Of Instagrammatology

Had Instagram for ages and ages but never got into looking at it regularly until quite recently....  the algorithm quickly learned to serve me up dance music, as that's what I'd linger on. So what I get is an endless succession of reels of deejays playing tunes, either in their living room, or it's clips of them performing at a rave. 

Occasionally there'll be one where a DJ or producer talks about a classic track,  either their own or someone else's - breaking down its sample constituents, naming its breaks, or talking about the gear used to make it. I also get a fair number of haggard record collectors type sitting in their 'record room' pulling out obscure library or soundtrack LPs, or Old Wave cult items, and mumbling about them.

But what follows here are some thoughts on dance music today informed entirely by the Instagram perspective.

TimeisNOTnow

I say ‘dance music today', but the first thing that comes across on Instagram is not-todayness: how dance music exists in a state of complete atemporality.  Tunes from decades ago sit alongside current tracks that are either incrementally different contributions to a long established and overcrowded tradition (techno, house, D&B, trance) or they are outright retro (with just a glisten of contemporary production polish sprucing up the time travel). Deejays draw from across these huge reserves of material, where the long-ago and the this-minute are equally valid. 

There's a tremendous awareness of history - a lot of clips are like ultra-brief history lessons, on a genre or a sound (like say Reese bass) or an auteur (DJ Zinc just today did a great little potted history of three key tracks by A Guy Called Gerald).  Yet offsetting that historical awareness, the overall effect of the platform interface for users is that chronology gets completely jumbled. There's little sense of a tune's original context (let alone adversarial context) or its place in historical sequence: the platform makes everything current.  

What has completely vaporized is the idea that anything is obsolete or passé. Everything exists in a permanent plateau of equal relevance - which has the side effect of making it impossible for any one sound (should an actually fully new sound ever emerge) to assert itself as supremely relevant and demanding of your undivided attention. Indeed, you could say that our attention is pre-divided, splayed across both an enormously expanded and accessible present and a teeming archival vastness that feels vertiginously limitless. Anything that is new and different, like say amapiano, has to fight against, fights its way through, all this quality music arrayed before our ears.

An example of how these syndromes play out.

The gentleman who calls himself Fish56Octagon - and who deejays in his front room wearing a dressing gown (I'm always expecting it to come open as he jigs about, genitals bouncing forth) and often is nibbling on his breakfast, which appears to be Weetabix bits in what looks like a dog's bowl -   played a nu-UKG tune on this label: 

Timeisnow

Sub-label of Shall Not Fade, specialising in UK bass-driven dance music styles.

Established 2019. Bristol, UK.

The record has a period-perfect title, Bubblers EP, and the sound is spot-on

According to Mr Fish, this labels and others like it have pushed nu-UKG to the point where deejays playing it are getting major sets at festivals all around the world.  

And this makes me queasy....  for all the reasons you can imagine. Like what happened to supercession? The dialectic of dance? Fanatical focus? 

(Mr Fish picks from a huge range of genres and as a working deejay either jumbles it all up in a set OR plays a set dedicated to a single genre but just as one arrow from his quiver)

Atemporality and historical hyper-awareness has some strange kinks.

Here's a nu-UKG label called Move Silent, and Keymag asks the man behind it why the name: “This is really giving up the secret. Years ago, I had this t-shirt that sold really well, and had the phrase “Move Silent”. It embodies how I operate in life. I’m a big believer in the phrase, “empty vessels make the loudest noises”. “

Which is funny to me because I would have 100 percent assumed otherwise it was a nod to  "Bad Boys Move In Silence" - could this dude really not know the foundational UKG track by A Baffled Republic? 

 (Mind you, I only just realised the line "bad boys move in silence" comes originally from Notorious B.I.G.)

Another label Shadow System, the guy behind first heard UKG from his dad playing it!

(Reminds me of another reel I saw recently, a young kid playing "hardcore jungle"  - and the text reads: "When ur dad’s in the crowd so you gotta blend in his favorite tune from back in the day")

Some of these nu-UKG labels are as far flung as Finland and Houston, Texas.  

So it's not just atemporalized, dance music, it's really postgeographicalized too - unrooted from any location socially and spatially. 

Well not completely  - in the Keymag article, one of the Finnish nu-UKG dudes (the label is Polar Dance) says: 

"I’ve been cutting icicles from roofs because when you snap it off, it makes an amazing sound rhythmically. There is a traditional Finnish instrument called a kantele, which is like a sitar. I've been trying to use it on some tracks as well."

The Keymag writer Nathan Evans notes of the Houston nu-UKG bods: 

"Aside from the way they literally went back in time with a black mask and comically large knit sack and stole from the Nice ‘N’ Ripe mixing desk, what struck me about Houston’s UKG is how there is even a label pressing limited-run vintage garage vinyl at all. It speaks to shockwaves of the revival, that’s enough to traverse space and time simultaneously."

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

Another new-to-me genre  has popped up in these reels - not the living room ones but the (usually female deejay) playing to a big room.

The name of this genre is schranz. It designates - I assume onomatopeia-cally in German - a sort of hard, fast, banging techno with a scrapy, dirtily abrasive sound. 

I looked it up and was surprised to learn that the term has existed since the late '90s, albeit very much a local-to-Germany term, associated with Chris Liebing… and it appears to have crept forward gradually to some kind of larger semantic currency without ever really taking off. 

I listened to a Chris Liebing associated album (Metalism) the other day and  thought it was rather good - and then with a shock realized it was over 20 years old. 

The female deejays playing hard as nails tekkkno brings me to InstaGrammatological observation number 2

DJ as showman not shaman

The hyper-visibility of social media and the influencerization of dance has turned deejaying into a performance style rather than a technical craft - or rather the craft aspect of working the deck has itself become spectacularized.

In these clips - at home alone as much as in front of a crowd - the deejays are really working those mixer controls. They are dancing while mixing and whooping it up -  as if the jock was a punter rather than a punter-pleaser. The etiquette of deejaying has vastly changed from back in the day when jocks were still figures, impassive and grave as they went about their work, their sobriety in marked contrast to the abandon of the revelers,  as if to say "this is serious work, I'm a professional."  Deejays never danced; their job was to make others dance. But nowadays deejays performatively flaunt their own pleasure, erasing the distance between the professionals and the crowd. If female, they are usually glammed up and often scantily dressed - blurring the roles of deejay and podium dancer.

Male or female, these deejays work the mixer frenziedly, fussily tweaking the EQ knobs and finessing the fader. There is a kind of performative rhetoric where the arms are tensed as they reach for the knob and they pull away the hand and arm after tweaking it with a dramatic flourish. All while jigging around sinuously and often drawing on a cigarette (tense business, deejaying)

But... as far as I can see,  little of this flaunted physicality is really necessary - the exertions are extraneous to the modest physical effort that is actually required.  It’s all for show - and in that sense similar to, indeed possibly inspired by, the rock guitarist’s gestural repertoire, the expressive pantomime of “guitarface”. You can make massive, devastating noises on the guitar with very small movements, thanks to amplification and effects. You can make them sitting down, as Spacemen 3 proved, without all the strutting or headbanging. And so it used to be used to be with deejaying (often the deejay was nowhere in sight, tucked away in some alcove).

I have seen a few Insta reels that prove my point: here the deejay goes against the norms of hyper-visuality and goes about their work in a low-key sort of way, minus the histrionics. Instead of all that mixological performative hoo-hah, the jock - usually filmed in the domestic space - is subdued, limply moving their arm to tweak the knob and then withdrawing their hand slowly, without any flamboyantly flecked gesture that says "decisive mix move just made"

Also - this happens with the tracky techno and house above all - more often than not I cannot hear any substantial difference made by these decisive moves to change the EQ or cut out a frequency band. It all chugs on much as before without a dramatic change - certainly not a wrenching shift that would require such gestural flourish. Perhaps the very smoothness and seamlessness of the transitioning erases its own achievement?  

DJ tools-y techno seems to me to be the most static of artforms, really unchanged in its fundamentals since the late '90s.

N'Joi'd that

 

Sourced in

Isn't she lovely?

After N’Joi, Saffron fronted - front being the operative word  - this Republica tune that I file with a lineage of excitable go-for-it ladette pop (Icona Pop, "I Love It", Pink "Coming Up", Spice Girls's "Wannabe", Ke$ha "Tik Tok" / "We R Who We R", Martin Solveig + Dragonette "Hello", Ting Tings "The Drums", right through to Charli xcx)

Even more delightful in this mode I think

Too exuberant and boisterous to be glamorous, too insolent to be elegant 

Lily Allen hovers on the edge of this lineage, as a spiritual sister, a cheeky monkey, but her tunes are a bit too chill and leisurely in tempo yet also laden with meaning, lyrics-wise. Too fraught with grown-up anxieties and recriminations, too, whereas these girls are out to party and have not a care in the world.

Of course that's pretty much where Charlie XCX started her career, so it's make a nice loop of party-hard girl-pop

“Ready to Go” is a very calculated record - let's merge dance and Britpop - but for all that a perfect slice of mid-Nineties energy - a time when things were a lot better than we tended to think at the time  (all that pre-millennium tension bollix, darkness shtick) compared with the next three decades of steady descent into hell

N-Joi, I've never found anything else by them quite as exciting as "Anthem"

But the Untouchables had another amazing moment

Shattering ecstasies

Part of its own mini-lineage of 'distraught divas' tunes - Johnny Jungle "Flammable", Omni Trio  "Mainline" , Acen's "Trip"

Talking of being "taken away" and shattering ecstasies

N'Joi played an important role in my life insofar as they were one of four rave acts playing live at a major conversion moment in my journey towards becoming a raver. The headliner, in fact, so I would have been peaking when they came on....

Ahoy there, me hearties (pirate encounters)

Well, a dream comes true - I appear on a pirate radio station. Except it's legal now, but still - Rinse FM!

I am talking - alongside Martin Clark aka Blackdown - about Burial's debut album, which came out 20 years ago - on Eclecticist's show on Rinse.  

Now I think about it, I have been on a pirate before - twice in fact. 

The first time was inadvertent: BBC radio (I think Radio 4) had done a report on jungle, then emerging, in the summer of 1994, and the reporter came around to our flat to get some quotes from me. And immediately after it aired, one of the pirates - Kool FM if I recall right - pirated it. Played the whole program a few times on the radio. So there I was, coming over the airwaves of the station I most  frequently tuned into at that time. (In 1994, after 8 years living in South London, I had finally made it North of the River and was living in Belsize Park, slipping out of range of my beloved Don FM but in compensation able to pick up Kool and other pirates that had mostly been out of reach when living in Brixton). 

Another time I actually deejayed on a pirate - but this was not a nuum pirate, it was a sort of hipster pirate in Williamsburg.  Sometime in the early 2000s. I played gloomcore and stuff like that, but the guy before me played Anthony Braxton and such. So the station was a bit like The Wire on the air.  I have no idea if anyone listened. Still, a buzz to do. 

A few times I have been inside an actual functioning London pirate station - Flex FM at the height of 2step in 2000, that was in South West London, a big if delapidated house, when reporting on UK garage for Spin. Deekline was spinning.

And then in 2005, again reporting for Spin, this time on grime, I got to go inside Rinse FM's HQ, a basement of a building near Whitechapel. It had once been a travel agents and it was surprisingly smart looking still (compared with Flex FM). They even had a sort of ante-room with a sofa in it, and then the actual room where the deejaying took place - the Ruff Sqwad followed by Roll Deep - was quite tidy. And actually now I recall it was Martin Clark who made the connection for me and came long to the session (thrilling to watch close up - the young Skepta was there). So big up Blackdown. 

Here's what I wrote about Burial in 2006 when I reviewed it for The Observer Music Monthly

Burial

Burial

(Hyperdub)

The mystery-shrouded artist known only as Burial is affiliated to the dubstep scene, a  sister-genre to grime that this year looks set to eclipse its waning sibling. Running in parallel for the past half-decade, both these London underground sounds rely on the same pirate radio infrastructure and share a common history in UK garage and jungle. But dubstep is a largely instrumental style bigger on mood than personality (no shouty MCs here). It’s also a site-specific music, its bass-heavy menace achieving full impact only through a massive sound system in a dark, crammed club. Burial’s self-titled debut is the first record from the scene to transcend that context. It evocative atmospherics and enfolding  ambience make it a perfect lose-yourself soundtrack for headphones or lights-low living room listening

“Distant Lights” blueprints the basic Burial sound: an ominously amorphous bass-rumble and a frantic-yet-subdued 2step beat are countered by the slow-motion mournfulness of the track’s other elements, a yearning vocal sample and a reverb-blurry trumpet, like Kenny Wheeler wilting in a Temazepam swoon. Titles like “Night Bus” pinpoint Burial’s subject as the melancholy and anomie of city life, while “Southern Comfort” localizes the vibe further to South London. But the feeling this music creates--imagine The Blue Nile of “Downtown Lights” but with the euphoria turned to sorrow--is something any metropolis-dweller anywhere on the planet will understand: sensations of  grandeur and possibility battling with desolation and entrapment.  There’s a simmering, suppressed violence bubbling inside Burial’s music, hinted at in titles like “Wounder,” which conjures images of a city full of damaged people ready to inflict damage on others. But there’s also a hovering grace and tenderness that makes me think of Wings of Desire, a quality that emerges most clearly on “Forgive,” a beatless ache of sound threaded with the sounds of cleansing rainfall.

This album actually comes complete with a concept (it’s a sound-portrait of a near-future South London submerged under water, New Orleans-style) while the most persuasive readings of the album hear it as a requiem for the lost dreams of  rave culture. But the non-specific sadness that shimmers inside this music ultimately transcends attempts to pin it to a place, period, or population. You can imagine Burial’s tremulous poignancy reaching out to hurt and heal all kinds of listeners--fans of David Sylvian and Harold Budd, Massive Attack and Boards of Canada, Radiohead and Joy Division. This music can go far. 

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

I am reading Moby Dick at the moment - it's incredible, but it's taking me a long time - and one thing that surprised me is that seafaring men of that era did actually address each other en masse as "me hearties" e.g. "pull hard, my hearties" when rowing a small boat in pursuit of a whale

Pure Inspiration

Well, I may not have provoked a musician to pen a retaliation tune (unlike my own flesh and blood, who recently joined a select pantheon of irritant critics). 

But I can now bask in having inspired a song, and one made by a well-known and highly regarded group too: electronic act Overmono. 

Their single "Lockup" - which heralds a new album Pure Devotion - apparently came from reading not Energy Flash, like you would probably have expected in the circumstances, but the other book of mine that people like.

 According to the Overmono duo, brothers Tom and Ed Russell:  

"We’d been reading rip it up and start again by Simon Reynolds and just generally on a massive post punk binge trying to find out as much as possible about how some of those records were made and the philosophy behind them". 

"We got so obsessed with the all tactile soundscapes, the chaotic mix decisions, the use of physical processes and spaces and probably most importantly the approach to trying to break as many things as possible in the process of creating something new. "

For "Lockup", Overmono  sampled "What A Waste" - not the Ian Dury song, but a tune by Birmingham postpunk outfit Fast Relief, who I've never heard of (call yourself a postpunk historian!)

It's on this comp of Midlands postpunk on the Easy Action label

Which you can hear on the streamers - like here at Tidal

Update: Stylo finds it on YouTube too

And here's a photo of the group, who appear to only made the one recording, as excavated for Un-Scene!

They could hardly look more postpunk. Flute in the line-up too.

Listening to "Lockup" I'm not really hearing the connection to postpunk beyond the sample. But it's a cool track - I like the way they loop the yammering vocal from "What A Waste", making it sound almost like bhangra. 

I seem to remember enjoying Overmono's earlier stuff while feeling they were, if not outright retro-rave, then consolidators of the tradition.

But then people making music today in most fields are unavoidably history-conscious, given the  accumulation of all that music behind them.

Whether it's rave or rock or rap, the tradition exists as a fact, a pre-existing thing, an arrayed archive of massed material - something to work with, to rework...  

It's in the way, and the only way forward is to go through it... 

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

I await the album with interest, curious to see if there are other manifestations of postpunk

don't B ridiculous

 

Made me mad? Sent me to sleep more like!

It's nearly always the case that the things that are touted for their supposedly superior musicality, are actually - on inspection - rather meagre, musically speaking. 

Timbrally and tonally impoverished. 

Especially when compared to the alleged hoi polloi of the day.

Far more startling melody-dissonance clashes and harmonic strangeness to be found in the jungle tekno of the time.  

(And we won't even mention the rhythmic shortfall).

But I am preaching to the choir here, no doubt! 

"Mondrin" - I assume there's an "a" missing here?

I liked the title of their second full-length effort, which was three years a-comin', Time Tourist but not sure I ever listened to it. 

Yet like so many IDM-ers they had a perfectly solid pre-career doing hardcore

Like this moderately entertaining bit of novelty bleep-acid

This one even has a breakbeat-y groove and a mentasmic synth-smear

This has a piano vamp and a nice curl of diva vocal

A blippy chugger with a fairground Waltzer-like riff

Moderately bangin'!

But then within a year or so, they opted for restraint and politesse

Another good title

from a less-good titled EP Retreat from Unpleasant Realities

Acen apex

This video for the Monolithikmaniak mix of “Window in the Sky” - only to be found in this fuzzy, off-TV video cassette recording - is some kind of audio-video apex of its era. 

The chaste frenzy of the female dancers, who look like twins, but aren’t

The sound, so original and consummate - not techno but pure rave: those swoops and the squitty synth riffs that mash and mesh into the breakbeats, which are choppige at its most advanced yet also pop euphoric.

Here is something I blogged 20 bleedin years ago about “Window” - first installment of an unfinished (barely started, more like) series at Blissblog:

instalment one of an irregular series

THE TOP 300 HARDCORE RAVE TUNES OF ALL TIME

300/ Acen, "Window In the Sky" (Production House, 1993)

"Window In the Sky" was Acen's "River Deep Mountain High." After such a colossus was spurned by both general public and hardcore rave scene, what else was there to do but retreat from view. (Well there was a cool trip-hoppy thing as Spacepimp on Clear several years later, and I heard that more recently he's returned to making drum'n'bass in a low-key way). But "Window in the Sky," wow: a spectacular exit. The drum programming alone contains more creativity than most bands cram into their entire career. You want the mix ("Kingdom of Light") that's on Hard Leaders III: Enter the Darksideand also starts the 75 minutes CD that Profile put on in 1994, a weird little posthumous monument/semi-anthology that's highly listenable (six other mixes of "Window" by other Production House bods like DMS and Nino in state-of-art-94-junglist style, plus various other Acen tracks) but ultimately inadequate (doesn't have the definitive mixes of "Trip to the Moon" or "Close Your Eyes"). Someone really should do a proper Acen anthology, with the original mixes/remixes of "Trip" and Close". But yeah, with "Window", the moment at which hardcore could be pop has passed (it had passed with "Trip" which narrowly failed to be a hit in the late summer of '92) but it's like Acen is trying to hold onto that moment by force of will. And also hold the rave scene together (the sound at times is almost jungle-trance--epic and cheesy and dark and pop and hardcore all at once) under the roof of a single anthem-of-anthems.

~~~~~~~

Strangely Acen is not as proud of this personal zenith as you would imagine, see below from this extensive convo I had with him for the Wire pegged to my review of the Acen box set on Kniteforce.

 Acen Razvi

Simon Reynolds talks to the producer behind the reissued 1992 hardcore classic "Trip II The Moon"

Released by Production House in 1992, Acen's “Trip II The Moon” is widely revered as a hardcore classic. As the Kniteforce label prepares to release a six disc vinyl set dedicated to the track and its various B sides, including new remixes from the likes of Pete Cannon, Luna-C and dBridge, Simon Reynolds speaks to Acen Razvi about hardcore history and breakbeat science.

Simon Reynolds: In the 1980s there was a kind of street beats culture in the UK – almost everything came from America and Jamaica, but they got jumbled up here. That resulted in a series of only-in-Britain hybrids whose components all came from overseas. In America, the borders between scenes and genres was more demarcated, but in the UK people moved across scenes or they took bits of everything they liked and made a composite. The classic example would be B-boys into electro and early rap, who then had their minds blown by acid house, and started to mish-mash hiphop, house, techno, dancehall, dub and more into a new sound: hardcore jungle. That is basically your story arc, right?

Acen: Pretty much exactly that. In the early 80s I was doing a lot of breakdancing to electro at school discos. Then I was in a crew called Atomic Rockers, we’d put our lino on the street and practice crazy legs and windmills all summer. The Breakdance movie was a huge inspiration. Then came the harder mid-80s rap and I started to get heavily influenced by the Def Jam sound: Beastie Boys, LL Cool J, Public Enemy. Around 1987–88, I started hearing the DJ cut-up tracks by UK producers like Bomb The Bass, MARRS, Coldcut – that whole megamix scene. That’s when I started listening out for samples and becoming aware of all the old James Brown classics.

My family lived in Greenford in West London. Ealing and the Broadway was my stomping crowd. I would go to the Warwick Road parties near Ealing Common and the Haven Stables club. That’s when I started hearing acid house and then the warehouse ‘bleeps’ tunes like Nightmares On Wax, Unique 3, Sweet Exorcist.

SR: Around the same time as those Northern bleep records, a distinctive London sound combining bleeps with sped-up breakbeats and ragga chat emerged – the germ of what would become jungle. You have mentioned figures like Rebel MC and Ragga Twins as particularly inspirational.

Rebel’s “Wickedest Sound” and the whole Ragga Twins/Shut Up And Dance set-up really cemented that fusion of raw hiphop and ragga with the warehouse rave sound. It was a melting pot of everything: bleeps, bass, breaks. Tunes by The Scientist like “Exorcist” and “The Bee” really moved me. I started religiously following labels like Reinforced, Tone Def, Kickin’, Moving Shadow, Suburban Base, XL. Liam Howlett and The Prodigy were another big inspiration – the What Evil Lurks EP.

SR: Part of the mythology of hardcore rave is teenagers making tunes in their bedrooms with no musical training, messing about with technology without consulting the manual – leading to a lot of mutilated, mutant, so-wrong-it’s-right results. That’s not entirely a myth, as a listen to the early 90s flood of white labels would show. But quite a few rave producers had backgrounds in bands and knew how to play instruments. You didn’t, but you had studied music technology – a different kind of technical expertise.

I did a BTEC media course at West London College in Hammersmith, where I cut my teeth on film making, drama and music technology. Originally I was interested in dance and fascinated with film. But once I went into a music studio for the first time I was hooked. The equipment I had available in the early days was simple stuff – hardware synths like the Yamaha DX7 and Korg M1, and drum machines like the Roland R-8. And an Akai S950 sampler. A bit later I got the Roland W-30 workstation, which was actually way ahead of the gear we had on the course. That was the beginning of gathering samples and obscure records – anything from the BBC Radiophonic Workshop to The Wiz soundtrack. Then there were the soul and club tracks – those came back then with a cappella versions and dub mixes – so it was easy to isolate a vocal to sample.

SR: Production House, through which you released “Trip II The Moon”, was not only one of the biggest hardcore rave labels, it was as crucial a cluster of multicultural mix-and-blend as Soul II Soul or the Bristol scene centered around Massive Attack. How did you hook up with them?

I already had a demo of the first single “Close Your Eyes” sitting on a cassette and a friend knew this DJ called DMS. He liked the tune and took me round to Production House’s HQ in Harlesden, West London. It was a completely ordinary looking three bedroom suburban house in Herbert Gardens, but with two recording studios inside. The upstairs one was kitted out with synths, samplers and a tape machine, and then downstairs was a more acoustic studio with a vocal booth. Phil Fearon, the co-founder of Production House, had enjoyed chart success with the Britfunk group Galaxy in the 80s and produced some pop acts, so there was gold and silver discs on the walls of the studio, But by the time I joined, the focus of the label had shifted from street soul in the late 80s to house and rave – underground tracks.

SR:Alongside the three Acen singles, you became a mainstay of the Production House team. You worked with DMS on his classic “Vengeance” track, remixed/reproduced tunes by the label’s core act The House Crew, made tracks like “Exodus (The Lion Awakes)” with Floyd Dyce under the name The Brothers Grimm, contributed to Russell Norris’s releases as X-Static…

After “Close Your Eyes” started making waves, I got on a roll with other potential tracks and had demos of “Exodus” and “Field Of Dreams”. But because “Close” was still hanging around the top of the dance charts, Floyd thought it would be better to put them out under a different names. He finished both tracks. Then DMS rolled in with the Run DMC “king of rock” sample, so that led to “Vengeance”. X-Static was a similar process: Russell would bring in some dub records and we’d started jamming and ended up with "Murderous Style”.

While we were finishing the X-Static EP, I was already into the process of making “Trip II The Moon”. Originally, the “take me higher” sample from Britsoul group Tongue N Cheek was the main hook, but I felt it needed something else. I hit a wall, so I went out looking for vinyl and I just happened on the You Only Live Twice John Barry soundtrack at an Oxfam shop in Ealing. I had always remembered a haunting bit of music from the James Bond film and it turned out to be "Capsules In Space”. That immediately resonated with me for “Trip II The Moon”. And then I used “Mountains And Sunsets” from the same Barry score for the “Pt 2” remix “Trip II The Moon (The Darkside)”.

SR: That subtitle would have been one of the very first times that “the dark side” became a buzz term on the British rave scene. The track came out late summer 1992, but by the start of 93, everyone was going on about darkcore and putting out records full of horror movie samples and sinister mind-bending sounds suggestive of a bad trip. Of course there had been darker moods in techno before: Eon’s “Fear: The Mindkiller” and “Basket Case”, and before that acid house tracks like Sleezy D’s “I’ve Lost Control”. But with that “The Darkside” subtitle were you tapping into the emerging drift towards dread and paranoia in hardcore rave?

I wasn’t really picking up on anything dark side coming from the scene. It was more a double meaning to do with the dark side of the moon. And a darker reimagining of “Trip”.

SE: Then there was third mix of “Trip II The Moon”, showcasing some dramatic piano playing. You actually taught yourself to play the instrument just for that mix, right?

I really don’t have any background in music. I don’t even know how to read or write, I just play riffs and feel out the structure. Everything is from the gut but I see it visually also, so when designing sounds or creating patterns, that helps me. With “Trip” part three, I wanted to create something more synth based and I just kept jamming until I had this piano riff.

SR: Championing this stuff as a critic at the time, the polemical thrust was the idea of hardcore producers as untrained delinquents shredding all the rules of musicality. But what strikes me now listening to breakbeat hardcore and early jungle is actually how musical it often is. The tunes often involve multi-segmented arrangements, artfully structured with dynamics and builds, bridges and breakdowns. Partly because there’s so much use of samples from film scores, the tunes are packed with melody and interesting harmonic shifts – or clashes. With producers like you, Hyper-On Experience and The Prodigy, it’s a maximalist aesthetic, whereas most techno and house in the 90s was ‘tracky’ – one idea strung out over six minutes, subtly inflected. That kind of techno works as DJ tools: unfinished music that is completed by the decktician combining it with another barebones track. Whereas the best hardcore tunes are actually much more like finished ‘works’.

I got into the music when it was minimalist, the repetitive acid and bleep tracks – just a square-wave riff over a four-to-the-floor Roland 909/Roland 808 beat. But by the time I was producing my own stuff, it felt like the music and the scene had turned a corner with full-on breakbeats and big riff changes every 16 bars.

SR: “Trip II The Moon” is literally orchestrated, isn’t it? The rights owners to the John Barry tunes wouldn’t clear the samples, so Production House had to hire a small orchestra to perform the parts and you resampled them.

And I sampled both pieces of music with the exact same settings I did with the original vinyl – the same low resolution bit rate. We used that to save space for memory because we always used to max out the very limited memory on these samplers. Or you could get creative with speeding up the record on the turntable and slowing it down in the sampler to squeeze more time out of the sample memory.

SR: Your first two singles under your own name, “Close Your Eyes” and “Trip II The Moon”, were monster successes – the top one and top two dance tracks of the year in the Music Week chart, shoving The Prodigy’s “Everybody In The Place” to number three. “Trip” cracked the Top 40 pop charts too, albeit only just – it got to number 38. Was the thinking with the follow-up, “Window In The Sky”, ‘this time, let’s have a real pop smash’? There was a proper promo video, with a pair of female dancers doing amazing frenetic moves, and yourself as a shadowy figure, the rave magus. But it didn’t cross over.

“Window” was released just a bit too late. The scene had already turned a corner. I wasn’t fully satisfied with the EP compared to the first two Acen releases. I had changed my studio set-up and that slowed down the creative process. 1992 was the magic year where everything was on point. But around mid-93, it all changed. The darker, more minimalist stuff was ascendant again and “Window” still had that MAXIMALIST 92 vibe. Of all the “Window” mixes, I prefer the harder “Monolithikmaniak’ version.

SR: Production House would actually score a UK pop number one with the 1994 release of Baby D’s “Let Me Be Your Fantasy”. That was through a deal with London Records and its dance sublabel Systematic. You also had an album deal with them – but nothing ever came out. What happened next?

Jungle had really taken over by 1994 and I was trying to make an album on that basis but London couldn’t see a commercial angle in the way that they did with Baby D. I parted ways with Production House and took some time out from making music. For a while I was really into the Mo’ Wax vibe and early big beat things like The Chemical Brothers. I made some slower tempo tunes. Under the name Spacepimp, those tunes – “K9 Law” and “The Pimp (Lino-Cut)” – came out on Clear Records. That was going back to the electro 808 bass sound and my days of getting the lino out in the street and breakdancing.

Then in 1997, I was really liking what was going in drum ’n’ bass with Bad Company, Ed Rush, Optical, Dom & Roland. I started making some tracks in that vein, one of which, “116.7”, came out on the American label Higher Education. My favorite release for them was the Eric B & Rakim “I Know You Got Soul” remixes – Ganja Kru on one side and me on the other.

SR: Rakim is someone you’d sampled on “Trip” – “I get hype when I hear a drum roll” . Your Production House tracks are full of 80s Brit B-boy touchstones – snippets of Ultramagnetic MCs and The Real Roxanne. I’m curious, though, whether you kept on following rap into the 90s. For me, after the cartoon hyperkinesis of hardcore, the East Coast sound of Jeru The Damaja, Wu-Tang Clan, Nas, sounded really flat – one break, one loop of orchestration. I suppose the counter-view would be that these beats are meant to function as plain parchment for the scripture of the rappers, whose intricate flows syncopate with the steadfast groove and whose complex lyrics should be the focus of your attention, not the music.

All the rap records I collected over the 80s transformed into a big sample library in the early 90s. I definitely went out and bought even more “flat” hiphop in the 90s simply because I needed more breaks and vocal samples, not really for listening pleasure any more. But I did like the rawness of Wu-Tang and in 1993–94 I was hugely into the Dr Dre/Snoop sound.

SR: After putting out a few more mid-tempo breaks tunes in the early 2000s, like “Dirty Raver”, you dropped out of music for about 15 years. You switched lanes completely, plunging into a career working in video, while also moving to Dubai. But then suddenly in the last couple of years, the Acen name has reappeared with tracks like “Play 2092” and “Thrilla” that build from the classic Acen sound of 1992. You’ve done a similar thing with your re-remixes and the totally new track “Rings Around The Moon” that appear on the Trip II The Moon 2092 box set. What’s it like trying to put on an earlier music self like an old pair of trainers?

I actually found it quite therapeutic to reinhabit the mindset of my 19 year old self and use the same methodology. The equipment was pretty much the same – I needed it to be authentic and so I hunted down the old Akai MPC60 and used a lot of the old methods of generating samples. Sometimes you need the old gear to trigger "that" sound and be inspired by that era.

SR: The Guardian placed “Trip II the Moon” at number two in its list of All-Time Greatest Rave Anthems. Many old skool hardcore fans would place it at one. Casting modesty aside, do you agree? And what would its competition be?

Honestly, it’s impossible for me to really know what the biggest rave anthem was. Even for me personally, it was always a changing state of emotions: when a tune comes on at a particular moment and resonates with you, that is the biggest tune for you. At different times that would be The Prodigy’s “Your Love”, Genaside II’s “Narra Mine”, Nebula II’s “Athema”, Shades Of Rhythm’s “The Scientist”… Sound Corp’s “Dreamfinder” was another marvel.

SR; you are obliged to be diplomatic, I’m sure, but which of the nine guest remixers does the best reinterpretation of “Trip” and its original B-sides “Obsessed” and “Life & Crimes Of A Ruffneck”?

If forced, I’d say that I was equally impressed with Pete Canon’s remix and NRG’s. But I have a soft spot for drum ’n’ bass and I also loved Danny Byrd’s take and the dark rattle of dBridge’s remix.

that's why they call it a...

 

Missed this 2016 tune, nodding back to / riding on a 1997 tune

that's some folk-memory persistence

some contiNUUMity

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Ooh a UKG refix of what on some days is my absolute favoritest jungle tune of all-est time. 

This looks to have been not made during the height of speed garage but much later... 

It is admittedly not great but...  

It's the thought that counts!

Let's hear the original

I mean, how could tunes this glorious this not birth an ongoing and sustained cultural movement, I ask you! 

No wonder subsequent phase-stages felt compelled to honor and reactivate

Hertfordshire massive, part 17

Everyone knows about Moving Shadow coming from Stevenage

But I hadn't realized that Ruff Kut! Records was from there

As in The Good 2Bad & Hugly 

Variously spelled - sometimes there's a comma, sometimes it'se "The Good", sometimes it's Hugly and sometimes the Hugly, and sometimes there's an ampersand and sometimes nothing at all

Like The Criminal Minds, the ruff-cut origins are in Britrap

Those are all from Ruff Kut!'s debut release from 1991, which wasn't a single but an album - a sort of scene sampler, mixing MC tracks, street soul, fast breakbeat instrumentals that aren't quite jungle yet, and some bleepy acid-y tunes

On Discogs it says the LP came out of a youth project - "thanks to Prince of Wales Trust"!

Now I think about it - actually I did know Ruff Kut! was from Stevenage. Because that's the label that put out Gappa G and Hyper Hypa's "The Information Centre" - and I discovered not so long ago that GG and HH played on a Hertfordshire pirate, Perception FM, whose existence I couldn't have imagined back in the day (on visits to my hometown to see the family,  it would never occurred to me turn on the radio).  (There was also Pressure FM in Luton). 

But then again Stevenage was an London overflow town, like Hemel and Hatfield - and in that sense a kind of outpost of nuum demographics. In fact it was the U.K.'s very first New Town - albeit having existed in much smaller form for centuries before it. 

However I hadn't realized that Good 2 Bad Hugly was the main driving force behind the label

At a certain point Good 2Bad Hugly reactivated and has been churning out nu-jungle releases including New Town Sound Boy, Vol. 1. 

That record features the track "Never Give In"

https://good2badandhugly.bandcamp.com/track/never-give-in

on which the man behind the alias - Jimmy  Ryan -  muses on what jungle meant to him back in the day... 

Also powerful is "Brush Dem Off" 

Never give in, never give up, indeed - still hurling out EPs, with New Town Sound Boy, Vol 3 out  just this January 

There's also been a bunch of reissues, including Ruff Kut Reissue, Vol. 3, whose cover shows a famous pair of modernist landmarks in Stevenage - the Joyride statue and Clock Tower in the town centre. 

There's some similar but not quite as impressive statues in the New Hemel bit of Hemel Hempstead as it happens

 

Previous posts on the Hertscore Continuum

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Back in the day

G2BH did a track called "Wuthering Heights', sampling you-guessed-it the twittertastic vocals of Home Counties girl Katy B

Well in recent years G2BH went back to the Bush source for "Running Up The Road"

A different twist on 'hardcore' - laced with porno moans

"You Know How To Love Me" is the stone classic but the rest is a very solid body of ruffige 

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Here's a whole interview with Jimmy Ryan of Ruff Kut! and Good 2Bad Hugly at Gone To A Rave

some key snippets: 

"I used to work in a youth centre in Stevenage called Bowes Lyon Centre. From the age of 11 up to 16 or 17 I was there literally every day. I’d gone to the director of the place and asked him if there was anything I could do, and he said, ‘yeah we’ve got a music project going’. The project was to produce an album using all the youth that go to the centre. This first album was called Ruff Kut.

"... There was a group of us who were really into hip hop from an early age. We were all DJs and MCs, we were into stuff like Public Enemy, Rob Base and EZ Rock, all the electro albums. Bowes was a youth club – if you imagine a youth club that every Friday had 500 kids from all over Herts and Beds. It was quite a melting pot of people. For example, we’d have crews from Luton, St Albans, Letchworth, Stevenage, North London, they’d all go to this club. If you ever watched Grange Hill, it was like that, but the music was current. 

"..... Just to give you an inkling of the heritage of the place, Rob Playford from Moving Shadow, and 2 Bad Mice used to go.

".... with what I gained knowledge wise [from doing the album], I went to Princes Trust to start a recording studio, I’d got a bug for the recording side of things. The youth leader at Bowes said, look I know you’re interested in starting up a studio, I’ll let you do it here until you get yourself going. I couldn’t believe it! I got the grant from Princes Trust, then I got approached by two… I’ll call them partners now. They said they were looking to invest in something, and they knew I had a recording studio, so they suggested we start a label." 

"before I’d created what I’d call my first rave track, a guy took me down to a rave club called Milwaukee’s. I walked in and was like, wait a minute, this is me! Hahaha… I’d gone, ‘everything I love about music is here, its getting played right now!’ And that was it. I knew that it was my music, what I wanna do. Literally coming home from Milwaukee’s, I went straight into the studio and produced my first rave track. I think that was You Know How to Love Me – although it gets a bit foggy in my memory…

On The Good 2 Bad and Hugly -

"It was supposed to be like Soul II Soul at the time, people would drop in and out – I was the main person, some people would drop in – for example, when we did PA’s there’d be 5 of us working keyboards and samples, scratching and DJing, and MCing, then we had about 15 dancers. It was all people who used to dance at Bowes, it was just a natural thing, we’d say, oh we’re going to do a rave next week, whose coming?"

We Can Be Freeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee

Enjoy this forensic analysis by Michaelangelo Matos of a classic pirate radio set. 

Presented yesterday at the EMP conference, it's titled "We Can Be Free”: The Pirate Radio Explosion of Ezee D on Don FM (February 20, 1993) and can be enjoyed in script form at MM's Beat Connection Substack.

Enjoy also the set itself at Soundcloud 

I once gave a talk titled "Just 4 U London" at EMP, back when it took place in Seattle every year - I can't remember if I played any pirate radio snippets, though.... 

Up Middle Finger

 

This pair had a Top 10 hit with a song that is basically about an intra-scene war - the nu garage rappists (Oxide + Neutrino, So Solid) versus the old guard. Represented here by the sour faced, jowly, paunching-out a bit deejays who get their comeuppance thanks to a G-Force rippling blast of noise. 

Portion of the lyric

The garage scene well it's really fucked up

Certain guys can't, won't keep their mouths shut

All they do is talk about we

Something about we're novelty cheesy

Smelling your top lip stop the jealousy

What, 'cos we didn't start from 1983

Oh, I was in my nappy

Did I mention we're only 18

Carnival '99 DJs put up a list telling other

DJs not to play this

But when I asked a certain DJ why

He gave me a shit of a reply

If I recall right, there was actually a kind of steering committee of scene elders - called maybe The Council -  that was formed or mooted to ensure that UKG was run correctly, in terms of media coverage, who got to represent the scene etc

An echo of the Committee (I believe that was the name) formed during jungle over the whole General Levy fracas...

Maybe the jungle era one was The Council, and the garage one was the Committee

Videos from this era of UKG (see also Truesteppers) have a cheap-and-nasty digi-quality (obviously age and wear have worsened it in this case, making it look really los-res - like an ancient 128kps mp3). Feels like it was clumsily processed to have a sub-Hype Williams gleam to it. Actually what it looks like is a Nathan Barley episode. 

Mark Fisher thought "Up Middle Finger" was the spirit of punk reincarnated as UKG.

Here is a piece he wrote for Hyperdub when it was a website rather than a label, under the name Mark De'Rosario

Hyperpulp: It's All the Rage 2001 

by Mark De'Rosario 

Oxide and Neutrino's Up Middle Finger is as important for 01 as the Pistols' Anarchy in the UK was in 76. Like Anarchy, Up Middle Finger is both a call to arms and an darkly exuberant gesture of joyful defiance. Alongside Ms. Dynamite's Booo! (an instant classic, surely the biggest tune in the last year), Up Middle Finger demonstrates that UK garage's efforts to ethnically cleanse the genre of all impure' elements has failed, big style. Everything exiled from the snooty, purocentric higher echelons of UK garage - jump-up ragga-chat, abstract numanoid electronix, frenzy-inducing MCing, deep darkcore bass, film samples, kiddiecore refrains - has returned to terminate its former masters. With extreme prejudice. 

Up Middle Finger captures a mood, a growing undercurrent of rage in the country about the discrepancy between the sunny vistas projected by managerialist PRopoganda and the webs of corrruption and incompetence that are lived everyday reality. Neutrino's fury will resonate with anyone who has the misfortune to have tangled with Style London's sad coterie of promoters, PR zombies and A and R people. But, more generally, his invective also speaks to and for anyone who has been blocked and patronized by the complacency and arrogance of all the bullet-pointed, empty-headed drones who officiate in the blurry liar lair of Blair's Britain. Neutrino brings back an edge, an aggression, that has been lacking for too long in a British culture that has seemed to pride itself on its tolerance of mediocrity. 

Whilst totally contemporary, Up Middle Finger (and the Execute album from which it hails) sound like a return to the vibe - if not exactly the sound - of jungle in its earliest, most fissile and molten phase, when the sonic contours of the new genre were first becoming audible. 

Effectively, O and N have rejected everything 'progressive' that's happened since then - they have rescinded the supposedly inevitable maturation process which proceeds from bolted-together, frankenstein-monster cyborgianism towards the smooth and seamless surfaces of the painstakingly simulated organically 'pure' sound that has enjoyed dominance lately. Listening to O and N, you're reminded of the cargo-culting, skip-scavenging exuberance of Rufige Kru, Tango and Ratty, even the early Prodigy. You're taken back to that vertiginously exciting moment, or series of moments, when rave's synthetic hyper-energy was swept up into the sorcerous vortex of timestretched breakbeats and hyperdub bass. 

Ms. Dynamite and O and N are being sold as 'garage', but as their interviews on this site show, they are themselves uneasy about the classification. The currents passing through them belong to ragga, rave and hip hop as much as to garage. Essentially, like early jungle, they are hyperpulp. Hyperpulp is a mode of hyperdub, but defined by a particular relation to mass culture; it is a cybernetic monster that feeds on pop culture and trans- [or de-] forms it into a blobby, seething multiplicity. 

Hyperpulp culture finds its model not in the club scene, with its cult of the DJ, but the Jamaican soundclash, with its ruff and rugged indifference to smooth mixing, and the pivotal role it accords to the MC. Oxide and Neutrino - the DJ and MC team - re-effectuate this abstract machine. For those schooled in a white European post-romantic tradition, MCing sounds like something supplemtary to the 'primary text' of the music itself. But in hyperpulp, there is of course no primary text, only an intense multiplexed libidinal experience, which includes and is intensified by the MC's chatting on the mic. The MC's melting of dominant english into the lyrical flow of patois sloganeering functions as an excitation-heightener for those who want to get hyper. 

Like NYC hip hop in its early days, Jamaican dancehall culture is fuelled by the antagonistic energy of competing crews. (It's no accident, of course, that Oxide and Neutrino are part of the So Solid posse.) Whilst the intense competition between collective groups is sometimes transected by hard war gangsta/ yardie territorialized violence, it is essentially a soft war - a gift exchange in which no-one loses, and the pressure to outdo the other crew produces a spiralling intensity of experience for da massive. 

Da massive is crucial in all hyperdub genres, but it is especially important in hyperpulp, which feeds on and amplifies hype-waves. Witness Oxide and Neutrino's sampling of 100,000 Scottish ravers on Up Middle Finger. The sheer size of the collective body is used as an audio-weapon targeted against the closed-system entropy of scenes which pride themselves on their disdain for popularity, as much as it is directed against the dismal tastefulness of overground popculture. O and D's use of samples of the Casualty TV theme and of dialogue Lock, Stock... are acts of audio-abduction or sonic viracy, in which existing mass cultural associations are radically deterritorialized and minoritized; the certainties of spectacular culture are de-faced, contaminated with traces of rogue semiotic virus. 

Where pop tends to interpellate the lone consumer, the solitary spectator, hyperpulp dissloves private subjectivity in the oceanic bassdrome of collective delirium. In overground capitalist popular culture, maturity is signalled by the move from impersonal collective pulp-out into privatized, facialized emotion. Goldie's career offers an exemplary map of this dreary trajectory. Beginning with Rufige Kru and Metalheadz, in which he anonymized/ pseudononymized himself into the collective while simulating the synthetic POV of the terminator and the replicant, he ends up sold as a 'solo' artist, hangs around with saddoes like Noel Gallagher, and devotes much of his last album to baring his soul. 

Soul and soulfulness are of course crucial terms for the anti-pulp purists. It's worth remembering here Foucault's remarks in Discipline and Punish on the production of the modern soul. The soul, Foucault tells us, does not precede modernity's disciplinary institutions: it is precisely constructed by schools, prisons, and factories, all of which act to extract an individual subject from the dangerous, teeming multiplicity of 'compact masses.' Baudrillard's arguments in Symbolic Exchange and Death take Foucault's position further. According to Baudrillard, the arrival of the immortal soul marks the imperialistic triumph of monotheism over primitive cultures, which transforms its swarming pantheon of warring entities into 'demons.' 

The tyrannical domination of Dance's SS - the Style and Soul gestapo - has kept the demons out, but they are everywhere in hyperpulp. (Even Goldie, never fully seduced by the soul paradigm, was still invoking Demons on Saturnz Return.) Hyperpulp trades in sonic fiction, and as such feeds upon pulp modes effectuated in other media, especially Horror and SF video. Video samples, once so conspicuous in jungle and speed garage, have been noticably absent in the re-musicalised, soul-dominated phase of garage. 

Over the years, there has been a remarkable consistency in the sonic textures of the various reactive, boracratic genres Style London has tried to foist on the rest of us. From rare groove through to acid jazz, from 'intelligent' drum and bass through to soulful garage, the same sonic traits are always evident : there's a preference for melody over rhythm, for 'real' instrumentation over the synthetic and the samploid, for personalised emotion over dehumanised abstraction. Naturally, these are reinforced by snooty social codes based on snobbery and exclusivity, which are diseminated by the scene's lapdogs in the depressingly hedonistic dance music media and in the style press - all of whom are dissed, hilariously, by Neutrino on Up Middle Finger. 

The so-called garage wars are nothing new, and in fact date back at least as far as the emergence of jungle. Jungle, don't forget, was so named as an insult. Devotees of the original US garage sound - that finessed-to-the-point-of-body-numbing-tedium 'lush' production identified most closely with that high priest of sonic bureaucrats, David Morales - decried the use of breakbeats, essentially for exactly the same reasons that Style London's current hipoisie are cussing Oxide and Neutrino - lack of purity. 

Purity is no more real in music than in ethnicity, and no more desirable. It is only ever a retrospective simulation, something hallucinated after the fact by a group of control freaks resentfully anxious about its fading status. Inevitably, purity has no positive features of its own, but is defined negatively, by what it excludes. What purocrats hate about hyperpulp is its ruffness, its refusal to close down into a well-formed aesthetic object. But this is precisely what is exciting about hyperpulp - its dubtractive removal of all that we thought we knew about identity, genre, about where sonicultures had come from and where they are going. Subtract identity, contaminate 'purity', and potential is produced. Now that Soul and Style are losing their grip on garage, something new can be heard emerging. 

Hyperpulp has come back to corrupt its illegitimate offspring. Celebrate its return. 

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"Up Middle Finger"  full lyrics

(Up middle finger I show dem) 

Didn't wanna back we

Now they beg friend

Up middle finger I show them

Back in the day, they didn't wanna know

They wanna dis bound 4 da reload

They wanna talk to Neutrino, no no no

They wanna dis so solid so, no no no

Didn't wanna back we

Now they beg friend

Up middle finger I show them

Back in the day, they didn't wanna know

They wanna dis bound 4 da reload

They wanna talk to Oxide no, no no no

They wanna dis so solid so, no no no

The garage scene well it's really fucked up

Certain guys can't, won't keep their mouths shut

All they do is talk about we

Something about we're novelty cheesy

Smelling your top lip stop the jealousy

What, 'cos we didn't start from 1983

Oh, I was in my nappy

Did I mention we're only 18

Carnival '99 DJs put up a list telling other

DJs not to play this

But when I asked a certain DJ why

He gave me a shit of a reply

Later a bitch said to me

We'll never make it with Casualty

Ha ha ha, he he he

Now the silly bitch wants to try and hire we

Didn't wanna back we

Now they beg friend

Up middle finger I show them

Back in the day, they didn't wanna know

They wanna dis bound 4 da reload

They wanna talk to Neutrino, no no no

They wanna dis so solid so, no no no

Didn't wanna back we

Now they beg friend

Up middle finger I show them

Back in the day, they didn't wanna know

They wanna dis bound 4 da reload

They wanna talk to Oxide no, no no no

They wanna dis so solid so, no no no

Certain guys can't face the fact of

What we've done

Sold over a quarter of a million Casualty went

Straight into No 1

And they still wanna cuss come on

Oh yeah about the Casualty theme

Well no one controls the scene

So you do what you want

And you do what like

And you do what you please

Yeah, guys want to cuss our tunes, say it's shit

Think other people don't like it

But boy we don't care

And we got something for you

This is DJ Oxide playing in front of about a hundred thousand people

Listen to this

When I say you say we say they say make some noise

When I say you say we say they say make some noise

When I say you say we say they say make some noise

When I say you say we say they say make some noise

Didn't wanna back we

Now they beg friend

Up middle finger I show them

Back in the day, they didn't wanna know

They wanna dis bound 4 da reload

They wanna talk to Neutrino, no no no

They wanna dis so solid so, no no no

Didn't wanna back we

Now they beg friend

Up middle finger I show them

Back in the day, they didn't wanna know

They wanna dis bound 4 da reload

They wanna talk to Oxide no, no no no

They wanna dis so solid so, no no no 

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Ed in comments makes a good point about the middle finger thing - when we were kids, the V-sign, the two-fingered salute, was the universal expression of hostility and disrespect.