Monday, September 9, 2013

not Nineties revivalism but Nineties survival-ism

and fuck me, the third one in the series is about drum'n'bass! my derision turned out to be prediction

Clive Martin continues his Vice explorations into "scenes that refuse to die"



someone involved, or connected, gave this rationalisation via twitter -- "no one ever claimed these were new things, just that they existed. and as such, justify analysis."

erm, i'd have thunk, to be honest, it had more than enough analysis, drum 'n' bass, over the years....  i confess to being sated, in that department... perhaps that's the reason for its living death, being analysed to death


"refusing to die" (yet ceasing to change, grow, evolve), that would suggest something faintly monstrous, going against nature, about the entity in its umheimliche persistence....  a calcified recalcitrance in stubborn opposition to the natural arc of genres that carries them through through emergence to maturity and then onto decay, senescence and disappearance

it suggests there's something uncanny about time, in our time

still according to Laurent Fintoni at FACT, D&B is in ruder health than it's been in many a moon, thanks to infusions of footwork and reversions to the 93-95 split-tempo, slow-bass/fast-breaks 80/160 template

some examples from the piece


s'alright... Mark Pritchard's hardly young blood though is he!


s'nice,  bit like Hidden Agenda, or J-Magik, or indeed MP's "Amenity", a year or two before the whole scene turned to shite



3 comments:

Simon said...

questions after actually watching the film all the way through

1/ might have been interesting to address what caused a majority black or at least 50/50 mixed-race scene (jungle) to become such a total white-out (only black face in those scenes = the MC)

2/ a chance of getting glassed - you kidding? like metal, it's a pantomime of violence and aggro. and as with metal and hardcorepunk, probably couldn't find a gentler bunch of kids i'd have thought

Simon said...

oh yes and

3/ "guaranteed to confuse your Bowie loving parents"

erm, possibly, but not if they'd been paying attention, because David Bowie did a drum'n'bass influenced album called Earthling back in 1997, laced with Amen beats and framed with interviews in which he knowledgeably referenced the likes of Kemet Crew. So that's 16 years ago,,,,

Timh Gabriele said...

RE: Pritchard being an old hat, dBridge also cut his first single back in '94 (!) and has been doing drum n' bass pretty much ever since (http://www.discogs.com/MC-ID-Featuring-De-Ice--D-Bridge-Rare-Jazzy-Crash-Test-No-2/master/66663). Not exactly a newbie himself.