged its way to the outskirts of the Top Ten, achieving grime’s highest chart placing since… well, “Oi!”. The riddim, produced by Dexplicit, is basic verging on crude, a madly gyrating loop that resembles an out-of-control carousel. “Pow!!!,” Lethal’s chorus chant, evokes the fisticuffs of comic book superheroes. Matching the track’s rowdy vibe (it was reputedly banned in some clubs for inciting mayhem on the floor), a squadron of top MCs lay on the ultraviolence, the cartoon flavor of which can be gleaned from Demon’s immortal warning “you don’t wanna bring some beef/Bring some beef you’ll lose some teeth”.

JAMMER featuring WILEY, D DOUBLE E, KANO & DURTY DOOGZ
"DESTRUCTION REMIX"
(WHITE LABEL)
D DOUBLE E & P-JAM
"ANGER MANAGEMENT"
(DICE RECORDINGS)

Like “Pow”, “Destruction” is a rollercoaster of pugilistic noise and lyrical aggro, but Jammer’s production is marginally more sophisticated, slicing ‘n’ dicing brassy fanfares (probably from blacksploitation movies) and filtering them to create a sort of surging-yet-leashed effect, like the track is simmering with pent-up rage. The four scene-leading MCs rise to the occasion, from Wiley’s riffed variations on “I know Trouble but Trouble says he don’t know you,” to Kano’s quaintly Anglicized gangsta boat “from lamp post to lamp post, we run the road”. But the star performance comes from D Double. Seemingly battling multiple speech impediments, he expectorates glottal gouts of raw verbiage. As so often, there’s that characteristic sense of involuntary utterance, like it’s him who’s being spoken through. “Spitting” is too decorous a word for his rhyme style;
retching is closer. Witness Double’s astonishing first six bars on “Destruction”, a gargoyle-like gibber closer to hieroglyphics than language, and seemingly emanating from the same infrahuman zone Iggy plumbed on “Loose” and “TV Eye”.

On Double’s first solo single since “Birds in the Sky”, rising producer P-Jam’s snaking wooze of gaseous malevolence sparks one of the MC’s most Tourettic performances. Barely tethered to the beat’s bar scheme, Double seems to be wading waist-deep through sonic sludge. He boasts of “sucking up MCs like a hoover”, an image possibly cued by the Mentasm-like miasma unloosed by P-Jam.

LOWDEEP
"STR8 FLUSH"
(COLORFUL STATE RECORDINGS 2005)
CRAZY TITCH / IMP BATCH
"SING ALONG"
(IN THE HOOD RECORDS 2004)

The sped-up diva on “Str8 Flash” might be a nod to Kanye West’s Chaka-accelerating “Through the Wire” but equally could be a folk-memory flashback to the early Nineties, when rave producers whisked female vocal samples into helium-squeaky hypergasms of spectral bliss. That said, everything else in Lowdeep’s hot riddim testifies to the influence on grime of the last half-decade of rap and R&B. Pizzicato harp-like sounds and stuttering beats create a frozen peak of tense glory. IMP Batch’s “Gype,” the inescapable riddim of early 2005 and the backing track for Crazy Titch’s “Sing Along,” takes grime’s quasi-orchestral ambitions to the next level. Using classical music samples (Prokofiev?), IMP Batch expertly chop up and resequence the refrains--fluttery flutes, cascading strings, a cello ostinato--to form a hilariously prissy yet dynamic groove. This parodic high-culture refinement makes a wonderfully incongruous setting for Crazy’s hoarsely hollered anthem.

TRIM
"BOOGIEMAN"
(AFTERSHOCK 2004)
BRUZA
"NOT CONVINCED"
(AFTERSHOCK 2005)

Like most producers in most dance genres, grime beat-makers typically invent a striking sound, then wear it out with endless market-milking iterations. Terror Danjah has often approached that dangerzone, but on “Boogieman,” he shows how much scope for inventive arrangement remains in the “Creep Crawler” template. You can hear the cartoon-comical wooh-wooh-woooooh ghostly touches best on the instrumental version, “Haunted” (on Aftershock’s Roadsweeper EP). “Boogieman” itself is a showcase for rising star Trim, here honing his persona of scoffing imperturbality: “I’m not scared of the boogieman/I scare the boogieman.”

On “Not Convinced,” Danjah draughts a whole new template that reveals the producer’s roots in drum’n’bass (the track’s futuristic tingles vaguely recall’s Foul Play “Being With You” remix). Again, though, the MC makes it hard to focus on the riddim. More than anyone apart from not-grime-really Mike Skinner, Bruza incorporates British intonation and idiom into a totally effective style of rapping, in which the not-flow of stilted English cadences becomes a new flow. It sounds “brutal and British,” as Bruza puts it. As his name suggests, the MC has also perfected a hardman persona that feels authentically English rather than a gangsta fantasy based on Compton or Kingston. He exudes a laconic, steely menace redolent of bouncers. “Not Convinced” extrapolates from this not-easily-impressed persona to create a typology of character in which the world is divided into the serious and the silly, the latter lacking the substance and conviction to give their words authority. Bruza addresses, and dresses down, a wannabe MC: “I’m not convinced/Since you’ve been spitting/I haven’t believed one word/Not one inch/Not even a millimeter/To me you sound like a silly speaker/Silly features in your style/You spit silly/You spit like how kids be**.”

KANO featuring D DOUBLE E & DEMON
"RELOAD IT"
(ON HOME SWEET HOME, 679, 2005)

Circling back to “Bound 4 The Reload,” this track celebrates the pirate radio and rave tradition of the DJ rewind, when the crowd hollers (or home-listening audience text-messages) its demand for the selector to wheel and come again. Until grime, the trigger for rewinds would be a killer sampled vocal lick, thrilling bass-drop, or even just a mad breakbeat. Nowadays, the MC being king, the crowd clamors to hear their favourite rhymes. “This is what it means when DJs reload it/That sixteen was mean and he knows it,” explains Kano, before listing the other top dog MCs who get nuff rewinds (two of them, Double and Demon, guest on the track). “I get a reload purely for the flow,” Kano preens, and you can see why as he glides with lethal panache between quick-time rapping and a leisurely, drawn-out gait that seems to drag on the beat to slow it down. The track itself, co-produced by Kano and Diplo, is all shimmery excitement, pivoting around a spangly filtered riff that ascends and descends the same four notes, driven by a funky rampage of live-sounding drums, and punctuated by horn samples, Beni G’s scratching, and orgasmic girl-moans. The old skool breakbeat-like energy suggests an attempt to sell the notion of Grime as British hip hop, yet if Trans-Atlantic crossover is the intent, that’s subverted by the lyric, its theme being as localized and Grime-reflexive as imaginable. “Reload It” encapsulates the conflicted impulses that fuel this scene: undergroundist insularity versus an extrovert hunger to engage with, and conquer, the whole wide world.

^^^^^^^^^

* footnote: I quipped to my friends that when I’d pitched this piece to the Wire it was on the grounds that the scene was now unpopular enough to be in the magazine! Joking aside, it was actually, weirdly true. The breakthrough for me was realizing that pirate radio had become a narrowcast medium. Because the potential audience is limitless, there’s always been a grandiosity to the pirates—“this one’s for you, London”—and at key points, that’s been perfectly justified: hardcore was massive nationwide, jungle was the Sound of London in ’94, as was speed garage in 1997, while 2step felt like a form of pop music in exile and sure enough broke through to dominate the mainstream. Grime initially had the air of something that was destined to be pop, and the precedents of So Solid and More Fire and various garage Number One hit wonders like Pied Piper gave it great self-expectations. But just because you’re broadcasting doesn’t mean everyone’s tuning into the signal; most people who chanced upon grime stations probably veered away as quickly as if they’d stumbled on a pirate dedicated to Derek Bailey-style improv. All of sudden, I realized that the grime pirates had become a niche thing, a micro-culture that probably wasn’t that much bigger than the anti-pop vanguards that populated the pages of The Wire.

** for the longest while I heard this as "you spit like Agnes B"!

2008-04-26T17:45:00.000-07:00

[Bring the Noise deleted scene #69]

VARIOUS ARTISTS
Risky Roadz: Volume 1--Tha Roadz Are Real
VARIOUS ARTISTS
Run the Road
director's cut Village Voice, April 12th, 2005

By Simon Reynolds

I’ll cut to the chase: if you can’t find anything to like on Run the Road, you might as well give up on grime. Listen to the five best tracks--Terror Danjah’s “Cock Back,” Riko & Target’s “Chosen One,” Jammer’s “Destruction,” Lady Sovereign’s “Cha Ching,” Shystie’s “One Wish”--and if you still feel a bit shruggy, well, strike the genre off your list, ‘cos that’s as good as grime gets.

I’d be perplexed and disappointed if you did, admittedly. Surely there’s something for everybody here? You want to feel the same dark rush that “Bodies” by the Sex Pistols gave you? Just listen to the six opening bars of D Double E’s “performance” on “Destruction”--vomitous, a self-exorcism, he sounds barely human. Conversely, if you’re jonesing for nursery rhyme tunefulness, there’s pasty-faced Lady Sovereign’s delicious faux-patois. Grime can do quasi-orchestral grandeur (swoon to Target’s “Chosen One” and Terror Danjah’s “One Wish” remix) as superbly as Anglo-gangsta (check Bruza’s astonishing 27 seconds on “Cock Back,” equal parts Jadakiss and Bob Hoskyns in The Long Good Friday). But what pushes Run into the first-class compilation zone is the second-tier tracks: Durrty Goodz’s double-time and ravenous “Gimmie Dat,” EARS’ plaintive elegy for lost innocence “Happy Days”… Indeed there’s only a couple of outright duds.

Grime sometimes gets treated as merely “the latest fad” from the trendhoppy U.K. But the grander movement of which it’s an extension/mutation--London pirate radio culture--has been going on since circa 1991, if not earlier. From hardcore rave to jungle to garage to grime, underlying every phase-shift there’s an abiding infrastructure based around pirate radio stations, dubplates, and white labels sold direct to specialist stores. The core sonic principles are also enduring: beat-science seeking the intersection between “fucked up” and “groovy,” dark bass-pressure, MCs chatting fast, samples and arrangement ideas inspired by pulp soundtracks. The b.p.m. have oscillated wildly, the emphasis on particular elements goes through changes, but in a deep, real sense this is the same music. You could even see it as a conservative culture, except that the underlying article of faith is “keep moving forward.”

One of the few recent innovatons in the scene’s means of production & distribution has been the vogue for DVDS (which Americans can mail order from companies like Independance. This syndrome seems symptomatic of grime’s impatience for fame. Tired of waiting for the TV crews to arrive, they decided to do-it-themselves. Typically consisting of promos, live footage, interviews and quasi-documentary material, the production values lean toward cruddy. Nonetheless, these DVDs are fascinating capsules of subculture-in-the-raw. For American grime fans just seeing where their heroes actually live--projects a/k/a council estates in low-rent areas like Peckham and Wood Green--ought to be revelatory. Some of the videos in Risky Roadz are shot on the concrete pedestrian bridges connecting different blocks of flats. Compared to American rap promos, the grime efforts, with their ultra-amateurish camerawork and "choreography", look positively third-world.

In Risky Roadz, Dizzee Rascal is interviewed on an actual road--Roman Road, to be precise, a crucial thoroughfare in grime’s topography, home to legendary record store Rhythm Division. Dizzee offers sage advice to aspiring MCs: “Do you. Do you well.” Another interview is with Riko--a future star, everyone agrees, so long as he can stay out of jail. “I want to get my zeros,” says Riko hungrily, talking of his immediate plans (to get signed). When the subject of mic’ battles and MC feuds comes up, he fires off the usual threats to anyone stepping forward to test, then checks himself: “I don’t mean ‘shot’, I mean lyrically shot.” Looking at Riko standing there, you might well think: “here’s someone with the charisma-glow, the sheer physical beauty, and--‘cos these things count, for better or worse--the bad boy back-story, to be, ooh, as big as DMX.” It’s quite likely that’ll he’ll remain just a local legend. The excitement of this moment in grime’s rise is that the latter, lesser outcome doesn’t feel inevitable.

2008-04-26T17:35:00.000-07:00

[Bring the Noise deleted scene #68]

VARIOUS ARTISTS
Run the Road
director's cut, Observer Music Monthly, November 14, 2004

by Simon Reynolds

Grime is our hip hop, the final coming of a Britrap that’s not merely a pale reflection of the original. Instead it’s a wonky, hall-of-mirrors reflection. To American ears reared on “the real thing”, grime sounds disconcertingly not-right--the halting, blurting MC cadences don’t flow, the gap-toothed, asymmetric grooves seem half-finished and defective.

Something of grime’s skewiff quality is captured in the title of this compilation. “Road” is grime-speak for “street”. On “Destruction VIP,” one of the killer tracks here, Kano proclaims “from lamp post to lamp post/We run the road”.The intent is gangsta menace, an assertion of territorial might, but perhaps even to English ears, the quaint phrasing makes the boast fall a little short. American rap fans would most likely crack up on hearing the line. No wonder Grime’s modest fanbase in the United States consists almost entirely of white Anglophile hipsters.

If Grime doesn’t have a hope in hell with American’s hip hop heartland, it can console itself with the knowledge that right now it’s got the edge over “the real thing”. The records sound cheap’n’nasty next to US rap’s glossy production values, but Grime’s way with rhythm and sound is far more jaggedly futuristic. More crucially, Grime has a feeling of desperation that American hip hop has largely lost. Individual rappers may still follow rags-to-riches trajectories, but as a collective enterprise, hip hop has won. It dominates pop culture globally. The music oozes a sense of entitlement, something you can also see in that lordly look of blasé disdain that’s de rigeur in rap videos nowadays. In America, rising MCs rhyme about the luxury goods and opulent lifestyle they don’t yet have because it’s also so much more plausible, within reach. The path is well-trodden--not just selling millions of records, but diversifying into movies, starting their own clothing lines, bringing their neighbourhood crew up with them once they’ve made it.

As a sound, Grime is still very much an underdog, and so its fantasies of triumph and living large are much more precarious, and affecting. There’s a definite ceiling to how much money can be made on the underground scene. Selling 500 singles is a good result, shifting a thousand is a wild success, and even hawking your white labels direct to London’s specialist stores with a huge mark-up won’t generate that much cash. At the same time, nobody in Grime, not even Dizzee, has really mapped out a crossover career path yet. Indeed, making that transition from pirate radio to Top of the Pops is risky. Take So Solid Crew, who got to #1 with “21 Seconds” a few years back. Their second album flopped and their rep on the street (or should I say "road"?) is now non-existent.

You can hear all this in the music, in those pinched, scrawny voices--the sound of energy squeezing itself through the tiniest aperture of opportunity and grabbing for a chance that most likely will prove to be a mirage. All of the guys (plus occasional gal) on Run The Road already feel like legends in their own minds. Standout track “Chosen One” by Riko & Target distils that sense of destiny and destination. Over sampled movie-soundtrack strings that evoke a kind of stunted majesty, Riko imagines himself as a star on satellite TV, then offers counsel that applies equally to other aspiring MCs and to everyday street soldiers dealing with adversity: “Stay calm/Don’t switch/Use composure, blood/Use your head to battle through, ca’ you are the chosen one.”

American rappers, once they’ve made it, can sound like bullies and tyrants when they reel out the same old lyrical scenarios: humiliating haters, discarding women like used condoms. From Grime MCs, the endless threats and boasts, the big-pimpin' postures, somehow seem more forgivable. When Grime MCs batter rivals real and imaginary, they’re really battening down their own self-doubt, chasing away the spectre of failure and anonymity with each verbal blow. Sure, the misogyny and gun talk can be hard to stomach. “Cock Back,” one of 2004’s biggest grime anthems, is a Terror Danjah riddim constructed from the click and crunch of small arms being cocked. Over this bloodcurdling beat, D Double E spits couplets like “Think you’re a big boy ‘cos you go gym?/Bullets will cave your whole face in.” Outnumbered twenty to one, the female MCs give as good as their gender usually gets. No Lay, on “Unorthodox Daughter”, promises to “put you in BUPA” and warns “soundboy I can have your guts for garters/turn this place into a lyrical slaughter”.

Probably the best grime collection yet, Run The Road is also touted as the genre’s first major label compilation. Actually, a Warners sub-label released one in 2002, Crews Control. But its contents were more like proto-grime, the beats mostly 2step and UK garage, and the vibe far more playful and genial, courtesy of now almost forgotten crews like Heartless and Genius. Their brand of boisterous bonhomie and quirky humour is in short supply on Run The Road. One exception: Lady Sovereign’s “Cha Ching”, on which the squeaky-voiced “white midget” announces “It’s Ms Sovereign, the titchy t’ing/Me nah have fifty rings/but I’ve got fifty things/To say/In a cheeky kind of way/Okay?”

Bruza sounds comic, injecting the Cockney into “Cock Back” with his lurching, Arthur Mullard-like delivery and lines like “you’ll be left in ruins for your wrong-doings”. But content-wise, he’s “brutal and British”, reeling off the usual list of inventively gory acts of revenge. Run The Road 's brand of laughter is strictly the gloating, vindictive kind. Hence the eerie digital cackle, like an evil, leering cyber-goblin, used by Terror Danjah as a motif on all his productions (on this comp, “Cock Back” and Shystie’s “One Wish”). Compared to even a few years ago, Grime seems like it has less scope for goofing about now. There’s a deadly seriousness in the air, possibly influenced by the sense that there’s more at stake--a real chance of making it, now the majors are cautiously sniffing around and signing up MCs like Kano.

If Grime ever does makes it, collectively--achieving the sort of dominance that American rap enjoys--these last three years of the genre’s emergence will be looked back on as the golden age, the old skool. Make no mistake, the MCs on this compilation-- Kano, D Double E, Riko, Sovereign, Dizzee, Wiley--are our equivalents to Rakim, Chuck D, Ice Cube, Nas, Jay-Z. To twist slightly the words of another rapper from that American pantheon, Notorious BIG: if you (still) don’t know, get to know.

2008-04-26T17:26:00.000-07:00

[Bring the Noise deleted scene #67]

INFINITE LIVEZ
Bush Meat
Village Voice, July 6th, 2004

by Simon Reynolds

For years the pathos of Brit-rap as a pale and slightly off reflection of the Real Thing was summed up in the name Derek B. He was pretty good, actually. But in the gladiatorial realpolitik of rap more than anywhere, "pretty good" don't cut it. All through the '90s, at regular intervals, you'd hear the cry go up: "British hip-hop finally comes good with ____." But to be honest, none of the names that've filled the blank ever got further than Derek-level decency. Which is why you never hear your Mike Skinners and Dizzee Rascals name-dropping Gunshot or Ruthless Rap Assassins or the Brotherhood; no, it's always Nas or Raekwon or Ludacris they cite. And that's not inverted patriotism, not really—-that's just genius responding to genius.

In recent years, the most convincing case for British hip-hop (not counting grime, which is really a totally different animal: nowt to do with UKrap, it evolved out of dancehall via rave's shouty MC'ing) has been mounted by London's Big Dada, the sister label to rap-less trip-hop imprint Ninja Tune. The British backpacker scene is even more insufferable and self-stifled-by-cool than its American undie-hop counterpart. But as heard on their excellent 2002 comp Extra Yard, Big Dada's acts (Ty, Gamma, Roots Manuva) injected some real and long-overdue rudeness into the U.K. sound—albeit mostly production-wise, as U.K. MCs on the whole tend to remain low-key. All that changes with Infinite Livez, who dominates his own records in a way few non-grime Brit MCs do.

The first thing that distinguishes Livez is his in-yer-face voice (or voices—he has several comic alter egos, some of them quite Monty Python–esque). He saunters through the tracks of his debut album, Bush Meat, with a sort of loutish elegance. One of his trademarks is extending the last syllable of a line into a great bleary smear midway between yawn and yowl, insolently slackjawed and somehow saucy. This man is larger than life; his imagination's equally outsize. Standout track "The Adventures of the Lactating Man" puts a whole new twist on "flow." After squirting his girlfriend in the eye when she's fondling his nipples, Livez visits his doctor. But when the nurse tries to take a specimen (expertly—"she was twiddling my nipple like my radio dial") the man-milk just won't stop gushing. The population has to stay "afloat in boats" as the entire U.K. gets inundated "with fresh milk well pasteurized" (past your eyes, geddit?). Livez's languid lasciviousness as he raps about girls "making me feel all frisky" by "chewing on my tit like it's made of Wrigley," and his delirious moans of "bit more . . . oooooooh . . . little bit more" as the "white gravy" gloops out introduce a Princely polymorphous perversity I've never heard in hip-hop before, apart from maybe OutKast. (Who might be a reference point, or even influence, although former art student Livez's favorite André is actually Breton).

Like a rapping Rabelais, or Bataille with a beat, Livez's mind's eye is magnetized by that ripe zone where the appetites (erotic, gastronomic) intersect with animalism and scatology. "White Wee Wee" is a moist miasma of sex-as-food and lovers-as-beasts metaphors ("ejaculate honey for you," "my snout in your wet wound") while the skit-ish interlude "Brown Nosh" features Bouncement Queen demanding a rim job as her fee for appearing on the album. "Worcestershire Sauce" redefines flava in terms of U.K. potato chips (or, to put it proper, crisps, which come in exotic flavors like "ready salted," "cheese & onion," et al.). And "Drilla Ape" tells the story of a man cheating on his partner with a primate.

The music, mostly produced by people from Livez's crew, Shadowless, totally fits the lyrics. It's a bit like "Atomic Dog" if produced by Rembrandt Pussy Horse–era Butthole Surfers: bulging and Bootsy-elasticated, hyper-gloss cartoony (Livez did a comic book called Globulicious and used to design Game Boy graphics), wriggly with funkadelic detail. The Afro-future funk of "Claati Bros" (lyrically a droll if slightly opaque spoof on Brit Art, painters daubing canvases with elephant doo-doo, etc.) might be Groove of the Year; like "White Wee Wee," it's slinky yet ruff. And some of the best bits are the interludes—for instance, the Animal Collective–weird romp of "The Forest Spirit Sings the Bush Meat Song."

Only toward the end does Livez's shtick gets a little fatigued—"Pononee Girl," from its punany pun on down, belabors a not hugely amusing sex-as-horse-riding metaphor. But then Bush Meat rallies with the brilliant "Last Nite." Over an apprehensive xylo-bass riff, Livez unfurls a panic-attack panorama of bad stuff, the mindscreen of a man unable to stop contemplating all the sadness and terrible goings-on in the world: stillborn babies, abused wives, teenagers scarred by a face full of shrapnel, murders in forest clearings, a Massai warrior losing all of his cattle. The chorus, nicked from Indeep's hymn to life-saving deejays, goes, "Last night I nearly took my life."

Honestly, I'd be surprised if a better rap album is released this year, from anywhere.

2008-04-26T17:15:00.000-07:00

[Bring the Noise deleted scene #66]

CRUNK
Blissblog, March 22, 2004 / March 30, 2004

by Simon Reynolds

pleased to meat ya

… Re. Crunk's deep-bass growl... it's funny how when Ja Rule does it's like a thug rap update of Barry White the Walrus of Love, but w/ Crunk it's just pure leering menace, zero slowjamz potential. (Did I hallucinate this or is there actually a line in "Get Low" that goes "until the sweat runs down my balls?"). [Anthony Miccio’s] shouting-at-strippers thing is spot on, cos as Barthes said in Mythologies, striptease isn't about eroticism, it's about fear.

When I hear that bleary baleful rasp of unison baritone voices on Crunk records, it always makes me think of bad breath--you can almost smell this barking reek of chicken, beer, and stale weedsmoke hitting you in the face. Chicken.... hmmm... that's the thing about Crunk, it's carnivorous. It's all about surrendering to your basest appetities, being a predator. That's what makes it so vital... yet its vitality is intrinsically bound up with a kind of death-force, a monstrous will to make the world dead. Having mentioned Mythologies, I'm going to up the over-interpretation stakes and bring The Sadeian Woman into it, if only to get off on having a sentence that contains the names Angela Carter and Lil Jon in it. But in that book--whose subtitle if I recall is something like 'the pornographic imagination'-- Carter makes play of the fact that the German word for flesh-- fleisch--is the same as the word for meat. She writes that every time she sees the word she shudders. She then goes on to discuss how a certain objectifying form of (male, natch) sexuality turns everything into meat, devitalized and dead. Now, ur-Crunk text "What's Your Fantasy" I always thought had a hint of the Sadeian about, the scurrying ominousness of the music making the parade of sexual configurations Ludacris enumerates seem strangely joyless. At any rate as per Carter's fleisch thing you could pretty much summarise the lyrical universe of Crunk in two words: BEEF and RUMP. Men: I'll turn you into carcass. Women: you're just meat to me.

(Interesting too that as per recent New York Times piece Lil Jon has moved into the beating-yr-meat market and actually gotten into cross-synergy with the porn industry, etc)

dogg breath pt 2/the spiritual godfathers of crunk?

Picking up on that crunk-as-carnivore-music theme, it suddenly struck me that all that metal on their teeth must be a bit like braces--really bad for meat-shred retention. (Are rappers good about flossing? [Boom-boom!!!])

Also started wondering where I’d heard those halitosis-rasp baritones before--and then it hit me: The Stranglers! Aren’t they kinda like the godfathers of crunk? There was that infamous open-air concert in Battersea or someplace like that, where they had strippers onstage. And think of all those songs of sexual malice like the leering "Peaches" and the truly twisted “School M’Am” and the ho'-sanna “Princess of the Streets” (“she’s no lad-eee… she’s a sweet piece of meat”). “London Lady” slags off a skeez (except what she--a well-known punk scenester/journalist--is gold-digging for ain’t cash, it’s cred). And let’s not forget that char-ming B-side track “Crabs”.

The Stranglers-as-protocrunk ur-text though is “Bring On The Nubiles”--compare the title/chorus with Lil Jon’s ”all these females”: the idea is, this song is the opposite of a song for and about a special Lady, it’s aimed at a faceless plurality of fuckable fleisch, a banquet of ass and gash. "Nubiles" also has the strange malicious-witholding-of-satisfaction lyric "and when the fever reaches you/I'll hide beneath my zip". Pretty fetid, pretty rank, inside Mr Hugh "I Like Dominating Women" Cornwell's skull, I reckon.

Yeah, the Stranglers, they also had a whole carnivore theme--they identified with two carrion-eating creatures, first the Rat, and then the Raven. Hugh Cornwell’s gruffmale malevolence is one thing, but Jean-Jacques Burnell took it to a whole lower sewer level of nastiness: “Ugly” (“I guess I shouldn’t have strangled her to death… but she had acne”), and how about this verse from the Yukio Mishima paean “Death and Night and Blood”: “hey little baby don’t you lean down low/your brain’s exposed and it’s starting to show/your rotten thoughts, yeuuuuch”. In classic masculine abjection-projection syndrome, the “rotten thoughts” are all JJ’s. Yeah Burnel's voice simply is the pus of male self-loathing spurting free.

BUT (again, like making allowances for crunk cos when all’s said it rocks, unfortunately) The Stranglers remain a favorite band of that era, I can never quite disown them like I know I should. At the time their misogyny just seemed part and parcel of punk’s equal-opportunity animosity, that really crucial part of punk's appeal that related to pure monstrous evil, c.f. “Bodies” and “Belsen”, or the icky-grody side of Devo. Plus they had this really quite idiosyncratic and odd sound, and even the Doors comparison only takes you so far.... “Nice ‘N Sleazy” for instance sounds like nothing else in pop. Dave Greenfield did some cool stuff with Moogs and electronic keyboards on tracks like “The Raven” where the Stranglers developed this kind of rok-disko sound picking up where the electrothrob of “Hello I Love You” left off. And Burnel did a whole electronic solo album come to think of, Euroman Cometh, with an anti-America/European-unity-as-vital-geopolitical-counterbalance concept. Never heard it though.

But yeah with crunk and Stranglers, the nub of it is: you can smell death on their breath.

2008-04-16T17:41:00.001-07:00

[Bring the Noise deleted scene #65]

HIP HOP VERSUS THE ELECTRONICA INVASION
Blissblog, March 17, 2004

by Simon Reynolds

... On ILM I said rather metaphysically that dance isn’t generating anthems cos a culture in retreat isn’t going to have much call for rallying cries. The real explanation, though, is more prosaic. The kind of music being made now is made by and made for people who have been in this for a while; they’ve grown with the music, they don’t want to hear crass riffs and obvious hooks. Microhouse, especially, strikes me as music for seasoned sensibilities, sophisticates.

But new recruits get pulled in by the most accessible hooky stuff. I just can’t see it as a music that is going to pull in that many new people. It’s not fierce or full-on enough. Some of the riff-patterns in Michael Mayer’s set at Volume last week verged on the imperceptible to be frank, minute fluctuations of texture. Well they don’t call it ‘micro’ for nothing. I think you can see this de-cheesing tendency across the genrescape. And of course that becomes a self-perpetuating cycle, the neophytes arrive in steadily diminishing numbers, leaving the connoisseurs in an ever increasing majority.

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

A culture in retreat. Well, I promised a fanciful and involved theory last week, so here goes. You know how certain rock bands get “destroyed” by their failure to conquer America--it’s their last chance to really make some money, to pay off their record company debts. A certain Liverpool band had to break America to pay for its cocaine requirements and made a fatally compromised album that lost them their fanbase. Another Liverpool band tried repeatedly to break America and broke up over 1 million pounds in debt, despite selling millions of copies elsewhere in the world over the years. Anyway, pondering the meaning of the word ‘retreat’, it occurred to me that Electronica’s ultimately unsuccessful attempt to conquer America was a bit like the Nazi invasion of Soviet Union--a fatal act of hubris. In some weird way I think that was the beginning of the collapse.

The Nazis did real well at first, drove deep into Russia (this would be Prodigy, the Chemicals, Underworld in '97). But the supply lines got too long, there was a punishing winter, and then Stalingrad--in this schema, the failed campaign for Fatboy Slim’s You’ve Come A Long Way Baby. I would single out Spike Jonz and his fucking terrible video for “Praise You” as the turning point. (Get Joy on this subject and you will hear a rant, she loves that song, and Jonz just made a joke out of what could have been a glorious redemptive anthem, a ‘Bittersweet Symphony’ or ‘Beautiful Day’ if done right). Oh Fatboy did alright what with the songs in movies and on TV commercials, but in the deepest and realest sense he lost: he never became a household name or star, not even on the Moby level. Astralwerks now is like some Wehrmacht division stranded and surrounded in the Ukraine: you can only stave off the inevitable for so long.

The last gasp for Anglo-Euro-tronica, that would be Daft Punk. The Battle of the Bulge, in my schemata. D Day had happened, but the Germans unexpectly pushed back and looked like they might drive the Allies back to Normandy and another Dunkirk. They’d never win the war but they could dream of fighting on, forever. If the WW2 film I dimly recall from boyhood corresponds to historical reality at all, then the Wehrmatcht were so short of fuel their first goal was to capture the Allied gas depots, while all along their advance back into French territory they had to siphon fuel from the tanks of abandoned Allied trucks and armored vehicles. That’s Daft Punk, siphoning from America’s FM rock radio memory-banks in the hopes of infiltrating some house music into the US pop mainstream. Brave try, not a hope in hell. The writing was on the wall.

In WW2, the Soviet Union engaged something like 70 percent of Axis troops and suffered the most casualties, 20 million, something like 30 or 40 times the Allied losses. Okay, then, in my strained and deranged analogy, who’s the Red Army? Black American music. Hip hop and R&B. Between ‘91 and ’97, I really thought us Brits (and some of you EC lot) gave hip hop a good run for its money. We were more sonically advanced, and the whole rave thing mattered almost as much. It was a close as we were going to get to something as important and life-forceful as rap.

But around ’97, just as we started to flag, hip hop and R&B just surged forward again. I'm talking about the commercial mainstream street stuff of course. By and large, since then it has simply been better than electronic dance music
--better on every level -- just as, and probably more, inventive sonically, and it had personality, and an indelible, perennial connection to real-world stuff. How could trance, or nu skool breaks, or whatever you want to come up with, compete? That’s why even if Basement Jaxx could make the most fantastically excitement-crammed records of their genus ever (and they have, several times now, or so some claim), in America they’ll always sell less than, oh I dunno, Juvenile’s fifth, inspiration-sapped album, or Nelly’s nephew. As for poor old Armand Van Helden… he knows the score.

The exceptions? Well 2step and Grime are nothing if not attempts to keep up with and assimilate the innovations of Black America. Plus you could see the London pirate continuum as Britain's own little internal Red Army of a black population--the equivalent of Tito’s partisans, perhaps.

(Jamaica? The People’s Republic of China).

Yeah, the Red Army, that’s what Black America is. You cannot stop them. I vaguely recall Julie Burchill in her Stalin-groupie mode going on about the Russian masses, the unstoppable force of "that deep moral fibre". Moral fibre's not exactly the word that springs to me when you think of rap but this is pop music so the values are inverted: in these terms, thing of whatever the energy is that makes Bling or Crunk. English people had to neck loads of E and other mindbending substances for ten straight years just to have the same kind of life-force that Black Americans generate just through living in America and dealing with all the shit they have to deal with!

Okay, then, who’s Stalin? Timbaland, obviously. I never want to read another word about him (give it a rest Sasha!) but he’s pretty much the One who turned everything around in ’97. Interestingly he did it by being almost as good at being a Nazi (electronica, remember = Axis powers) as the Nazis were. He may even have ripped a few ideas off "us" (still not convinced by the he-got-it-all-from-dancehall argument, just don’t hear it to be honest). Jungle never happened in America. Except it did: that was “Get UR Rinse On”-- sorry, “Get UR Freak On.”

2008-03-30T17:54:00.000-07:00

[Bring the Noise deleted scene #64]

GARAGE RAP compilations
Village Voice, February 3rd, 2003
plus footnotes from Blissblog, February 05, 2003

by Simon Reynolds

So everybody knows about the Streets now, but only as an isolated case: that unprecedented phenomenon, the U.K. rapper who's both excellent and authentically English-sounding. Skinner actually comes from a context, though. It's not that perennial lame duck Brit-rap, but a new genre that some have dubbed "garage rap": basically, 2step fronted by MCs. Nowhere to be found in the American house tradition, the MC has been an important figure in U.K. rave culture from the start. All manner of Brit B-boys and dancehall chatters got swept up in the late '80s acid house explosion, and for a while there was even hybrid rave-rap, with performers like Rebel MC, Ragga Twins, and Demon Boyz. For most of the '90s, though, the rave MC knew his place: a strictly supporting role, exalting the DJ and hyping the crowd. Through jungle and early U.K. garage, there were star MCs, but they weren't nearly as well paid as the top DJs, and even when they appeared on records their careers were largely based around a few trademark catchphrases or signature vocal licks, like MC Creed's funky bullfrog stutter.

Gradually, MCs started to write actual verses, and then, two years ago, came the putsch: They refused second-billing status (DJ/Producer X featuring MC Y). Suddenly the scene was swarming with MC collectives—So Solid Crew, K2 Family, Pay As U Go Kartel, GK Allstars, Dem Lott, Horra Squad, Nasty Crew—as if only by ganging up for sheer strength of numbers could they shove the DJ out of the spotlight. American rap's clan-as-corporation structure was also an influence, with collectives like So Solid modeling themselves on such entrepreneurial dynasties as Wu Tang and Roc-A-Fella. If the trend continues, the DJ in U.K. garage could become a vestigial figure, just like in mainstream American rap. This power struggle has musical implications. Listening to U.K. garage these days, the most striking thing is its torrential wordiness. Rave music was always about the nonverbal sublime. But in garage rap, verbose and swollen egos trample all over the loss-of-self that was originally house culture's promise and premise.

With its raucousness and Englishness and sometimes sheer malevolence, garage rap is comparable to another music of the embattled ego: punk. The Englishness comes through in the delivery: Mic chat has always been fast in Black British sound system culture, but there's also a tightness-in-the-throat, a dainty crispness of diction, that is distinctly un-American. As for the nastiness, you only have to look at garage's current lexicon of superlatives —"gutter," "stinking," "disgusting," "thugsy" —to see where it's coming from. There's even a character called MC Vicious! Sometimes it's closer to the original '60s garage punk: lots of sexual malice and second-person hostility. But when MCs drop lines like "there's a lot of anger that's been building up inside," there's a sense of pre-political rage and social frustration that feels very 1977. As it happens, the state of the nation in 2002 uncannily mirrors the mid-'70s U.K. context that fueled punk's ire: a fatally compromised Labour government, recession, public service workers on strike, and resurging racial tension reflected in both electoral success for far-right political parties and a revived Anti-Nazi League. As far as U.K. garage's underclass audience is concerned, though, collective struggle is a sentimental, distant memory, strictly for suckers. And so it bypasses the failed realm of politics altogether, expressing its rage-to-live through individualistic fantasies of stardom or crime: Staggerlee transplanted to Sarf Lundun.

Garage rap isn't all crime-pays false consciousness, though. Like punk, the nu-garage upheaval has opened things up for all sorts of quirky voices: Skinner obviously, but also honey-dripping Barrington Levy-like charmers such as Laid Blak's MC Joe Peng. On "Scream & Shout" (Moist import), he describes himself as "a nice and decent fellow," gently chides "the ladies dressed in black" ("those are the colors of a funeral"), and even pulls off a non-cloying plea to build a better world for our children. Judging by their name, Heartless Crew ought to be peddling more Social Darwinist ruthlessness, but "Heartless Theme" verges on positivity, talking about how hard they've worked for their success, and claiming that they're only heartless "cos our hearts are in the music." Then there's the geniality of Genius Kru, whose "Course Bruv" revives the amiable (if insanitary) rave-era ritual of sharing your drink. The insanely addictive chorus goes: Male Voice: "Can I 'ave a sip of that?" Genius Kru: "Course bruv!" Sexy Female: "Can I 'ave a sip of that?" Genius Kru: "Course luv!!"

Your best chance of hearing "Heartless Theme" and "Course Bruv" is on (groan!) Crews Control, a Warnerdance U.K. compilation you might find in Tower or Virgin. Somewhat patchy, this double-CD justifies the import price by containing around eight certified classics, including Purple Haze's "Messy" and More Fire Crew's "Oi!" Early in 2002, the latter became the most avant-garde U.K. Top 10 hit since the Prodigy's "Firestarter," its dead-eyed drum machine beats sourced in Schoolly D and "Sleng Teng," its patois-tinged jabber equal parts Cockney Rejects and "Cockney Translation" (Smiley Culture's 1985 dancehall classic). Garage Rap, Vol 1 (Eastside import) is more consistent and up-to-date, ranging from the quasi-orchestral grandeur of Wiley & Rolld Deep's "Terrible" to the thunderdrone rampage of GK Allstars' "Garage Feeling."

The trouble with comps, even superior ones like this, is they inevitably lag behind where the scene is at right this minute. With 2step's crossover bubble long popped, it's like the "real musicians" (MJ Cole, et al.) have fled to more prosperous climes, leaving the genre in the hands of barbarian teenagers who don't give a shit about things being in key, who break the rules 'cos they don't know the rules.
Right now, London's pirate-radio underground is like a primordial swamp, seething with protean new forms and percolating with ideas nicked from Dirty South bounce, electro, ragga, even gabba. Much of it is sub-music: unfinished experiments, prototypes thrown onto the marketplace for the hell of it. Some tunes want to be proper rap, but sound like all those No Limit wannabe labels: cheap 'n' nasty synth-refrains inspired by or sampled from video-game muzik or cell phone ring-tones, doomy horn fanfares à la Swizz Beats or Ludacris. There's a whole vein of spartan tracks, just beats and B-lines, designed for freestyling over—the most famous and ubiquitous being Musical Mobb's "Pulse X," the U.K.'s very own "Grindin'." In techno, tracky tunes of this type are regarded as "DJ tools"—uncompleted work that only becomes music in the DJ's mix 'n' mesh. In U.K. garage, they function as MC tools, designed to both enable and test the rapper, the most extreme riddims as buckwild challenging to ride as a mechanical bull. Every big tune these days comes with an instrumental lick on the flip, so aspiring MCs on the pirates can version it, throwing down solo freestyles or sparring in on-air ciphers. Increasingly, they're using the instrumental B-sides of current rap hits.

Like its precursors dancehall and hip-hop, garage rap is capitalist competition at its most honestly brutal, a free market governed only by the fickleness of popular desire, a/k/a, the massive. Reigning rhymestar Wiley asserts, "I will not lose/Never, no way, not ever"; he's next in line for So Solid-style stardom, alongside his Rolldeep cohort Dizzee Rascal (who's quite possibly the most inspired and provocative U.K. rapper since Tricky). But most MCs will be lucky to have one or two hot tunes, and run t'ings for a season before they're dethroned.

Footnotes from Blissblog

1/ there was even hybrid rave-rap, with performers like Rebel MC, Ragga Twins, and Demon Boyz.

Plus the ones I didn’t have space to mention: Unique 3 (most reknowned for pioneering bleep’n’bass tekno, but on various B-sides and on the album Jus Unique they did a few rather shaky-sounding rap-rave tracks and were basically a B-boy crew who got tripped out by acieeed) and most heinous omission Shut Up and Dance. Who started out as the Britrap outfit Private Party ("My Tennants", way ahead of Roots Manuva, and a pisstake on Run DMC for sponsorship tune "My Adidas), then as SUAD did tunes like “Rap’s My Occupation” and “Here Comes A Different Type of Rap Track not the Usual 4 Bar Loop Crap”. Their conflicted relationship with hip hop (they wanted to be a UK Public Enemy, but thought the latter were sonically staid) was surpassed only by their conflicted relationship with rave (they deplored drug culture and declared “we’re not a rave group, we’re a fast hip hop group”). But despite doing socially concerned tunes raps “This Town Needs A Sheriff” most of their big anthems were sample-collages that updated slightly the DJ record style of Bomb the Bass/Coldcut/MARRS. Still, SUAD’s comeback of the last few years is all too appropriate, with killer tunes like “Moving Up” (not a fully-fledged rap track with verses, but with enough of a MC vocal lick thing to fit the current moment). Ragga Twins, who I did mention, were on the SUAD label and now seem especially ahead-of-their-time, with the Belgian h-core uproar of their “Mixed Truth” prophesying the gabba-garridge sound.

But let’s not bring MC Tunes into this, eh?

2/ a strictly supporting role, exalting the DJ and hyping the crowd

The MC's role in hardcore/jungle/earlygarage was paradoxically crucial-yet-menial: he (invariably a he) functioned as a membrane between the expressive/social and the rhythmic/technological, vocalizing the intensities of machine-rhythm and in the process more or less transforming himself into a supplement to “the drum kit”. Another key part of the job description: the rewind, in which the MC relays the will-of-the-massive to the DJ. A ritual aknowledgement, at least on the symbolic level, of the idea that he who pays the piper calls the tune.

From ’92 onwards, though, you could sense a latent expressive potential in rave Mcing -- especially on the pirates, when MCs like Don FM’s OC or Trace and Ed Rush’s sparring partner Ryme Tyme would go off on one, get real imagistic and panoramic (“North South East and West, we got you locked”), as if surveying their domain from a lofty vantage point. Never quite getting to the point of storytelling, but still, you could tell that there was an artform in waiting, something that could bloom if given the opportunity.

3/ there were star MCs

You had name MCs from quite early on in rave--mentioned in the pirate ads, obviously considered part of the draw. But the real character MCs arrived with jungle, when rave's aerobics instructor/cockney street vendor style of hoarse hollered rabble-rousing was replaced by something more relaxed (even as the music got more frenetic), warmer, magnanimous, full of authority. These guys--GQ, Dett, Moose, 5-0, Navigator, et al--were almost MCs in the old showbiz sense, hosting the event, stroking the egos of all present, from the selecta in the booth to the massive on the floor. And now and then you’d get the first hints of the MC’s role as truth-teller and vibe-articulator, someone expressing the values of the scene. Overwhelmingly, these were black voices. While the DJ and production sides of hardcore/jungle/UK garage seem close to racial parity, MC-ing, from jungle onwards, seems like it's a 98 percent black thing. Does this monopoly of the role of host/articulator/spokesman have a symbolic role, expressing the dominance of black musical/cultural priorities in a subculture that in terms of population composition is actually pretty mixed? A sense that the public face of the scene ought to be black (the MC is generally actually more visible than the DJ, out there with his mic). Or is it just something about the grain of the voice, suiting the flow of MC-ing?

4/ but their careers were largely based around a few trademark catchphrases or signature vocal licks

Which could wear real thin real quick. Somewhere I have this eight-cassette pack, the looks-like-a-video sort you could buy back in the day as a memento of megaraves like Raindance or Dreamscape, but this was for a Pure Silk garage event in ‘98. Eight cassettes, eight top DJs, and all playing the same hot-that-week tracks as each other: talk about “changing same”. Worse still, there was two or three top MCs hosting the night, and so you get to hear the same trademark vocal gimmicks and human-beatbox tricks over and over and over again.

5/ Gradually, MCs started to write actual verses

Some key transitional records here:

----DJ Luck and MC Neat, “A Little Bit of Luck”. Not many words by comparison with today’s norms, but the beginnings of MC tunes that actually said something (in this case, I-and-I survive, “with a little bit of luck we can make it through the night” doubling as a big up to his DJ, who takes first billing despite contributing a really rather perfunctory groove over which Neat croons the most naggingly catchy and rootically haunting lick). Big BIG tune this: I remember someone telling me they heard a pirate station play this tune over and over again for half an hour. For a month or so in 98 this tune WAS the scene.

----Corrupted Crew, “G.A.R.A.G.E.” Again, not saying a lot really, but awesomely hooky and the MC (Neat?)’s baritone is wonderfully commanding. Also probably the first letters-for-words spelling anthem (“E’s for the Energy etc”), a routine that still gets re-used.

--- N&G feat. Rose Windross and MC Creed, "Liferide” . A classic plinky xylo-bass tune, with Creed spinning out some dizzyingly assonance-thick rhymes in his trademark clipped’n’prim style (weird how something so compressed and inhibited sounding is so cool).

---Middle Row's The Warm Up EP. Are these the first real narrative tunes? I’m talking about “Millenium Twist": Shy Cookie, Sweetie Irie and Spee reinventing the Englishness of canonical literature and costume drama with this hilarious slice of Dickensian dancehall, starring an updated Fagin from Oliver! instructing modern urchins how to duck 'n' dive Y2K stylee. And "K.O.", with its bizarre boxing-ring MC narrative (Neat again, accompanied by Shy Cookie and Spee).

Should also mention perhaps the “singjay” tunes, half way between chat and song, by the likes of Richie Dan (on the M-Dubs tune “Over Here”) and Glamma Kid ("Sweetest Taboo", yes a Sade cover), not forgetting the various 2step hook-ups with dancehall dons and don-ettes such as Lady Saw (underlining the point that UK garage’s return to the vocal, after the vocal-free desert that was techstep drum’n’bass, wasn’t just about diva vocals but about ragga chat, e.g. Gant’s “Sound Bwoy Burial”).

6/ they refused second billing status (DJ/Producer X featuring MC Y)

As in Scott Garcia feat MC Styles “It’s A London thing.” From ’97, which might very well make it the first garage rap tune of all.

7/ Suddenly the scene was swarming with MC collectives

There was a predecessor to So Solid Crew, a group no one cares to remember, because they weren’t much cop. I’m talking about Da Click of “Good Rhymes” infamy. A seriously naff record (Chic’s “Good Times” reworked) but it made the pop charts and was “important”, just like “Planet Rock” (surely the most over-rated dance record of all time? I always thought it wooden and dreary, but I bought it anyway: you just knew it was important). Same applies to “Good Rhymes”, had to have it, if only for the sleeve with its pix of 70 players on the UKG scene. Da Click was basically the scene’s premier MCs teaming up to make a record with the explicit intent of bigging up the role of the MC in UKG. They were inspired in a major way by Puff Daddy and the whole Bad Boy thing of flash thugs riding/rolling with this collective swagger. One of the record’s instigators, Unknown MC, used to be in Hijack, a Brit-rap group signed to Ice T's Rhyme Syndicate label. In late 2000, quite some time after the group’s profile had waned (the follow-up single was even worse), he told me “in London right now, there's a thing happening where true MCing is coming back to the floor. You have these clubs with 2000 people where the MC really is interfaced between the DJ and the crowd. And he's whipping the crowds up into mad frenzies, getting them involved in the party. Which I imagine is what it must have been like in the Bronx in the 70s, you know what I'm saying?”

8/ American rap's clan-as-corporation structure

Crews and posses have always been part of hip hop lore, but it’s fair to say that until the late Nineties rap's dominant lyrical mode had always been been first person singular. But with the rise of Ruff Ryders and Cash Money (both based around real families) and with the likes of Roc-A-Fella’s styling themselves as Cosa Nostra-like syndicates ("You Are About To Witness A Dynasty Like No Other), there’s been a dramatic first person pluralisation of rap; ego eclipsed by what might be called "wego," the collective triumphalism of Ruff Ryders's "We In Here" or Hot Boys's "We On Fire". Likewise in UKG you’ve got Kartels (PAUG) and Famos (K2) galore.

It would be incorrect to suggest, though, that this vogue for presenting what are clearly economic organisations as quasi-families is just ideological window-dressing for business realpolitik. Hip hop’s family values represent a kind of privatized socialism, based around ideals like sharing, altruism, co-operation, and self-sacrifice. In the war of clan against clan, loyalty is paramount, not just because teamwork is more effective, but because cameraderie provides refuge and respite from what would otherwise be a grim dog-eat-dog struggle. Effectively, the rap clan offers a haven from the rapacious cut-throat competition of the hip hop industry/capitalism, and on some level offers solace and security in what would otherwise be a desolate moral and emotional void. This is also why the Ruff Ryders/So Solid style emphasis on unity resonates with their fans--the idea of the clan on the warpath magically reconciles the contradictory impulses to be a winner but also to belong.

Of course, there’s a tension between business realities and these quasi-familial relationships: rappers like The Lox and Snoop Doggy are flexible in their fealty, shifting allegiances as deftly as sportsmen changing teams at the drop of a cheque. Still, for many, the "thick like blood" rhetoric is for real. DMX, in particular, regards loyalty as a transcendent value. In a hyper-individualistic world where market forces tear asunder all forms of solidarity and everybody has their price , he claims: "They do it for the dough/Me I do it for the love". Lyrically DMX is fixated almost exclusively on loyalty, betrayal, and retribution. Then there’s his curious obsession with dogs. Strikingly different from the lecherous hound persona adopted by George Clinton ("Atomic Dog" etc) DMX's use of "dog" seems to draw on the idea of canine fidelity--to the pack in the wild, to its owner (hence Fido). In song after song, DMX insists "I will die for my dogs". Then there’s the way he reinvokes what Foucault called “the Medieval symbolics of blood": Flesh of My Flesh, Blood of My Blood, his new label Bloodline. All seem to relate to atatvistic notions of blood-brotherhood and the loopy fantasy of DMX and his dawgs as some sort of pedigreed aristocracy of the streets ("My dogs, the beginning of this bloodline of mine"). So it’s interesting that in UK garage slang “bruv” has been displaced by “blood” as a salutation or bonding term--“ya get me blood?”

“Dog”, “blood”, “nigga”: all these terms have superceded the old racially encoded but more universalizing greetings like “brother”, which one associates with the civil rights era. The idea of family offers a kind of unity that seems more tangible and grounded than allegiance either to abstract, remote and problematic entity known as the United States of America, or any of the various forms of African-American nationalism. In rap and in UKG, group affiliation contracts to the compact and plausible dimensions of a clique, and one usually one tied to a place---a project, a council estate, a borough, a postal district (More Fire Crew shout out to the E4 and E11 crew on the sleevenotes to their debut album), or at the very most, a city (from “it’s a London thing” to “Millenium Twist”’s "L.O.N.D.O.N, London/That's where we're coming from"). As opportunities for feelings of solidarity and communality shrivel and retreat all over the social landscape, the withering especially pronounced in the very places where people once found them (trade unions, electoral politics, organized religion), it makes sense that this basic human need for a sense of belonging would find other points of focus, albeit on more diminished terms. In the neo-Medieval scenario of unchecked capitalism and holy war, it’s no surprise that we’re witnessing a resurgent atavism in the form of these Mafia-inspired clan structures (“amoral familialism”, Italian sociologists call it, diagnosing their persistence as caused by the relative weakness of nationalism in Italy--as a political entity, Italy is a relatively recent creation). Musical mobs indeed.

9/ torrential wordiness

Never ceases to amaze me, this. In UKG at the moment there's almost like a battle between the words and the music for dominance, the MC's almost seem to trying to drown out the DJ. Are there even name DJs anymore? Who gets top billing on the flyers these days? Recently playing Pied Piper's 'Do You Really Like It', which can only be two years old, I was struck by 1/ how as MCing it just wouldn't cut it now, it sounds so wack, and 2/ there must be about 25 words in the whole song. That said, the first true examples of rampant logorrhea I can think of date from shortly before ‘Do You Really Like It?’: Sparks & Kie on Teebone’s “Fly Bi” (wrong Matthew, sorry this tune is the B.O.M.B. and what's wrong with the spelling thing anyway) and Skibadee on Teebone’s “Super S”, mad-hectic tongue-twisty sinous sibilant biznis.

10/ with its raucousness and Englishness

One of my favorite bits ever on a garage rap record, can’t remember the tune or artist right this minute, occurs when, after a series of grisly threats, the MC’s killer verbal blow to his adversary is the instruction: “Behave!”. It’s like some eerie transcultural morphing effect: Bounty Killer turns into Frankie Howerd. That’ll be lost on non-Brits, I’m afraid, as is the next reference: the way Horra Squad’s Mr Guns’s has this bizarre tic-like mannerism of going “just like that”--an immaculate imitation of Tommy Cooper--right in the middle of the most bloodcurdling eruptions of “thugsy-ugsy” threats and “messy-essy” slackness.

11/dainty crispness of diction

Actually, it’s all about the tension between the impulse towards criss precision and the “drag” of the uncouth grain-of-the-voice that resists and impedes that impulse. But, and this is crucial (what some Americans, no offence, don’t get), the refinement doesn’t equate with whiteness and gentility (Masterpiece Theater, your daft ideas that the U.K is all castles and cucumber sandwiches), and the ruffness doesn’t equate with black/Caribbean. The uncouth element isn’t so much the patois as the Cockney gutternsipe factor, and the slick diction is more about a Black British elegance-smoothness aspirational thing. So you have this really semiotically rich and overdetermined criss-cross collision of class/race factors, a tug-of-war between assimilation and recalcitrance, “this is where we came from" and "this is where we're going" . But most of all it just sounds wicked.

12/expressing its rage-to-live through individualistic fantasies of stardom or crime

The art of Mcing doesn’t really entail opening up virgin zones of unexplored content. “Originality” means finding fresh twists on a stock set of themes. Like that literary critic who broke down the entirety of western drama and fiction to seven basic narrative structures (I.A. Richards?), here's my stab at isolating UKG’s core thematics (which are also stances, outlooks, dispositions, states of mind, ways of walking through the world).

i/ “I will not lose/we’re gonna make it/ain’t know stopping us/we are coming through”
more on this below

ii/ “know we/they don’t know/people dun know/if you don’t know, get to know”.
Probably the most interesting and unique to UKG theme (despite my Notorious BIG quote just now). Interesting, because the scenario it implies is that the MC is actually unknown---it evokes an imminence, a star status or stature that is being suppressed, thwarted, or is simply latent. The MC is an unknown on the brink of breaking out massively, a "supernova" (to quote Neutrino) microseconds before ignition. They don’t know but they should know and they will know. It’s hard to imagine an American rapper writing from this position: regal triumphalism, Jay-Z style, or even ennui (that standard face of blase derision you get in all the videos) seems to be more appropriate for a music that has won and is basking in its victory. Because “they don’t know” also suggests a collective demand for recognition, which US hip hop enjoys but UKG hasn’t; the theme seems to convey something of the marginality and underdog status of UKG-rap as a whole. “They” could be mainstream UK culture (which only acknowledges UKG when it is scapegoating it for street violence), or it could even be American hip hop. Alternatively, "They don't know" sometimes carries a suggestion of (see Black Ops cru) of secrecy, subterfuge, assassins with deadly powers moving unnoticed through society.

iii/ making paper/chasing cheddar/we floss the biggest whips etc

Wish fulfillment, one assumes, or hope: there can’t be that much money to be made on this scene, surely. (So Solid sold 400,000 of their album but when you divide the royalties by 30…). Nice UK-specific touches to the conspicuous consumption/status games, e.g. A-reg and K-reg license plate disputes.

iv/ biters/why you want to imitate me

yeah right, if you're so unique how come you sound just like everybody else?

v/“haters
—yeah yeah they're all sick to their guts on account of your wealth/fame/success with the ladies, well why not desist from rubbing it in their faces every chance you get then?
Biters and haters are essential accoutrements, status symbols, on a par with the flash phones and cars. Mo money mo problems etc.

vi/ alpha male biznis (is that your chick/steal your wifey/kiss her on the lips you’re tasting my semen).
Char-ming.

vii/ “wego-mania” (ride with us/imagine, you’re with a crew like this, etc)

Viii/ “revenge/retribution/ultraviolence”.
the scenarios seem to get more vivid and colorful and cruelly creative every month

13/ Laid Blak .

From Bristol, and not just a UKG outfit, their spokesman tells me, but a proper band that can do all sorts. I await their next release keenly and with real curiosity.

14/ equal parts Cockney Rejects and "Cockney Translation"

The cover of that More Fire Crew single is a beautiful thing. Not because it’s especially attractive or remarkable-looking (it’s quite plain and nondescript actually) but simply because it has these three black lads and the word “Oi!’ on the sleeve. And the last time the word “Oi!” appeared prominently on record sleeves, these were early Eighties Oi! compilations and the young men on the sleeves would have been cropheaded and pasty-faced hooligans with dubious political allegiances and jingoistic leanings. In one infamous case, Strength Through Oi! (a supremely tasteless and inflammatory title), the chap stomping his 18 hole DMs at the camera (almost as if to suggest if the photographer was the victim of a racial attack) turned out to be an ex-member of the British Movement or NF or some similar neo-Nazi outfit. So the More Fire Crew sleeve is an encouraging sign, in some weird way, of a degree of cultural miscegenation that's taken place in the last twenty years: a once noxious word being defused and reclaimed. (“Oi, oi!” was always a big MC chant on the hardcore scene, come to think of it).

As much as electro or the proto-ragga Casio-riddim ‘Sleng Teng”, I like to think of Smiley Culture’s "Cockney Translation" as the Eighties Origin for “Oi!” and for MC garage as a whole. At least it makes for an appropriately fertile fiction, as Mythic Origin. Released on the Fashion label (worth rediscovery I reckon, it captured a phase-shift in the Caribbean-British story), this is the tune where Smiley translates back and forth between patois and patter, West Indies and East Enders. “Say Cockney say Old Bill/We say dutty Babylon”, “we say bleach. Cockney knackered”, “Cockney say triffic. We say waaacked…. sweet as nut. just level vibes. Seen?”

It pointed ahead to the future hybrid argot of multiracial London, the hardcore/jungle/garage mix’n’blend of rhyming slang and rhymes-and-slang.

And talking about the More Fire Crew song, here’s a particularly apt line from Smiley’s song:

“We bawl out YOW! While cockneys say Oi!”

“Cockney Translation” is an ancestor for garage rap in more than a symbolic/mythic way, though. The tune was an example of the UK fast-style reggae sound, which Dick Hebdige describes as “reggae’s answer to rap”, as spearheaded by the Saxon International Sound System and its MCs like Tipper Irie, Asher Senator, Lady Di, and Philip Levi. Fast-style chatter is, if not ‘the roots’ then one key root for everything from Ragga Twins and SUAD to jungle/UKG MCs like Skibadee.

More Fire’s debut album is good BTW.

15/ a Warnerdance U.K. compilation you might find in Tower or Virgin.

At one point I was thinking about framing this piece as a ‘world music’ story. Because that’s what this music is at this point—impossibly exotic and hard to get hold of outside the UK. In America, it’s easier to buy records of Madagascan guitarpop or Javanese court gamelan than it is to acquire UKG.

16/ "I will not lose/Never, no way, not ever"

Been really struck by the recurrence in UKG Mc-ing of expressions of uncontainability: “we’re coming through, whether you like it or not” (Black Ops), “this style be original/we can’t be stopped” (GK Allstars). Or a sense of destiny and determination that would seem pie-in-the-sky if it wasn’t marked by such hunger--the scrawny ardor animating lines like: “always believing/follow my heart, keep up the dreaming/behind the cloud, there is a shining….I know my time is coming.” (GK Allstars again). Talk of dedication, hard work, all of my energy going into this. Again and again, this almost-American insistence, not that anyone can make it, but I’m gonna make it (I’ve got to make it; there is no alternative). Flying in the face of statistical reality.

Here’s Peter York (an under-rated analyst of UK socioculture) on what happens in a tightly class-stratified country like Britain where talent is “blocked off from conventional embourgeoisment”. “If you have a whole lot of people who are blocked, then the steam is much more intense. And where it finds a crack it rises more violently.”

2008-03-26T10:05:00.000-07:00

[Bring the Noise deleted scene #63]

THE MOST OVER-RATED SCENES/GENRES OF ALL TIME PART 2: THE MOD/SOULBOY CONTINUUM
from Unfaves 2001, Blissout

by Simon Reynolds

Thoughts prompted by three near-simultaneous irritations: seeing the video for Style Council's "My Ever Changing Moods" on VH1 Classic (Weller and Talbot as Tour De France cyclists); reading Kirk De Giorgio's Invisible Jukebox in the Wire; perusing the suspiciously dapper and small-faced Paul Gorman's In their Own Write, with its excessive number of quotes from Paolo "Cappucino Kid" Hewitt.

I'm using "mod" here to signify not so much a specific period in the Sixties, or even its revivals and explicit echoes, so much as a UK youth cultural continuum, a perennial space in the sociocultural field of possibilities. And it's something whose appeal almost entirely bypasses me; it consistently non-resonates. And obviously in this respect I'm just as much trapped in my own class identity (middle middle class, as opposed to lower middle class). What irks? Mod's non-Dionysian, neat-freak retentiveness? Its refusal of both "revolution" (mod is essentially about resignation: youth as brief burst of energy and hope before capitulation to the humdrum) and "bohemia" (which as someone wise said, basically replaces politics with art as solution to/salve for the contradictions of late capitalist society)?

The mod/soul-boy continuum occupies a thin strip of sociological terrain--basically suburban upper working class/lower middle class--and is defined on one side through its disdain for the "studenty" (that bedrock of all things "progressive", Floyd to Radiohead) and on the other through its recoiling from the base pleasures of the un-sussed plebs (your proper proletariat). Caught between these two equally unattractive prospects and with the dire fate of suburban mediocrity staring it in the face, Mod escapes England through a massive projection towards Black America (never, crucially, rock'n'roll America) and through its flirtations with European-ness. As per Style Council's Our Favorite Shop, what's imagined is a utopia of perfect consumption: transcendence achieved through the details of a lapel, the iconicity of a label.

At the core of the mod self-conception is the idea of being one of a select few white boys who truly understand black passion and black style, simply through strenuous self-education in all its crucial details. The original mods were at least dealing with contemporary Black American music, but by the Seventies, with Northern Soul, the mod continuum became increasingly and paradoxically opposed to Black Modernity--it was equally horrified by white misappropriations of black music and by black musician's own deviations from the true path.

For Energy Flash, I was interviewed by Robert Elms on his GLR show, and during a desultory interrogation, with one eye kept on the Test Match playing on a little TV above the studio console, the former doyen of the style bibles opined that as far as he was concerned, house and techno had been the death of the British working class's love affair with black dance music. Like everybody else from a certain mid-Eighties moment in style culture/London clubland, Elms seemed to have imagined that rare groove/"the jazz revival"/go-go should have just have extended itself in perpetuity: a Thousand Year Reich of refinement and righteousness.

Elms's inability to accept house and techno as "proper black music" (let alone all the things that followed like jungle and 2step), then gets weirdly echoed by your Terry Farley types who went a bit further than Elms, falling in love with deep house, but stops there. Read his house review column in Muzik and you sniff the tell-tale neo-mod whiff of "we are the custodians", signaled by phrases like "proper black dance music" and "this is real black house music for those who know". Then there's Kirk DeGiorgio with his historically confused insistence that Detroit techno came entirely out of black synth-exponents like Stevie Wonder, Herbie Hancock, and Bernie Worrell, and owed not one whit to Kraftwerk/New Order/Depeche. DeGiorgio operates some kind of web-site project dedicated to documenting early Seventies black music year by year down to every last record released--so far as he's barely got to 1971!.

I've strayed a bit far from mod here (DeGiorgio is probably as much a case of a jazz curator or Steve Barrow-style archivist type as anything...) but the syndrome is essentially the same: what typifies the mod/soul-boy mentality is this weird self-effacing relationship with black music, where the best one can aspire to is to emulate/simulate black music as closely as possible. These white people are continually complaining about other white people ruining black music, making it too "white boy."

Like the house bods referenced earlier, these guys always seemed destined to become curmudgeons, disenchanted by the direction that their beloved black music has gone. Because their attitude to black music is so reverential, conservationist, and purist, they cannot comprehend black musicians own impulses to be faithless and heretical, to miscegenate. Your actual black musicians, on the whole, give or take a few real cultural protectionist/Afrocentric/black power sorts, don't think like this: in fact they think as musicians first, responding to excellence wherever it comes from. The examples are too numerous: southern soul singers who loved the plaintiveness and everyman's-woes aspects of country, George Clinton loving the Beatles and Vanilla Fudge, Ice T's penchant for Phil fucking Collins and making bad hard rock records, jungle with people like Goldie being into The Stranglers, David Sylvian and PiL as much as Loose Ends, Maze, Marley Marl; Jeff Mills's digging post-DAF Euro Body Music and actually playing in an industrial band called Final Cut.

For your mod/soulboy types, this sort of swerve is a real headfuck. And so electro and the hard, drum-machine driven rap of the early Eighties totally wrongfooted the chaps at Echoes and Blues & Soul [supposedly they formed a--admittedly jokey organisation--called something like LADS, League Against Disco Shit if I recall rightly], and most of your style bible clubland guru types consistently backed the wrong horse, rallying to go-go or rare groove rather than rap or house. All hand-percussion and call-and-response, go-go corresponded to their received ideas of proper blackness; Troublefunk's shows in 1986 were wall-to-wall white hipster funkateers, barely a black face in sight.

Black music has an inherent mutational drive that is continually pushing it into directions that are "un-black"--in the process challenging and complicating the reified notions of blackness ("swing", "funky", "soulful", "warmth" etc) cherished by the white believers. (And sometimes the black believers too: in The Death of Rhythm and Blues, Nelson George's ideas lead him towards the paradox that, post-electro, the true conscientious custodians of black music, the people who really cherished and had a gut-understanding of its principles, were all white and mostly British: your George Michaels, Phil Collins, Daryl Halls,Steve Winwoods, Mick Hucknalls etc.) Time and time again, a younger, upstart generation of black musicians will find themselves attracted to some new white music and embrace its qualities (hard attack riffs, distortion, machinic angularity), and the result is the next quantum leap for black music. Time and time again, the white soulboys huddle in horror and disdain, holding tightly onto models of black innovation that have become essentially antique.

And here's the truly perturbing twist---quite often it's been the "pale theory boys", the studenty, art-school, pretentious twats that your mods and soul-boys love to mock--who are not only the first to grasp the new cutting edges of black music (I'm thinking here of your Cabs, New Orders, Mark Stewarts) but who even occasionally have reciprocal influence back on black music (DAF and Throbbing Gristle with the Chicago house pioneers; Pop Group deeply shaping members of Massive Attack, etc). Standing to one side of this fruitful dialectic of funklessness and refunktification, the mod/soulboy types condemn themselves to irrelevance and redundancy. Can you imagine any black musician being inspired by, or finding some re-deployable element worth stealing in, the music of Jamiroquai or the Style Council?

2008-03-19T12:37:00.000-07:00

[Bring the Noise deleted scene #62]

CANNIBAL OX
Village Voice, October 9th 2001

by Simon Reynolds

Rap's a funny business, really. People pay good money to experience as "entertainment" what in real life they'd run a mile from. Bug-eyed sociopaths threatening cruel and unusual deaths, nouveau riche bores droning on about how much they make and the expensive shit they wear... And (let's not forget the underground) paranoid poets who've never met a conspiracy theory they didn't like, crackpot autodidacts who glimpsed the secret of the cosmos in a cloud of weedsmoke and they just have to tell you---the sort of I-be-the-prophet spiel you can endure for free if you hang out on the subway long enough.

The cipherpunks of undie hip hop can be a real chore for ear and brain: barely scanning stanzas overcrammed with too many words per bar (at its worst, indie-rap rivals opera for its anti-musical subordination of sonix to textuality), as imagistically over-ripe and knotted with riddles as a late period Costello lyric. Your typical undie MC sounds like he chomped down a dictionary for breakfast and it keeps repeating on him. The prolix code-flow and hermetic, baffle-them-with-thy bullshit shtick is just the bookworm counterpart to gangsta machismo---often just a more convoluted and encrypted battery of boasts and threats. Jesus, with all the wordy machismo and heated who's-really-real debates, it's a bit like rock criticism with a beat!

Actually, the consciousness informing underground hip hop reminds me more specifically of nothing so much as prime period Forced Exposure, the legendary post-hardcore noisezine: the recondite reference points and in-jokes, the cultivated trash aesthetic, the ultra-condensed and jaggedly stylized writing style. As Sasha Frere-Jones quipped in these pages a while ago, El-P--lynchpin of late lamented undie-rap gods Company Flow and producer of Cannibal Ox--is something like the Steve Albini of hip hop: fanatically opposed to the major label rap industry, addicted to noise. Extending the analogy a bit, you could imagine
a few years down the line the emergence of a rap equivalent to grunge ("grime", maybe): underground in style and sound, but hooky and forceful enough to storm the barricades of Hot 97 and BET, and end the entire bling-bling era (hip hop's equivalent to hair metal). And a few years after that, El-P will be drafted into uglify and render radio-unfriendly the post-breakthrough album In Wu-Tero by spearhead grime-rappers Gnosis....

El-P's the anti-Bling king, with an approach to sound that equates "independent" with "fucked". (His forthcoming solo album's titled Fantastic Damage). Cold Vein is actually steeped in some of the same Eighties electro and Nineties technorave synth-sounds you can hear in Hot 97-style rap, but the chrome futurism is rust-speckled, worm-holed with the metallic equivalent of cancer. El-P's sound--electronic-but-dirty, grooves that are borderline dysfunktional--has a lot in common with IDM groups like Autechre and the whole glitch approach to using software malfunctions and digital distortion. Something of a convergence is taking place between underground rap and left-field electronica, signalled by the recent Chocolate Industries compilation Rapid Transit with its mix of MCs and IDM artists, or figures like Prefuse 73's Scott Heren who has a foot in both backpacker and nerdtronica camps. Indeed, the response to Cannibal Ox has been warmer outside rap than within: cover stars of The Wire, rave reviews everywhere from Urb to NME to CMJ, but so far snubbed by The Source (perhaps because Vordul demands "108 mics", 103 more than the highest mark in the mag's album grading system)

What El-P shares with your Autechre sorts (who typically started out doing breakdancing and graf) is roots in that brief post-electro, pre-sampling phase when rap tracks were built around drum machines, scratching, and not a lot else: Schoolly D's "P.S.K", Skinny Boys's "Rip the Cut". Back then that slow, torturous sound struck me as closer to post-hardcore bands like Swans and Big Black than the mainstream black pop of the day--it was music for wigging out, not dancing. Company Flow's debut EP Funcrusher had a title more redolent of Godflesh than a modern rap group, and Cannibal Ox itself sounds like a grindcore band. Cannibal Ox are essentially the continuation of Co-Flow--same soiled samples, entropic tempos, and sprained-in-both-legs beats--but fronted by two new MCs, the marvellously monikered Vast Aire and Vordul Megilah, both formerly of the Harlem group Atoms Family but now live-in proteges chez El-P's Red Hook, Brooklyn apartment.

The worldview that V&V tout is deeply unjiggy: gangsta hyper-realism, but without the crime-pays glamor or delusions of invincibility. "Iron Galaxy" is their trope for an uncaring cosmos. The track starts with a movie sample, a blase white voice going "Yeah, tell me about it... it's a cold world out there... Sometimes I think I'm getting a little frosty myself". Then, riding a groove uncannily reminiscent of Donna Summer's "State of Independence", the duo unfurl a panorama of urban decay, rife with imagery of vultures, dogs eating dogs, roaches and rotten apples, little black girls getting shot, absent fathers ("Course his pop's gone/What you figure?/That chalky outline on the ground is a father figure?"), stillborn babies.
"Molested children" gets rhymed with "rats in ceiling". Clearly Cannibal Ox have inherited the Co-Flow mantle of "#1 feel bad crew".

Although Vast spells out their ghetto-realist creed with the lines "I guess that's why I was born/To recognize the beauty of a rose's thorn", Cold Vein isn't relentlessly grim. There's a sense of deadly frolic, pure linguistic sport. On "Raspberry Fields," Vast kills his battle-rhyme opponent repeatedly in successive reincarnations ("this is the next lifetime"). This "scissortongue" MC with a "mouthful of parables" prides himself on vocabulary and the writerly art of elegant variation: when he drops the verse "the sample's the flesh and the beat's the skeleton/you got beef but there's worms in your wellington/i'll put a hole in your skull and extract the skeleton," he immediately corrects himself ("oh my god, said a word twice") and then repeats the whole verse changing the second "skeleton" to "gelatine". Vordul favors breathless sprints of assonance-dense rhyming like "stress got my chest a mess/breathless and vexed/trying to escape/from outa the depths of hell's nest" that suit his blurting flow, a logorrheiac lockstep that often seems barely tethered to the groove. Vast is more ruminative and languid, crisply enunciating choice lines like "the beat be trying to sex me and marry me/I'm talking white picket fence and a family" and audibly underlining specific words to ensure your close attention. On "Vein" he verbally smacks down a 12 year old baby-gangsta who flashed a gun in his face (the kid's got saggy pants, but "thoughts gotta pull up") while "The F-Word" explores the vulnerability of being a love triangle's third side (the dirty word in question is "friend", as in "just friends", as in being the thankless, nookie-less role of shoulder-to-cry).

Throughout El-P's sonic choices are stunning--the galactic funk of "Battle for Asgard"; the dank futurism of "Vein"; the melted-candle sample-slurry of "B-Boys Alpha"; "Raspberry Fields" with its Butthole Surfers-like slowed-down vocals and dying-walrus guitarwail. "Real Earth" simultaneously reminds me of Flipper's cosmic dirge "Survivors of the Plague" and a slowed-down version of the Blade Runner-esque techy-sounding drum'n'bass purveyed by E-Sassin and Dieselboy. His tour de force comes with the closing songs "Pigeon" and "Scream Phoenix" (a hidden track). The avian imagery has run through the album: pigeons representing the world's small fry, the dowdy downtrodden. The phrase "Scream phoenix" is V&V's grimy equivalent to Curtis Mayfield's "move on up": imagination soaring free of reality's chains. In an alchemy of soul, every pigeon can will their metamorphosis into the glittering phoenix. El-P rises to the challenge of such epic concepts. "Pigeon" sounds literally Gothic: Rome after the barbarians, temples sacked and torched. A grandiose horn fanfare conjuring the twilight of empire, and Neil Hagerty-like guitar raining down on the smoking embers. "Scream Phoenix" is a woozy delirium of just-offkey angelic chorale and a looped tic of beautiful blues guitar. The way the final track offers a glimpse of hope recalls Tricky's similar move with "Feed Me" at the end of Maxinquaye.

If there's one drawback to Cold Vein, it's that the music's so strong and strange it almost overshadows the words; simultaneously, focusing on Vordul & Vast's dense verbal flow with anything like the intensity it deserves makes it hard to wallow in the sonics. Separate dub and accapella versions would be a dream. Mind you, this splitting of consciousness/double-tiered focus effect only adds to Cold Vein's sensations of disorientation and out-of-jointness. After 74 minutes of gruelling brilliance, you'll probably need to lie down and unclench your brain.

2008-03-15T10:31:00.000-07:00

[Bring the Noise deleted scene #61]

JAY-Z, The Blueprint
Uncut, autumn 2001

by Simon Reynolds

This is supposed to be Jay-Z's big comeback. Which is odd 'cos he's been "away" a year, and the last album sold a couple of million. Then again, the one before sold more, and the album before that shifted five mill. So the perception was that Jay-Z had fallen off significantly (and bar the Neptunes-produced monstergroove "I Just Wanna Love U," the last record did show signs of burn-out) while the hype is "Jay-Z reclaims the throne"--a coup almost unprecedented in the merciless, high-turnover world of rap supastardom.

Clearly the embattled star felt he had much to prove, because it's all nonstop Jay-Z: no verses farmed out to proteges from his Roc-A-Fella camp, and the only celebrity guest is Eminem, whose flow on "Renegade" is so dense and twisting it damn near sprains your brain. The CD booklet shouts out "To This Whole Fake Bulls**t Industry, Thanx 4 being so Fake and Keeping me on my Toes!!!," and the lyrics stomp down various upstarts who'd been sniping that Jay was slippin'. "Takeover" absolutely DESTROYS Nas, ridiculing his output ("that's a one hot album in every ten years average") and boasting alpha-male style of fucking his girl ("you know who/did you know what/with you know who"). The track is based on The Doors's "Five To One" (Morrison hoarsely hollering "gonna win, yeah/we takin' over") and there's more inspired pop intertexuality when the chorus from Bowie's "Fame" is transformed into a series of deathblow disses: "that's why you're... LAAAAAME!!!".

If The Blueprint is a triumph, it's one of form over content: Jay-Z's got nothing new to say, but loads of fresh twists on the same-old same-old. Plus he's always been able to cherrypick the hottest tracks from the most inventive trackmasters, and the sonics here are relentlessly ear-catching. Almost every tune sounds like a hit: Kanye West's insanely catchy Jackson 5-based "Izzo," the swampy reggaematic fonk of Timbaland's "Hola Hovito", the drum 'n'bassy tympani thunder of Bink's "All I Need," Just Blaze's "U Don't Know" with its sped-up diva histrionics like parakeets on amyl, the crunchy-yet-wet percussion and snakecharmer melodics of Poke & Tone's "Jigga That N***a" .

Apart from Jay's mic' hogging, the most striking thing about The Blueprint is how deeply steeped it is in 70s soul. Ignoring the fact that this music's melt-your-hard-heart tenderness was originally radically opposed to big-pimpin' niggativity, Jay-Z deploys the timeless sweetness of Al Green, Bobby Blue Bland, and David Ruffin to sugarcoat his own ultra-cynical worldview. The plea for social redemption in "Heart of the City (Ain't No Love)" gets flipped around into Jay-Z complaining about resentful haters: "where's the love?," he asks, as if it never occurred to him that rubbing your success in people's faces will rub 'em up the wrong way. Jay-Z's OG shtick involves the fact that he was wealthy through drug dealing before he became a rap star, and that "the rap game" is just a phase before even greater glories. "Put me anywhere on God's green earth/I triple my worth... I'm a hustler, baby/I sell water to a well". The sole chink in these delusions of invincibility comes with "Song Cry", an almost-apology to the girl he lost through fucking around. The title's clever concept is that the music (more symphonic soul) sheds the tears Jay-Z's too tough to weep.

Rap's mystery is that people pay to be entertained by what they'd normally flee: vivid death-threats, bores bragging about their income and sexual conquests. Clearly a deeply unpleasant fellow, Jay-Z is also mildly evil. How about the line "I'm still fuckin' with crime, 'cos crime pays" for socially destructive myth-mongering? Ultimately, though, resistance is futile. So give it up for the don of disrespect, the virtuoso of vanity, the king of conceit.

2008-03-11T11:37:00.001-07:00

Bring the Noise deleted scene #60]

AALIYAH, Aaliyah
unpublished* review, Village Voice, August 2001

by Simon Reynolds

I was going to call myself an Aaliyah fan--after all, she's made two of my
all time favorite singles, "One In A Million" and "Are You That Somebody?"--but somehow the idea of an "Aaliyah fan" seems faintly absurd. There's dozens of websites devoted to the singer whose name is Swahili for "most exalted one", but beyond her obvious beauty and vocal skill, what are these folk latching onto? The sites are uniformly thin on biographical content or back story. Of all the premier league R&B goddesses, Aaliyah seems the most blank: she doesn't even have a persona as such, let alone exhibit actual this-is-me personality. This is a young woman who's been involved in the music industry for most of her 22 years, working her way up the rungs from the age of nine. In a recent Billboard interview, droning fluent bizspeak about the importance of "versatility" and the need to pace your career, unfurling cliches about creative "chemistry" and thriving on "pressure", Aaliyah comes over as a dour professional and a workaholic strategist who's cannily diversified into movies like Romeo Must Die and Queen of the Damned.

More than just impersonal, there's something almost immaterial about Aaliyah
(it's hard to imagine her flossing her teeth, or wiping her bottom). Aaliyah might be best understood, and enjoyed, then as a figment--a phantom of cathode-ray dazzle and studio-processed breath--concocted by an ensemble of stylists, choreographers, make-up artists, personal trainers, lighting technicians, video directors, song-doctors (like her main writer, Static from Playa), and, not least, trackmasters like Timbaland, her primary production foil until now. Timbaland has said he uses Aaliyah as "a probe" (itself an oddly depersonalized phrase), a vehicle for testing his most far-out ideas in the "urban" marketplace. That metaphor fits "One In A Million", the 1996 smash whose stutterfunk kick drums created the rhythmic template for the last five years of R&B and rap, and it works for 1998's "Are You That Somebody?",
which took the stop-start groove thing to the brink of rhythmic arrest. But the sole novelty of last year's "Try Again," its acid-house Roland 303 bassline, was fresh only in context (urban radio), while this year's "We Need A Resolution" continues the decline in daring, showcasing no new moves whatsoever. Everything in the song is decidedly deja for Tim-watchers, from the snake-charmer flute motifs ("Big Pimpin'") and tabla-like percussion ("Get UR Freak On") to the sinister slither of the reversed-sounding techno riffs ("Snoopy Trak," off Jay-Z's Vol. 3). With his two other cuts on Aaliyah's new album being the catchy but unstartling "More Than A Woman" and "I Care 4 U", a five year old, Missy-penned out-take from the One In A Million album sessions, there's a suspicion that Timbaland shot his wad on So Addictive and is all innovated out for the time being.

The other producers involved in Aaliyah--Keybeats, Inc (a/k/a Rapture & E-Seats), Bud' Da, and J-Dub a/k/a Rockstar-- aren't probing any outer limits either. The result is an album that is unspectacular, but very listenable. From the ungainly title/chorus down, "We Need A Resolution" wasn't exactly singular as a single, but its midtempo understatedness works just fine as an album opener. The same applies to most everything here: Aaliyah's all album tracks and no obvious hits, but it's expertly paced and programmed, the whole stronger than any individual part. Make it past the first, underwhelmed listen and its cumulative seductiveness kicks in.

Rapture & E-Seats's stand-out "Rock The Boat" is all diffuse sensuality and shimmering sleekness. The song's "adult" lyrics--"stroke it for me/work it to the middle/change positions"--are something of a maturity move for Aaliyah, and not wholly convincing. She doesn't really do "hot", it doesn't suit her gritless voice, at times so snowy-textured and sparing with the melisma that it's almost white. Showing more skin than usual, draped in snakes and caked in vampy make-up, she looked uncomfortable in the "Resolution" video, and you can't really imagine
her mucking in with the harlots of "Lady Marmalade". Until now, her two primary modes have been near-virginal devotion ("One in a Million", "4 Page Letter") and tension, a yearning-but-holding-back wariness of love. Both "Are You That Somebody" and "Try Again" are premised on the idea of Aaliyah as hard-to-get, while "Resolution" is all about people not getting (it) on.

Outside these two modes, Aaliyah doesn't fare so well. The twittery-vocaled
anti-wife abuse schlock of "Never No More" is a calculated display of versatility, announcing "I can deal with heavy topics". "U Got Nerve" is a weak stab at Beyonce-style toughness, and "I Refuse", from its I-am-woman-hear-me-roar defiance to the baroque'n'roll bombast of J. Dub's arrangement, is a "Bills Bills Bills" knock-off two years tardy. Mind you, this Austro-Hungarian Rhapsody might be the album's most authentic Aaliyah moment, given that her all-time favorite band is apparently Queen!

On two songs, you get a glimpse of Aaliyah as a potential auteur, rather than just a key component of hit records, the brand name front for a collective of expert technicians. Bud'Da's "I Can Be" is Aaliyah at her most frosty, shrouded in a skein of glassy guitarscree that seems to belong more on a Banshees or Cocteaus album. And the J.Dub-prod. "What If," daubed in garish metal-funk guitar, even sees Aaliyah rock out with a modicum of sass. The song's sheer overwraughtness feels cathartic after so much mature'n'demure restraint.

Hints, if not of darkness or deepness, of at least an aspiration in that direction: Aaliyah as ice queen of Gothic R&B! "I Can Be" especially is a glimpse of the more audacious album Aaliyah could have been, if, for instance, the singer had
done a collaboration with Trent Reznor as she once improbably contemplated with apparently genuine enthusiasm ("I think he's a genius!", she gushed). For the time being, though, Aaliyah is a fine third album. And Aaliyah remains a exquisite cipher.

* unpublished: this had to be pulled at the minute having been written and edited and ready-to-roll but then Aaliyah died in that awful plane crash.

2008-03-11T11:07:00.000-07:00

[Bring the Noise deleted scene #59]

DESTINY’S CHILD, Survivor
MISSY ELLIOTT, Miss (E) ...So Addictive
Uncut, 2001

by Simon Reynolds

NME, The Face, Vibe, and Rolling Stone all put Destiny's Child on the front cover this year. Mainstream pundits like The New York Times seriously assess Beyonce Knowles's credentials as postfeminist icon. Give or take a few stubborn hold-outs, just about everybody--lapsed indie types, electronica fiends, non-aligned pop fans-agree that nu-skool R&B is the bomb. Confronted with this nearly unbroken consensus, the impulse to offer a dissenting opinion is irresistible. Is R&B all it’s cracked up to be? And is the current boom, which started about five years ago with Aaliyah’s Timbaland-produced smash “One In A Million” , finally running out of steam?

“Million” was one of the first R&B tunes where the beat was a lead voice, duetting with and often distracting attention from the singer. And it debuted Timbaland’s trademark sound: kick drums hyper-syncopated into triple or quintuple time spasms, stop-start grooves full of disconcerting yet tensely funky hesitations. Trademark infringers spread the Timbaland riddim-virus across the R&B/rap soundscape: most creative of these clones was She’kspere, architect of the big hits from Destiny’s previous album The Writing’s On the Wall. And for the longest while, the nu-R&B’s “dope beats” were so muthafunkin’ dope that it was easy to overlook the genre’s downsides: chronic oversinging, two-dimensional diva personae, suspect values, borderline tacky “glamour”. But if R&B really is just showbiz with a better beat (and slightly more risque sex-talk), those riddim-boys have gotta keep delivering the shock of the new. Trouble is, thanks partly to superstars like Janet and Jennifer diluting the already-weak brew, that Timbaland falter-funk beat has gotten kinda stale.

With She’kspere absent from Survivor, assorted lesser-known producers have been drafted to tweak the rhythm blueprint. “Independent Women Part 1” has a nice loping groove, refreshingly laid-back compared with the tense’n’twitchy norm. But the song’s not much cop, and where the debut communicated it ladies-first sass through story-songs and real-seeming scenarios ("Bills Bills Bills," "Bugaboo", "Say My Name"), now Destiny’s quasi-feminist stance is baldy declared. The stiff, harsh beats of "Independent Women Part 2" (not a sequel but a remake/remodel) bring out the true coldness of Destiny's take on modern love: after making the bootie call and having her itch scratched, Beyonce dismisses the spent stud with "when it's all over/Please get up and leave... Got a lot to do/ I am my number one priority/No falling in love, no commitment for me."

Likewise, the bombastic arrangement on "Survivor" matches the histrionic lyrics. The album credits salute those who've made it through "bad relationships, health issues, discrimination, being abused, death of a loved one, loss of a friend, not being popular, low self-esteem...". Beyonce, by contrast, appears to have "survived" a coup d'etat in her favor instigated by her manager/father (and involving the downsizing of two of Destiny's original four members) and.... fame/money/adulation beyond her fans’ wildest dreams. Tough life, eh?

Vibe magazine’s own Destiny's cover had the trio dressed as the Supremes. But the Motown-style separation of singer/songwriter/producer roles that worked so brilliantly on Writing is junked: Survivor sees Beyonce credited as co-writer/co-producer on every song. Although the results are uniformly inferior, it's a shrewd move in credibility terms: being an spokesperson for female empowerment but not writing your own songs wouldn't wash, really, would it? As a self-portrait, though, Survivor is incoherent, cutting from the coquetry of "Bootlylicious" ("I don't think you're ready/for this jelly") to the prudish "Nasty", which reprimands a scanty-clad tramp for flaunting her flesh. And even when the bump'n'grind is rhythmically in full effect---the almost-great "Sexy Daddy"--the raunch is sabotaged by tame, lame lines like "sweety pie/I think it's your lucky night".

“Tame” is one word you’d never use to describe Missy Elliott. Unlike, say Lil Kim, Missy can act the "crazy ho" but never degrades herself. She's got the power, doesn't need to issue shrill micro-manifestos a la Beyonce. She just revels in her own identity and appetite: "Dog In Heat', track 2 of her third and latest album, features the most cheek-flushingly heavy breathing since "Love To Love You Baby" and huskily droned lines like "slide/let's take a ride" that are genuinely erotic something that barely exists in modern R&B, for all its graphic imagery).

There's more than hormones fuelling Miss (E) ...So Addictive, though. The title is a flashback to the dodgy puns of 1989, like "Everything Starts With An 'E'" by (groan!) E-Zeee Possee. The cover art recalls those ultra-crap "cyberdelic" videos of computer animations for post-rave chilling out: three little orbs go on a journey through a kosmic wormhole, you know the score. There's a woogly-oozy love ballad titled "X-Tasy", and another tune that shouts-out to "my XTC people". Short of covering the Shamen's "Ebeneezer Goode', Missy couldn't be more blatant about where her head's at these days.

But where other "B-Boys On E" producers do little more than tack on a few techno-y sounds, Timbaland & Missy's production on So Addictive feels permeated with the MDMA vibe, electric with it. The sound is like a hyper-real painting, so sharply contoured and glossy that just listening makes you feel that you've been dosed. Elliott's's forte is vocal arrangements: songs like "One Minute Man" teem with a swarm of multitracked micro-Missies distributed across 3D space. Timbaland's endlessly inventive beats offer a whole new bag of tricks for others to nick. "Get Ur Freak On" is a pure drum'n'bass roller, but with a dark-and-daft playfulness that went AWOL from jungle sometime in 1994. And there's even a full-on house tune. "4 My People", one of the few cuts where Timbaland relinquishes the controls (in this case, to Nisan & D-Man), is a chugging monstergroove that cuts suddenly from pumping euphoria to edgy paranoia, as if crossing that one-pill-too-many line.

And yet for all So Addictive’s brilliance, there's something lacking: call it "vision". Missy's never exactly been a "deep" artist, more a rare female recruit to the lineage of cartoon freaks like Bootsy and Busta Rhymez. Mostly she boasts about how freaky and funky and shagadelic she is. Her real genius is the way she says stuff: timing, intonation, contorting the words in her mouth, vocal syncopation that's as virtuoso as anything Timbaland does with beats. But if you'd thought maybe MDMA might have opened her up a bit (for the record, she steadfastly denies trying the drug) there's little sign of E-motional growth. True, there's a hidden track, a lovely slink of modern gospel featuring The Clark Sisters. But for all its talk of "pressing on to higher ground", elsewhere there's scant evidence of a new spiritualized consciousness. Missy's idea of God is, frankly, childish: a sort of agony uncle in the sky. Always there to listen uncomplainingly to her complaining, but never expecting anything in return, like attending church on Sundays (Missy, "witness for Jesus" and true believer, admits she never goes), let alone forsaking vice, deferment of gratification, humility, good deeds, or sacrifice of any sort. Like gangsta rappers who thank the Creator extravagantly in the sleevenotes, then spend the entire CD breaking commandments like Sin's going out of fashion, Missy appears to think she can have her disco biscuits and eat them too.

2008-03-11T10:48:00.000-07:00

[Bring the Noise deleted scene #58]
CEX, live
Village Voice, May 2 - 8, 2001

by Simon Reynolds

Cex, a/k/a 19-year-old Baltimore-based Rjyan Kidwell, is an infamous figure in the world of IDM (Intelligent Dance Music). A recent IDM digest contained an open e-mail to Kidwell and mentor kid606: "Do not bowdlerize our subculture just so you can finally get your goofy looking nerd asses laid." Their crime? Bringing too much showmanship to live performance, which left-field electronica purists believe should be faceless and abstract. The trouble with the purist line is that IDM, because it's not dance oriented, can't count on involving the audience through physical participation; in the absence of visual stimulation, it runs the risk of lapsing into background ambience.

On April 23, a kid606-and-friends night at Tonic showcased various strategies for avoiding the laptop musician's nightmare scenario: that "all is lost" switch point when the audience chatter gets louder than the music. kid606 held the listener rapt through sheer density of sonic events per second (and was helped not a little by Kurt Ralske's ravishing improvised video projections). Matmos usually incorporate an eye-catching performance-art element in their sets, but tonight they simply played tunes from their new plastic-surgery-themed album (A Chance to Cut Is a Chance to Cure) against a backdrop of discomfiting close-up footage: ear canals, eyes, hair follicles, and the like.

Opening the night, Kidwell took the most radical approach. Instead of playing what he puts out on record (plaintive, melodious electronica perfectly suited to the IDM palate), he's got a totally different live set based around the premise of Cex as "#1 Entertainer in the Game." Naked save for his fashion briefs, he looks like an emaciated computer programmer but sounds uncannily like Eminem, his rhymes oscillating wildly from professions of alpha-male omnipotence ("I know you're stressed/cos there's only one Cex/and your girlfriend's pissed/cos it's not you") to touching admissions of terminal dorkhood. Often he's rapping over purloined grooves (like the Neptunes-produced instrumental track from Jay-Z's "I Just Want to Love U"), and like a rap CD, he does between-song skits—like his hilarious fantasy about going to the MTV Awards "the year minimal techno blew up."

"Representin' for fun" versus art-techno solemnity, Cex reminded the audience, "You got booties, let's use 'em," and then vowed to "take your maturity/eat it up, spit it out" (this accompanied by cartoon-raptor gestures of devouring/regurgitation). Surprisingly, the audience lapped up Cex's wiggatronica shtick, avidly participating in call-and-response and throwing hands in the air on cue. As an in-joke/polemic within the cloistered IDM context, Cex's Apple Mack Daddy persona is inspired, although you do wonder how a real rap audience would respond to his not-exactly-fluent freestyles. Then again, only the sternest purist (techno or hip-hop) could fail to chuckle at Cex's adapted-for-PC booty song, which starts by exhorting "Ladeez in the house, get the fellaz in the house, to take their balls out," then extends its equal-opportunity agenda to the inanimate: "Objects in the house, get the people in the house, to take their balls out."

2008-03-07T10:14:00.000-08:00

[Bring the Noise deleted scene #57]

VARIOUS ARTISTS, The Biggest Ragga Dancehall Anthems 2000
ELEPHANT MAN, Comin' 4 You!
Uncut, March 2001

by Simon Reynolds

From early Nineties jungle to 2-step garage, dancehall is the vibe-it-up spice, the pungent flava added by producers for that extra tang of rudeness. Beyond this subordinate role as a pantry full of patois vocal licks ripe for sampling, though, dancehall has its own forceful claims as Electronic Music. Just check the madcap creativity of Beenie Man's "Moses Cry" on this Greensleeves double-CD Biggest Ragga Dancehall Anthems 2000 for sounds as futuristic and aberrant-sounding as any avant-techno coming out of, say, Cologne. Produced by Ward 21 & Prince Jammy, its assymetrical groove is built from palpitating kick drums, garbled rave-style synth-stabs, and an eerie bassline that sounds like a human groan digitally mangled and looped. Or check the quirktronica pulsescape underpinning Beenie on "Badder Than the Rest", or Elephant Man's amazing "2000 Began," which is basically acid techno a la Plastikman.

It's easy to overlook dancehall's sonic strangeness, though, because the performers' personae are so domineering. The mix seems lopsided, in-yer-face voices battling with the beat to control the soundscape, and crushing the rest of the music (strangulated samples, perky videogame-style blip-melodies) into a skinny strip of no-man's land in between. The ragga voice, jagged and croaky, is a form of sonic extremism in itself. Dancehall's got to be the only form of modern pop where the typical range for male vocals is baritone to basso profundo. Obviously related to the culture's premium on testosterone and disdain for effeminacy, ragga's ultramasculinist bombast sounds simultaneously absurd and intimidating. From some DJs, like Buccaneer, you'll even hear a Pavarotti-esque warble, hilariously poised between portentous and preposterous.

Elephant Man's own voice is a pit-of-belly boom that opens up like an abyss of menace, enhanced by a sinister, serpentile lisp. Combine this sort of gravelly machismo with typical lyrics about exit wounds and tonight being the opposite of your birthday (ie. your "deathnight") and you've got some seriously chilling Staggerlee business. "Replacement Killer," a series of boasts about how coldblooded Elephant is, actually utilises death-rattle gasps as functioning elements of the beat. No surprise, then, that there's a mutual trade pact between dancehall and gangsta rap. "One More" is based on DMX's "One More Road To Cross," "E-L-E-P-H-A-N-T" rips a Dre/Snoop chorus, and the album's fiercest cut "Somebody" rides the clanking rampage of the Yardbounce riddim, a fusion of dancehall with the New Orleans bounce style popularized by Cash Money Records.

With six appearances on Biggest Ragga Dancehall Anthems 2000 Capleton reaffirms his supremacy over the dancehall already established by 2000's awesome More Fire LP. Like Malcolm X, he belongs to the syndrome of the self-reformed Staggerlee; like Buju Banton, he's a raggamuffin who turned Rasta. But Capleton's sanctimony doesn't sabotage his records because instead of soothing roots reggae visions of "one love", he concentrates on Old Testament-style wrath and armageddon: Jah as the ultimate Enforcer, the Don of dons, smiting the corrupt and ungodly. The gloating relish with which he wields the brimstone imagery of divine retribution is as powerful as ragga's ultraviolence. Capleton's righteousness and Elephant Man's ruthlessness are flipsides of the same cultural coin as; God's fire simply replaces gun fire. Even though he's a "good guy" now, Capleton still sounds like a rude boy.

Bonus Bit, from Blissblog Wednesday, December 04, 2002

Still reeling from the Greensleeves launch party for Elephant Man’s third album Higher Level, probably the closest I’ll ever get to attending a proper bashment. What a strange-looking gentleman the self-styled “energy god” is—as my companion Sci-Fi Paul remarked, with his bright yellow tendrils of hair and homely face Elephant looks uncannily like Harpo Marx. And what gives with the bizarre patchwork corduroy suit in shades of brown, beige and white?

Elephant is probably the biggest dancehall deejay of the last few years, at least inside Jamaica itself, and offhand I can’t think of an event where I’ve witnessed such audience love: the front six rows were a forest of mini-cameras and camcorders, a panorama of adulatory faces and frank female lust. The first half-hour of the show was one of the most intense performances I’ve ever experienced, in impact terms on a par with Swans and Diamanda Galas. Perhaps the most exciting and thought-provoking aspect was the collectivity: it was meant to be Elephant’s show, but apart from a bizarre, extremely long and mostly (to me) incomprehensible-owing-to-patois speech right at the start of the performance, he mostly let his retinue of crew members and guests shine. Hardly any songs got played for more than a minute, and some got cut off after about 20 seconds; it was a chaos of MC freestyles and singers crooning lover’s rock and R&B in delirious falsetto (one chap actually sounding like a soprano, so womanly it was almost disturbing). And even though the event started to flag a bit about two-thirds through, owing to the excessive number of people onstage and the incessant swapping around of the mic, I’d still say this was way more entertaining than any hip hop show I’ve ever seen.

Which may explain the looks of sheer delight on people’s faces. After years of going to moody jungle and UKG events, it was a surprise, and refreshing, to witness such full-on enjoyment and joyousness. In a really interesting way, dancehall stars seem to simultaneously be treated as gods and yet have a representative-of-the-people quality that makes them accessible and down-to-earth. Maybe this is related to the way that dancehall’s turnover is so intense that most star deejays return to the street real quick. But while they’re in the spotlight, boy do they revel in it. Elephant, the bastard, made us wait two hours, basking in the VIP room as TV crews (presumably from JA) jostled for his attention, and members of his entourage seized their moment in front of the camera, firing off their mammoth “big-up” namecheck lists and performing their trademark vocal licks.

And along with the sense of fun and release, my god, the style of the audience: with the men, it was sometimes so exquisite, it verged on (and this is damn weird all things considered) gay. The whole experience did make me sympathise with wigga types who just decide ‘"nah, white culture can’t compete with this’"and dedicate their whole lives to the pre-doomed fraudulence and pathos of trying to pass for black. There were a handful of white wannabes at this event, looking distinctly awkward. And of course there was ginger-haired Bobby Konders of Massive B/Hot 97 fame. (Talking of your white custodian/Steve Barrow-Barker types, I was given a flyer for a David Rodigan event: have you ever seen a picture of this guy, he looks like Alan Partridge gone totally bald!).

And the album? It’s great—-my favorite track at this moment is “Tall Up Tall Up”, with its Yuletide dancehall versioning of “Joy To the World”, complete with string quartet. At a certain point I realized I was never going to be more than a dancehall dilettante, ‘cos to really keep on top of it is a full-time activity, entailing many hours in record-store basements whose walls are covered with 7 inch singles. But I look forward with renewed eagerness to the dilettante's annual ritual: buying the Greensleeves and VP "anthems of the year" comps.

2008-03-07T10:09:00.000-08:00

[Bring the Noise deleted scene #56]

BREAKBEAT GARAGE a.k.a "Grime Ahoy!"
from Unfaves 2000 (written spring 2001)

by Simon Reynolds

When this flavour of "garage" first started to come through--must have been late
1999, with Deekline--I remember being excited by the way the sultry, swinging R&B-2step flow would be disrupted by this much more raw, stripped down and rhythmically unsupple sound that was disconcertingly similar to Big Beat: 130 bpm breaks, bulbous bass, wacky samples. But what was refreshing about these tune--"I Don't Smoke", later the more electro-flavored "Dilemma" by So Solid Crew--when they were a brief tang of different flavour, becomes tediously homogenous as a scene/sound on its own. Stanton Warriors's Da Virus" especially seems to be the drab template for a lot of this stuff, and "138 Trek" wore out its welcome fairly quick. There's some cool-enough stuff, I suppose--like Blowfelt's bippety bassline tune "Lickle Rolla"---but generally it sounds too much like jungle minus the extra b.p.m speed-rush, hardcore without the E-fired euphoria. Or worse like nu-skool breaks (alarming to see Rennie 'Stupid Fucking Name' Pilgrem reviewing 2step tunes in Muzik's breakbeat column).

That said, the last batch of pirate tapes I got, showed signs of a new twist in this breakstep (or whatever they're calling it) direction: not so much jungle-slowed-down, and more like a post-rave, drum'n'bass influenced form of English rap. On these spring 2001 pirate tapes, there's hardly any R&B diva tunes, and every other track features very Lunndunn-sounding MCs or ragga-flavored vocals, over caustic acid-riffs and techsteppy sounds, like some latterday Dillinja production. Unlike with techstep or recent d&b, there's very little distorto-blare in the production, there's this typically 2step clipped, costive feel, an almost prim and dainty quality to the aggression-- a weird combo of nasty and neat-freak. Lyrically, the vibe seems to be similarly pinched in spirit, a harsh, bleak worldview shaped subconsciously by the crumbling infrastructural reality beneath New Labour's fake grin; UKG seems to be already transforming itself from boom-time music to recession blues. The Englishness of the vocals reminds me of 3 Wizemen Men and that perpetual false-dawn for UK rap. Lots of killer tunes I can't identify, but one in particular stood out that I could: "Know We" by Pay As U Go Kartel. As I say, quite mean-minded and loveless music but sonically very exciting-- a new twist if not quite paradigm shift from the hardcore continuum.

2008-03-07T10:03:00.000-08:00

[Bring the Noise deleted scene #55]

WU-TANG CLAN, The Wu
Uncut, January 2001)

by Simon Reynolds

Wu lynchpin the RZA is almost unique in the pantheon of great hip hop producers for having not-a-lot going on rhythmically. Most of his creativity goes into Wu's trademark cinematic arrangements--noir strings, moody horn stabs, dank wafts of gloomy ambience--and even these tend to be looped and layered in fairly straight-forward fashion. Trouble is, in this post-Timbaland era of futuristic cyberpunk and jagged riddim science, it simply doesn't cut it anymore to take a breakbeat and let it roll. Track after track, that's exactly what the RZA does. It took me a while to work out why his beats are so subdued and pro forma. In contemporary rap and R&B, the drums are basically lead voices, duetting with and sometimes upstaging the real vocalist. But for Wu-Tang Clan, the Word is King. Rhythm is subordinated to a supportive role; it should never draw attention to itself.

What Raekwon, Method Man, Ghostface Killah, GZA, and so on do is great. But it's hard to see why headz rate the Clan on a higher level of consciousness than, say, Jay-Z. Sure, they invented that we-are-crime-family, collective thang. But everybody's now copped the blood-brotherhood, dynasty shtick. And, 90 percent of the time, all the Wu offer lyrically is more complicated boasts and threats than your average gangsta. You get the alpha-male humiliating his inferiors by stealing their women: "You know me/Every time you kiss that ho, you blow me". You get delusions of invincibility and thugly nonsense about fucking "bitches raw". You get crime/rhyme analogies ("used to be in chains/now we snatch chains/took the crack game/applied it to the rap game") and realer-than-thou bluster about how "the streets raised us" and living on "hostile blocks" where "Glocks is spittin'". Basically you get the same old shit--redeemed, just, by the cinematic vividness and rapid-fire relentlessness of image-flow.

That said, The W contains a fair few exceptions to this deadly combo of "talking fast saying nothing" over perfunctory beats. Standard-issue RZA dirge-murk "One Blood Under W" is given added ache by Junior Reid's mournful roots vocal. Ol Dirty Bastard drools neat, wacked-out drivel on "Conditioner". "Let My Niggas Live" is the only really rhythmically inventive track--a percussive roil of brooding avant-funk that could be Last Poets or Tago Mago. Based around a beautiful if over-used sample source, "I Can't Go To Sleep" is a howling blues of racial paranoia. The similarly themed "Jah World" makes an abject plea for deliverance from intolerable conditions the Wu apparently believe are only one tiny step up from slavery.

In some quarters, the W is being hailed as a return to Enter the Wu-Tang , the group's worldstorming debut. And there's little here that would sound anachronistic in 1993. OK, it's a great Wu-Tang Clan LP, complete with the obligatory, well-stale-by-now snatches of dialogue from martial arts movies. But the rap game's changed several times since '93, and, beyond the diehards, does anyone really care any more?

2008-03-07T09:47:00.000-08:00

[Bring the Noise deleted scene #54]

RADIOHEAD VERSUS BRIT-ROCK
Part Two of piece from Uncut,November 2000
(first half is spliced to The Wire Radiohead interview in BtN)

by Simon Reynolds

... A great, fully contemporary record would have to rival the vivid colors, spatial weirdness and rhythmic compulsion routinely available in the realm of electronic music, but combine them with the kind of interiority and potential for individualised response that surface-and-sensation oriented, collective-high-oriented dance rarely reaches.

Kid A is such a record. On "Everything In Its Right Place," the lead vocal is just one strand in a shimmering tapestry of multitracked and treated Thom Yorke voice-goo, whose pulse-riffs and rippling patterns simultaneously recall Robert Wyatt's Rock Bottom and contemporary avant-electronica outfits like Curd Duca. On "Kid A", a drastically processed and illegible Yorke vocal nestles amid a honeycomb of tweeting 'n' cooing space-critters and enchanting music-box critters--again, the track would be right at home in the world of "glitch techno" labels like Mille Plateaux or Mego. The jacknifing two-step beat that powers "Idioteque" explicitly nods towards contemporary dance, but leeches the joy out a la PiL's "Memories" or "Joy Division's "She's Lost Control" --call it Death Garage. At the opposite extreme, the beat-less "Treefingers"--a miasma of glistening vapors and twinkling haze--could be an eerie dronescape from Aphex Twin's Selected Ambient Works Vol II or Eno's On Land. Now you too can own your own miniature of eternity.

Elsewhere on the album, the coordinates are less electronica and more the remotest extremities of the rock tradition. All wincing and waning atmospherics, "How To Disappear Completely" is the missing link between Scott Walker's desolate orchestral grandeur and the swoonily amorphous ballads on My Bloody Valentine's Isn't Anything. The grind-and-surge bass-riff, cymbal-splashy motorik drums, and asteroid-belt-debris guitars of "The National Anthem" initially recall Faust or Loop at their most kosmische, until the freeblowing entrance of Art Ensemble of Chicago style horns takes the song to another outerzone altogether. "Optimistic" combines the noble pure-rock drive of the Bunnymen circa Heaven Up Here with the gnarly, swarf-spitting graunch of Gang of Four. "In Limbo" would be Kid A's most old-fashioned sounding song (imagine a fey fatalistic castaway from Eno's solo albums trapped in the treadmill churn of Led Zep "Four Sticks") if not for its dazzling sound: a shimmer-swirl of dense overdubs, like the song's swathed in a cloud of hummingbirds. Kid A's sound is astounding throughout: warm, smudgy, the instruments seeming to bleed-through and mingle with each other uncannily. Colin Greenwood's bass is a particularly powerful presence, often seeming to throb from inside your own body, hip hop-style. On "Morning Bell," it's like the rest of the music is the outer crust or husk of the monstrously swollen but tender bass-pulse.

Revealing fact: most Radiohead websites provide "guitar tabs" so that fans can imitate the three guitarists's every last fret fingering, chord progression, and tone-bend. Something tells me there won't be too many tabs transcribed from Kid A, though. The use of effects like sustain and delay, in tandem with the signal-processing and disorientating spatialisation potential of the mixing desk, is frequently so drastic that the guitars function as texture-generators rather than riff-machines. They're just another means of sound-synthesis. Indeed, it's often impossible to tell where a sound originated--it could be from guitars, or keyboards/synths, or orchestral/acoustic instruments, or from digital effects/ samples/mixing board malarkey.

Kid A is the return-with-a-vengeance of a phenomenon that had seemingly petered out:
post-rock. This highly contested genre dates back to 1993-94, when various smart operators began to notice the glaring and ever-widening gap in sonic vividness between guitar-based music and "sampladelia" (the whole area of digital music that encompasses dance, atmospheric electronica, and hip hop). The result was a loosely connected semi-movement of artists determined to close the innovation gap, which I had the temerity to christen "post-rock". At its utmost, post-rock delivered an aggregation of psychedelias: the original psychedelic cosmonauts (especially the Krautrock contingent), the Jamaican psychedelia of dub, the neo-psych resurrection of the late Eighties (Spacemen 3, Sonic Youth, MBV, etc), the digital psychedelia of Nineties electronic dance. What all these phases had in common was their partial or total abandonment of live performance as the model for recording: the willingness for music to be unrealistic, anti-naturalistic, a studio-spun figment.

Despite its early promise, though, the reality of post-rock rarely lived up to the dream. Too much post-rock failed to supply what people get from trad rock (the singer's charisma/neurosis, big riffs, something to look at on stage, tunes you can hum in the bath, the whole apparatus of identification and catharsis), without ever really rivaling what full-on dance offers either (groove power, surrogate drug-sensations, the rush). What you got was mood music--not necessarily emotionless, but tending to elicit admiration rather than involvement. I always thought post-rock would languish on the hipster margins until an Established Band took on its ideas-- a REM, Pearl Jam, U2 (who came close, and nearly whittled away their superstardom in the process). Now Radiohead have embraced post-rock (if not the concept, then certainly its techniques and its intent) but brilliantly merged it with all that indispensable trad-rock stuff like Emotion and Meaning.

Kid A is the kind of record that makes you want to curl up in a foetal ball inside your headphones, immerse yourself utterly---not just to catch all the loving sonic details, but because it's a record for emotional wallowing. Yorke may resent the hack stereotype of himself as "tortured artist", but his words and delivery do little to resist it. The song-moods run the gamut of dismal D-words: despondency, dis-assocation, dejection, discomfort, and (on the Floyd/Animals-redolent "Optimistic") broader cultural themes of decline and de-evolution. Ian McCulloch hyped his first solo album back in 1989 by saying that it was time for "some bleak" (the context being Madchester's day-glo positivity). Against a similar backdrop of vacant boom-time optimism, Radiohead bring the bleak in a thousand shades of lustrous grey.

What's striking about Kid A is how perfectly the colors of Yorke-as-instrument fit with the band's palette. Sometimes he gets a little help from technology--effects lend a wincing toothache edge to his voice on the solar wind howl of "The National Anthem", while on "Everything In Its Right Place" and "Kid A", Yorke offers himself up as raw material to be slice'n'diced, played backwards. On "In Limbo", the chorus (either "in a fantasy" or "your inner fancy": diction is deliberately imprecise throughout, adding to the sense of Yorke as an ensemble player rather than frontman) crumbles and disappears into the band's wall of sound.

You can learn a lot about bands through their fans: one of the top Radiohead websites has a section called Song Interpretations, where fans email in their own private and widely divergent readings of lyrics that are either opaque or so indistinctly enunciated they enter 'Scuse-Me-While-I-Kiss-This-Guy territory. As with any classic rock band, Radiohead's music musters the aura of gravity that puts fans into this mode--a sensation of deep-and-meaningful that's as important as any actual statements being made. Although this kind of approach can be reactionary and middlebrow in that perennial sixth form/undergraduate/music-paper-reader way, it has a certain oppositional value at this precise moment because it is runs against the grain of the pop culture--teenpop's ascendance, dance at its most complacent and non-utopian (trance, garage, R&B, all basically accept reality as it is). Radiohead's reinvocation of art rock seriousness, at a time of compulsory triviality and pseudo-camp cynicism, is a reminder that people once believed music could change minds, have profound, life-shaking impact.

This seriousness--the earnestness of being Important--is one reason why the Pink Floyd comparison dogs Radiohead, although Joy Division would be just as appropriate. Kid A is the kind of record that would have come out on Harvest or Virgin in the early Seventies, on Factory or 4AD in the early Eighties. Today, if this was an unknown band's debut, you'd have to say Domino or Kranky. (Often the record sounds like lo-fi on a Dark Side of the Moon budget, lo-fi for audiophiles). Kid A is also an Album in the bygone sense of the word. The immaculate aesthetic logic of the track sequencing (something of an obsession for Radiohead) lends Kid A the sort of shape and trajectory that lingers in your mind. Rather than reprogramming the CD into micro-albums of favorite bits, people will want to play and replay it in its entirety. Smart, too, of Radiohead to resist the temptation to release a double or even use the CD's full capacity, and instead go for a 50 minute duration just a little longer than the classic vinyl elpee.

How groundbreaking is Kid A really? Committed margin-walkers will argue that if you like the title track, you'll find more wildly warped and deranging stuff on tiny glitch-techno labels out of Cologne, or claim that freaks in Japan or New Zealand are unleashing more out-there space-rock jams than 'The National Anthem'. They might be right (I couldn't tell you). But the fact is, in pop music, context is everything. It matters that this is Radiohead, who didn't have to go out on such a limb, but did. Radiohead are shoving all this strangeness, hitherto the preserve of hipster snobs, down the earholes of the Q readership--not exactly a vanguard of listeners. And the fact that the band's slightly middlebrow following will, out of sheer loyalty, learn to love it, is exciting. (On that subject, Q readers are often mocked for picking OK Computer as the Greatest Album of Time-- but why not? Better this error of passion than yet another unfurling of the conventional historical wisdom, Revolver/Astral Weeks/London Calling, blah blah, yawn yawn. And who says the Best Elpee Ever couldn't occur in rock's fourth decade rather than its first or second?

Context is everything, and it makes a mighty difference that this is an awaited record. There's a momentousness that--unjustly, inevitably--will never pertain to the next effort by Labradford or Mouse On Mars. The sense of a Major Band on a journey that is exceeding expectations recalls the giant steps made with each successive album by the Beatles, or the way that certain art-rock luminaries progressed by taking the weirdest elements of their previous record and making them the blueprint for the next (e.g. the sequence that climaxed with Talking Heads's Remain In Light), or just springboarding into a strange beyond of their own imagining (e.g. Kate Bush's The Dreaming). Radiohead could have easily, profitably, remade OK Computer. But instead they've made a record where every track sounds 1/ unlike each other, and 2/ unlike anything they've done before, yet still 1/ works as a glorious whole, and 2/ has a distinct Radiohead identity. Saviours of Britrock? Don't know about that, but Kid A is a shining example and stinging reproach to the rest of the Britrock pack for their low horizons and underachievement.

2008-03-07T09:20:00.000-08:00

[Bring the Noise deleted scene #53]

JIMI HENDRIX RECONSIDERED
essay contributed to feature package on Hendrix, Uncut, July 2000

by Simon Reynolds

Think ‘Hendrix’, and the first image that comes to mind is the onstage Jimi – a sensual inferno of improvisatory creativity, fingertips ablaze; Jimi the aural arsonist, sonically torching the Stars and Stripes; Jimi the Dionysian dandy, the pyrotechnician who put the flambé into flamboyance. But – and you knew this was coming right? – there was another side to Hendrix that runs against this pat if not entirely misleading image: Hendrix the diligent, patient craftsman, the ‘studio rat’ who methodically pieced together Electric Ladyland over several months of
ten hours per night, all week long work. Some Ladyland songs were re-mixed three hundred times.

If Jimi onstage was a case of never-mind-the-Pollocks, a volcanic spermatozoic splurge of garish gushing expressionism, in the studio he was more a landscape painter, endlessly layering overdubs, tweaking equalisers and echo buttons, trying out new effects and arrangement ideas. With Electric Ladyland, Jimi exhibited the kind of obsessive detail-oriented perfectionism you associate with ultra-white, classicist-not-Romanticist auteurs such as Brian Wilson, Paul McCartney/George Martin, Todd Rundgren, even Brian Eno. This isn't a Dionysian lineage (frenzy, intoxication, orgiastic chaos – think Stones, Doors, Stooges) but an Appollonian one (Apollo being the god of serenity, sanity – art as contemplation, Nature garden).

As well as this unlikely white company, you could also place Hendrix in a black lineage of studio science and producer wizardry – Lee Perry, George Clinton, Sun Ra, Prince. In the ‘Afro Futurist’ pantheon, the band leader or producer orchestrates all the sonic strands into funkadelic symphonies, using texture, polyrhythm, and multi-track spatiality to weave what critic Kodwo Eshun calls "sonic fiction". A crucial aspect of this producer-led approach is that effects and studio as-instrument processing are as important as the musicianship. In Hendrix's case, the two things were always inseparable: using wah-wah, sustain, distortion, fuzz-tone, feedback modulated by the tremolo arm, etc, he refracted the blues into a vast spectrum of timbres. And this was a pretty radical idea at the time. When Jimi did a session for Radio One, the crusty old BBC engineers were hopelessly confused, and in the end the producer had to speak up: "Look here, Jimi, I'm terribly sorry, but we seem to be getting quite a bit of distortion and feedback and can't seem to correct it."

As Hendrix's music evolved, its timbre-saturated colour motion got more ultra-vivid and kaleidoscopic. It also got more spatialised. ‘3rd Stone From the Sun’, a sirocco roar of controlled feedback and one of the few songs on Are You Experienced? to extend beyond three minutes, looks ahead to Ladyland's studio-spun immensities, and further still – to the drone swarm daze of My Bloody Valentine (who worked with Roger Mayer, the geezer who built FX pedals and technical gizmos for Jimi), to Husker Du's wig-out blizzardry, to Sonic Youth's "reinvention of the guitar". Jimi's guitar becomes increasingly gaseous and contourless, like radiation or a forcefield in which the listener is suspended. Contemporary rockcrit Richard Meltzer described how Hendrix replaced the "tunnel space" of conventional rock production (the guitarist distinctly positioned in the stereo-field) with "paisley space" (a wormholey, fractal surroundsound with Jimi coming at you from all sides, from behind you, sometimes seemingly from inside you). Electric Ladyland had a ‘3D sound’ that, Jimi later complained, the technicians who transferred the masters to vinyl "screwed up… they didn't know how to cut it properly. They thought it was out of phase."

Jimi's music was about space in another sense. His lyrics are full of extra-terrestrial journeys and kosmik imagery – ‘3rd Stone’'s Barbarella-like request, "may I land my kinky machine?", and bizarre narrative about aliens visiting Earth, deciding chickens are the smartest species, then blowing up the planet; the imagery of "Jupiter sulphur mines/Way down by the Methane Sea" in ‘Voodoo Chile’; the solar system tour guide of ‘The Stars That Play With Laughing Sam's Dice’, a title that non-coincidentally acronyms the hallucinogens STP and LSD; unreleased songs like ‘South Saturn Delta’ and ‘Valleys of Neptune’. Jimi was an avid consumer of sci-fi, fantasy, and all forms of mysticism. His obsessions included the I Ching, numerology, astrology and the symbolist poets' belief that there are synaesthetic correspondences between colours and sounds; he believed he had ESP and could recall astral travels. All these traits came together in his dream of an "electric religion". He died before he could pull together the overtly transcendentalist double album, First Rays Of The New Rising Sun, his hymn to the Eternal Cosmic Feminine, featuring songs like ‘Hey Baby (The Land Of The New Rising Sun’ about a female messiah leading humanity to the promised land.

Like other Afro-Futurists, Hendrix was as interested in mythic antiquity as in the outerspatial tomorrow – Nubia, Atlantis, the whole "ancient to the future" (Art Ensemble of Chicago) shtick. His song ‘Pali Gap’ was named after the Hawaian goddess of the volcanoes aka Pele (beating fellow space cadet Tori Amos by a couple of decades). ‘Purple Haze’ was influenced by Hopi Indian myths, and ‘Voodoo Chile’ taps into West African magick via Haiti and New Orleans. In terms of his own mystique, Jimi achieved a double-whammy, being half black and half-Native American. For the beats and the hippies, blacks and Red Indians represented two kinds of authenticity and exoticism that beckoned as alternatives to consumerland emptiness: blacks incarnated passion, sexuality, energy, soul, and Native Americans represented mystery, ritual, ceremony, a non-alienated relationship with the land.

The culmination of all these tendencies – the black science fiction, the studio wizardry, and the alienation from contemporary Western industrial culture – was Ladyland's closing song suite, ‘1983 … (A Merman I Should Turn To Be)’, and ‘Moon, Turn the Tides… Gently, Gently Away’. The lyrical scenario is Jimi and girlfriend abandoning a war torn, despoiled Earth for a subaquatic paradise, ignoring their sceptical friends who argue "the machine, that we built, would never save us… it's impossible for a man to live and breathe under water… anyway, you know good well it would be beyond the will of God". Flouting the patriarchal
reality-principle, Jimi and his water babe are reborn as aquanauts in a womb-like wonderland beneath the waves. Sonically, ‘1983’/‘Moon’ is a masterpiece of stereo panning and guitar-treatment techniques (slowing down and speeding up tapes to depict a shoal of fish swimming up to check out the human visitors, then darting away again; seagull noises created from headphones feeding back into mics), with all the myriad components painstakingly assembled and then mixed live in a way that anticipates both dub reggae and ambient. All undulating flow and flickering refraction, this is rock unrocked and uncocked, androgynised, Jimi exploring the anima kingdom inside his own soul. There is nothing else like it in rock except maybe Robert Wyatt's similarly oceanic/amniotic Rock Bottom, Can's moonstruck ‘Come Sta La Luna’, John Martyn's dubby-bluesy shimmerscapes ‘I'd Rather Be The Devil’ and ‘Big Muff’.

Electric Ladyland is sometimes accused of being somewhat self indulgent and over-produced, but if anything it's not self-indulgent enough. The double-album was, however, the climax of his burgeoning relationship with engineer Eddie Kramer, who was able to implement Hendrix's vague desires ("I want the sound of underwater") and who gradually displaced the Experience as Jimi's foil and launchpad. With Ladyland less like a power trio than a 300-piece guitar orchestra, songs like ‘All Along the Watchtower’ and ‘Burning of the Midnight Lamp’ are stately constructions rather than spontaneous combustions – haciendas and pagodas gyrating in the sky.

2008-03-04T10:26:00.000-08:00

[Bring the Noise deleted scene #52]

PAUL GILROY, Against Race: Imagining Political Culture Beyond the Color Line
director's cut, the Village Voice, May 2 2000.

by Simon Reynolds

It was Randall Jarrell, I think, who took the entire oevure of Yeats, did the pre-computer age equivalent of a word-search, and discovered the matrix of forty or so favorite (that's to say, over-used) words and tropes that encapsulated the poet's aesthetic. You could do something similar to Against Race, the new book by Paul Gilroy, the black British cultural studies maven and Yale Professor of Sociology and African American studies. On one side, there'd be the list words that make Gilroy frown: purism, essentialism, roots, unanimism, primordialism, homeland. On the other, the words that make Gilroy smile: hybrid, syncretic, cosmopolitan, transcultural, creole, heteroculture, and, especially, diaspora.
Against Race's contentious contention is that even in their "weak" cultural forms ("mild ethnocentrisms" identity politics, discourses of racial pride), the first frowned-upon cluster of words are philosophically on the path that leads to a bunch of even nastier words: ultranationalism, fraternalism, militarism, fascism, ethnic cleansing.

Against Race is going to upset a lot of people. With admirable courage and forthrightness, Gilroy dismisses race as a quasi-biological mystification, a toxic concept that, even when turned around into black-is-beautiful pride or made the basis of resistance, has basically fucked up our thought. Railing against the "cheap pseudo-solidarities" offered by ethnic loyalty on the grounds that they effectively terminate politics (in the sense of coalition, mediation, negotiation, alliance), Gilroy aims to discredit what he calls "race-thinking" or "raciology". He aims to analyse the history of race as a concept in the same way that Michel Foucault interrogated "sexuality" as discourse and discipline. Gilroy traces the way the near-simultaneous birth of "rationality" and "nationality" at the start of the modern era led to pseudo-scientific mergers of superstition and logic such as eugenics and theories of racial decline through miscegenation. Imperialism, Darwinism and the emergence of ecology, and the growing importance of what Gilroy calls (after Foucault) "biopolitics," created the context for ideas of the people or volk as a quasi-biological organism rooted in specific territory. This in turn led to the Nazis's demand for lebensraum and the literalisation of their slogan "blood and soil"--where the soil is soaked in the blood of the original but now exterminated inhabitants of the conquered territory.

What is going to offend a lot of people is the way that Gilroy shows that fascism is not the special genius of the German people, or even the white race. He reveals not just alarming parallels but strange alliances and mutual respect pacts between black separatist groups and white supremacists. The British National Party actually demonstrated in support of a Bermudan Rastafarian who wanted the UK government to fund his "return" to Ghana. That sounds bizarre, but if you listen to the Seventies roots reggae of groups like The Congos and Israel Vibration, you will hear the word "repatriation" being sung with disconcerting yearning and anticipation. Even more startling is the story of how Marcus Garvey met with the Ku Klux Klan in 1922 and concluded that they shared similar ideals of purifying and standarizing the race. Gilroy dubs this syndrome "fraternalist mirroring"--blood-brotherhoods who are enemies but who respect each other as honest representatives of their race, and actually even admire each other's brutality. Garvey's United Negro Improvement Assocation anticipated the European fascists with their use of uniform and drill. In 1937, Garvey boasted "we were the first Fascists... Mussolini copied fascism from me. " Long after the defeat of the great dictactors, his son Marcus Garvey Jnr called in 1974 for "African lebensraum" and talked about "African National Socialism." What connects these depressing examples is a fundamental nation-building narrative, argues Gilroy, that goes back to Moses and underpins the careers of Hitler, Farrakhan, and Milosevic to name just a few: the shepherding of a weak, scattered, decadent but "chosen" people, by a messiah-like leader, towards its manifest destiny and/or promised land.

Against all these different manifestations of "ethnic absolutism", with their tendencies towards authoritarianism, militarism, and pageants of primordial kinship, Gilroy marshalls the concept of diaspora. As developed in The Black Atlantic (his book about the cultural traffic connecting West Africa, the Caribbean, the Southern USA and the U.K), diasporic identity has nothing to do with chosen exile or mere migration; Gilroy stresses the crucial dimension added by the forced nature of the dispersal. It might seem odd to valorize such cataclysmic traumas as the scattering of the Jews or slavery, but Gilroy--himself a child of the Black Atlantic--values the end result: a kind of subject-in-process, neither totally assimilated to the new culture nor able to preserve the old folkways. In turn, diasporic peoples unavoidably transform the cultures they pass through; they unsettle as they settle. London, whose popular culture is a mish-mash of Jamaican, Indian and imported Black American music and style, is one example; the entirety of Brazilian culture is another, where the ideal of mesticagem (mixing) was enshrined as state policy only a few decades after slavery was abolished in the late Nineteenth Century.

Unfortunately the weakest parts of Against Race are those concerned with the play of hybridities and essentialisms in modern pop culture. While you've got to admire his guts in dissing current rap as mere "pseudo-rebellion" and appreciate his chutzpah in using Luther "2 Live Crew'" Campbell's professed debt to lecherous Brit comedian Benny Hill as proof that hip hop is not a purely black artform, Gilroy's analyses of contemporary rap and R&B are riddled with strained over-interpretations, non-sequiturs, and arguments that trail off frustratingly. There's also a fogey-ish slant to his repetitious complaints about the video age and its privileging of image over sound, or his misinformed identification of sampling and programmed rhythm with musical de-skilling (no, Paul, it's just a new form of digital-not-manual virtuosity). Despite his nostalgia for the bespectacled seriousness of Curtis Mayfield and the fluent fingers of bassist Marcus Miller, he does acknowledge that it's precisely in the domain of computerized dance music that the praxis of "multiculture" is at its most vital--clubs, raves, pirate radio, are the real Rock Against Racism, he argues. Indeed, rave's implicity anti-fascist bodypolitics can be traced all the back to the secret parties in Nazi Germany where "niggerjew" jazz was played on gramophones rather than by live bands. The sound-not-visuals oriented hybridity of underground dance contrasts with the "specular" orientation of "corporate sponsored multiculture", where imagery of blackness as vitality, health, beauty and physical potency circulate in music videos, sports, fashion, and advertising, and negritude has been transformed "from a badge of insult into an increasingly powerful but still very limited signifier of prestige".

As Gilroy concedes, some of the race-thought eradication he wants to see is already being implemented by globalisation. But he doesn't really take on the quite powerful notion that ideas of local tradition and ethnic identity might be useful resources for resistance, if only in the mechanical sense of a drag or recalcitrant counterweight to capitalism's tendency to dissolve all forms of solidarity and difference. This in turns opens up another set of problems that Gilroy acknowledges but doesn't attempt to resolve: how to avoid the kind of homogenisation caused by globalisation without being insular, Luddite, nativist; how to avoid the weak and banal forms of rootless cosmpolitanism in which "everything becomes... blended into an impossibly even consistency" . The problem is that Nietzche was right: a fierce sense of identity and an us-versus-them worldview creates a certain kind of will, vehemence, and certainty that people find attractive and energizing. Which is why, as the old ethnic, regional and religious tribalisms fade, new ones keep emerging around culture and consumption--new volks like death-metal fans, snowboarders, Abercrombie and Fitch wearers. Maybe, for all Gilroy's hopes, there's actually an innate and almost pre-cultural instinct towards tribalism--look at the way children instinctively form gangs and show hostility towards the non-same. Humanism and tolerance have to be learned, they're part of the civilising process (which is why Nietzche was against civilisation and regarded the "will to stupidity" as an evolutionary advantage). Fascism and ethnocentrism can also draw upon all the irrational romance of the archaic and mythological--the seductive sagas of decline and rebirth, the resurrection of lost imperial powers and the inauguration of new eras. In response, Gilroy imagines abandoning the mythopoeic allure of antiquity and instead relocating utopia in the future: a "heterocultural, postanthropological and cosmopolitan yet-to-come".

In the end, the grand problem at the heart of Against Race is how to reinvent "that perilous pronoun "we" without lapsing into the inclusion/exclusion effect, into us/them psychology with all its consolations and intoxications. Gilroy's answer is to wield a bigger "We" that will hopefully subsume the smaller, squabbling "we's"--a species-level "strategic universalism" that repairs the shattering damage caused by raciology to the notion of the human. Following his hero Franz Fanon, the great anti-colonialist thinker, he wants to renew Europe's humanist project and simultaneously "purge and redeem" the Enlightement of its darkside (imperialism, racism, the coupling of reason and superstition that culminated in the scientific slaughter of the concentration camps). It's a noble but somewhat woolly ideal, and it's ironic that Gilroy takes heart from the way white and black unite to fight malevolent extra-terrrestials in movies like Independence Day and Men In Black, without realising that this is just racism on the cosmic scale, war against monstrous Others that truly are alien.

Weirdly , Against Race feels both overlong and sketchy. Passages of amazing lucidity and original insight alternate with garbled meanders where Gilroy seems perpetually on the verge of actually saying something. He also has an annoying habit of ending sections with long series of questions that propose fruitful areas of further enquiry, which only serves to frustrate the reader by making you think 'well, why didn't you enquire further?' Gilroy's prose demeanour can also be off-putting--a controlled simmer of indignation beneath the cool Sidney Poitier-like surface of elegant professionalism, revealed in odd verbal tics of squeamishness like his use of phrases like "unwholesome ideology" and "unsavory political phenomena" to describe things he disapproves of, like the Afrikaaner Voortrekkers. Other rhetorical gestures have the flavor of the lectern--lots of "I want to ask" or "I want to argue" , constant admonishments not to overlook or pass over too quickly the role of X in Y, calls for vigilance and diligence, soundings of notes of caution. Schoolmarmy tone and what Gilroy himself calls "my own wilfully dislocated argument" aside, Against Race is a brave and compelling book.

2008-03-04T10:15:00.000-08:00

[Bring the Noise deleted scene #51]

JAY-Z, Vol. 3... Life and Times of S.Carter
DMX,And Then There Was X
JUVENILE, Tha G-Code
THE LOX, We Are The Streets
Uncut, May 2000

by Simon Reynolds

Critics love lost causes. It’s almost part of the job description. At a certain point, though, doggedly insisting “this should be pop, not that chart crap” gets counterproductive, blinding you to vital things going on in the world of the stuff that sells. It’s particularly problematic with rap, a megabuck entertainment industry these days, but still motored by the cruel fluctuations of popular desire, aka “the streets”. Predictably, last year’s critics polls endorsed such “lost causes” as the Roots and Prince Paul/Handsome Boy Modelling School, and overlooked huge-selling records by DMX and Eve, Lil Wayne and Hot Boys, despite the fact that the two labels/clans to which these artists are affiliated (Ruff Ryders and Cash Money) are at the forefront of a creative upsurge in hardcore rap. Yo, reality check: a bitter pill to swallow, but the truth is that Nineties rap was shaped not by 3 Feet High or Fear of A Black Planet (twin totems of the critic-cherished “lost golden age of 1988-91), but by NWA’s Efil4zaggin and Notorious BIG’s Ready To Die. Similarly, the directness of Tupac has proved far more influential than any Wu-Tang clansman’s virtuoso encryption skillz.

These new platinum-selling monsters by Ruff Ryders’ DMX, Cash Money’s Juvenile, and Jay-Z (don of his own dynasty, Roc-A-Fella) completely shred the tired critical line: major label = formula and indie (aka “undieground”) = inventive. Take Jay-Z's single "Do It Again": Rockwilder's production as harsh and mechanistic as a track by Jeff Mills, just a melody-free spasm of sub-bass, a nagging blurt of computer-in-distress bleeps, and an asymmetrical loop of punishing kicks and snares. Not for nothing does the track start with the warning: “it’s about to get real ugly in here”. Street rap like Jay-Z’s is unpretty in another sense. Like the Swans circa Greed, the lyrics--an interminable catalogue of boasts, threats and flaunted wealth--offer an X-Ray view of capitalism’s primary drives of will-to-power, alpha-male display and ravenous appetite. But where Gira’s vision was a Beckett-style dehumanized hell of domination/submission, Jay-Z and Juvenile make like they actually enjoy living like this. Lyrically, “Do It Again” revels in the playa's nightly cycle of clubbing, drinking, pulling, and taking the ho home: "6-AM I be digging her out/6-15 I be kicking her out". But the music (tres Swans, actually) makes it sound like a treadmill grind.

As superthugs go, DMX is the most interesting, because he doesn't glamorize the gangsta lifestyle. Produced by Ruff Ryders chief soundboy Swizz Beatz, "One More Road To Cross" has the accursed, burdened heft of Blacks Sabbath and Flag--a perfect fit for DMX's stoic description of a carefully planned liquor store heist that goes bloodily wrong. "The Professional" is a bleak glimpse into the mind of a hired assassin ("Shit ain't go too well/THAT'S MY LIFE/Know I'm going to hell/THAT'S MY LIFE") while the betrayal-and-retribution themed "Here We Go Again" starts with the insuperably fatigued murmur "Same old shit, dog/Just a different day". This vision of thug life as agony, repetition, and endurance is communicated as much through DMX's hoarse rasping timbre (pure Ozzy/Rollins) and his flow (alternating between pay-close-attention-this-is-hard-earned-knowledge-I'm-sharing slow to rapid-fire blurts like he's got too much pain to cram into the rhyme-scheme's stanzas.)

The Ruff Ryders camp has its moments of exuberance, like the rowdy call-and-response clamor and bruising bass-bounce of The Lox's "Wild Out" . It’s almost exhilirating enough to make you forget socially irresponsible couplets like "if a nigga step on your goddamn shoes/fuck him up/WILD OUT!!!"--virtually incitement to over-act to any perceived insult or threat. Lyrically, no two ways about it, street rap is pure evil: spiritually bankrupt, in thrall to false consciousness (delusions like “crime pays” and “some gangstas stay on top for ever”) and basically no advance on the black nihilism and commodity-fetishism of Schooly D circa 1986’s “PSK” and “Gucci Time”.

Word-wise the creativity resides in the endless, black-humorous twists on murder/money/misogyny. Jay-Z’s OG shtick pukes up some of his wittiest wordplay. In “Do It Again” he’s so iced-out with diamond-encrusted jewelry , his “wrists’s frostbit minus two degrees”, while “S. Carter” turns the rapper’s real name into the jeering chorus: “S dot carter/you must try harder/competition is NADA!”

Juvenile’s old-head-on-young-shoulders, worldly and slight-weary persona is much easier to warm to than Jay-Z’s richer-than-thou condescension. It helps, too, that Cash Money’s trackmaster, Mannie Fresh, is rap’s most creative producer right now, merging the joyous electro-style bass-boom and ear-tickling triple-time hi-hats of New Orleans bounce with incongruous stuff--baroque pseudo-classical synth-melodies, jazz-fusion guitar licks, techno stabs and textures. Fresh used to make house tracks with Chicago pioneer Steve ‘Silk’ Hurley. There’s been a bizarre convergence between rave and rap in the last year: Jay-Z’s "Snoopy Track" sees Timbaland blaring Numan-meets-Beltram synth-bombast, while his Swizz-produced “Girls Best Friend” has the off-kilter lurch of 4 Hero’s early breakbeat hardcore.

On the latest Ruff Ryder product, the Lox’s album, though, Swizz’s sample-free digital synth sound (theme-from-Rocky-style triumphal fanfares, spindly videogame semi-tunes, atonal keyboard trills) is sounding a little threadbare from over-use. The Lox don’t help with lines as blunt as “I turn your face into pudding”, “I’ma make a nigga leak”, and the niggativity nadir of call-that-a-worldview? couplet “all I know is drugs and guns and plenty of weed/and that bitches suck dick and niggas’ll bleed”.

The trouble with hardcore rap is that while producers keep coming up with sonic surprises, the MCs face a tougher challenge: how many different ways can you say “I don’t give a fuck”?

2008-02-25T08:58:00.000-08:00

[Bring the Noise deleted scene #50]

SUZANNE E. SMITH, Dancing in the Street: Motown and the Cultural Politics of Detroit (Harvard University Press)
Washington Post Book World, March 18th 2000

by Simon Reynolds

Against a cultural studies backdrop of academics locating "subversion" in the shifting sexual personae of Madonna videos, finding "resistance" in the thickness of rappers's sneaker laces, and decoding allegories of post-colonialism in Andrew Lloyd Webber musicals (okay, I made that last one up), Suzanne E. Smith's ideas about the politics of pop music are bracingly straightforward and old fashioned. In Dancing in the Street, music is ultimately judged in terms of its contribution to the struggle--in Motown's case, the civil rights movement, which Berry Gordy Jr. flirted with but ultimately distanced the label from as Martin Luther King's integrationist dreams were superceded by the black power militancy of the late Sixties.

The Leftist lingo Smith favors--terms like "cultural production" and "cultural workers"---initially seems rather dry and drably demystifying for her subject matter: the pop fan in your heart wants to yell "c'mon, Suzanne, this is Tamla Motown, font of timeless pop perfection like "Reach Out (I'll Be There)" and "You Keep Me Hangin' On"!". But Smith aims to strip the lustrous veneer of myth and reveal Motown's prosaic material realities. She shows that the label was literally a hit factory, modeled by ex-Ford employee Gordy on the auto industry's assembly line--from specialization of labor (a strict division between writers, performers, and producers) to part-interchangeability (his session musicians the Funk Brothers often built rhythmic chassis not knowing what song would be welded on top). Entering the factory as raw material, Motown's vocal talent was trained by a team of stylists and choreographers, then spewed out the other end as die-cast, ready-to-sell product. Motown's singers, players and writers really were "cultural workers", and like members of the industrial proletariat anywhere, they were exploited. The Funk Brothers had to moonlight for a rival label to get paid at union scale, and the songwriting team Holland-Dozier-Holland actually went on strike in the late Sixties as a protest against their bad royalty rates.

Smith compares these labor disputes with the emergence of militant black auto worker unions like DRUM (Dodge Revolutionary Union Movement) as part of her argument that Motown cannot be separated from the urban politics of Detroit and the broader racial struggles of the era. Yet in a sense the Motown story consists of one long effort to separate itself gradually from this context, culminating in Gordy's decision in 1972 to move the company to Los Angeles, the entertainment industry capital of America and the world. This perfectly logical business decision (given Gordy's desire to branch out into movies) was understandably felt as betrayal by Detroit's black community. For Smith, it's poignant proof of the fault-line that runs through the ideology of "black capitalism", in so far as capitalism is ultimately inimical to any form of solidarity, racial or otherwise. The milieu in which Gordy grew up--middle class black Detroit--was steeped in the self-help ideals of Booker T. Washington, the founder of the National Negro Business League. Indeed, Gordy's father actually named his Booker T. Washington Grocery Store in homage to this early ideologue of black capitalism. Similarly, Motown's famous charm school, where its artistes learned deportment and etiquette, also belongs to this aspirational tendency in African-American culture--you can draw a line connecting pre-War figures like Carter G. Woodson (who regarded the rowdy energies of jazz, blues, and even gospel, as unseemly and anarchic) to the hyper-genteel urbanity of Nat 'King' Cole and Dionne Warwick. But as Smith shows, these pro-business, pro-respectability ideas also spawned cultural strategies a world away from the crossover dreams of Cole and Gordy--like the Nation of Islam, with their bow-ties, dapper suits, and separatist intransigence.

All this meant that Motown--its music, the signature elegance of its stars, and the sheer magnitude of the label's success as a black-owned business--inevitably became highly contested symbols, with different African-American organizations and cultural milieux endeavoring to co-opt the meaning of the phenomenon. Although Gordy was adamantly opposed to "cause music" (which he regarded as un-commercial), Motown did get swept up in the change-soon-come hopes of the Sixties. Probably the most interesting part of Smith's book concerns the little-known history of Motown's spoken-word recordings, like The Great March To Freedom, a 1963 Martin Luther King speech. Motown eventually founded a specialty label called Black Forum through which recordings by Amiri Baraka and Langston Hughes were released. Yet Gordy's energy was mostly devoted to building a business empire, which ultimately entailed extending Motown's appeal to the white suburban majority of the consumer population. And so he groomed his stars for the nightclub circuit, and had The Supremes make a fund-raising movie for the United Fund, a philanthropic organization established by Detroit's white corporate elite. Meanwhile Langston Hughes's Poets of the Revolution project languished in limbo, and only got released several years after the poet's death.

For the most part, Motown's impact on the black politics of the Sixties wasn't direct intervention but through the inadvertent resonance of songs like Martha & the Vandellas's "Dancing In The Street" (the unofficial anthem of the urban riots in Watts and Detroit). Sometimes Smith's eagerness to find similar resonances leads to strained readings. She claims that Stevie Wonder's "Fingertips Part 2"--an exuberant live recording with a false ending and a surprise encore--"celebrates a desire to assert oneself in face of authority, rules, and literal displacement" and is therefore analogous to the defiance of Detroit's black community circa 1963's Great March to Freedom. Yet her own account suggests that Wonder's stage-hogging antics were simply bad showbiz manners; poor old Mary Wells was waiting in the wings for her turn in the limelight. Occasional excesses of over-interpretation aren't the only drawback to Dancing In The Street. Smith's workmanlike prose and the density of organization names and acronyms can make the text hard-going for the non-academic reader.

Perhaps the biggest flaw is how little music itself figures in the story. It's a shame because what there is on the recordings (the reason anyone cares at all, surely?) is often fascinating. Take Smith's observations about the Motown sound being shaped by the mushrooming popularity of the car radio: not only was Motown's trademark beat, strident and steady pulsing, perfect for riding along in your automobile, but the label's recording engineers set up car speakers in the studio so they could mix the tracks to sound good while driving. It's this aspect--the politics of sound, of pleasure, of the ways people use music--that could have made Dancing In The Street a more fully-rounded account of Motown's impact on its era.

2008-02-25T08:52:00.001-08:00

[Bring the Noise deleted scene #49]

EVE, Ruff Ryders’ First Lady (Ruff Ryders/Interscope)
Village Voice, October 6th 1999

by Simon Reynolds

It was like the changing of the guard—that moment this summer when Missy's "She's A Bitch" flopped spectacularly while Eve's "What Ya Want" established its long thrall over BET and Hot 97. This wasn't just Eve Jeffers displacing Missy Elliott as "that next bitch" (as she describes herself in her album's notes), it was the defeat of Timbaland by Swizz Beatz, chief producer for the Yonkers label/MC clan Ruff Ryders. Indeed, there was a definite hint of slay-me-not Oedipal anxiety when Timbaland paternalistically bigged up Swizz in The Source as the only producer he checked for.

Like that other new beat pretender She'k spere (TLC, Destiny's Child), Swizz is rhythmatically a son of Timbaland, though; both take the latter's trademark microsyncopations and hiccuping hesitations and make them even more fiddly and off-kilter. The flagship single off the Ruff Ryders' Ryde or Die, Vol. 1 compilation, "What Ya Want" worked as a perfect advertisement for self—Eve pushing herself forward both as look-don't-touch fantasy object (for male rap fans) and "the one to fear" (for rival female rappers), Swizz polyrhythmically announcing the Ruff Ryders sound as "changing the game." The ultra-languid groove of "What Ya Want"—a slinky lattice of Latin percussion and piano—dovetails perfectly with Eve's seductively supercilious flow.

"Gotta Man," the first single from Eve's debut album (which entered the Billboard pop charts at No. 1 a few weeks ago) is even more striking. It's so sparse, so deceptively simple, there's almost nothing to it: a loping, falter-funk beat, a pre-orgasmic female moan like the lowing of a lovesick cow, and a plangent mandolin refrain doubled at the chorus by a singsongy schoolgirl vocal with the indelibly catchy play ground chant quality of "The Clapping Song," "Double Dutch," or "Iko Iko." "Gotta" is a chip off the same block as Swizz's other smash production of the moment, Jay-Z's love song to diamonds "Girl's Best Friend"—similar clip-clop rhythm and ultrafeminine vocal hook, but even more so-wrong- it's-right sounding. With its asymmetrical beat-loop and staccato Morse code synth-riff, "Girl's Best Friend" could al most be a hip-house or early rave track, some thing by Shut Up And Dance or 4 Hero from 1990—there's that same makeshift, threshold-of-disintegration quality.

Exquisitely blending supple lilt and stilted lurch, "Gotta Man" and "Girl's Best Friend" are the most peculiar black pop hits since Aaliyah's "Are You That Somebody?" So it's a little disappointing that nothing else on Eve's debut approaches their idiosyncrasy and charm. Most of Ruff Ryders' First Lady sounds like Swizz's productions for DMX—that grimy, "ugly" sound that defines street (as opposed to under ground) hip hop in 1999. The formula is crude but effective: muddy bass thump, kick drums impacting like low blows, snares like syncopated flurries of punches to the head, and the Hook. Usually played on keyboards (Swizz prides himself on not using samples) and exuding that cheap-and-nasty '80s-digital odor, the Hook ranges from the bleat of a traumatized pocket calculator, to spindly semi-melodies like ad jingles or videogame muzik, to sub–Harold Faltermeyer synthstrumental refrains of the sort you'd hear in a pre-Hollywood Jackie Chan movie, to riffs that oddly recall early-'80s hard core techno, to random-sounding, atonal trills like mice scampering on Schoenberg's piano.

There have been hints that First Lady is not exactly the record Eve intended to make—one early interview promised a Lauryn Hill –style mélange of styles and collaborations with multiple producers. But Swizz wound up producing almost all of it—a putsch that might explain his low placement in Eve's sleeve-note thank-you list, after virtually everybody else involved in the record, including the team who designed the sleeve. And you can sorta see why she might be pissed. From the testosterone-soaked production to the title Ruff Ryders' First Lady itself, Eve is subsumed within her crew's identity. Although she holds her own amid the gruff-voiced brawl of posse cuts like "Scenario 2000," she's had to play down what was so unusual about "What Ya Want"—the sultry skrewface poise, the sweatless cool—in favor of a more in-yer-face, tomboy raucousness.

At a time when hardcore rap's sole acknowledged value is flow (verbal and cash), Eve is more than capable of running with the boys, though. Rhyming with an impressive blend of smooth 'n' vicious, she finds the requisite new twists to the standard-issue thematic repertoire: boasts, threats, brand-name checks, click salutes, and territorial boosterism (like her Illadelphian anthem "Philly, Philly," which is preceded by a nativist-verging-on-racist skit caricaturing a Bangladeshi immigrant who can't make a cheese steak correctly). Predict ably if entertainingly, Eve righteously scourges inadequates and haters, blasting "little-dick niggaz" and "fake-ass bitches" in "Let's Talk About," and in "Stuck Up" humiliating a suitor with "insufficient funds" and an unfortunate allegiance to last year's designer goodies. "Ain't Got No Dough" is the most sonically arresting track after "Gotta Man," an amalgam of con temporary r&b beats, electro high hats, and scratching (skids and disconcerting decelerations, like your turntable keeps switching off midbeat). Lyrically, though, it's just a late entry in 1999's quasi-feminist trend of divas trashing "broke-ass niggaz." The skit "Chokie Nikes" similarly savages a scrub with a fake Rolex, chronic halitosis, and poor chat-up technique. And while the anti-wifebashing "Love Is Blind" could be construed as pro-empowerment by those looking for strong women in hip hop (what other kind could there be, though, rap not exactly being a haven for the shy or self-doubting?), Eve seems as disgusted by her girl friend's weakness in sticking with her abusive man as by the perpetrator's brutality.

Basically, Eve's persona is the thug's moll. As guest rapper DMX puts it in "Dog Match," "behind every real dog there's that bitch behind him"—you'n'me–against-the-world, Bonnie & Clyde romanticism undercut somewhat by the chorus's marrowcurdling image of "paramedics on your chest/pushing and breathing." (The couple that slays together, stays together?) By far the best of First Lady's (th)ugly tracks is "Maniac." Driven by rowdy call-and-response and a TV sports–style triumphant synth-horn fanfare, the song thrillingly evokes the bristling alpha-male energy of a nightclub. It's a milieu through which Eve moves confidently, flirting with the scene's "top dog," getting "drunker than a muthafucker," and finally cutting in line for the ladies' room. The image of Eve gloating as she leaves a long line of "chicks hating" in her wake says something about the bitch-eat-bitch "reality" that rap in 1999 so doggedly represents. And it says something about Eve herself—in the contrast between the originality of the rhyme versus the petty triumph of incivility it celebrates.

2008-02-25T08:49:00.000-08:00

[Bring the Noise deleted scene #48]

SPORTY THIEVZ, 'No Pigeons' (Roc-A-Blok/Ruffhouse)
Village Voice, July 14 - 20, 1999

by Simon Reynolds

Polyrhythmically speaking, TLC's "No Scrubs" is a frisky bundle of joy, but words-wise, it's cheerless as can be. Designating an entire class of low-or-no-income guys as deadbeat "scrubs," the song obsessively reinforces the bleak notion that designer commodities and the financial wherewithal to ac quire them constitute the ultimate measure of a man: "I'm looking like class and he's looking like trash."

Now there's an answer record. "Representin' the so-called 'scrubs,"' says the sticker on Sporty Thievz's single "No Pigeons," and although they're brandishing champagne glasses in the booklet of their Street Cinema CD, the Yonkers trio aren't playas. In the "Pigeons" video, they dress like casual, neighborhood B-boys, while their track "Cheapskate" adopts a proud-to-be-tightfisted stance in defiance of con temporary rap's ethos of conspicuous consumption.

Basically a cover of "No Scrubs" with new lyrics, "No Pigeons" savagely mocks women who front like they're high-class by, say, wearing a designer outfit for one night then returning it to the store. What makes "Pigeons" more interesting than the opportunistic novelty hit it's already become is the smarting sense of wounded retaliation underneath its high-spirited surface.

BET has edited the "Scrubs" and "Pigeons" videos together into a single "sick mix"; if this were simply a straightforward battle-of-the-sexes à la UTFO vs. Roxanne Shante, the Thievz's jeers about dirty Victoria drawers and mustache removal would be plain misogynist. But class animosity gives the tussle a different inflection, and an edge. It even hints faintly at some dim-and-distant end to the name-brand-fetishizing, it's-all-about-the-Benjamins era. In the interim, maybe it's time for specter-of-Marx concepts like "reification" and "false consciousness" to reenter the lexicon of hip hop critique.

2008-02-25T08:41:00.000-08:00

[Bring the Noise deleted scene #47]

FOOTNOTES TO "FEMININE PRESSURE: 2STEP GARAGE" a.k.a. "ADULT HARDCORE", + ORIGINAL ARTICLE

article originally published in The Wire, April 1999; footnotes originally online at Blissout website

the original Adult Hardcore/Feminine Pressure article is now archived at The Wire online, along with the other six pieces in the Hardcore Continuum series

FEMININE PRESSURE: 2-Step and UK Garage
by Simon Reynolds

If you live in London, perhaps you've scanned the FM spectrum and come to a halt at a pirate station whose sound you can't quite finger or figure. It's got house music's slinky panache, but the rhythm's wrong--too fitful and funked-up, and besides, there's an MC jabbering over the top, jungle-style. Maybe it's jungle, then--but then again, maybe not: too slow, too sexy. Sometimes it's a bit like American R&B--except it sounds druggy, the wrong kind of druggy: like Timbaland on E.

So what is it, this genre-without-a-name? It's the latest in a series of mutations spawned from London's multiracial rave scene, the next evolutionary stage beyond speed garage (itself a swerve sideways from jungle). And the new style does have a name, albeit an unsatisfactorily dry, technical one: "2-step," increasingly a general rubric for all kinds of jittery, irregular rhythms that don't conform to garage's traditional 4-to-the-floor pulse. Somebody really should coin a more attractive name, though, one that captures 2-step's lipsmacking lusciousness. Because all the juice squeezed out of jungle by the post-techstep school of scientific drum & bass has oozed back in the succulent form of 2-step.
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* * *

"Truthfully, jungle stemmed from house music. It has a reggae influence, but it's still house," MC Navigator from jungle pirate Kool FM insisted back in 1994. Three years later, jungle returned to the source, when its rude bwoy spirit and rhythmic science violently possessed the body of garage (the most soulful and songful form of house), in the process creating a new London scene.

Jungle's relationship with garage actually went back some way. Instead of techno clubs' ambient chill-out rooms, the second room at jungle clubs usually bumped to garage; pirate radio stations often programmed garage shows for mellow moments in the weekend (Saturday morning, Sunday afternoons). It was on these pirate shows that DJs started pitching up their garage imports (artists like Masters At Work, Kerri Chandler, Todd Edwards) to 130 b.p.m. giving them the extra "oomph" required by the London jungle audience. DJs favoured the dub versions of the US tracks, says Spoony of DJ collective The Dreem Teem, because "not having much vocal element, you could play the dubs faster without them sounding odd"; these near-instrumentals also left gaps for the MC's to do their stuff. Soon the DJs started making homegrown garage trax that sounded like their pirate shows--faster than the US sound, with jungalistic sub-bass, dub-wise FX, and ragga chants timestretched so that the vocal fissured and buckled like the wings of a metal-fatigued Boeing 707.

This UK underground garage also radically intensified the aspect of the New York sound that most appealed to jungle-reared ears: intricate percussion patterns, highly-textured drum sounds, and above all, the skippy, snappy, syncopated snares and busy, bustling hi-hats that make garage much more funky than regular house. Reticular and metronomic, house is "banging" or "pumping"; polyrhythmically perverse, garage is all bump'n'flex, twitch 'n' grind. But house and garage are both underpinned by a 4-to-the-floor kick drum that pounds monotonously on every bar.

2-step transforms garage into a kind of slow-motion jungle---a langorous frenzy of micro-breakbeats, hesitations and hyper-syncopations; moments when the beat seems to pause, poised, and hold its breath. In its simplest form, it does this by removing every second and fourth kick from the 4-to-the-floor pulse, creating a lurching, falter-funk feel. More adventurous 2-step producers program irregular kick-drum patterns which syncopate with the bassline, akin to Timbaland's double-time or triple/quadruple/quintuple-time kicks. 2-step has actually taken the "speed" out of "speed garage", or at least the sensation of velocity, because removing two out of every four kicks subtracts that steady-pulsing energy. The effect is similar to the way the dub bassline in jungle used to run at half-time under the frenetic breaks. Indeed, some 2-step tunes have a ska or rocksteady-like skankin' feel.

To compensate for the energy-deficit, 2-step producers hype the funk by making every element in a track work simultaneously as rhythm, melody and texture. Organ vamps, horn stabs, keyboard pads, vocal licks, all interlock like cogs with the percussion patterns, which are processed through effects until the rhythm track alone offers an ear-tantalizing panoply of textures: crunchy, squelchy, spangly, woody, spongy, scratchy. These tactile timbres combine with the twitchy triplets and syncopations to create weird cross-rhythm effects--nicks and barbs that seem to snag your flesh and tug your body every-which-way.

"The rhythm track is not just the backing for a song any more," declare Dem 2, the Thurrock, Essex based duo of Spencer Edwards and Dean Boylan, whose nubile nu-funk anthem "Destiny" was the UK blueprint for 2-step. "The beats, the various instrument voicings, and any vocals within a track all carry equal amounts of importance--any one can be the hook that sticks in the mind." Although Dem 2 correctly argue that you can hear this rhythmelody/texturhythm simultaneity at work across the gamut of contemporary dance music, it's undeniable that UK garage mostly assimilated this knowledge from drum & bass; many of the leading 2-step producers did their apprenticeship programming jungle. But right now, it's hard to imagine any neurofunk producer building a groove as seductively sleek and springheeled as "Destiny."

This is ironic, because 2-step is in many ways a reassertion of the jungle influence in reaction to the alarmingly rapid crossover of first-wave speed garage, which simply proved too attractive to mainstream house clubbers. 2-step is a semi-conscious attempt to make garage "a London thing" (even an East London thing) again, rather than a shortlived nationwide fad. The similarity with jungle comes across in the way 2-step DJs mix. "With traditional garage and house, the underlying beat and instrumental arrangement is more continuous and pulsing," says "Bat" Bhattacharyya, the resident 2-step expert on the Internet discussion forum ukdance. "New York garage is designed so that the DJ mixes in a new track with a slow continuous fade-up. But 2-step, like hardcore and jungle, is far more amenable for chopping and cutting with the cross-fader--the sort of hip hop techniques you can't use with a house pulse-beat, 'cos it sounds funny."

You can also hear the jungle ancestry in 2-step's low-end seismology, which has evolved way beyond the wah-wah/"dread bass" that drove speed garage in '97.. Listen to pirates like Freek, Mission or Smooth, and you'll hear bubbling B-line melodies, chiming bass-detonations, and pressure-drop booms that have nothing to do with house as hitherto known. The baleful electro-dub rumble, plinky melody-riffs and migraine-wincing synth-tones of Steve Gurley's remix of "Things Are Never" by Operator & Baffled hark back even further than jungle---it's just one of a number of tunes that flash back to the bleep-and-bass era of Unique 3/Nightmares On Wax/Sweet Exorcist/LFO/Forgemasters, that dawn-of-the-Nineties moment when the British merged house and reggae for the first (but not last) time.

* * *

If jungle really did stem from house, as Navigator claimed, the true continuity between the two genres is not rhythmic or textural: it's the use of vocals (almost always absent in techno). At a rough guesstimate, maybe two-thirds of hardcore/jungle anthems between 1991-94 relied on sampled diva vocals as primary hooks. Producers lifted them from old house or R&B classics, or from CDs packed with accapellas recorded specifically for sampling. While there's no diva refrain equivalent to the ubiquitous, endlessly revisisted "Amen" break, certain classic vocal phrases were reworked time and again, with producers using similar techniques to breakbeat manipulation: acceleration, pitchshifting, timestretching, looping, filtering, and so forth.

When techstep achieved dominance in 1996, vocal samples began to disappear from drum & bass. But the house-hardcore-jungle continuum of diva-worship didn't end, it just branched sideways into speed garage. You can see it in the career of Steve Gurley. As a member of Foul Play, he sampled diva-vocals from SOS Band and Kleer for tracks like "Finest Illusion" and "Open Your Mind"; going solo as Rogue Unit, he crafted a gorgeous drum & bass revamp of "Say I'm Your Number One", a 1985 hit for Brit-soul chanteuse Princess. Today, Gurley is a leading 2-step producer, doing damage with torrid diva-driven tunes like his remix of Lenny Fontana's "Spirit of the Sun."

Traditional New York garage privileges the classy vocal, draping its melodious melisma over the groove. In contrast, 2-step producers subordinate the singer to funktionalist priorities, slicing'n'dicing the vocal samples into staccato, percussive riffs that interlock with the groove to create extra syncopations. "Vocal science" is Bat from ukdance's term for this vivisection of the diva, which effectively transforms the singer into a component of the drum kit. 2-step's vocal tricknology has resituated garage on the other side of house's great divide: songs versus "tracks", melody versus rhythm 'n' FX. Right from the start, there's been a tension in house between veneration of the Big Voice (Darryl Pandy, Robert Owens, Tina Moore, CeCe Peniston, et al) and a more pragmatic "trackhead" approach that uses anonymous session-divas as raw material (Todd Terry and Nitro Deluxe creating stammer-riffs by "playing" the vocal sample on the sampling keyboard).

Jungle producers like Omni Trio took these crude techniques to the next level of sophistication, molding and morphing diva vocals into a sort of passion-plasma, a body-without-organs fluid. Then, just as the hypergasmic diva was fading from jungle, "vocal science" flickered back to life somewhere else--US garage, of all places. On his remixes of St. Germain's "Alabama Blues" and his own tracks like "Never Far From You", New Jersey producer Todd Edwards developed a technique of cross-hatching brief snatches of vocals into a melodic-percussive honeycomb of blissful hiccups, so burstingly rapturous it's almost painful to the ear.

Todd Edwards's music had an extraordinary impact on London's emergent speed garage scene. If anyone in 2-step picked up Todd's baton and ran wild with it, it's Dem 2. "Destiny" features an android-diva whose plaintive bleat is so tremulously FX-warped that for months I thought it went "dance t' th' beat" instead of "des-tin-eee". Dem 2's "Don't Cry Dub" of Groove Connektion 2's "Club Lonely" is an even more ear-boggling feat of robo-glossalalia. This 1997 remix sounds like the missing link between Zapp's vocoder-funk mantra "More Bounce To the Ounce" and Maurizio's dub-house. Snipping the vocal into syllables and vowels, feeding the phonetic fragments through filters and FX, Dem 2 create a voluptuous melancholy of cyber-sobs and lump-in-throat glitches: "whimpering, wounded 'droids crying out in desolation!", as Spencer Edwards puts it.

"You can add a different soul that wasn't there", is how Dem 2 describe this kind of vocal remixology. "Deconstruction" is not too strong a term, for what is being dismantled is the very idea of the voice as the expression of a whole human subject. "Instead of the 'organic' female singer of early garage, you get a legion of dismembered doll parts," says journalist Bethan Cole, who's writing a book about the diva in dance music. On tracks like Dem 2's remix of Cloud 9's "Do You Want Me" or Colors featuring Stephen Emmanuel's "Hold On (SE22 Mix)", the vocal --a paroxysm of hairtrigger blurts and stuttered spasms of passion--doesn't resemble a human being so much as an out-of-control desiring-machine. What you're hearing is literally cyborg--a human enhanced and altered through symbiosis with technology.

2-step's vocal science has intersected with the anti-naturalistic studio techniques of American R&B, whose producers have long been digitally processing vocals to make them sound even more mellifluous and diabetically ultra-sweet. US R&B tunes are routinely given a 2-step remix these days. Two early, superior examples are The Dreem Teem's sublime transformation of Amira's "My Desire" into a gamelan-tinkling tumble of undulant percussion, and the sultry menace of First Steps remix of "Telefunkin'" by British diva-wannabes N-Tyce. Alongside such official remixes, there's been a spate of bootleg revamps of R&B anthems like Jodeci's "Freak 'N You." 1999's heavy-rotation pirate smash is Architechs' unofficial 2-step remix of Brandy & Monica's "The Boy Is Mine," which resurrects hardcore's infamous sped-up chipmunk vocals by whipping the dueting divas into a creamy warble of wobbly, high-pitched melisma. But 2-step's favorite R&B goddess is Aaliyah, whose Timbaland-produced "One In A Million" has been extensively pillaged. Best of the bunch is Groove Chronicles's "Stone Cold", which samples a handful of vocal phrases ("you don't know/what you do to me," "desire," and other splinters of yearning) and deploys them to create endlessly fresh accents against the groove. The original song's mood is totally subverted: what had been a devotional paean becomes a baleful ballad of sexual dependency, with Aaliyah digitally dis-integrated into a multitracked wraith of herself, stranded in a locked groove of desolated desire.

* * *

Hang out at a garage shop like Rhythm Division in East London, and chances are you'll hear one of the blokes behind the counter say "the girls love that one" in reference to certain tracks-- like Doolally's Top 20 hit "Straight From The Heart" or the duo's pirate smash/UK Number One "Sweet Like Chocolate," released as Shanks & Bigfoot. In most dance scenes, this comment would be a diss. Take the unwritten boy's own constitutions of techno and drum & bass, where overt melody, explicit emotion, and recognisably human feelings are regarded as "cheesy", conventionally poppy-- in a word, girly. For the UK garage scene, though, "the girls love that tune" is a recommendation. There's a striking deference to female taste. Pirate DJs dedicate tunes "to the ladies's massive." And most DJ/producers share Ramsey & Fen's opinion: "When the girls start singing along to a tune like our own 'Love Bug', it gets the guys hyper! If the ladies love it, they all love it. "

Feminine Pressure is the name of an all-female garage DJ crew. In a very real sense, UK garage is organised around the pressure of feminine desire; a key factor in the scene's emergence was when women defected en masse from the junglist dancefloor, fed up with the melody-and-vocal-devoid bombast of techstep. 2-step garage bears the same relation to jungle that lover's rock did to dub reggae: it's the feminized counterpart of a "serious" male genre. Like 2-step, lover's rock was a UK-spawned hybrid of silky US soul and Jamaican rhythm, that restored treble to the bass-heavy frequency spectrum and replaced militant spirituality with romantic yearning. Pirate MC's send out shouts to couples cuddling at home ("or even engaged in horizontal activities"). The mic' chat can get seriously lewd, in the beyond-suggestive, explicit style of modern R&B; on one station I heard an MC rap "to the ladies, undo my zip/and you'll find I'm well equipped"!. There's even a pirate station called Erotic FM.

2-step is lover's jungle; it's also hardcore for grown-ups. Ravers who were teenagers during the 1989-92 era are now in their mid-to-late twenties, with jobs, marriages, even kids. At Rhythm Division, I saw a guy behind the counter bottle-feeding a six month old baby, who seemed utterly unperturbed by the thunderous B-lines booming out the speakers; later that day I picked up a flyer for a club that boasted it was "the very first rave with a genuine creche for the children -- with registered child minders, 5 quid per child. So there's no excuse, bring the fucking kids. " Rather than abandon the drug-and-dance lifestyle, the first rave generation is finding ways to accomodate it to their new adult circumstances--coupledom, relative affluence. The garage remakes of hardcore tunes like Jonny L's "Hurt You So," the samples from Shut Up And Dance's 1989 "$10 To Get In" redeployed in Some Treat's 2-step anthem "Lost In Vegas"--these represent not so much old skool nostalgia as a celebration of continuity. Hardcore to 2-step, the subcultural infrastructure of pirate radio/specialist record stores/dubplates/etc abides. The dress code, crowd rituals, and other elements have evolved; MC's, for instance, now superimpose a smoov R&B patina over the junglist's creole hybrid of ragga patois and Cockney patter. But the subcultural project is the same as it ever was: the creation of "vibe".

"Vibe" is UK garage's biggest buzzword--from Aftershock's classic "Slave to the Vibe (Dem 2 Remix)" to garage dons Tuff Jam's "Unda-Vybe" remixes, from MC chants like "I've got the vibe to make you hyper" to Da Click's "Good Rhymes", an MC-anthem that culminates with a rollcall of the scene's key players, all of whom "got the vibe" . But isn't "vibe" just one of those nebulous buzzwords, like "street" or "real", used to evoke blackness? Yes, but it's also what everyone (except maybe chronic hermits or Detroitphiles) are looking for from music: that palpable forcefield of tribal energy generated by the perfect convergence of music, drugs, technology, and popular desire.

"Vibe" works through evolution rather than revolution: producers simultaneously giving the people what they want and slyly seducing them into wanting things they've never had ; DJs pulling off the same trick through sheer sleight of mix, all the while carefully avoiding a lapse into disparate (vibe-less) eclecticism. And "vibe" only really occurs when music is a component in a subcultural engine, a urban folkway with its own privileged sites and rites. Its musical methodology may be postmodern, but 2-step garage has no truck with techno notions of the post-geographical or transcending the local--hence the recurrent variations on the old hardcore themes "just 4 U London" and "London sum'ting dis". Like jungle, 2-step is heard at its utmost through a big sound-system, by a body surrounded by other bodies (the massive). Which is why 2-step, like most hardcore dance styles, can sometimes sound flat when heard as an isolated 12 inch, outside the DJ's mix, without MC chat or the participatory clamor of the audience. If you want to "catch the feeling", the next best thing to being there is to tape pirate radio transmissions for free; third best is buying a mix-CD like the Ramsey & Fen mixed Locked On, Volume 3, probably the finest introduction to the full span of UK garage.

* * *

Compared with the anhedonic severity of its estranged cousin drum & bass, one of the most striking things about speed garage is the scene's relentless emphasis on pleasure. The names of clubs, labels, and pirate stations evoke melt-in-your-mouth, sensuous indulgence--Cookies & Cream, Nice N' Ripe, Chocolate Boy, Ice Cream, Pure Silk, Twice As Nice, Bliss, Lush FM--and mirror the sonic penchant for warm, organic textures and thick, succulent production. Garage's fetish for "niceness" and luxury --champagne-and-cocaine, designer labels, "rude bimmers"--has a long history in Black British dance culture, going back to the pre-rave dancehall and R&B scenes. The most charitable reading of such "living large" is that it's a refusal of your allotted place in the class system, an insistence that "nothing's too good for us." A more hostile viewpoint would argue that garage's opulence is mere hyper-conformism, deluded mimicry of the high life.

Either way, cocaine is the perfect signifier for garage's ambivalent politics--not only because of its associations with prestige, but because it's a drug that stimulates the appetite for all pleasures, and because the dynamics of its use (insatiability, basically) offer a kind of parody of consumerism. Sonically, garage seems to fit cocaine like a glove: the playa-pleasing patina of deluxe sound, the fidgety, febrile beats that feel itchy with desire. The "cocaine ear" favors bright, toppy sounds--hence garage's harsh glare of crisp hi-hats, shrill brass, glossy synths and trebley vocals.

Horny-making coke has changed the vibe in other ways, encouraging a return to the sexed-up, dressed-up mores of pre-rave clubland. The shift from Ecstasy to cocaine represents a kind of Fall from paradise, with rave's androgynous asexuality displaced by re-polarized gender roles and rapacious sexuality. And although the standard image of the coke-head is of a chatterbox who finds himself endlessly charming, the effects in clubland has been to replace loved-up bonhomie with charlied-up hauteur. "On coke, you don't feel the need to talk 'cos you've got so much brilliance within yourself," says Bethan Cole. "But there's no E-like empathy, it's a hollow feeling." You can feel the difference in the music--the gaseous diva vocals of hardcore mirrored the swoony, boundary-melting intimacy of Ecstasy; 2-step's staccato vocal stabs accentuate coke's cold, brittle glitter.

Drug phenomenologist David Lenson describes almost too vividly the "third stage" of cocaine intoxication, "hypersexuality", a frenzy in which desire is unable to focus on any single object (kinky sex, grandiose fantasies, other drugs) for more than a few seconds before flitting off elsewhere. Ultimately, the mania fixates on cocaine itself--desire-for-desire. Not far beyond hypersexuality lies the paranoia and undead delirium of "stimulant dysphoria." Whether anybody on the garage dancefloor regularly reaches hypersexuality is beside the point--the music's own internal dynamic is pushing it into the twilight zone. Often hidden on B-sides or released on white labels that circulate for only a few weeks, 2-step is producing some fiendishly fucked-up tunes that merge twisted vocals, convulsively DJ-unfriendly beats, and svelte-but-sinister textures. Easier-to-find pinnacles of darkside garage include DJ Richie & Klasse's "Madness On The Street", productions by Skycap like their '97 classic "Endorphin", and "Plenty More" b/w "Get It" by rising producer Chris Mac--tracks whose unsettling blend of brittle and supple, desperation and desire, show how the pursuit of pure pleasure can take music to some pretty strange places. Dem 2 also look set to probe "a darker, deeper electro direction" in 1999, what Dean Boylan describes as "Gary Numan meets Tina Moore"; the duo are also starting an overtly experimental label called Purple Orange. For now, check their alter-ego U.S. Alliance's "Grunge Dub," with its angular anti-groove and gibbering, strung-out vocal (like a crackhead Bobby McFerrin).

The original 1993 darkside hardcore was a catastrophic plunge, the first rave generation succumbing to E-induced malaise en masse. With garage, though, it's more like "darkness" is a normalized component of the scene, a zone some cross into if they overdo the stimulants, perhaps even a phase of any given club night (after 4-AM, say, when some of the clientele has crossed the optimal threshold of enjoyable wired-ness, or reaches a weekly apprehension of the void at the heart of the hedonistic lifestyle). In fact, dark garage existed right from the earliest days of the London scene. K.M.A's "Cape Fear" combined breakbeat rhythms, ominous "video vocals," and destabilising "bass warps" that triggered crowd pandemonium the very first time the tune was played out, in late '96. "You could see the goosebumps rising on everybody's neck, the hair standing on end," says KMA producer/vocalist Six . "The crowd erupted, they were so confused about what just happened they forced the DJ to rewind the track. "

The anecdote recalls the early stunned responses to the body-baffling pitchshifted beats in "Terminator", the Goldie tune that pioneered darkcore. Six talks like Goldie, declaring "my music is like a movie" and "I see myself as a painter, a surrealist painter." After following "Cape Fear" with another moody, breakbeat garage anthem, "Kaotic Madness," Six tired of K.M.A.'s darkside reputation and decided to go in a smoother, more "musical" direction--just like Goldie did circa "Angel." The result was "Re-Con Mission EP", whose highlight track "Blue Kards" meshed disjointed emotions, phased vocals, bluesy guitar, and asymmetrical beats to create one of 1998's most exhiliratingly sonic (con)fusions. What's exciting about "Blue Kards" and the other dark 2-step tunes that have surfaced in the last year is that the music often sounds like a hybrid where the grafts haven't wholly congealed. Sometimes, it sounds "wrong", but only in the way that 1993 darkcore sounded not-quite-there-yet. If you want seamless, fully-realised fusion, listen to drum & bass, a style that has arrived at a definitive version of itself and accordingly spent the last two years scratching its head wondering where to go next. 2-step sounds like it has a whole world of places left to go.

FOOTNOTES TO FEMININE PRESSURE
by Simon Reynolds

1/ A typical MC mantra is "house and garage is setting the pace"; flyers commonly refer to "house and underground garage". Yet 2-step increasingly contains virtually no elements that relate to house music as commonly understood or currently practised. The rhythms, the B-lines, the vocals, the MC-ing, all have more to do with jungle, dancehall reggae, electro, and R&B; in some tracks, it's only the hi-hat patterns that connect to traditional New York garage. So why the rhetorical appeal to "house"? One reason may be what MC Neat articulates: "In the beginning was house. Without house, there'd be no jungle, no garage. 2step, it's just an evolvement of house." So the UK garage scene's pledging of allegiance to house represents a return to original principles (one of the first London garage pirates was called Chicago FM, rather than New Jersey FM or New York FM: the real homes of garage). It also signposts the scene's swerve from the "wrong" path that jungle took, the dead end that was techstep's dirgefunk.

2/ Quantization, a computer function that can alter the entire rhythmic vibe of a track, plays a big role in garage's bump'n'flex. You can use quantization either to correct the inconsistencies in a rhythm track (to make it more metronomic/hypnotic) or conversely to add tiny inconsistencies and accents that give "feel" to a programmed rhythm track (i.e. the illusion of hand's-on, real-time drumming). "Press one button, and it'll give the track a housey vibe, the hi-hats will sound square," says Fen of Ramsey & Fen. "Press another and you get more of a shuffle, a garage swing." Sounds easy, but, Fen stresses, the real skill of garage production is knowing the right kind of fills and percussion parts to program in the first place so that they will interact best with quantization when it's in "shuffle/swing" mode.

3/ 2step has actually inverted speed garage's rhythmic organisation. In the original 1997 speed garage, the snares are fussy and clattering over the stomping 4-to-the-floor kickdrum. But in 2-step, it's usually the kick-drum that gets busy with hyper-syncopated, feet-confounding patterns, while the snare dutifully marks out the measure.

4/ In terms of US garage, Kelly G's "Bump And Go" remix of Tina Moore's "Never Gonna Let You Go" is regarded as first 2-step track.

5/ Since writing this piece in January 1999, the jungle legacy has really reasserted itself with the trend for MC tracks with rhyming or half-toasting/ half-singing on top of the 2step beats: DJ Luck & MC Neat's rootical-vibed "A Little Bit of Luck," The Corrupted Crew's "G.A.R.A.G.E.," MJ Cole's 2step remix of dancehall raggamuffin Glamma Kid's "Sweetest Taboo", etc etc.

6/ Making the rhythms more breakbeat-like (and thus less conducive to E'd up trance-dancing) effectively makes speed garage "a London t'ing" again; the rhythms are tailored to please a multitracial audience with a long (20 years or more) tradition of moving to black beats. In fact, the composite of sounds in 2-step (garage, R&B, reggae, the jump-up side of jungle) could have almost been designed, consciously or unconsciously, to fend off "undesirables": non-Londoners, students (i.e precisely the sort of people who moved into jungle when it got technoid, and who now effectively "own" drum and bass).

7/ Here's Bat from UKdance further discussing with his usual meticulous attention to detail and insider's insight the DJ-ing differences between "US garaaaage and UK garidge": "Just been farting about on the decks trying to mix US garaaage with UK garidge (the housier 4:4 stuff rather than the 2step). As with most experiments, it was a miserable failure. Four main problems I reckon:
i/ USG has a key signature: all the components of the tune harmonise. So you have to worry about keymatching. UKG, in contrast, isn't nearly so sensitive on this score. Providing the vocals don't clash, you're sorted (the basslines are too low frequency to cause any problems). But mix harmonised USG with unharmonised UKG and you get a right fuckin dog's breakfast. I'm almost entirely tone deaf and even I was cringing.
ii/ USG sounds shit when pitched up. The vibe just disappears, bugger knows why. But with UKG you can pitch it up quite happily without losing the vibe of the track. Conversely, USG sounds quite good pitched down, kinda deep & spooky. UKG, however, sounds distinctly plodding when pitched down. Mix the two & you're stuffed either way: either the USG sounds all squeaky or the UKG sounds slow and clunky.
iii/ USG takes ages to build, the trax average at about 8 mins long and the mixing is all about slow subtle fade-ins over a long period of time. UKG is much faster paced - there's some kind of chop or change every 16 bars or so and it's designed to be mixed in a way that takes advantage of this. So you get a worst-of-both-worlds vibe-clash if you try to mix the two; the frenetic UKG distracts from the USG builds or vice versa.
iv/ the EQing/production is utterly different. USG is EQed around the midrange and designed for hi-fi style club systems. UKG is EQed like jungle - subbass & tops, sod the bleedin midrange. UKG sounds wicked blaring out of a bass-heavy dub sound system, but tinny and weak over a poncey hi-fi. USG, conversely, sounds great on expensive kit, but muted and grey on a ruffneck booyakka junglist dubshack ting. Mix the two and it's just messy, no matter what sort of system you're using.

8/ These gamelan-style percussive-melodic vamps and vibraphone/xylophone/marimba-like riffs constitute another micro-trend in 2-step, reaching its most bleep-and-bassy with the shivery, ice-plinky riff on Cisco's "Bonnie & Clyde," which sounds like Unique 3's "7-AM" (flipside of 1989's "The Theme"). In at least one case--Steve Gurley's remix of Lenny Fontana's "Spirit of the Sun"--the baleful chords are actually sampled from a Unique 3 track ("The Rhythm's Gonna Get You").

9/ Through the phenomenon of illegal bootleg remixes of American R&B goddesses, two of 1999's biggest underground records in London were by Whitney Houston (!!!!) and Brandy & Monica. In the spring and early summer, the remixes of "It's Not Right, But It's Okay" and "The Boy Is Mine" blared out of cars everywhere and were played on pirate radio twice an hour at weekends. Even a Whitney-phobe like myself had to admit the tune ruled (although the original is if anything even better than the many
illicit garage bootlegs). One of the most gorgeous of the post-"Boy Is Mine" R&B diva bootlegs is Large Joints's "Dub Plate"; one side featuring a remix of "Down With You" (original artist unknown, by me: Total? Monica?), the other featuring a bootleg take on "I'll Be There For You" (again, diva unknown). What's striking about both sides of "Dubplate" is that, like the Brandy & Monica bootleg, the diva vocals aren't chopped up Dem 2 style but are left pretty intact, at least in terms of obvious stutters, edits, and warps. But the vocal is transformed on the level of timbre/grain, rather than accent and syncopation; it's processed to sound wobbly, warbly, ultra-tremulous. The swoony effect is simultaneously a flashback to old skook 'ardkore's sped-up chipmunk vocals and like an attempt to intensify the hyper-melisma of contemporary R&B. Various theories have been offered for this vocal effect. Talking about the "disembodied, gutless" vocals ("ethereal without being asexual"), Bat speculates that this stems from producers being unable to sample from an accapella and therefore having to isolate the vocal from the track's instrumentation using filtering. Inevitably this filters out the mid and bass frequencies of the vocal, creating the ultra-trebly "ghost-diva" effect. The fact that the original vocals are often absurdly addled with melisma and vibrato exacerbates the fluttery, ectoplasmic quality. My brother Jez reckons the warbly effect comes from producers using timestretching on a vocal that's full of vibrato and melisma; the timestretching exacerbates the micro-oscillations in the vocal.
Another cool thing about Large Joints and similar tracks like "Shorty Swing My Way" (I know neither the bootlegger nor the original artist unfortunately) is the way the diva vocal is left adrift in this dub-chamber echoey space over a reggae bassline and a little rootsical organ vamp. It's the kind of amazing mutation and recontextualization that only takes place in London: unsuspecting R&B goddesses abducted into a Jamaican soundworld. Of course, UK garage reaches "dub" spatiality through NY house's own tradition of dub mixes and early Eighties dub-influenced dance-pop (Peech Boys, Grace Jones, Arthur Russell/Dinosaur L) as well as through the transplanted Jamaican sound-system culture in Britain.

10/ "If Your Girl Only Knew" and "Are You That Somebody?" have been bootlegged, and "One In A Million" has been extensively pillaged.

11/ "Girls really do relate to vocals, " says Bethan Cole. "But that's something that's always been belittled by people into 'serious' dance -- it goes back to the days of 'intelligent techno' versus handbag house, which was dismissed as lightweight, fluffy, vacant." As part of its realignment with techno, the homosocial fraternity that is drum & bass gradually eliminated the vocal, perhaps regarding it as a vestigial trace of the social (love, sex, relationships) or as a biological remnant to be purged in favor of abstract textures and posthuman emotions.

12/ Jazzy B of Soul II Soul is really into 2-step and sees clear links between today's garage scene and the early Eighties lover's rock scene. It was also known as "uptown reggae", which suggests a perennial uptown versus ghetto dialectic in black music; R&B versus hip hop, playas versus gangstas/soldiers/thugs, lovers versus dub, Althea & Donna's "Uptown Ranking" versus Willie Williams's "Armagideon Time". Jazzy says that 2-step people "bust the same moves" as the uptown reggae folk back in the early Eighties; there's the same designer label, champagne VIP vibe. And the model of masculinity is identical: what he calls the "sweet boy", i.e. the guy who's ultra-masculine but dresses up "nice" for the girls. "Back in the late '70s it was Burberry coats, now it's guys in fake fur!". "Sweet boy" (Bat has heard the term "dainty boy" used today) suggests the polar opposite of the "conscious" dread; a rude boy in flash clothes, secular, enjoying Babylon's bounty, but still not fully assimilated, rather he's "ghetto fabulous". Six from KMA says he transferred allieganice from the roots reggae scene (sound systems like Saxon) to the lover's rock/soul/rare groove scene, "'cos that was where the pretty girls were!...". Re. Soul II Soul, the 1989 Number One success of "Back To Life" is just about the only precedent for Shanks & Bigfoot's "Sweet Like Chocolate": both London underground anthems going all the way to the top. Bizarrely, "Chocolate" was recorded in one of Jazzy B's Camden studios.

13/ Dance music theorist Will Straw argues that high-end sounds (strings, pianos, female voices) are coded as "feminine", while low-end frequencies (drums & bass) are coded as masculine. Neurofunk and techstep are all low-end (growling, gurgling, duck-being-strangled, old-man-farting bass) and midfrequency distortion, with hardly any treble. Weirdly, some recent 2-step tunes have gone all neurofunky and technoid, e.g. E.S. Dubs's "Standard Hoodlum Issue" with its moody bass and Source Direct-like sample "reflex action, like a snake".

14/ One of the ironies of UK garage is how a genre originally identified with NY gay culture (The Paradise Garage) has become so fiercely heterosexual. When house originally reached the UK, the gay sexual passion of the music was shifted to a new referent; a specifically drug-induced bliss. Now with 2-step garage, the loved-up, hypergasmic vocals refer once more to sexual desire, although still carrying residual traces of drugged intensity (which possibly work as as memory-rush flashback FX that conjure up the scene's roots in hardcore rave). It's a strictly heterosexual desire, though; I've noticed certain DJs on the scene refer with a hint of anxiety to how garage has been perceieved as "a gay thing; " It's as though the "batty boy" side of house needs be continuously exorcised and compensated for by doses of dancehall rude-boy attitude.

15/ With their 130 b.p.m shuffle and boombastic bass, two step tunes often sound like the early breakbeat house tracks from 1990-1 by Shut Up and Dance, Ragga Twins, Rum & Black etc, albeit filtered through nearly a decade of added production expertise and subtly marked by the neurological echoes of years spent at the cutting edge of the drug-technology interface ("caning it", in plain English). "Lost In Vegas" is serious intertexutality bizness 'n ting: it's a tribute to/remake of Shut Up And Dance's 1990 track "Ten Pounds To Get In," which sampled Suzanne Vega vocal-riff from "Tom's Diner" but probably got from DNA's unoffical-then-subsequently-sanctioned dance version of the S. Vega track. The Suzanne Vega vocal melody-riff also cropped up, in mimicked form, on Ratpack's hardcore "Searching For My Rizla" . Like the bleep-and-bass echoes in current 2-step, "Lost In Vegas" pays homage to the hardcore continuum: ten years of mixing it up, hybridising hybrids and mutating mutations; a tradition of futurism. Roots N' Future = the endlessly fresh NOW!!!!.

16/ MCs send out shouts to "all the garage ravers" or dedicate "this one's for the bumpy ravers". This semantic slippage, "garage/rave", would have been unthinkable in the early 90s when garage clubs like The Ministry of Sound positioned themselves as the classy, "mature" antithesis to rave's rowdy juvenile thrills. Why has the word "rave" persisted despite the jettisoning of rave culture's behavioral and attititudinal apparatus, its paradigm drug Ectasy, etc?. In part, it's a reversion to the (largely black, and derived from Jamaica) use of the term in the pre-rave 1980s: letting off steam at the weekend. Partly, it's an honoring of rave culture, an acknowledgement of it as a lost dream that most of the people in the garage scene passed through; culturally, and neurologically, they are still scarred by their pursuit of that dream. So the trajectory of the verb "rave" goes from weekenderism in the Eighties, aquires a utopian/dissident charge in the early Nineties, then gradually fades back to its original meaning, albeit bearing faint trace-associations of hardcore madness. Just like the music itself...

17/ To get Deleuzian, "vibe" is the mechanical hum of a desiring machine cranked to the max.

18/ Evolution versus revolution. Influenced by Rock and the Pop Narcotic and its anti-art rock/anti-bohemian polemic, I'm starting to agree with Joe Carducci's argument that it's easier to destroy a tradition than it is to replace it or renew it; that expanding/mutating/contributing to an aesthetic form or scene is hard work. Think about it: it's far easier to break the rules of a genre than it is to bend them. Anybody can break the rules of jungle, by making it 40 bpm too fast or too slow, or using a bassline that doesn't work with the beats. (Despite Boymerang's "No Rules", jungle's never been about limitless possibilities or utter lack of formal constraints; at any given point in its history, the genre's had parameters that you work with). To actually take a genre's format and create extra room within it, find new twists and possibilities, while still making something that's recognisable as that genre and, more importantly, actually works in that scene's context -- that's real work. That's a genuine contribution. This model of how genres mutate and grow also helps to explains why, at a certain point, all the possibilities for extension or expression within a given format become exhausted, and the genre stagnates, survives only through purism or antiquarianism (what Carducci calls "genre-mining").
Discarding the "revolution" model of musical progress means abandoning the closely linked notions of genius and vanguard. (Political revolutions are always triggered by a small party of individuals who are more theoretically advanced than the rest of society). Replacing the auteur theory, Brian Eno's notion of "scenius" explains how hardcore dance cultures develop. "Scenius" maps perfectly onto Deleuze & Guattari's "rhizome"; where genius implies a tree-like hierarchy, innovators generating new ideas that are then copied by the second-rate mass, scenius operates rhizomatically, like grasses, bracken, lilies, orchids, bamboos: "creeping underground stems which spread sideways on dispersed, horizontal networks of ... filaments and [which] produce aerial shoots along their length and surface" (Sadie Plant). A hardcore scene like early jungle or 2-step is literally grass roots -- it's a distributed meshwork, a ceaseless exchange of ideas; culture in that yeasty, bacterial, composty sense that Eno the gardener loves; small incremental advances on a week by week basis. So you could totally remove Goldie or Bukem in jungle, or MJ Cole and Dem 2 from 2-step--or whatever privileged innovator you might focus on (and I certainly haven't expunged auteurism from this piece)--remove them wholesale, and the culture would still grow and prosper. No one individual is the guardian of the scene. Rhizomes are notoriously hard to uproot; like weeds or nettles, you kill one but the group-organism survives. Same with music; we're dealing with tribe-vibes. This also explains why scenes decline, like drum and bass currently, where it's like everybody has simultaneously been afflicted by creative block, all the old reliables like Andy C, Dillinja, Trace, Hype. If the health of a scene/sound was down to individual pioneers, at least one of them would have found somewhere new to go. Instead, it's like a collective malaise, a scenius exhaustion; an ecology in evolutionary wind-down, its biodiversity fatally depleted.

19/ Recently, I realised that what I've been doing these last seven years--tracking the various permutations from hardcore to jungle to garage, analysing/celebrating a London-centric subcultural continuum--is really a kind of ethnomusicology. We're talking about a "vibe tribe" (to again borrow a song title from hardcore heroes Phuture Assassins); a tribe scattered amongst the general population but which communicates via bush telegraph (the 20 plus pirate radio stations operating at any given point 1989-99), and that gathers at various privileged spots (specialist record stores, clubs, raves). Over the years, the population has fluctuated, expanded and contracted both in numbers and geographical reach; at one point, "hardcore" basically equalled the entire UK national rave scene, 18 months later (in mid-1993) it was strictly a London thing, with tiny colonial outposts in Bristol and the Midlands (ie. the most multiracial, London-like areas of Britain). Different tribes have splintered off from the subcultural continuum (e.g. drum and bass). Throughout it all the 'strange attractor' that has acted as the geographical pivot of the scene has remained, arguably, just a few square miles in East London. Stray too far from what this "strange attractor" "wants", and you spiral off into a different orbit (as happened with drum and bass, caught in techno's gravitational field).

What defines this "tribe", this postmodern ethnicity? Neither a type of person (sociologically) nor a set of folkways/type of music; rather it's a vital tension between the two as they evolve according to their own dynamics. Neither base nor superstructure is the determining factor. Both the demographical constituency and the aesthetic/drug-tech parameters of the culture are in constant-but-separate flux; yet somehow the culture, the tribe, has managed to maintain an undeniably consistency. Different people come into the tribe (some get old and drop out, some get old and stay involved, new recruits come in; different classes and races and genders are attracted or repelled at different stages of the culture's evolution); similarly, the music is constantly shifting and redefining its contours thanks to the flows of influence from other genres, subculture, technological change, drug use patterns etc. That it all manages to hang together as an entity seems remarkable, but this is only what an organism or an ecosystem does; perpetuate itself, as it responds to and absorbs environmental pressures and opportunities.

The evolution of the tribe-vibe has taken a peculiar trajectory. "Hardcore", born in 1989 with the split between the ravers and the Balearic, back-to-the-clubs types, quickly became a nationwide phenomenon that was simultaneously underground and chartpop. After its 1991-92 heyday, hardcore contracted to darkside and then jungle (underground, London-centered, multiracial but dominated by black sonics/behaviors), then re-expanded to drum & bass (ultimately a national/international, bourgeois-bohemian network, multiracial but dominated by white sonics/behaviors), then mutated into speed garage (back to a London/multiracial/ working class thing, but quickly escalating to a national fad...) prompting 2-step (London-centric, multiracial, with a strong Asian component; plus unexpected intersection with American R&B although this remains a "one-way alliance," unreciprocated, so far).

My own role as an ethnographer is a bit like one of those researchers who lives with the tribe, gets too involved, and compromises his objectivity.

Why ethnomusicology as a model, and not just "subcultural studies"? The trouble with the "resistance through rituals" tradition of cult-studs is its left-ist bias and insistance on locating in every form of popular culture it studies some kind of "contribution to the struggle," however opaque or obtuse or tangled with 'false consciousness'. 'Resistance' is too loaded a term; in some cases, what we're dealing with is more like "resilience through rituals", or resistance in the sense of intransigence. So the persistence of Jamaican folkways in jungle, the rootsical traces you can hear in UK garage, constitute a sort of anti-colonial, anti-hegemonic alterity that endures despite the upwardly mobile, outwardly assimilationist and conservative sheen of the music. "Anti-hegemonic" may be overstating the case, though, with a subculture that seems to have more to do with Baudrillardian, contradiction-fraught notions like "transgressive hyper-consumption" or "resistant micro-capitalism"; precarious strategies of survival that collude with as much as they resist the Thatcher/Major/Blair order.

The crucial distinction is between class identity and class antagonism. Phenomema like UK garage and US R&B have a class identity; they mark themselves out in terms of class and race. But there's nothing oppositional about them, or at least overtly oppositional. The insubordinate energy of hardcore and jungle isn't there; it's aspirational working class, playa rather than gangsta. Bat from UKdance believes that London's multiracial, working class "street" culture is intrinsically where it's "at"; you have to follow the London massive as they are always the leading edge, and the massive have gone into R&B and garidge. So his affiliation is to the class rather than the specific music form it generated (jungle). Not sure if I buy Bat's stance (what if the massive suddenly got into New Age or Britpop?!?) but I do agree with him that the massive's secession from jungle in 1997 fatally depleted that music of its vibe and energy. This argues for really complex interrelationships and feedback loops between the sonic and the social.

20/ In a sense, speed garage only needed to emerge because drum & bass steadily banished its vibe-creating elements (ragga influences, diva vocals) as it adopted a techno mindset (auteurism, the notion of music as quasi-autonomous aesthetic realm divorced from the social). Like minimal techno, drum & bass has oh-so-abstractly painted itself into its corner of anhedonic (meaning: the inability to feel pleasure) experimentalism. The cunning of UK garage is the way it's taken the skills aquired during the jungle era--the rhythmic and texturological science--and directly transferred them into a context of enjoyment rather than "education". In a broader sense, the frenzy of jungle and the delirium of hardcore have also been cunningly resituated inside a smoother, mellower, more "adult" and "musical" sound--reflecting the way that the hardcore tribe has grown up but refuses to relinquishes drug-and-dance culture. 2-step is ten times more exciting than the UK garage of 1990-95 precisely because of these encoded traces of hardcore and rave.

21/ Reasons to be hostile, part three: The elitist dress code (no trainers, no caps, often no jeans; sometimest the injunction "dress smart/glamorous") designed to keep the young and the poor out. The designer-label fetishism and flagrant materialism: I saw a guy walk around with the neck label of his Moschino shirt pulled out from under his sweater, just so you could be sure of seeing how much he'd spent; T-shirt logos like "Dolce & Gabbana Is Life" suggest a rather shallow worldview. Cocaine itself, that ultimate signifier for expenditure and waste: a drug whose high lasts about twenty minutes and that, because of its rapid comedown , encourages the user to repeat the dose until the supply runs out. Whereas Ecstasy creates a Zen-like plateau state of serene joy for a good six hours, and then leaves you with an afterglow that lasts another 24 hours. And despite the explosive euphoria and sunshine spirit of the music, UK garage can be a grim, unfriendly scene, oddly fusing the snobbery of the deep house purist with the moody, rude bwoy menace of junglists.

22/ That itchy , anxious quality in speed garage makes me think of a delusion that sometimes afflicts abusers of drugs like amphetamine and cocaine that stimulate the central nervous system: the belief that insects are crawling under your skin. Intravenous abusers of speed and cocaine sometimes scratch at their arms until blood is drawn in order to remove these " crank bugs", as speedfreaks call them. Like darkside hardcore and jungle (musics metabolically overdriven by E and whizz), 2-step is insectile music, full of clicks and chitters and mandible-scrapes (the insects's musical world is relentlessly percussive). The music's rhythmic tics are themselves like kinaesthetic infestations that penetrate your body, muscular parasites that burrow inwards and possess our nervous system. To give this CCRU-style idea an appropriately Deleuzian spin, could the body-without-organs be defined as the "desire" "felt" "by" a subdermal swarm of intensities, a "desire" to break the individual's skin and form a macro-swarm with the intensities of the massive? Is that what "vibe" is? Sub-individual intensities communicating with other sub-individual intensities....electricity....

23/ UK garage involved a reversion to traditional sexual roles. In contrast to the androynous baggy clothing of rave, women wear more revealing clothing. Men tend to look musclebound; there's a big connection between speed garage and the East London gym culture.

24/ Cocaine is basically a snob's expensive, short-lived surrogate for long-lasting,
value-for-money amphetamine; in clinical literature, these two central nervous system stimulants are not differentiated. The cocaine/garage interface creates a sort of grown-up, upmarket version of the hyperkinesis induced by hardcore/ E's 'n' whizz. In his phenomenology of intoxication book On Drugs , David Lenson discusses a phenonemon called "reverse tolerance". It's the opposite of the normal syndrome of building up tolerance to a drug and being forced to take more and more to get the same effects. Instead, those who've been through periods of intensive use of stimulants can find that a low dose of the drug will get them disproportionately high; it's as though the brain has learned a short-cut to this higher plateau of drug-sensation and only requires a small trigger dose. Could it be that "garage ravers" only need relatively small doses of cocaine to trigger sensation-memories and flashback-frenzies encoded in their brains back in the old skool days of hardcore stimulant abuse?

25/ A doctor friend tells me that one definition of neurosis is anorgasmic sexuality. One of the characteristics of cocaine intoxication, its mechanism of desire-for-desire, is that the release/relief of tension through orgasm is forestalled as long as possible. Sexual satisfaction is dreaded. Compare this with what CCRU's Mark Fisher favorably identifies as "anorgasmics": abandoning the "testicular-thermodynamics" of climax-oriented sexuality in favor of polymorphous plateaux of pleasurable tension. "Alienated and loving it".

26/ At a garage club, I've only ever seen one person in a state approximating "hypersexuality": a woman doing the most twitchy, alienated-looking dance I've ever seen; with her clenched fists level with her jaw and meeting under her chin, her arms were pulled tight up against her body and the elbows nearly met at a point just above her navel. She was frugging urgently and fussily, twirling around in a sort of grim rapture, her face racked by this rictus snarl of coked-out disdain, at once absurd and terrifying. She was like the incarnation of Colours feat Stephen Emmanuel's "Hold On (SE22 Mix)", its vocal spasm-riff ("wh--ERE?! wheresitgonewhereitsgone? wh--ERE? wheresyourlovewheresyourlove?") conjuring a nympholeptic frenzy of desire without locus or focus.

27/ Bizarre, and apparently coincidental echoes of darkside hardcore in KMA's darkside garage: Six's use of the pitch wheel to warp the bassline of "Cape Fear" paralleling Goldie's pitchshifting of the breaks on "Terminator" (making them seem to speed up vertiginously while staying in tempo--a similar destabilisation FX to 'Cape Fear', where the bass suddenly trembles and threatens to give way underfoot, like the floor's turned to jelly); the spelling of "Kaotic Madness" echoing Kaotic Chemistry (the darkside alter-ego of Moving Shadow's 2 Bad Mice, which was Rob Playford and cohorts). Fact tidbit: "Cape Fear" and "Kaotic Madness" both started life as jingles for Six's brother DJ Madness's pirate radio show.

28/ UK garage has resolved (or rather, suspended in a productively unresolved tension) most of the major conflicts and binary divisions that have structured rave culture this last decade: musical v machinic, soul v. posthuman, organic v. synthetic, song v. track, pop v. underground, breakbeat v. 4-to-the-floor. In 2-step particularly, songs become tracky and tracks become songful; melody is percussive and percussion is melodic; the vocals constantly make you wonder if this is a human being or a machine, soul or technics. Answer: it's both, and neither, simultaneously.

Perhaps the most crucial conflict that UK garage resolves is between tradition and futurism. Raymond Williams, the grandfather of cultural studies, analysed culture in terms of "residual" and "emergent" elements. Residual was what persisted from the past (e.g. country music in the USA, superstition etc); emergent is what's marginal now but will one day be mainstream and hegemonic (e.g. "camp" in the Sixties). But the reality is that almost any cultural artefact that has any popular currency (ie. not the totally antiquarian or the utterly avant-garde/academic) will in fact be a tissue of residual and emergent elements; that could work as a definition of "the present". Dance culture rhetoric tends to overstate the emergent properties of a musical phenomenon. For instance, discussions of "breakbeat science" in jungle (including my own) stress the science, the posthuman futurity of the programming. Yet the "science" would have nothing to manifest itself in or work through without the historical materiality of breakbeats--the human, hand's on, real-time rhythms laid down in the 1960s and 1970s. When breakbeat science is at its best there's a vital tension between the humanity and the technology, the residual and the emergent. Too much technique led to the over-programmed, micro-edited , vibe-less beats of latterday drum & bass; relax the technical virtuosity too much, though, and the results sounded too naturalistic, too residual.

2-step at its best has achieved a vital poise, a tense balance, between the residual and the emergent. So in conclusion, let me reinvoke Phuture Assassin's phrase Roots 'N Future. "Roots" plural, because they're multiple, hybrid, intertangled, but always specific--we know where we've come from. And "phuture" singular, because tomorrow by definition is abstract, open-ended, and unknowable.

2008-02-19T11:03:00.000-08:00

Bring the Noise has been picked up for French translation by the publisher Au Diable Vauvert.

Provisional publication date: March 2009.

Like ISBN's Italian edition (also due early next year) the French version will include bonus material in the form of articles from 2007 and 2008 (i.e. after Bring the Noise's original UK publication).

In further BtN news, the German translation (which is being done by Rip It Up translator Conny Losch) is due out from Hannibal Verlag in spring 2009, again most likely updated with extra material.

2008-01-04T08:16:00.000-08:00

[Bring the Noise deleted scene #46]

TIMBALAND, Tim's Bio: From the Motion Picture: Life From Da Bassment
Spin, autumn 1998

by Simon Reynolds

Maybe you've heard of the Jamaican tradition of "version" albums:
a dozen or so tracks all built on top of the same bass-and-drum
undercarriage. Different songs, different dubs, same riddim. Timbaland isn't quite so frugal with his creativity, but Tim's Bio does pretty much consist of eighteen variations on that beat. For the last eighteen
months, Timbaland's convulsive kinaesthetic -- double-time kicks, crisp snares, spasmodic flurries of hi-hat-- has dominated the R&B soundscape. So what's immediately striking about Bio is its failure to probe a fresh new direction.

But perhaps this complaint misses the point. Ever since it lost the "-'n roll," rock has had a problem with repetition: albums and shows are supposed to have dynamics, pacing, constrasts,demonstrations of versatility; at a certain point, more is always less. But in dance music, more is... more; repetition accumulates intensity, creates and sustains that crucial intangible known as "vibe". Black dance scenes (and their white mutations) work according to the principle Amiri Baraka dubbed "the changing same": minute variations on the same building blocks (jungle's "Amen" breakbeat, Miami
Bass's subwoofer-quaking 808 boom, dancehall 's "pepperseed" rhythm , and so forth). Mercenary copyists and opportunistic cloners play their part, too. For when a certain sound is doing it, the audience can't get enough of the good stuff. If you're in it, the slight tweaks and twists to the reigning
formula have enormous impact, whereas the uninvolved outsider hears only monolithic monotony.

That said, Timbaland really does need to come with a new cyberfunk matrix. His frequent complaints about "beat-biters" are rich when Tim's Bio verges so frequently on biting himself--self-plagiarism as auto-cannibalism. Likewise the lyrics: where last year's album with Magoo was thematically impoverished, this one's destitute, reaching its self-reflexive nadir with "Here
We Come"-- a song based around the Spiderman theme. What does catch the ear is all the stuff interwoven around the basic grid-groove: the scurrying infestation of percussive detail, the digitally-warped goblin vocals, the Afro-Dada grotesquerie of keyboard licks and sample squiggles, the onomatopoeic bass-talk.

The viral spread of ideas in dance culture works to erode the auteur theory, our ingrained impulse to fixate on originators. Timbaland's twitchy hypersyncopation was widely attributed to a drum and bass influence, something steadfastly denied by Tim and Missy. Now you can hear that imagined compliment
being repaid by the children of jungle, in the form of the two-step garage style that currently rules London. Dropping the four-to-the-floor house pulse and "versioning" Timbaland's falter-funk kick, producers like Ramsey & Fen, KMA, and Dreem Teem are basically making smoov R&B filtered through a post-Ecstasy sensorium. Call it lover's jungle, strictly for the ladies's
massive : midtempop bump'n' grind; sped-up and succulent cyborg-diva vocals; a playa-pleasing patina of deluxe production.

With the next phase of beat-science being researched-and-developed in England , the "bumpy pressure" is really on for Timbaland, if he doesn't want to go the way of ex-pioneers like Jam & Lewis. The dancefloor has no brand loyalty.

2008-01-04T08:06:00.000-08:00

[Bring the Noise deleted scene #45]

KODWO ESHUN, More Brilliant Than The Sun: Adventures in Sonic
Fiction
The Guardian, 1997

by Simon Reynolds

More Brilliant Than The Sun is a survey of the 'black science fiction' tendency in music, from Lee Perry and George Clinton to contemporary sonic wizards like Tricky and Goldie. Although the idea of 'Afro-futurism' has been broached before (most notably by American critics Mark Dery and Greg Tate), Kodwo Eshun's book is the most sustained and penetrating analysis to date of what the author calls 'sonic fiction': the otherworldly vistas and alien mindscapes conjured by genres like dub reggae, hip hop, techno, and jungle.

The book kicks off at blitzkrieg pace and ferocity, with a manifesto that excoriates music journalists and cultural studies academics for being 'future shock absorbers', forever domesticating the strangeness of music. Dance music hacks are rightly ticked off for their abject failure to deal with rhythm, dance music's absolute raison d'etre and primary zone of impact on its listeners. As for the academy, Eshun is particularly scathing about treatments of black pop that analyse it in terms of soul, roots and 'the street'.

Rejecting these notions of raw expression and social realism, Eshun instead celebrates a lineage of black conceptualists, speculators and fabulists. These renegade autodidacts - Sun Ra, Rammellzee, Dr Octagon, Underground Resistance's Mike Banks and Jeff Mills - weave syncretic and idiosyncratic cosmologies using an
array of esoteric sources. Eshun tracks this 'MythScience' through lyrics, songs and album titles, cover artwork, and (in Underground Resistance's case) hermetic slogans etched into the run-out vinyl of 12-inch singles.

As well as decoding these encrypted expressions of the Afro-Futurist imagination, Eshun focuses on the materiality of the music -- jungle's convoluted breakbeat rhythms, the headwrecking delirium of dub production and 'remixology', the timbral violence of the hip hop DJ's scratching. But Eshun's brand of "sub-bass materialism" has nothing in common with Marxist historical materialism. Instead of causality or continuity, Eshun looks for breaks, those moments when the future seems
to leap out of music; his punning name for the Afro-futurist canon he's erected in More Brilliant is a discontinuum.

It's a provocative stance, for sure, but at times you wonder if the baby hasn't been thrown out with the proverbial bathwater. Jungle, for instance, is probably best understood as a tangle of 'roots and future', to borrow a phrase from drum & bass outfit Phuture Assassins; as a subculture and a sound, it has one foot in the concrete jungles of Kingston, Jamaica, and the other in the data jungles of cyberspace. And is it really true, as Eshun seems to insist, that hip hop or reggae are diminished by attempts to locate them in a social context? 'The streets' may be a journalistic cliche too often marking a condescending attitude towards black creativity, but the phrase also contains a kernel of truth that can't be blithely brushed aside: the material realities of exclusion, disadvantage and exploitation that simultaneously hamper and energise all forms of underclass music, black and white.

Still, as a rhetorical strategy, Eshun's relentlessly future-focussed approach pays huge dividends. Compare More Brilliant Than The Sun with Greil Marcus's overpraised Dylan tome Invisible Republic of last year. Marcus's is a book burdened with history and barely concealed nostalgia, weighed down with ponderous, almost Old Testament imagery of curses, birthrights, debts,reckonings, and so forth. Having gleefully jettisoned the very category of the sociohistorical, Eshun's prose is free to be rapt by the future-now materiality of music as it impacts his "bodymind". The latter is just one example of the author's favorite stylistic strategy: the neologism. Puns, self-coinages and compound terms like "sonomatter", "conceptechnics", "clairaudience" and "auditionary" (the last two refer to seers who work with sound rather than vision) induce a pleasurable disorientation akin to starting a William Gibson novel, where it takes 40 pages before you get any grip on how this strange new world works.

Eshun's stylistic dazzle (every sentence aspires to be a bomb going off in your head) is highly effective in conveying the intensities of music, but it does mean that More Brilliant is best consumed in short spurts and small sips; a little pacing, the odd workaday bridging sentence, wouldn't have hurt. The influence of Marshall McLuhan, Paul Virilio and Gilles Deleuze & Felix Guattari isn't just intellectual but stylistic; like them, Eshun's forte is the aphorism and apercu.

Still, if the absolute measure of any music book is the extent to which it makes you want to hear the records, More Brilliant is a blinding success (literally--sometimes you have to shield your mind's eye from the glare). Eshun's book will get you rushing off to hunt down George Russell's Electronic Sonata For Souls Loved By Nature, a 1968 masterpiece of studio-warped 'electric jazz',
or Alice Coltrane's controversial tetralogy of albums that orchestrally remixed the music of late husband John. A 219 page elaboration of the enthused entreaty "you've just got to hear this record, you won't believe your ears", More Brilliant Than The Sun is compulsory reading for anyone even
remotely interested in music's cutting edges.

More Brilliant Than The Sun, review for Groove magazine special on Essential Techno Books, 2008

Kodwo Eshun’s first book takes a panoramic sweep through the “black science fiction” tendency in music. Not so much interpreting as recreating in ultra-vivid prose the alien mindscapes conjured by genres like dub reggae, hip hop, techno, and jungle, More Brilliant offers a heroically unorthodox approach to music writing. Eshun rejects the standard academic and journalistic approaches to black pop, specifically the sociohistorical angle that analyses Afro-diasporic music in terms of soul, roots and “the street”. Instead of perpetuating what he sees as the condescending myths of raw ghetto expression triggered by oppression and exclusion, Eshun celebrates the power and penetration of black intellect. He focuses on a lineage of conceptualists and fabulists that includes Sun Ra, Rammellzee, Dr Octagon, and Underground Resistance. Practitioners of what Eshun calls “Mythscience,” these artists weave idiosyncratic cosmologies from an array of arcane sources, scattering clues for the listener in lyrics, song and album titles, cover artwork, and so forth. As well as decoding these encrypted messages, Eshun pays equal attention to the materiality of music--jungle's convoluted breakbeat rhythms, the head-wrecking delirium of dub production, the textural violence of the hip hop DJ's scratching.

Rather than celebrate the grand ongoing tradition of black creativity, Eshun looks instead for breaks: moments when the future seems to leap out of music. He calls his
Afro-Futurist canon a discontinuum. It’s a provocative stance, especially when you consider that the discourse of roots and reverence for ancestors has always been integral to black musical culture. Another problem with Eshun’s approach is that in rejecting the social aspect of music, he falls back into a kind of cyberculture era update of auteurism. More Brilliant focuses entirely on the singular genius, figures like Lee Perry, George Clinton, Goldie, rather than the collective processes by which music really evolves and mutates. More Brilliant is asocial in another sense: it is written from inside the head (or “bodymind” as Eshun calls it) of the atomized individual. There’s never any sense of the communality of musical experience--a major failing when you’re writing about dance music and especially black culture with its call-and-response rituals, rewinds, and appeals to the “massive”. In the end, though, these are small quibbles next to the enormous stimulation provided by Eshun’s provocative thesis. Above all, the book triumphs as an intoxicating prose experience. The inventiveness of the language is dizzying, its bombardment of puns, neologisms and compound terms "sonomatter", "conceptechnics", "auditionary"--a visionary who works with sound rather than vision) inducing a pleasurable disorientation to rival the music itself. Ten years on, More Brilliant Than the Sun remains compulsory reading for anyone interested in music’s cutting edges.

2007-12-16T13:10:00.000-08:00

[Bring the Noise deleted scene #44]

BRITPOP AND THE BRITPRESS
Request, May 1996

by Simon Reynolds

Right now, the British weekly music press--New Musical Express (NME) and Melody Maker (MM)--is going through one of its periodic phases of feeling self-important. The reason, of course, is Britpop. The weeklies didn't create the movement, but they did name it, and for two years now they've given Britpop their unconditional support. The official line is that 'we've never had it so good' (an echo of a famous political slogan from the '60s); that Britpop is a golden age for UK music, and that if you want to keep tabs on this fast-moving scene, you've got to buy the weeklies.

Grunge wasn't a bad time for the UK music press (in fact Melody Maker
was way ahead of American publications in picking up on what was happening in
Seattle). But the Brit-press is happiest when it can cover stuff happening
on its own doorstep, on a week-by-week basis. If a band is local, it's so much easier to kickstart the hype-cycle that so appals Americans: the group's discovery at a live gig by a cub reporter ('I have seen the future'), its endorsement by a more established writer, the granting of 'Single of the Week' honors, the pricking of major label A&R interest, the full-page debut album rave, the front cover, and so
forth. So accelerated is the hype-cycle these days that stages are often
skipped; buzz bands sometimes make the front cover before they've even released a
record.

Being so USA-based, grunge interfered with this process. NME
and MM rely on record companies to pay for trips outside the UK,
which means that most American bands are already signed by the time the press write about it. Grunge also goaded the Britpress' patriotic pride, triggering
its reflex-resentment towards America's domination of pop culture.
After an initial anti-grunge backlash in '93 (Suede's defiantly Anglophile blend of glam Bowie and glum Morrissey),Britpop really got rollin' in '94. There was the neo-Merseybeat swagger of Oasis, Blur's unexpected self-resurrection out of the 'has been/never-was' dumpster, and Pulp's strange and wonderful ascent to cult popularity, after 15 years in the wilderness. In '95, Britpop went into overdrive: Elastica, Supergrass, Bluetones, Cast, Gene, Shed Seven, Menswear, ad infinitum, ad
nauseam.

The Britpress will seize on any excuse for a fit of
chest-swelling, tub-thumping jingoism. Britpop was ideal, since its aesthetic base--the mid-60's, filtered through its late '70s echo, New Wave--had hitherto been strictly an indie style, and thus the province of the weeklies. At the same time, Britpop bands are overtly anti-experimental and pre-psychedelic; they combine a playsafe 1966-meets-1978, three minute pop aesthetic with a doctrine of
stardom-at-all-costs, making them highly desirable to record companies and
extremely radio-friendly. Because the bands it deals with now hit the charts,
the prestige and morale of the Britpress has been boosted; for the first time in
15 years, people turn to them as tipsheets on future stars. For instance, this
January a grubby little gang of sub-Oasis oiks called Northern Uproar
appeared on MM's cover one week, and on Top Of the Pops the next (TOTP being the UK's premiere pop TV show, based around that week's new chart entries). Furthermore, Britpoppers behave like pop stars; they make strenuous efforts to give good face and good quote, all of which makes
the music papers' job much easier.

That job is basically to convince the readers that stuff is happening.
Now, you might think that ain't so hard, given the plethora of scenes and sounds
generated by the merry postmodern tumult of the 1990's. But the Britpress readership is deeply conservative, and its idea of what's relevant
is decidedly narrow. Look at the NME and MM annual readers polls in the last 15years and you'll invariably find the Best Band position occupied
by a white, all-male, British guitar band: the Jam, Echo & the Bunnymen, the Smiths, the Stone Roses, Suede, Blur, Oasis. The Top 10 Band, Album and Single categories usually feature no women, no blacks, no dance music, and rarely any Yanks (although REM and Nirvana did briefly challenge the Anglocentric bias).

The Britpress has to give its readers what they want, i.e as many pieces
as possible on the 10 or so Big Brits (pegged around the single, the album, the
tour, any excuse whatsoever basically), plus features on Brit-pop 'contenders'--younger bands waiting in the wings for fame and fortune to take its toll on the established Brit biggies. That still leaves a fair number of pages which have to be be filled by token coverage of 'minority' interests like techno, hip hop, weird guitar experimentalism, American rock, and other stuff which market research shows the readers are simply not interested in.

The big problem for the weekly music papers right now is that the
very commercial success that's vindicated their Britpop boosterism is also making
their own role redundant. A few years ago, NME started its Brat Awards
as a sort of parody-cum-riposte to the Brit Awards (the UK record industry's official, Grammy-like honors). In the beginning, NME could
justifiably argue that the truly vibrant pop of the day was being ignored
by the Brits, in favor of MOR artistes like Elton John and Phil Collins,
whose awards were basically rewards for their contribution, via international sales, towards rectifying Britain's trade deficit. These days, both Brits and Brats are alarmingly similar in their fixation on the triumvirate of Blur/Oasis/Pulp; yesterday's alternative has become today's mainstream.

Because of this, everybody is writing about Britpop--from the newspapers
and tabloids to glossy teenybop mags like Smash Hits. With their traditional turf usurped by other mags and by TV, the weeklies don't know
where to go next, how to reclaim their unique role. Do they carry on
scrabbling to find the next Blur or Oasis ahead of the slower-moving monthly magazines, a strategy which is already dredging up lame xeroxes and runts-of-the-litter like Northern Uproar? Or do they dare to drift left-field, and discover/dream up a new alternative?

Another reason why the weekly papers have been obliged to narrow their
focus is the vast range of music media now available in the U.K., from specialist
publications (dance mags like Mixmag and Muzik, metal mags
like Kerrang, cutting edge eclectics like The Wire) to the 'general interest' music monthlies like Select, Q
and Mojo. The last three are owned by the publishing group EMAP, and are designed to take the reader from cradle to grave: Select is
targetted at indie-loving teens and colledge kids, Q is for late twenty-to early thirtysomethings who buy maybe ten CD's a year, while Mojo is
a largely retro-oriented magazine aimed at the 30-plus market
who've given up on 'modern music' but are still passionately interested in the graying rock'n'rollers who soundtracked their youth.

NME and Melody Maker are deadly rivals,
which is odd because they're owned by the same media conglomerate, IPC,
and are situated just one floor apart inside IPC's King's Reach Tower.
Once upon a time, this emnity was based on ideological differences. Today,
the rivalry is sustained out of habit more than anything; Britpop unites
all in its engulfing mediocrity. In truth, the papers have a
complementary relationship. Since the late '80s, MM has
been ensconced in the role of discovering new bands first; the bigger-selling NME bides its time and usually reaps the benefits of timing its coverage closer to the point at which bands break into the mainstream.

Writing for a weekly music paper offers writers cachet and power,
but little financial reward or career prospects. There's a constant influx of firebrands who arrive, make their mark (usually by crusading on behalf of a particular scene or genre) and then burn out. There's a definite type that's attracted to the weekly music press: almost always male, almost always middle class,
over-educated, a bit emotionally retarded. (I speak as someone who's written
for Melody Maker for ten years, and certainly don't exempt myself from this
description!). The Fall's Mark E. Smith tagged this breed with his phrase
'hip priest'. Throbbing with will-to-belief and gifted in the arts of messianic
rhetoric, these angsty young men gravitate towards the music press, where in
previous generations they might have chosen revolutionary politics,
poetry or evangelism.

See, thriving (as opposed to eking out a living) in the Britpress
requires a weird sort of doublethink: the knack of participating in the conscious
construction of a 'happening scene', while simultaneously believing in the reality and righteousness of the figment you've created. A good example of this syndrome is Romo, the pipe-dream of two of Melody Maker's brightest journos,
Simon Price and Taylor Parkes. Short for 'Romantic Modernism', Romo is not,
the duo stress, merely a revival of early '80s New Romantic
synth-and-eyeliner pop, but "a renaissance" of the quintessentially English aptitude for artifice and androgny. No matter that the one Romo band I've seen so far, Viva, were quite dreadful, a cut-price Roxy Music; Price & Taylor's manifesto-mongering and sheer will to hallucinate into being an alternative to the increasingly prosaic Britpop are admirable. It's what the English music press does best, and doesn't do often enough these days.

British music hacks engage in this kind of scene-making partly
for glory, partly out of dissatisfaction with pop's stasis quo, and partly in a purely generous attempt to make things seem more exciting than they actually are. Ideas are thrown down, as a challenge and a reproach,
and in the hope that someone will pick up the baton. There's no profit
to be had from these crusades; only the bands who get signed by majors thanks
to the hacks's efforts, and the A&R scouts who do the signing, make any money out of the hype-cycle.

The weekly nature of the Britpress, the sheer number of pages
that require filling, and the swarm of young egos hungry to make their mark--all this contributes to the infamous "hothouse atmosphere" of the UK music scene: the
rapid turnover of scenes and styles, the histrionics and overheated prose.
The readers don't particularly like these qualities, but they kinda expect them;
they're locked in a peculiar love/hate relationship with the weeklies, and tend
both to overestimate and underestimate their power. NME and MM can't break bands on their own, without radio play, nor can they significantly damage successful bands. But the papers do have a huge influence on the record companies' A&R policy (several Romo combos have already been signed!),
and a more subliminal effect on British music culture itself. By creating a critical climate in which certain ideas and attributes become highly charged, sexy, de rigeur, the music papers shape the aesthetic universe in which a young band develops; by the time they're getting written about, the bands are spouting the buzzwords, dropping the references, reciting the litany. Dreampop, the post-My Bloody Valentine wave of Lush, Slowdive, Ride, etc, is a good example of this syndrome.

In the end, the Britpress's virtues are the same as its vices.
It is volatile, venomous, fickle, pretentious, lacking in perspective, frothy with premature exaltations and disproportionate fervour, absurdly polarised in its judgements, prey to the most pernicious kinds of boosterism, and an utter stranger to fact-checking. Wholly un-American, in other words.

2007-12-16T13:06:00.000-08:00

[Bring the Noise deleted scene #43]

BRITPOP
Frieze, December 1995

By Simon Reynolds

'Britpop'--just in case you've been in a coma for the
last year--is the music papers' buzzterm for an alleged
rejuvenation of the charts, with the likes of Oasis, Blur,
Elastica, Pulp and Supergrass displacing American
grunge/faceless rave/super-annuated AOR in the higher reaches
of the Hit Parade. 'Britpop' has become a rallying cry, an
excuse for chests to swell with patriotic pride. It's even
made the tabloids and the News At Ten. Back in August a
cabbie told me he'd only ever bought four records in his
entire life, then--unprompted--brought up Blur and Oasis.
Even he'd heard about their big battle over whose single
would enter the charts at Number One.

So everybody--industry, media, 'the kids'--is frothing
with excitement about Britpop. Why? The music biz, which
was having trouble building long-selling careers off the back
of dance music and had lost ground to the post-rave indie
labels, is thrilled because the Britpopsters are guitar-based
bands who willingly constrain themselves within the 3-minute
pop single format and radio-friendly, trebley production.
The music press is buzzing 'cos Britpop's aesthetic base--
the mid-Sixties, filtered through its late '70s echo, New
Wave--had hitherto been strictly an indie style, and thus the
inkies' province. At the same time, the bands are overtly
anti-experimental and pre-psychedelic; they combine playsafe
1966-meets-1978 aesthetics with an almost doctrinal ethos of
ambition and stardom-at-all-costs. Because the bands it
discovers now hit the charts, the music press' prestige and morale
has been boosted; for the first time in years, people turn to the inkies as
tipsheets! Moreover, Britpopsters behave like stars, make
an effort to give good face and good copy, and this makes the
journos' job easier. And 'the kids'? Even the youngest
surely sense, on some subliminal level, that the sound of
Britpop harks back to the days when Britannia ruled the pop
waves, while the attitude evokes an era when being young was
a real cool time. The glory-lust of Oasis' "Champagne Supernova",
the insouciance of Supergrass' "Alright", seem mighty
appealing, even as they fly flagrantly in the face of the
socio-economic facts.

As it happens, I think Britain IS the place to be, pop-
wise; it's just that this state-of-affairs has NOTHING to do
with Britpop. Relatively unheralded by the media, another
generation of Britons are waiving the rules. There's the
post-rock experimentalism of Laika, Pram, Techno-Animal etc;
the trip hop of Tricky, Wagon Christ and the Mo'Wax label;
the 'artcore' jungle of 4 Hero, Dillinja, Droppin' Science,
the Moving Shadow label; the art-tekno weirdness of Aphex
Twin, Bedouin Ascent, et al. All these strands of UK
activity are either offshoots of, or deeply influenced by, club
music and sound-system culture; sonically, they're informed
by the rhythm-science and studio-magick of dub reggae, hip
hop and techno. And all speak eloquently if non-verbally of
the emergence of a new hyrid British identity, a mongrel,
mutational mix of black and white.

Britpop is an evasion of the multiracial, technology-
mediated nature of UK pop culture in the '90s. If it started
a few years ago as a revolt against American grunge (Suede's
fey fusion of glam Bowie and glum Morrissey), now it's
extended itself into the symbolic erasure of Black Britain,
as manifested in jungle and trip hop. For Britpopsters, the
Sixties figure as a 'lost golden age' in a way that's
alarmingly analogous to the mythic stature of the Empire vis-a-vis
football hooligans and the BNP. Even more than the insularity of
Britpop's quintessentially English canon (Kinks, Jam, Small
Faces, Buzzcocks, Beatles, Smiths, Madness), it's the sheer
WHITENESS of its sound that is staggering. Take Elastica,
whose singer Justine Frischmann confessed that she could only
think of one form of black music she liked: ska (the
jerkiest, most New Wavey form of black pop ever!). And take
Blur, whose homage to the U.K's music-hall pop tradition
manages to sever The Kinks from R&B, Madness from ska, and
Ian Dury from the Blockheads' fluency in funk and disco.

Damon Albarn's pseudo-yob accent testifies to a
nostalgia for a lost white ethnicity, one that's fast eroding
under the triple attrition of America, Europe and this
nation's indigenous non-white population. Like his hero
Martin Amis, Albarn fetishises London's vestigial remnants of
authentic white trash as "the last truly English people you
will ever know" (to borrow a lyric from Morrissey, another
feller with a dubious penchant for skinheads and villains).
Mozzer is right, this is a dying breed, already displaced by
a new generation of London youth who speak an alloy of
Cockney/Jamaican patois/B-boy slang, watch American sci-fi
movies, grapple with Japanese computer games, and listen to
sampler-based music like jungle.

It's these kids--the kind you'll find at drum & bass
hang-outs like Speed and AWOL--who are today's mods, not the
sorry-ass mod revivalists at Camden's Blow Up club. Mod
originally meant 'modernist', meant having utterly
contemporary tastes in music, clothes, everything. Today's
junglists, trip-hoppers and techno-heads share their '60s
ancestors obsession with records (the obscurest track, the
freshest import) as opposed to bands; the same orientation
towards Black America and Jamaica; the same anticipation for
the future. Camden is supposed to have brought back the idea
of Swinging London, but for five years now pirate radio has
been making a clandestine cartography of the metropolis,
bringing the scent of enchantment to forsaken places like
Peckham and Dalston, as MC's chant out the listeners' paged-
in "big shouts" and "'nuff respects".

Perhaps even more than race, it's covert class struggle
that underpins the Britpop phenom: the fetishising by mostly
middle class bands and fans of a British working class
culture that's already largely disappeared, is really a means
of evading the real nature of modern prole leisure, which
remains overwhelmingly shaped by rave. Blow Up's avowed
anti-Ecstasy stance symbolises this perfectly. Not only did E
usher in a new and still unfolding era of psychedelic music
based around the drugs/technology interface, but the drug
also permanently altered the mentality of vast tranches of
da youth, blasting away reserve, inhibition, emotional
constipation, everything in the English character that holds
us back. E and rave transformed the UK into one funky
nation, but you wouldn't be able to tell that from Britpop.
From Blur's rickety arrangements to the raunch-less
turgidity of Oasis, Britpop is rhythmically retarded, to say the least.
Partly, it's the result of cultural inbreeding, of a white pop tradition
that's long since distanced itself from the R&B roots that
made the Beatles and Stones dance bands; partly, it's a
deliberate avoidance of anything that smacks of lumpen rave.

Thanks to rave, the most vital sectors of '90's UK
subculture are all about mixing it up: socially, racially,
and musically (DJ cut'n'mix, remixology's deconstructive
assault on the song). Returning to the 3 minute pop tune
that the milkman can whistle, reinvoking a parochial England
with no black people, Britpop has turned its back defiantly
to the future. Here's hoping the future will respond in
kind, and remember Britpop only as an aberrant, anachronistic
fad--like trad jazz, the early '60s student craze that
resurrected the Dixieland sound of 30 years earlier. Perhaps
Oasis will one day seem as inexplicable as Humphrey
Lyttleton!

Where Blur's The Great Escape and Oasis' What's The
Story) Morning Glory bask in the setting sun of England's
bygone pop glory, Tricky's Maxinquaye and Goldie's
Timeless gaze into the future. Both Tricky and Goldie are
black British B-boys mindwarped by the drugs/technology
interface; both share a strikingly similar set of
miscegenated influences ranging from art-rock (David Sylvian,
Kate Busy) to ambient (Eno) to the black avant-garde (Public
Enemy, Miles Davis); both made the Top 5 of the Album Chart.
Reflecting what is really going on in Britain in 1995,
Maxinquaye and Timeless offer two versions of a modern
inner city blues. Dark, discomfiting, devoid of the callow
cheer of yer Blurs and yer Supergrasses, yet it's these
records (and, believe me, a horde of other trip hop, jungle
and post-rock releases) that are the real reasons to be
cheerful about British popular music in 1995.

2007-12-07T09:04:00.000-08:00

[Bring the Noise deleted scene #42]

JON SAVAGE INTERVIEW / TECHNO-PUNK AND D-GENERATON
contributions to "New Wave of New Wave" issue, Melody Maker March 26th 1994

by Simon Reynolds

SAVAGE VERDICT: Jon Savage interviewed * on the New Wave of New Wave

Jon Savage's England's Dreaming, the first proper history of punk, is
often cited in interviews and overviews of the New Wave of New Wave. It seems
to have made the Sex Pistols adventure available to a whole new generation, just at
the point at which the saga was fading from folk memory. So does Savage, a
veteran of the original era as both participant and commentator, take any
credit for the current resurrection?

"Well, S.M.A.S.H. were very excited about England's Dreaming, and that
was very flattering. I mean, if you're a writer, that's the ultimate--to be
told that you've inspired someone else. I always intended England's Dreaming to be a kind of primer, presenting the data and saying 'this is how it's done'. The idea was not to push myself to the foreground, but to provide all the sources, the books and records that inspired the original punks. I don't know
if the book influenced the other bands, just that S.M.A.S.H. say they were
influenced. Thank God they're really good! Hahhahaha! I like S.M.A.S.H. a
lot. They've got good songs, cheekbones, short hair--a classic suburban English
mod band. Very exciting live--after I saw them live I stayed awake til 3-AM
just buzzing on adrenaline, and that's pretty late for me. And they have a
song called 'Shame', and that's a very English thing to write about."

Why are we still so obsessed with punk? Ever since 1978, most Brit-rock
activity has been conceived, and judged, as either a return to, or swerve away
from, punk--as either a resurrection or a 'betrayal'. Punk revivals have almost
been annual occurrences. Why are we still hung up on happenings 16 years time
ago--it's equivalent to the Pistols being obsessed with pre-Beatles pop, Billy
Fury and Adam Faith! Why is it that British rock culture can't bury punk, break
free of its ancient agenda?

Savage's explanation is that "the years 1976/77 are a bit like 1966/67--years of fantastic compression, too much happening too quickly. It takes years to unravel all that. And so those moments of breakthrough and upheaval always cast a long shadow. With punk, it took about 10 years to work through all that stuff. Beyond that, punk is simply a classic English archetype--with precursors in Dickens, in Graham Greene's Brighton Rock, in the Angry Young Men, in The Stones and The Who. And that archetype is so potent. The punk movement was very powerful, very ambitious, so it's no wonder that pop keeps coming back to it. Punk was all to do with sex, which is still a very charged phenomenon in England; it was about bondage and going into the nation's subconsiocus to bring out all the violence and filth. There's a huge gulf between the reality people live and the media edifice that's constructed over that reality. The simple fact is that all the things that were talked about during punk are still there and still need to be talked about. Nothing's changed.

"It's like with the fashion side of the current interest in punk--in a
sense, people are 'trying on the clothes' to see if they fit, and finding that
they do. The 'clothes' are all about anger, confrontation, hostility, and they
fit because there is a mood today similar to '76. The punks, and the
hippies in their own way too, posed certain questions that haven't been
answered. All great pop movements pose those questions, in slightly different
ways. Even rave culture is born of frustration, a desire to break out.
England is still a very claustrophobic, class-ridden, static society. And I'd
hate to be 18 now."

Arguably, it's much worse today than in '76. Not just economically but in
the sense that in the past 16 years all the little spaces of freedom have
contracted--what with the assault on dole culture, the impoverishment of
students, and of course, the forthcoming Criminal Justice Bill with its virtual
outlawing of squatting and its draconian clampdown on raves and warehouse
parties. The government seems determined to extinguish all the bases of an
oppositional popular culture. Today it's not even a question of 'No Future',
but closer to Hendrix' lament: "ain't no life nowhere".

"If I was 18 today, I'd be incredibly conscious of the hegemony of the
babyboomer generation. Because so much of the commentary on pop is by people
from that generation, and most of them wouldn't give a band like S.M.A.S.H. a
chance, 'cos the attitude is 'we've seen it all before'. And of course that's
totally irrelevant since, as any fule kno, when you're 20 you haven't seen it
all before."

Are there any parallels between 1976 and 1994, in that there's an
apocalyptic vibe--a feeling that something appalling is lurking on the horizon,
the spectre of social collapse, and its corollary, the resurgence of fascism?

"I don't know if that's actually happening, but it is a very teenage thing
to think that. Also--it's like, 'hello, it's 1994, the Millenium is coming'.
Punk was a millenarian movement, absolutely."

One of the interesting things about the New Wave of New Wave is the way
it's resurrected punk's ethics of drug use, ie. speed = good (cos it increases
IQ, self-confidence, aggression), dope and E = bad ('cos they make you mellow,
quiescent and full of love). Amphetamine is the perfect drug for messianic
fervour and tunnel-visonary crusading zeal, but its downside is paranoia (which
adds to the Millenarian, Doomsday vibe) and, at the extreme, psychotic
reactions.

"Well, amphetamines are very bad news. I only took it four times during
punk and it made me feel so peculiar. Whenever a pop movement gets overtly
based around one drug, it gets stupid. Speed is a dangerous drug. Several
friends of mine from the punk era ended up either psychotic or dead, because of
speed and heroin. Then again, if These Animal Men want to talk of burning for
two years then crashing, that's their prerogative. There's a grand tradition
there, a classic rock'n'roll trajectory,--Sid Vicious is the obvious example."

My reservation with these bands is that they're a too literal recreation
of punk. Really, they're like the pub rock bands that paved the way for punk:
back to basics, except that in this case "basics" means Situtationist slogans
and McLaren-like masterplans. But any real successor to punk would have to go
as far beyond 'nouveau punk' as the Pistols went beyond the white R&B
fundamentalism of Dr Feelgood et al. Another thing: the NWONW is
Nth-generation whiter-than-white rock, mod filtered through punk filtered
through the Manics. It completely ignores anything that's happened musically
since 1978: black or white, rap or rave.

"From an outside perspective, maybe that whiter-than-white rock can seem a
thin option compared to the wealth of stuff around, whether it's black-derived
or not. But why not make white-boy music? It doesn't make you racist, in
itself."

It's interesting the way that ambient techno has provided these bands with
a readymade enemy, the '90s subcultural equivalent of the mid-70s hippies. As a
punk vet whose current favourite music includes Aphex Twin, Richard Kirk,
Seefeel and Biosphere, what does Savage make of the nouveau punk critique of
ambient: that it's just aural sedatives for a defeated, spineless generation?

"I can understand their arguments against ambient. But I'm not at an age
where I need to define myself by the music I like. I've grown out of that
partisanship, cos I've been lucky enough to have lived within it. But the NWONW
is music that demands that kind of partishanship, and I can easily imagine that
if I was a kid who'd gone to see S.M.A.S.H. I might be inspired to want to
change my life..."

And throw the ambient LP's and Rizlas in the bin?

"Well, what the punk critique of ambient misses--and it's a fault shared by
all politically-engaged rock--is that there's a politics of sound that's just as important as explicit politics in lyrics. And the best ambient is streets ahead in terms of sound, the way the music makes you feel, the moods and images
it conjures. When rock gets too puritanically concerned with stripping
down to just the message, you end up with the Tom Robinson Band, who I
always had problems with--great politics, shit music. But anyway, at my age
I don't have to choose between ambient and punk. Ideally, the best of both
worlds would be great--ambient punk!"

TECHNOPHOBIA! The New Wave of New Wave versus d-generation

The great failing of the nouveau punk bands is their willful denial of the music of the last six years. The Sex Pistols had a relationship with both their era’s chartpop (glam’n’glitter like the Sweet) and its underground rock (The Stooges). Any band hoping to have the same impact today would have to take on board the innovations of sampler-based music, from rap and rave to ambient and avant-rock. A Nineties Pistols would be something like a cross between The Prodigy (this era’s Sweet), The Young Gods (this era’s Stooges) and Public Enemy (the black Clash).

Another big failing is that the NWONW’s refried Who riffs lack any kind of relationship with contemporary black music. Although the influence of roots reggae and dub really came through musically in 1979, punk had a spiritual kinship with reggae: both punk and Rasta were about exile and alienation. A Nineties punk should also have an awareness of, if not alliance of, today’s black British subcultures. And that means ragga and jungle techno, music of pre-political rage and urban paranoia. If These Animal Men are really into speedfreak music, they should be making 160 bpm ardkore jungle, which is driven by a rage-to-live that’s pure punk. THIS is the sound of youth today, whereas These Animal Men’s “This is the Sound of Youth” is the sound of youth yesterday: 1966, or worse, that year’s dismal replay in 1979, with neo-mod bands like Secret Affair and Squire.

We need real modernism, not mod revivals. So let me introduce: d-generation. As the name suggests, their music is informed by, but also a swerve away from, the music of the E Generation: “the corrupt modernism” of dark techno, jungle, ambient and ragga.

“We would have been punks in ‘77”, admit d-generation, “but today we can’t see why anyone would ignore modern music.”

They call their sound “psychedelic futurism, techno haunted by the ghost of punk”. It sounds like Ultramarine gone noir: ambient drones, lonesome dub-reggae melodica, stealthy junglist breakbeats. Like Ultramarine, d-generation deploy imagery of “Englishness”, but instead of pastoral quirkiness, the vibe is urban wasteland, influenced by “the dark, expressionist, deviant tradition” of Wyndam Lewis, The Fall and Michael Moorcock.

On their yet-to-be-released EP Entropy in the UK, ghostly allusions to punk are omnipresent. “73/93” turns around the sampled phrases “eroding structure, generating entropy… no future”. “The Condition of Muzak” (the title is from a Michael Moorcock novel) goes even further, using Johnny Rotten as a stick to beat the rave generation. A sample from the Pistols’ last performance at Winterlands is turned into a techno riff: Rotten’s famous “ever get the feeling you’ve been cheated” and mirthless cackle “ha ha ha”. Perfect: if this was played at a rave, it would start a virus of disaffection that would undermine the whole subculture. So many ravers have a cheated look on their faces, sometimes cos they’ve been sold dodgy E, mostly cos they’re burned out and can never get as high as they used to.

Rave is full of submerged utopian longings (“living the dream” etc). But because they aren’t articulated, the culture ultimately functions as a safety valve, releasing frustration at the weekend then returning you to workaday drudgery.

It’s not a culture of refusal, but an anti-culture that defuses. d-generation suggest one way that a true successor to punk (rather than a mere replay) could operate: as spies in the house of the loved-up, sowing seeds of discontent, making a grim dance of our national decay.

* Owing to a major cock-up by the copy editors, a massive chunk in the middle of the Savage interview was left out of the version as published, so this is actually the first time the piece in its entirety has appeared.

2007-11-30T09:47:00.001-08:00

[Bring the Noise deleted scene #41]
HIP HIP HOP BOOK REVIEWS
Melody Maker, early 1994

by Simon Reynolds

A decade ago, and a decade after the event, punk was the hot topic in pop academia. Today, hip hop is Number One in the cultural studies chart, although there are signs that rave will soon overtake it. Tricia Rose's Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America (Wesleyan University Press) is by far the best treatise on hip hop yet. Being of a left-wing, black nationalist bent, Rose is keen to validate rap culture as a proto-revolutionary force, but happily, she's not blinkered by her beliefs. Instead she has a nicely paradoxical sense of rap's contradictions. In her analysis, hip hop simulataneously celebrates black community yet reflects the internicine warfare that sets brother against brother; it's fiercely capitalistic (rappers' obsession with getting 'paid in full') yet contains a critique of capitalism's dehumanising effects. Musically, rap pays homage to black music tradition (R&B, soul, jazz, P-funk) yet wreaks iconoclastic damage to that tradition (via sampling).Capturing rap's contradictions, Rose deftly defends hip hop against the attacks of both the white Right and the black bourgeois establishment (who see gangsta rap as a disgrace to the race, with its promotion of 'negative stereotypes' of the young black male).

There's some fascinating historical/urban geographical stuff about rap's origins in the South Bronx. Rose sees it as a cultural response to the economic policies that literally ghettoised the area. Rap's resistance is embodied in the three formal characteristics--flow, layering and rupture-- that Rose identifies running through hip hop culture from graffiti and breakdancing to scratching/sampling and rapping. Hip hop simulates the urban warzone, yet simultaneously incarnates a survivalist response to its constant threats. Hip hop is full of ruptures--scratches, ambushes of samples, breaks--but incorporates them into the flow.

My only problem with Rose's approach is that she's so keen to validate hip hop that she glosses the extent to which a big part of its appeal is that it's nasty. A lot of rap is just black heavy metal, powertrippin' fantasies for testosterone-crazed adolescents. Snoop Doggy Dogg is Sid Vicious (always a more important part of the Pistols' and punk's appeal than cult-studs academics like to believe); both appealed because they're evil muthafuckers.

Brian Cross' excellent It's Not About A Salary: Rap, Race and Resistance in Los Angeles (Verso) offers a corrective to Rose's East Coast-centric history of rap. As well as interviewing a host of names obscure and obvious, Cross provides an urban geography of LA rap, and traces its history back through blacksploitation movies, the Watts Prophets (LA's Last Poets), to street-poetry forms like toastin', boastin', signifyin' and the dozens. Some of the flava of this oral culture can be gleaned from Juba To Jive: A Dictionary of African-American Slang, edited Clarence Major (Penguin). From the 1880's verb 'knock a joe' (a convict's term for mutilating oneself to avoid chain-gang labour), through 1940's slang like 'crumbcrusher' (a baby) and 'swobble' (eat food in a hurry), through to post-rap words like 'body bag' (condom), this is a treasury of linguistic flair. My only criticism: the book should have extended its coverage to Afro-Caribbean patois.

Finally, Microphone Fiends: Youth Music & Youth Culture, ed. Andrew Ross and Tricia Rose (Routledge). Despite its Erik B & Rakim title, this isn't a hip hop book, but an essential anthology of up-to-the-minute essays by all the big names in cult.studs.. The best are Susan McLary's brilliant piece on the history of moral panics about music, from Christian thinkers like John of Salisbury and Calvin (who feared that church music was getting too sensual and 'feminine'), through Adorno (who described jazz as 'eunuch-like') to the hysteria about rock'n'roll's jungle rhythms. And Lawrence Grossberg's treatise on the recurrent rhetoric of 'rock's death', in which he concludes that something has changed. Rock is no longer the centre of youth culture. Apparently kids spend twice as much time listening to music as they did in the '70s but it's way down the list of things that matter to them; music is something they use, rather than invest in. As Grossberg puts it: "rather than dancing to the music you like, you like the music you can dance to".

2007-11-20T10:31:00.000-08:00

[Bring the Noise deleted scene # 40]

JUNGLE EMERGES: A Flashback to 1993
director's cut of a piece written six years later, Spin, 1999

by Simon Reynolds

Years before Roni Size and LTJ Bukem became international hipster favorites, jungle was banished from the media limelight. To identify yourself as a "junglist" in 1993 meant you belonged to an outcast tribe, a scene feared by most London clubbers as a sinister underworld populated by speed-freaks and baby-gangstas. Born out of rave's Ecstasy-fuelled fervor, the music had mutated, under the influence of bad drugs and the desperation of the recession-wracked early Nineties, until it was too hard, too dark, and too black for most people to handle.

The emergence of jungle has everything to do with drugs. Its frantic breakbeat rhythms evolved because ravers buzzing on too many E pills and amphetamine wraps craved beats as hectic and hyper as their own overdriven metabolisms. The music's bad-trippy aura and disorientating FX simultaneously reflected and exacerbated the paranoia induced by long-term stimulant abuse. 1993 was the year of "darkside", a crucial transitional phase between hardcore rave's hands-in-the-air euphoria and jungle's guns-in-the-air menace.

"The production played tricks on your mind, " enthuses Two Fingers, author of the pulp novel Junglist, talking about twilight-zone jungle classics like Boogie Time Tribe's "Dark Stranger" and Origin Unknown's "Valley of the Shadows". "Darkside freaked out a lot of people, especially those still in the Ecstasy haze--because on E there's no distance between you and the music. Darkside was just evil, evil music--and that was good. Cos it got rid of the lightweights, to be honest".

One of the first all-jungle-DJs raves, Jungle Fever, went out of its way to scare off fans of happy rave and fluffy house, theming the venue with tombstones, coffins, and Gothic statuary. But the classic darkside moment in jungle mythology is an infamous inccident at a rave called Telepathy, where DJ Rap unwittingly played 4 Hero's "Mr. Kirk's Nightmare"---a song in which a father is informed about his son's fatal overdose--just seconds after a boy was knifed on the dancefloor.

Stabbings and muggings, friction and tension.... Many blamed the shift from rave's smiley-face glee to jungle's skrewface scowl on another drug: crack. After all, who else but rock-smoking fiends could possibly enjoy such insanely frenetic beats? Joe Wieczorek, owner of the hardcore rave club Labrynth, claims "the early dark jungle, you might as well call it crack music. There's nothing worse for a raver than being somewhere he doesn't feel safe, and if there's fifty rock-heads in the club, it's going to frighten the life out of you." But although there was a spate of anti-crack tunes like DJ Ron's "Crackman On the Line" in 1993, others reject the linking of jungle and crack as a crypto-racist slur based on the fact that the dancefloor was anywhere from 50 to 80 percent black.

If any substance has a claim to be the true junglist's drug, it's marijuana-- especially the hydroponically-grown ultra-strong weed known as skunk. An archetypal tableau in any jungle club is a group of boys stood in a huddle "building and burning." One youth clasps his hands together, fingers interlocked, and upturns the palms to form a flat surface for his friend to build a massive spliff on; in a crowded, jostling club, it's the only way to roll. Another friend leans close to block off the sight-lines of any security guard in the vicinity. "Burning"... well, that's self-explanatory. Marijuana is the reason jungle basslines started to run at reggae tempo, exactly half the speed of the accelerated breakbeats, thereby allowing dancers to skank rather than rave. And marijuana is why the nudge-nudge wink-wink references to E in tracks were gradually replaced by roots reggae samples exalting ganja, sensimilla and herb.

Jungle wouldn't exist without two black musics that also worship sub-bass and the chronic that intensifies the low-end boom: hip hop and reggae. The life arc of DJ Hype, founder of the labels Ganja and True Playaz, is typical. A white working class boy from the desolate East London borough of Hackney, Hype spent the Eighties playing on a reggae sound-system and competing in hip hop cut'n'mix contests. By 1990, he was spinning house on pirate station Fantasy FM and recording brutal Euro-techno anthems as The Scientist. Jungle is the only-in-London amalgam of all these different imported sounds, and crucially it was a collective invention. " I always say, we are the foundation, because there's no one record, no single DJ, no specific club, where jungle started," Hype declares.

If you wanted to pinpoint the emergence of jungle, though, one contender is the moment at the end of 1992 when tracks like Bodysnatch's "Just 4 U London" and Code 071's "London Sumting" hit the pirate radio airwaves. "That it's-a-London-thing stance, I always took as this-is-a-black-thing, y'know," says Two Fingers. "London has the biggest black population in Britain". It was black fashion that shaped jungle's style spectrum, which ranged from hip hop-influenced "ruffneck soldier" minimalism (puffy MA1 and MA2 flight-jackets, namebrand sneakers, baggy pants) to dancehall-reggae derived ghetto fabulous flashiness. At the ragga-dominated raves like Sunday Roast and Desert Storm, the 80 percent black British crowd "larged it" VIP style--the men flaunting Versace and Moschino, gold sovereign rings and bottles of champagne; the women flexin' their abdomens and winin' their waists in their skin-tight "batty rider" shorts, micro-skirts, bustiers, and thigh-high boots.

As well as changing the way people moved on the dancefloor, the ragga influence was decisive in another area that sealed jungle's break with house and techno: the crucial role of the MC. "Girls sticking their asses in the air and a MC really working the crowd, getting them to hold their lighters up and blow their horns to get the DJ to rewind the track." is how Lee Billingham, aka DJ Bo!ne, recalls his first encounter with jungle at the South London club Lazerdrome. "I loved the whole 'selector! wheel-and-come-again!' , rewind thing," says Two Fingers, another Lazerdrome regular. The democratic way in which the audience controlled the DJ via the MC, he argues, is part of jungle's renegade blackness--its participatory, call-and-response ethos. "As the jungle MCs like GQ, Det, 5-0 and Moose took on the Jamaican patois thing, they became more than crowd motivators, they were vocalizing what the massive was feeling, connecting you with the music more intensely, and adding a lyrical element to this largely instrumental music. There's an ephemeral, magical quality to the MC chants--especially on the pirate radio stations, they'd just go off on one, creating stuff on the fly."

It's the pirate radio stations that are the real heroes of jungle's story--they kept the vibe alive in the scene's early, pre-breakthrough phase. London has dozens of these illegal radio collectives, gangstas of the airwaves who broadcast from the top of towering apartment blocks and engage in a constant, quasi-military struggle to survive not just governmental suppression but the skullduggery of rival stations who'll gladly steal their pirate brethren's transmitters. Legend has it that one outfit, Rush FM, turned the derelict upper floors of an East London block into a fortress so impregnable that the DJ's had to rappel up the side of the building to reach the studio. They sealed the stairwell entrance with concrete, hollow metal tubes pumped with ammonia gas, and a wire connected to the electrical supply. When local government officials attempted to drill through the barricade, they hit the live wire and an electric spark ignited the gas, exploding the concrete and showering the workmen with shrapnel.

Yet for all its militancy and moodiness, jungle seethed with "a fierce, fierce joy", as convert Bjork put it. The speed of the music was crucial, as if you could somehow ride its future-rush, achieve escape velocity, and smash through to a brighter tomorrow.

"The breakbeats were so fast and chopped up, your body wanted to be pulled in twenty different directions at once," recalls DJ Bo!ne of his baptismal experience at Lazerdome. "Me and my mates just looked at each other, jaws dropped, and were, like, 'This is mental!!!!"."

Says Two Fingers: "Anyone can be a junglist, but for me, it's part of having a black spirit. Jungle is about getting sweaty and having a religious experience on the dancefloor. It can feel like the Holy Spirit is moving through you."

BONUS BEATS: A FLASHBACK TO 93!
A London Sometin' Dis
A Jungle Documentary filmed in 1993
Segment 1
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5jd2Lr7C0nc&feature=related
Segment 2
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tCXt62rfm18&feature=related
Segment 3
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nSsBcdD0Wsg&feature=related
and
another one, this from 1996
Lost In Music
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GRLfCYFntVg&feature=related

2007-11-12T07:46:00.000-08:00

[Bring the Noise deleted scene #39]

REVOLT INTO STYLE: POLITICS AND POP, mini-thinkpiece
Melody Maker, August 28th 1993

by Simon Reynolds

For a bliss-rocker like myself, the resurrection of agit-pop is a right turn up for the books. And it isn’t actually that easy to explain. Sure, socio-economically, we’re heading further up shit creek every day. But deterioration, immiseration and crisis have been the way of things since… since I was a nipper, actually. And for the last six years, pop culture’s response has been largely escapist (rave, slackerdelia, dreampop). So why--now--the return of agit-pop?

Perhaps people have simply been pushed too far, to the end of their tether. I don’t believe the current wave of agit-rockers has evaded the inherent problems of politics and pop any more successfully than, say, Gang of Four or The Redskins did. But even if they are just “preaching to the converted”, even if their audience are merely consumers of radical meanings, the very fact that consumer demand for “edutainment” has resurged is significant. Feelings of disconnection and impotence are so pervasive that people want to feel less isolated and find it cathartic (in an almost therapeutic way) to see anger and frustration acted out on stage or on record. There’s also a sense in which the apolitical rock that’s ruled the rock for so long has driven itself into a dead; rock culture needs to renew itself, and re-engaging with “reality” is one way to do that.

But, as I say, the contradictions of political rock, of protest in an entertainment context, remain unresolved. What do slogans actually achieve, apart from degrading language, and providing the warm, glowing feeling that comes from having one’s own convictions confirmed? For me, there’s a crucial difference between “political” (all music is political--even Slowdive--in that it involves choices and values) and the overtly “politicized”.

In terms of thought-provocation, I find more “politics” in the turmoil of contradictions of a PJ Harvey or the incoherence of Nirvana than in the plain-speaking, tell-it-like-it-is of Blaggers ITA, Rage Against the Machine, et al. And the utterly non-PC gangsta rap of Cypress Hill or Onyx--rage that offers no solutions or redemptive vision--tells you more about the state of Black America than the didacto-rap of KRS-1 or Hiphoprisy.

Consolidated trailblazed the revival of agit-pop: they grappled with its contradictions with a hyper-aware ferocity that puts the current wave to shame. But, to my mind, they foundered on those contradictions. Their first LP, The Myth of Rock, was totally invigorating, simply because its militancy was so virulently opposed to the dozy, hazy apathy of rock in 1991. The sequel, Friendly Fascism, was a precarious affair, with some blasting tracks but others that were just lectures over a beat. The last album was unlistenable and self-parodic.

The trouble with politicized rock is that the proselytizing impulse almost invariably goes hand-in-hand with a contempt for the aesthetic: music is only a means to an end. Look at Manic Street Preachers, who also trailblazed the resurrection of combat rock. Their desperation to get those supposedly crucial lyrics (actually a turgid, anti-poetic mish-mash of slogans from which I glean nothing--no illumination, no emotional response) into mass consciousness has led them to ape Bon Jovi’s quaint, lite-metal anthems.

As a movement, Riot Grrl has massive resonance and ramifications, but musically it’s had the effect of subordinating the music to the message: hence the staid, tomboy quality of Bikini Kill’s sound. The UK chapter, Huggy Nation, is more ambitious, and at least likes the idea of pushing the sonic envelope, but its doctrinaire rejection of virtuosity cripples that impulse.

So the perennial paradox endures: the most aesthetically adventurous music being made today is just--purely aesthetic, art for art’s, headfuck for headfuck’s sake. Ambient techno, the UK post-MBV fringe (shoegazing’s smarter sister), the US lo-fi bands--all are music that sounds great but “says” nothing. The US post-Pavement bands are a new kind of prog rock or jazz-rock (fission rather than fusion). Truman’s Water may be lo-fi, but their unusual time signatures, schizo-eclectic song structures and gibberish lyrics are pure prog. Most of the interesting music being made today is heading towards the state of the instrumental, all texture and no text.

Ambient dub-techno has already reached that point of pure muso-dom. It’s music as drug (or as adjunct to drug-taking), and its ascendancy shows that many people’s response to a strife-torn intolerable world is to seek asylum. Ambient is psychedelia, warped by Nineties retreatism, a desire to exile oneself from History. Whereas the agit-pop bands want to reconnect rock and history.

There are bands who combine radical form and radical content (although usually they’re more about personal politics), bands like Pram and Moonshake, who have revived the spirit of ’79 (PiL, the Raincoats, Gang of Four). But this avant-rock sector is probably too abstruse to win a mass audience; it doesn’t offer the satisfyingly simplistic, crude catharsis of your Rages. So, for the moment, aesthetic revolution and political radicalism remain uneasy bedfellows.

Perhaps agit-poppers devote so much time to rhetoric that they have none left for raising the aesthetic stakes? And yet agit-pop doesn’t need to sound trad to be populist (remember Public Enemy?). For now, though, we’re still waiting for that dream fusion of challenging form and confrontational content.

2007-11-12T07:39:00.000-08:00

[Bring the Noise deleted scene #38]

CYPRESS HILL, Black Sunday
Melody Maker, July 31st 1993

by Simon Reynolds

The first words you hear are "I wanna get high", and the rest of
Black Sunday is riddled with references to blunts and bongs.
Outspoken advocates for the legalization of hemp, Cypress Hill's
'blunted' sound defines hardcore hip hop today. The first time I
heard the term, I assumed 'blunted' had something to with dope taking
the edge off aggression, mellowing macho tensions into stoned, woozy
cameraderie. Actually, it comes from the Phillies Blunt, a cigar
which B-boys hollow out to make enormous joints. But my original
misapprehension actually fits Cypress Hill's fuzzy, muggy sound
perfectly: their laidback songs simmer with a violence just barely
held in check.

It's so right that this LP's release coincides with a record US
heatwave. Cypress Hill capture that humid, heat-hazy unreal feel
where walking the streets is like being inside a bad dream. Cypress'
music blurs the borderlines between psychedelic and psychotic. The
songs sound deceptively jaunty (the samples are all upful slices of
Sixties soul, Meters-style proto-funk, jump-blues, doo-wop), but the
lowest-of-the-low-end bass exudes a baleful, viscous menace. Rappers
B-Real and Sen Dog's nonchalant nursery rhyme delivery only increases
the marrow-chilling quality of the lyrics, a non-stop namedrop of
weapon slang (gats, glocks, AK's, sawn-offs, et al). The cartoon
violence ("coming out blasting like Yosemite Sam") and the jeering
"nya nya nya" playground chorus of "Hand On the Glock" add to the
impression that gangsta-ville is populated with overgrown schoolboys.

Talk about arrested development: Cypress Hill's world is so
retarded it's almost prepubescent. If there's no misogyny here, it's
only cos it's a boy's own world. The only tender line on the album
is "I love you, Mary Jane"--and it's not about a girl. Cypress aren't
as deeply into male-bonding as those other current hardcore rulers,
Onyx (slam-dancing slapheads whose chant is 'let the boys be boys!').
But their world is chastely fixated on two things: stupefaction
("Legalise It", "Hits From The Bong") and paranoia ("Insane In the
Brain", the creepy "Cock The Hammer", where samples shimmer like
spectres in the far corner of your vision).

Cypress Hill's soundscaper DJ Muggs is inspired, but he's a
fundamentalist. Shunning the arty advances of the post-De La Soul
bohemians, he takes rap back to the old school days when "get a
little stupid and pump that bass" was the rallying cry. Despite
their Cuban/Italian-American/Mexican composition, Cypress refer to
themselves as "niggas", in solidarity with the black lumpen-
proletariat. "Real-ness" is gangsta rap's watchword these days.
Ironically, the quest to be harder and realer than the rest has
spiralled out of control, resulting in a grotesque cartoon of ghetto
reality. Cypress' shrill loops of horn or soul-screams (the "kettle's
boiling!" effect invented by the Bomb Squad) make me think of a
'Beano' angry bloke with steam coming out his ears, blowing his lid.

Black Sunday is samey, thematically (it's all about getting
wasted or wasting the other guy) and musically (there are no
departures like the debut's sultry "Latin Lingo"). It's a
consolidation of DJ Muggs' influential sound, not an evolution. The
feeling of continuity is increased by quotes from earlier songs,
while "Hand On The Glock" is a (brilliant) remake of the debut's
"Hand On the Pump". But it's a magnificent, malevolent monotony.
Black Sunday is a chiller-thriller that'll have your blood running
cold even as the thermometer tops 99.

2007-11-02T10:41:00.000-07:00

[Bring the Noise deleted scene #37]

LETTER FROM NYC: BUM RAP, column
Melody Maker, January 30th 1993

By Simon Reynolds

Alternative rockers from the Chili Peppers to Sonic
Youth rallied eagerly to MTV's "Rock The Vote" crusade:
underneath the urgency with which they exhorted kids to
register, you could clearly read the message "VOTE CLINTON".
But rappers were conspicuous by their abstention. Ice T
couldn't be bothered to express a preference between the
candidates, while post-election, an underwhelmed Ice Cube
declared that now he was looking forward to getting "Clinton
out of the White House."

You could hardly blame the hip hop community for feeling
uninvolved. Clinton went out of his way to placate white
fears, with his strategic masterstroke of dissing Sister
Souljah, his cold shouldering of black leaders like Jesse
Jackson, and his often-aired plan to put 100,000 more cops on
the streets. Of course, you could hardly blame Clinton for
doing what he had to do to lure the Reagan Democrats (the
white, worried middle class) back into the fold. This was
politics as usual, and a lot of Black Americans gritted their
teeth and accepted it.

What was truly unnerving and despicable was the deafening
silence maintained by all the candidates concerning the LA
riots. In the Middle Ages, popular revolt functioned as a
form of petition. Rioters knew that the uprising would be
quelled, but they also knew the King would pay attention and
make an effort to alleviate their woes. But the LA riots
failed to elicit such a response from the political classes,
bar some woffle about creating 'enterprise zones' to
encourage business to move into the destitute inner cities.

So what do you do if you're black, from the ghetto, and
the most virulent and visible explosion of your pain and fury
has been swept under the carpet? The rap equivalent of
rioting is songs like Ice T's "Cop Killer" and Paris' "Bush
Killa": unconstructive, if perfectly justifiable, expressions
of rage, symbolic and ultimately sterile. These songs remind
me of Morrissey's petulant fantasy "Margaret On The
Guillotine", written at Thatcherism's zenith, when it seemed
the "good folk" were outnumbered by the loadsamoney majority.
The problem with the "killa" songs is that rage is vented
in the instantly gratifying fantasy of revenge, rather than
channelled into politics (which takes a lot longer to get
results).

In the pilot issue of Vibe, a new rap culture
mag, Greg Tate agonises over whether hardcore rap is just a
"momentary containment of [black anger] or worse, an
entertaining displacement?" For Tate, rap's problem is that
it's "agenda-less. It reacts better than it proposes."
Despite hip hop's astonishing cultural victory (its
permeation of US society from advertising to fashion), it's
yet to prove itself as "a harbinger of the black revolution".

In truth, hip hop is going through a bit of a
slack, directionless phase, and its problems are aesthetic as
much as political. Public Enemy's music has gotten mighty
tired: maybe Chuck D's recent pilgrimage to Africa will
rejuvenate, although the black Clash might end up recording a
Sandinista style turkey. The only sonic innovators around
are Cypress Hill, with their Hispanic-flavored, 'blunted'
vibe (a blunt is a special kind of joint), and Arrested
Development, who were last year's De La Soul, i.e.
bourgeois-turned-bohemian art-rap. And the only really
magnetic characters are Treach from Naughty by Nature and Ice
Cube, whose charisma and intelligence sustains their solid
but unimaginative music. The rest of rap is awful samey,
from butt-fixated crossovers like Mixalot's "Baby's Got Back"
and WrecksN'Effect's "Rump Shaker", to the underground's
unremarkable variations on the same old gangsta/B-boy themes.

Apart from the braggart bitch-dissing, hardcore rap's
main message is it's own refusal to cross over. This
fretting over "authenticity", which is partly an anxiety to
keep whites (as consumers and performers) out, has had a
inhibiting effect on the music. The retreat to old school
purism means every record revolves around the same formula: a
mid-pace funky beat, "phat" bassline, and looped samples
(usually jazzy horn-squawks or Hammond ripples). The
"authenticity" school of thought is articulated by the rap
magazine The Source (its name connotes roots, heritage). If
only the highbrow detachment of Vibe* could be combined with
the fanzine-like street-level patriotism of The Source, then
hip hop would have a magazine that could set challenges for
the music rather than follow in its wake. Rap sorely needs
such an injection of impetus.

* no really that's what Vibe was like in those days! Greg Tate was a regular contributor and not that out of step with/further out than the rest of the contents.

2007-11-02T10:30:00.000-07:00

[Bring the Noise deleted scene #36]

LETTER FROM NYC: SING YOUR NON-LIFE, column
Melody Maker, September 19th 1992

By Simon Reynolds

Morrissey's recent flirtation with jingoism really shouldn't have been that surprising. Insularity has always been his thing, from his nostalgic resentment of foreign/futuristic influences on English culture, to his denial of the truth that "no man is an island". For me, even more revealing than the "black and white will never mix" bit in the Q interview, was Morrissey's admission that he'd taken Ecstasy, twice, and each time by himself. The first time was, apparently, the most amazing moment in his life: he looked in the mirror and saw "someone who was extremely attractive".

Now, along with freaky-dancing, E promotes empathy, tactile affection and intimacy. The idea of Mozzer using the "interesting drug" to bond more closely with himself is so tragi-comical, so perfectly attuned to his image and his pathology, it's not true. In fact, I've begun to wonder if it really isn't true, but rather a tale spun by Moz as part of a strategic policy of disinformation. Because Morrissey knows that his aesthetic, his career, his financial future, depend on the idea that he is unloveable and unloved. He has to keep on insisting that he's charmless and untouched by human hand, in order to sustain his appeal to his mostly heterosexual, love-lorn following.

These feelings were amplified when I read the US Morri-zine Sing Your Life. In North America, the Mozzer cult is bigger than ever (amazingly, these kids were hooked by the lame solo stuff rather than The Smiths), and Sing is just one of a dozen, including one computer 'zine. By far the most interesting thing about Morrissey now is the devout ardour of his fans. S.Y.L. makes it clear that their main concern is strategies for getting onstage in order to kiss and hug their idol. So there are letters from readers thanking S.Y.L. for showing that Morrissey "is not untouchable", that "with unrelenting determination, our dream will one day be realised". There are innumerable testimonials of what The Moment was like. "The most emotional scenes I have ever seen... I just wanted to stay there forever", "I saw God coming down", "a lord up there, his music savagely attacked me", "Morrissey is my life; Morrissey is my death", "the utmost feeling of ecstasy", "Morrissey makes reality seem unreal".

I could never dismiss these people as sad individuals, but their stories make me sad. I can remember living that adolescent intensity, where the love you owe yourself or other flesh-and-blood humans seems like it can only be expressed through an idol or an Ideology. For these fans, touching Morrissey is an electrifying sacrament in which all their repression and passion is orgasmically released. Reading S.Y.L., it's also clear that it's crucial for the fans to believe that Morrissey is as shy, awkward, and starved of touch as they are. What's unique about Moz is the way he's codified the themes of loneliness and fan projection in his work, and exposed the circularity and ultimate sterility of the syndrome. He must know that his teen belief that he was engaged in "an absolute tangible love affair" with his idols, leads nowhere (unless they're all supposed to become idols, with fans/phantom lovers of their own - the argument of the song "Sing Your Life"?). A Pied Piper of teen angst, he's knowingly led his fans into the cul-de-sac of loving only the pristine images of distant (or dead) icons, rather than risking the messy compromises of real-life close encounters. What makes Morrissey such an increasingly grotesque phenomeon is the age gap between idol and fans; his audience hasn't grown with him because his art hasn't grown up. Instead his flock is endlessly re-stocked with each year's harvest of sensitive souls.

You can't live 'here', and the brighter writers on Sing Your Life know it. Hagop Janoyan observes how all Moz's US fans are in their late teens, how the Smiths-era fans have moved on, and worries that he too will out-grow his ardour and become a member of "the Ordinary World". Mark Sirard writes in "The Morrissey Equation" that "it is our desire to bridge this distance that keeps us in a state of eternal attraction". Fandom is an ultra-intense state of suspension and deferral that allows the fan to live in the ideal, unrequited but thus never dis-illusioned. But to give up illusions needn't mean a come-down to banality, it can mean affirming limits and finding an object worthy of your passion. Perhaps Hagop should start a spinter zine called Start Your Life.

BONUS QUOTES FROM THE MORRISSEY INTERVIEW IN Q

On racism and multiculturalism.

"I don't want to sound horrible or pessimistic but I don't really think, for instance, black people and white people will ever really get on or like each other. I don't really think they ever will. The French will never like the English. The English will never like the French. That tunnel will collapse."

On the death of Englishness

"It's a part of my overall psyche. It's not unique to [Your Arsenal]. I supposed a few years ago I would have spoken more morosely about this great, dying tradition. Well, now it has died. This is the debris, now.... I don't want to be European. I want England to remain an island. I think part of the greatness of the past has been the fact that England has been an island. I don't want the tunnel. I don't want sterling to disappear. I don't want British newscasters to talk in American accents. I don't want continental television.

On Ecstasy

"I've taken it a couple of times. The first time I took it was the most astonishing moment of my life. Because - and I don't want to sound truly pathetic - I looked in the mirror and saw somebody very, very attractive. Now, of course, this was the delusion of the drug, and it wears off. But it was astonishing for that hour, or for however long it was, to look into the mirror and really, really like what came back at me. Now even though I had that wonderful experience, and it was a solitary experience - there was nobody else present - I'm not actually interested in drugs of any kind."

2007-10-30T11:14:00.000-07:00

[Bring the Noise deleted scene #35]

LETTER FROM NYC: SLACKED OFF, column
Melody Maker, May 30 1992

by Simon Reynolds

Last year, the cult movie in America was Slacker: a low-budget snapshot of the drifting, shiftless, decentred life of the twentysomething hangers-on and burn-outs who inhabit the bohemian fringes of the University of Austin, Texas. The film's 28 year old writer/director, Richard Linklater first became aware of the slacker phenomenon when bumming around college towns in the US. Laterally mobile, slackers have rejected careerism and devoted themselves to "daydreaming as productive activity". Drifting through Austin's summer streets, Linklater's camera bumps into a hundred of these ne'er-do-wells, eavesdropping on their bizarre monologues and debates (usually concerning conspiracy theory, crackpot mysticism, or elaborate validations of their own apathy), and observing their peculiar rites.

Slackers are beatniks without the whooping, joyous get-up-and-go, hippies without the hope, punks without the will-to-power. But "beat" is probably the best parallel, since Kerouac's term meant both exhausted and beatifically blissed-out. Travel was a quest for satori, the sublime moment. But slackers are shagged out before they even step out the door: they experience satori by wandering listlessly through their own neighbourhood, flitting through TV channels in search of absurdity, or trawling the kitschy detritus of dead pop culture.

As well as the movie, there's an amusing book about the poignant plight of twentysomethings who never got on the career ladder (Generation X by Doug Coupland, Abacus), and even an art movement (installations that mostly consist of
random accretions of refuse, kitschy flotsam and personal souvenirs). American slackerdom is very similar to our own (post-Thatcher, somewhat beleagured) "dole culture", not least in that it's where all interesting bands spawn from. One scene in the film takes place in an Austin club, where a band engage in slovenly performance art in front of an audience of six pals. And there's a cameo performance from Theresa ex-Butthole, as a unhinged deadbeat trying to score drug money by flogging what she claims is Madonna's cervical smear specimen (complete with a pubic hair). And of course, the whole slacker sensibility was prefigured years ago in indie rock. Dinosaur Jr, Butthole Surfers, Sonic Youth, all trailblazed the slacker mix of kitsch and mysticism, the fascination with extremists and psychos; Daydream Nation was almost the last word about the lifestyle, unmoored drifting taken to the brink of schizophrenia.

In fact, it was just the beginning. Nirvana are slackerhood gone mainstream (Cobain's narcolepsy is THE slacker disease). Mercury Rev's Yerself Is Steam and Pavement's Slanted and Enchanted are masterpiece crystallisations of the sensibility, reality as viewed thru the off-kilter kaleidoscope eyes of folk who've slipped outside the schedules of productive life. Rev and Pavement both share an uncanny affinity with the Krautrock of Faust, Amon DuuL II and Can: drivelling streams of semi-consciousness, found sounds, haphazard hotch-potched stylistic jump-cuts, deadpan wit confounded by kosmic noise, blissful bafflement. And there's more of this stuff coming thru: look out for Unrest, whose Imperial f.f.r.r. combines oblique, translucent dream-pop with a bizarre gamut of pop kultur obsessions. As American bands cotton onto the "when
you're awake you're still in a dream" vibe of post-Valentine noise (MBV are real hip here, and starting to influence a whole new breed of US bands), slacker rock is going to get even weirder and wired-er.

2007-10-25T06:52:00.000-07:00

[Bring the Noise deleted scene #34]

GREG TATE, Flyboy In The Buttermilk: Essays On Contemporary America
The Wire, spring 1992

By Simon Reynolds

One of the most intriguing phenomena in recent years has been the rise of the postmodern black. From hardcore punk rastas Bad Brains, through the Kraftwerk influenced Afrika Bambatta and Derrick May, to rap's strange infatuation with heavy metal (Motley Crue-fan Ice T's Body Count) it's become apparent that racial tourism is no longer just a one-way traffic, with whites spoiling the black scene(ry). As a staff writer for Village Voice, Greg Tate has spent the last decade formulating a critical language to deal with this anything's-up-for-grabs state of play. (He's also been a co-founder of the Black Rock Coalition, which really got the crosstown traffic goin' on).

Tate's writing is produced out of interesting tensions: between his academic/radical background and his yen to be down with street culture, between his gung-ho fervour for African-American art and his fondness for some white artefacts (his fave LP's of last year included My Bloody Valentine, Nirvana, and bizarrely, Van Halen). The most crucial, productive tension comes from his desire to build a bridge between black cultural nationalism and post-structuralism; Tate wants his criticism to be proud-and-loud, but not to succumb to any fixed notions about what constitutes "authentic" black culture. This is probably why Miles Davis is such a totem for him, Miles being the example par excellence of the black artist who could incorporate white arthouse ideas and riffs (Stockhausen, Buckmaster) into his groove thang, and make them baaaad to the bone. Miles is the paradigm of the black innovator (see also: Hendrix, Sly Stone, George Clinton, the artist Jean-Michel Basquiat) who fused the superbad Stagolee tradition with an intellectual sophistication that white high culture couldn't deny. Their threat lies in being 'neither one thing nor the other': they're neither naively, instinctively passionate (the trad, racist ideas about black creativity) nor do they conform to the arid, restrained proprieties of white highbrow culture. Tate sees "signifyin'" -the ability to disguise meaning, to appropriate and remotivate elements from hegemonic culture - as a survival skill intrinsic to the black American tradition.

Tate inscribes this "neither/nor" factor in a style that mixes in-your-face blackness with po-mo riffs. Sometimes the onslaught of 'muhfukhuh's and 'doohickeys' can be a little alienating (possibly the point). The idea is probably similar to the old Lester Bangs/Richard Meltzer notion of rock'n'roll writing that throbs like the music. Tate wants to write with the swank of a Bootsy bassline, and more often than not succeeds. Some of his neologisms are inspired: I particularly like "furthermucker", an inversion which manages to combine the swaggering Stagolee persona and the far-out cosmonaut of inner/outer space tradition, thus becoming the perfect term for Miles, P-Funk, et al.

A hefty portion of "Flyboy In The Buttermilk" consists of stimulating essays on black culture--theorists like Henry Louis Gates, writers and artists like Samuel Delany and Basquiat. There's even some pieces on the occasional, honorary Caucasian, like novelist Don de Dillo, who's acclaimed for documenting the paranoiac death throes of white American culture. But for Wire-readers, the most interesting essays are about music. In some of his earlier pieces, Tate has yet to shed reified notions about musical "blackness". In the 1982 piece on Clinton's Computer Games, he's flummoxed (as an unabashed Santana fan well might be) by the phenomenon of black kids turning onto electro's "Monochrome Drone Brainwash Syndrome beat". At this point, he seems to share Chuck D's view of disco as soul-less, "anti-black" shit. This notion of black music as hot, sweat, funky and frictional, is uncomfortably close to the white stereotype, and it's a fix that black youth have being evading throughout the Eighties. I wonder what Tate thinks of acid house or Detroit techno?

Elsewhere, though, Tate acknowledges that Bad Brains were most authentic and innovative when playing ultra-Caucasian hardcore thrash, but totally jive when they tried to play roots reggae. And in his piece on the Black British but not "black" sounding A.R. Kane, he acclaims their radically polymorphous swoon-rock for opening up the possibility for a black avant-pop that isn't "in the pocket" but out-of-body. The Kane boys acknowledged only one influence, Miles Davis, who coincintally is the subject of Tate's best two essays, "The Electric Miles", and the elegy "Silence, Exile and Cunning". The former is the best piece on Miles' most feverishly creative, least understood phase I've yet encountered, with Tate anticipating the now emergent critical doxa that the late Sixties to mid-Seventies albums constitute the alpha and omega of furthermucker music, pre-empting Can, Eno/Byrne/Hassell, Metal Box, even dub and late Eighties freak-rock. Miles and his floating pool of players explored "a zone of musical creation as topsy-turvy as the world of subatomic physics". Tate's metaphors are vivid and precise: "He Loves Him Madly" is an "aural sarcophagus", Dark Magus sees Miles "scribbling blurbs of feline, funky sound which under scrutiny take on graphic shapes as wild and willed as New York subway graffiti". To say that he's only mapped the surface of Miles' planet, not probed the demonic, unclassifiable emotions that seethe at its core, is no diss to Tate, only a tribute to the inexhaustible nature of the music, of how far we still have to go (there will alway be "further" when it comes to Miles).

An excellent book.

2007-10-25T06:48:00.000-07:00

[Bring the Noise deleted scene #33]

LETTER FROM NYC: RAP PAYBACK, column
Melody Maker, February 15th 1992

by Simon Reynolds

When Apocalypse ‘91 came out, it felt like Public Enemy were in a rut. Sure, they still gave good interview, but the music was breaking no new ground and even the rap/metal link-up with Anthrax seemed old hat. But, over here, Public Enemy have managed to put themselves back on the cutting edge. Releasing their new single, “By the Time I Get to Arizona” (by far the best track on the LP, with its superbad-ass stink-funk riff) in time for Martin Luther King Day on January 20, PE have ignited a national furore.

See, Arizona is the only state that doesn’t recognize King’s birthday. And PE’s video is a “revenge fantasy” in which Security of The First World paramilitaries assassinate a local senator with a poisoned candygram and detonate a bomb under the state governor’s car. These inflammatory scenes are juxtaposed with re-enactments of King’s assassination and the civil rights struggles of the Sixties (blacks being splattered with food for sitting in whites-only diners or being expelled from apartheid buses). The ensuing controversy has put PE on the TV news and the front covers of America’s most mainstream papers.

On one hand, you sympathise with the outrage that prompted Chuck D to dub Arizona a “devil’s haven”--in 1990, the Arizona electorate rejected two proposals to re-establish a paid King holiday. Can you blame Chuck D for interpreting this to mean that most Arizonans would like to roll back the civil rights gains of the Sixties and return to Fifties-style segregation? At the same time, the video jars with Martin Luther King’s creed on non-violent protest and has been duly censured by civil rights activists and King’s family as a disgrace to his memory. Public Enemy’s riposte to that is, “while Dr King may have stood for non-violence, we wonder what he would have stood for after that bullet ripped violently through his neck. Being assassinated will often change your political viewpoint." Ho hum.

So is the video a valid symbolic expression of black rage, a publicity stunt for a group suffering the mid-career stagnation blues or a naked incitement to political violence? In a call-in poll, over 60% of MTV viewers supported the promo as legitimate protest and rejected the notion that it could encourage violence. But Public Enemy themselves have never said the video should not be taken literally; Chuck D’s declared belief in “a tooth for a tooth, a head for a head” suggests the opposite.

Where do us white liberals stand? Probably, like me, all over the place. On one hand, you empathise with the rage, especially considering the backdrop of escalating bias attacks (two black children just got sprayed with white paint) or the bid by the “former” neo-Nazi David Duke for the governership of Louisiana. At the same time, you feel perturbed by reports of paranoia in the PE camp: Chuck D (who’s been described as a man who’s never met a conspiracy theory he didn’t like) apparently believes that AIDS, Muhammed Ali’s speech problem and Richard Pryor’s multiple sclerosis are all part of a government anti-Black plot, while Sister Souljah’s new record imagines a President David Duke reinstating slavery--in 1995!

But wherever you stand or falter, there’s one thing you have to admit with more than a trace of awe. Four albums in, Public Enemy still do what no rock band today can seemingly pull off: not just comment on, but connect with, real issues, real stakes in the outside world; aggravate the contradictions, make the wounds rawer and harder to ignore. Compared with that, the petty debates and dissensions of “alternative music” seem awful puny....

2007-10-18T08:00:00.001-07:00

[Bring the Noise deleted scene #32]
CHUCK D, interview
Melody Maker, October 12th 1991

by Simon Reynolds

"The first album, Yo, Bum Rush The Show was, like, if
you can't get what you deserve, kick that motherfucking door
down by any means. It Takes A Nation Of Millions To Stop Us
was about how there's millions of motherfuckers stopping us
from getting what we need to get. And, from the black
nationalist point of view, there's millions of us holding
ourselves back. Fear Of Black Planet talked about the
paranoia of what race is - white people's problems with
themselves, their misconceptions about race.

"The new album, Apocalypse '91 - The Enemy Strikes
Black is about how we, the black race, have double agents in
our ranks who are contributing to the genocide. In order for
us to get our shit in order, we've gotta get those
motherfuckers. They'll just be outright destroyed, either by
the positive hardcore, or by themselves."

Chuck D looks me over, through hooded eyes, then continues. "From Day One,
I've said that there's no place for people who sell drugs in
the Public Enemy programme. Selling drugs to a seven year
old kid, that's just as lethal as coming by with an axe and
chopping his head off. You wouldn't allow him to do that, so
you shouldn't allow him to sell drugs."

Do you really see pushers as agents of white supremacy?

"Of course. They're victims too, but they're conscious.
They know what they're doing. And when they're doing the
wrong thing, they've got to suffer severe penalties. No more
time for the psychoanalytical approach. We can't feel sorry,
we can't even get emotional. It's damn near prophesised that
the motherfuckers will be slain outright, by the doers of
good over the doers of evil. What's going to happen is the
same thing that developed in South Africa, where the only way
to develop unity and organisation is to eliminate the agents.
In South Africa, they put 'rubber neckties' on them. Here in
America, you're soon gonna see brothers who want to get paid
saying to themselves: 'why bother to sell drugs, why don't I
just stick up and kill drug dealers?' You already got groups
coming up who say 'we love to rob the dope man'. We're gonna
see an apocalyptic situation with the rise of black
vigilanteeism."

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

It's said that African-American problems have a lot to
do with damaged family structures, with absent or derelict
fathers. I reckon Chuck D wants to be the 'Good Father',
hard but fair, meting out just punishment and putting his
people back on the straight and narrow. That's why he's so
tired this evening, worn-out by his duties. He's been awake
for 24 hours out of the last 28 hours, dealing with the
manifold aspects of Public Enemy, and he has to jet off early
the next morning to give a talk in the Mid-West.

The big conflict in rap right now is between aspiring to
be a "good father" (prophet, teacher, leader) or a "bad boy"
(hoodlum, gangsta). For some, rap's gotten too earnest,
righteous and didactic (you've even got groups appearing with
blackboards and lecterns in their videos). These people wish
rap would go back to the days when it was irresponsible, when
the slogan was "let's get stupid" not "holy intellect". But
others think its time rap grew up, shed its delinquent image.
and ceased reinforcing negative stereotypes of black male
youth. For these people, the inchoate rage of gangsta rappers
and ghetto youth needs to be channelled away from petty crime
and macho tantrums, into an orderly revolutionary programme.

"The new album's lesson is 'no more fun and games',"
says Chuck D. "There's no room for kids here. The black
situation needs less adolescents aged over eighteen. Fun and
games have got to be tucked to the side; responsibility and
business have got to take precedence. The album deals with
the whole question of what 'hardcore' means. The positive
hardcore is much harder than the negative hardcore. Negative
hardcore" - Chuck means gangsta rap like NWA - "is the easy
way out. Going round shooting brothers, beating them down -
that don't make you hard. Gangsta rap is street, but
political rap is a level above that, because once you
understand the streets then you're political. Gangsta rap has
lots of good stories, but it doesn't understand the structure
behind those stories. If you don't understand the situation,
you're gonna end up victimised by it."

If rap is suffering from a malaise right now, it's
because it's gotten so successful, it's fragmented; its
momentum has dispersed as people disagree about "the way
forward".

"People are saying rap's getting stale. Rap's not getting
stale; there are problems, but you've got to have a mechanic
that knows the motor rather than someone from outside. One
problem is that a lot of people are not controlling what they
create. Rap is selling more than it's ever sold, but the
industry has got this throw-shit-against-the-wall-and-see-
what-sticks mentality. Too many groups are novices in all
other situations apart from making the music. And they are
getting exploited. You can sell a whole load of records and
the record companies will tell you all the money went on
promotion. And that's where the game comes into play, and
whether you know what the game is and how to play it."

You sound personally bitter about your experiences with
the music industry.

"I'm not bitter, I understand it, where a lot of groups
don't understand it. You always get into a fight with
structures. A lot of people don't know the history of black
music, and how the jazz greats and the blues greats were
ripped off. At CBS alone, Aretha Franklin was exploited,
Johny Mathis was exploited, Sly Stone, Earth Wind And Fire
.... Everybody gets screwed over, I get screwed over - but I
know how to fight."

The last time I interviewed Public Enemy, in late 1987,
I claimed that their aggression, noise, militancy, brutalism,
made them far closer to ROCK than contemporary black music.
It was a contentious argument at the time, but since then the
"Bring The Noise" remake with Anthrax has validated it. Then
there's the fact that Chuck D doesn't like disco and doesn't
like R&B ballads, but loves heavy metal. "Metal has attitude
and it has speed, and that's two things that I like." More
than that, he admires metal groups for having their shit
under control.

"I've been to a few metal shows, and they were a
learning experience for me, in that I learned what I was
being shorted on when it comes to live rap shows. Sound
technicians and lighting technicians know how to enhance
metal groups to the max, but they don't know how to get a
good sound for rap. Seeing metal shows, I realised that rap
groups are missing out on a lot. One thing I know about
metal is that the attitude is there, and even though I
personally give out a lot to my audience, I know that other
rap groups can learn from metal when it comes to kicking out
to their audience. Metal records give a lot more in terms of
sleeve information and imagery. That's why metal groups stay
tight with their audiences for so long. A metal group's
career is like this" - his hand draws an undulating but
steadily rising graph curve in the air - "while a rap career
is like this" - he gestures a steep graph line that peaks
quickly then plummets. "In rap, groups are treated like
they're disposable, and so they become disposable. Heavy
metal groups are involved in how their their music is
presented, packaged, marketed. They have control of the
merchandising and their logos, whereas the vast majority of
rap groups have no control at all."

A shame metal groups don't do something more imaginative
with their total control, really. Still Chuck D genuinely
seems to believe rap and metal have a lot of common: Public
Enemy's upcoming tour with Anthrax is an attempt to tap into
the white headbanger market. One thing that Public Enemy's
kind of rap shares with Anthrax and Metallica's kind of metal
is an apocalyptic vibe. In righteous rap, as in doomsday
thrash, the lyrics speak of chaos and imminent devastation,
while the music embodies survivalist discipline in the face
of that threat. After the bewilderment and doubt of Fear Of
A Black Planet, Apocalypse '91 is a return to resilience,
spiritual stamina, girded loins. Musically, the new album's
not as varied as Fear; it's straight-slamming, rock solid
Public Enemy, the only real musical departure being "By The
Time I Get To Arizona", which pivots on a boogie bassline so
bad-ass it's stinks up your room.

Chuck D runs through some of the more notable issues
addressed on the album.

"The opening track, "Lost At Birth" is about how we as a
people were lost at birth, but now we
have to find ourselves. We do have a common bond. Excuses
are played the fuck out. In a time of war, equip yourself.
Equip yourself with what it takes to survive in the modern
world. The next track "Rebirth" deals with that problem:
how to reinstate your situation, get back the pride that we
had in the motherland.

"Night Train" talks about how, in the
black structure, we all look alike, but some people aren't
black inside like they claim to be. Everybody's riding the
same train, but for the shit to roll right, those people got
to be thrown off the train. They could be sitting right next
to you but you just can't trust 'em; they could be a pimp or
a murderer or a drug pusher. You've got to judge people by
their actions, not just by their black skin. You got devils
that come in all colours, all shapes and sizes. You got
grafta devils - 'grafta' meaning white, because whites are an
an offshoot or graft from the original black race. And you
got devils that look just like you. How you gonna treat
those people? You got to take them outa here." He makes a
sound like a pistol shot.

"'Can't Truss It' is about how the corporate world of
today is just a different kind of slavery. We don't control
what we create. And 'cos of the media, we don't control the
way we think or run our lives. We've got to limit working for
a situation that's other than ours. We have no ownership of
anything. If you don't own businesses, then you don't have
jobs. White people have jobs because they have businesses.
They have institutions that teach them how to live in
America. Black people don't have instititions that teach them
how to deal with shit. The number one institution that
teaches you how to deal is the family, but slavery fucked
that up. So the song is about the ongoing cost of the
holocaust. There was a Jewish holocaust, but there's a black
holocaust that people still choose to ignore."

"'By The Time I Get to Arizona' is about how there's two
states left in America that don't enforce the Martin Luther
King holiday: Arizona and New Hampshire. 'Move!' is about how
there's work to do. If you're over eighteen and you're acting
like a kid, get out of the way. The men are taking over.
Positive hardcore's gonna get the job done.

"'One Million Bottle Bags' is about the malt liquor
problem in Black America. Malt liquor has twice as much
alcohol content and twice as many residues, that's to say,
waste products from regular beer. It's fucked up beer, with
more alcohol. Instead of making people laidback, it makes
them hostile. And it leads to a lot of black on black
violence in America. They have massive campaigns for this
shit that are targeted at the black community. Malt liquors
are made by the major brewers in this country. When they put
their regular beers through the filters, all the excess
bullshit they push to the black community. And it's been
killing motherfuckers for the longest period.

"Lately one particular brand of malt liquor has been
advertised using rappers. And in one commercial [starring Ice
Cube] they sampled my voice. And a lot of people rang me and
asked was I down with it. They thought I'd endorsed it. So
I'm suing that company. I wrote "I Million Bottlebags" five
months prior to any of this legal shit. But when I found out
about the commercial, it was a slap in the face."

In Boyz In The Hood, a brilliant new film about life
in black Los Angeles (which incidentally features Ice Cube as
a malt liquor drinking youth) there's a Good Father character
who argues that it's no coincidence that there's a liquor
store and a gunshop in every black neighbourhood. He claims
it's part of conspiracy whose goal is the genocide of black
America. Do you agree?

"Of course. A liquor store, a gunshop and a drug dealer
on every corner. You go to a place like Louisville and
there's a liquor store every five blocks. And the type of
liquor they sell is stuff that's primarily targeted for black
consumption. Higher alcohol content, less healthy
ingredients, more bullshit. A quicker high, but more
devastation in the long run. I had two uncles in the past
year who died of liver disease. Personally, I 've never seen
the purpose of smoking or drinking. With other people, it's
their prerogative to do what they want. But on this issue,
there's two points. A lot of black on black violence is
caused by this liquor, it's distorted a lot of motherfuckers
mentality - they get into arguments, and if they've got a
gun, then somebody gets shot. The other factor is, I tell the
black community, if you're gonna drink anything, at least
drink what white folks drink.

"'Shut 'Em Down' is about major corporations like Nike
taking profits from the black community, but not giving
anything back, never opening businesses in black areas. And
it's saying that the best way to boycoot a business is to
start your own. 'A Letter To The New York Post' is about
how, whenever the Post covers a story concerning black
people, it's very one sided. They like to make out it's them
niggas fucking up again. They're like The Sun - onesided,
sensationalistic, trying to get readers at any cost. They'll
thrive on a racist situation. We've been misrepresented in
the New York Post a few times.

"'Get The Fuck Outta Dodge' is about apartheid in
America, in the form of noise pollution laws which are
designed so that you can't drive your car through a white
neighbourhood with your system playing loud. And I'm saying
when the shit gets that crazy, you've just got to get the
fuck out of town. I got stopped a while back for playing my
system too loud, cos I was a black guy riding through a white
neighbourhood in a jeep.

"Fear Of Black Planet dabbled in all kind of creative
avenues, the music was very broad. Sometimes I made
statements, sometimes I just presented a range of opinions
for the listener to pick and choose. A lot of the lyrics I
put questions marks at the end of them, to tell the listener,
'you figure it out, I don't know the answer'. This album I'm
hammering home specific points, saying you got to take care
of your own shit. Musically, it's very focussed too.

"With Fear Of A Black Planet, my bewilderment was the
question of who set race up. You have a limited amount of
time in your life, and yet the world is trillions of years
old, there's so much history. How much can any one person
master?"

That's the reason conspiracy theories are so appealing;
they simplify the confusion of history, give it a structure
you can grasp. It's tempting to imagine a plot (in both the
'narrative' and 'conspiracy' senses of the word) simply in
order to made the data overload manageable .

"You have data and you have counter-data. The data that
there is comes because it was written by people with a
certain perspective. I try to deal with things that are fact,
like slavery. One reason the Jewish people's story is so
strong is that it's recent and it's documented. In "Can't
Truss It" I talk about how it's hard to believe that for two
hundred years ships sailed the ocean with a cargo of slaves.
That's a holocaust. Jews are screaming over the 1932-1945
period - that's the headline for their story of persecution
which stretches back to the Middle Ages. The black holocaust
goes back centuries too, but we don't have that headline. We
don't document and we don't shout about it like we should."

2007-10-18T07:38:00.000-07:00

[Bring the Noise deleted scene #31]

LOLLAPALOOZA, report
The Guardian, August 29th 1991

by Simon Reynolds

Lollapalooza means a bizarre happening. Lollapalooza is a mobile rock festival currently traversing the US, a package of seven alternative bands (including Siouxsie and the Banshees, Living Colour, and Butthole Surfers) headlined by Jane’s Addiction, the Los Angeles-based art metal group who dreamed the whole thing up. Recession has led to the collapose of many of this summer’s US tours; Lollapalooza is one of the few that’s selling out, even adding shows in some of the 21 cities on its itinerary.

The more sanguine US commentators have dubbed it as “Woodstock for the Lost Generation”. That sounds fanciful, but although none of the shows pull more than twenty thousand kids, if you factor in the 26 performances being played you get a combined audience of nearly a half a million -- close to the number who attended Woodstock. The difference is that for Woodstock, Sixties youth traveled huge distances for the sake of an ideal; with Lollapalooza, the festival comes to the kids.

The festival was the brainchild of Jane’s Addiction’s charismatic singer Perry Farrell and drummer Stephen Perkins. The idea was conceived when the band attended the UK’s Reading Festival, a three day “alternative” rock jamboree, and, impressed, began to wonder why there was nothing like it in America. Farrell immediately saw an opportunity to create an event that was more than just a budget-price opportunity for kids to check out a load of bands. So each Lollapalooza performance comes with a sideshow of booths and displays operated by political, ecological and human rights organizations: Handgun Control Inc, Refuse and Resist, national Abortion Rights Action League, Rock the Vote (an MTV sponsored group that encourage young people to register to vote) and more. There’s also an “art tent” featuring work by local artists selected by Farrell (himself a Renaissance man, who sculpts, paints and has a full-length movie under his belt).

Lollapalooza is a riposte to the “twentysomething” debate that raged through the US media earlier this year. A number of critics and commentators characterized Eighties post-punk youth as a lost and defeated generation, impotent, directionless, and scared of political and emotional commitment. Overall, it was argued that the “twentysomethings” have failed to come up with a distinctive culture of their own to rival the baby boomer generation’s contributions (the counter culture and punk rock).

Lollapalooza is an attempt to rally the twentysomethings, to restore a sense of rock as a counter-culture rather than an over-the-counter leisure industry. “I predict a very strong youth movement will grown out of Lollapalooza,” Farrell told me in May. “I want there to be a sense of confrontation. But I’m not declaring myself left or right wing. I want to bring both sides into it.”

So how did it pan out in reality? I went to the New York area’s date (a couple of hours drive out to Waterloo Village in the wilds of New Jersey) with high hopes. But problems, or at least realities, intruded. One of the reasons the twentysomething generation seems to lack an identity is that it has too many cultural options, so that you either become a partisan of one subculture or you succumb to a schizoid eclecticism.

Lollapalooza’s bill reflects the fragmented nature of modern left-field music, ranging from Nine Inch Nails’ overblown electro-theatre to Butthole Surfers’ acid rock buffoonery to Sioxuse’s Goth and Ice T’s gangsta rap. Most of these groups attempt to reconcile or transcend genres, in order to achieve “crossover”. Living Colour blend metal, funk, jazz, soul et al into a polite, ungainly fusion with impecceable left-liberal credentials but little sense of danger. Ice T (now a superstar thanks to his role in the movie New Jack City) tried a more interesting gambit--not fusion, but fission, a split persona. For the first half of his set, he was “black”, a baleful rap hoodlum; for the second half, he tore off his cap, let loose flowing locks and rocked out as a “white” headbanger in his very own metal combo Body Count.

The counter cultural element of the festival was a shambles. The art was tediously “taboo-breaking” stuff (computer warped images, art made of detritus and found material), while the political aspect was more piously right-on than Perry Farrell had hoped. Overall, the event was marred by disorganization. Bringing your own food or water was forbidden, but they didn’t provided enough food concessions to cope with the demand.

What actually unites the youth of today was never really articulated. Most performers swore a lot, which went down well with the crowd, and there were various platitudinous expressions of opposition to censorship. But the most pronounced unifying aspect of the twentysomethings is a kind of voyeurism. This is typified by one of the groups participating in the cultural sideshow element of Lollapalooza--Amok, a publisher and distributor of “extremist information”; magazines and books by or about serial killers, conspiracy theorists, crackpots, and weird cults, plus video compliations of atrocities and autopsies.

Jane’s Addiction themselves are a great band languishing for the lack of a cultural context that would make them a world-historical force. (Hence Lollapalooza). After two brilliant major label albums--Nothing’s Shocking and 1990’s Ritual De Lo Habitual--they’ve built up a huge cult following, through reinvoking a sense of rock as an underground--a dark haven of deviant and transgressive behaviour. Jane’s Addiction are like an intellectual cousin to Guns “n’Roses.

Even performing below their transcendent best, Jane’s Addictoin fuse idioms (heavy rock, funk, ethnic music, psychedelia, Goth) in a far more volatile and incendiary fashion than Living Colour or anybody else in the “funk’n’roll” genre. Clearly, Farrell desperately wants his audience to live out their fantasies, rather than live through Jane’s Addiction vicariously. For Farrell, the only sins are self-denial, boredom and nostalgia. As the encore “Classic Girl” goes: “they may say, ‘those were the days’, but you know, for us, these are the days.” I was left feeling that the twentysomething generation, listless and impassive, doesn’t deserve Jane’s Addiction.

2007-10-18T07:33:00.000-07:00

[Bring the Noise deleted scene #30]

JAMES BROWN, Startime
Melody Maker, June 15th 1991

by Simon Reynolds

This four-CD mega-anthology reveals that there are actually two James Browns. The first is JB the patrician and patriarch: the disciplinarian who fined his musicians for the most miniscule misdemeanors; the black Statesman whose august presence could quell a ghetto riot; the black capitalist who monitored every last minutiae of his business affairs; the righteous role model with his anti-drug, pro-education songs ('King Heroin', 'Don't Be A Drop-Out'). This "hardest working man in showbiz"/"Say it Loud I'm Black And I'm Proud" JB is possibly the single biggest factor behind that particularly white/male version of soul that sees it as the music of spiritual fortitude. I recall one NME soulboy scribe declaring (having just slagged off some 'decadent' Goth group) that if he ever got to be Prime Minister, he'd make it compulsory for schoolkids to listen to JB for 3 hours a day, so that they could learn all about pride, passion and dignity. Totalitarian of passion, or what?!

But there's another JB that's worth digging through the R&B Reaganisms to recover: the JB that wasn't about being a control freak, but about freaked-out loss-of-control, voodoo possession, delirium, enslavement by the rhythm. The first disc, Mr. Dynamite, is unsalvageably antiquated, all huff'n'puff, horn vamps, hoary old showbiz dynamics. But from about 1966's "Bring It Up" onwards, Brown's music gets progressively more African and 'avant-garde': songs devolve into closed grooves, minimal, mantric, mind-exterminating and interminable. 'Cold Sweat' remains the definitive JB title, capturing the frigid feverishness of the sound. Tracks like 'I Can't Stand Myself (When You Touch Me)' and 'Ain't It Funky Now' are coition-combustion engines, "desiring machines", offering a stern, oppressive, exhausting brand of bliss.

On Seventies trax like 'Funky Drummer', 'Sex Machine', 'Superbad', 'I Got Ants In My Pants', 'Doing It To Death' and 'Hot' (the basis of Bowie's 'Fame'), almost every other guitar tic, bass palpitation and drum lick sounds déjà vu. But that's because they've been sampled by a thousand rap groups. If JB and Kraftwerk were the twin godfathers of hip hop, it's because there's an affinity between the coldblooded Teutonic technocrats and the fiery human volcano that would scandalize many a soulboy: a certain arid, clinical, maniacal precision of sound. Afrika Bambaata understood the 'Man Machine'/'Sex Machine' connection; that's why the Pharoah Of Electro persuaded the King Of Soul to collaborate on the 1984 single 'Unity'.

Madness, machismo, magnificent monotony: get up, get into it, and get involved.