the spark inside (kiddykore kontinuum)

 Chuck Eddy's fave single of 2024 -  "The Spark"  by Kabin Crew & Lisdoonvarna Crew, from Knocknaheeny, Cork.

The entire post-98 quarter-century-long enshittification of drum + bass redeemed at a stroke. It was all worth it.

The cadence of the rapping in the verses - with the first batch of MCs anyway - reminds me a little of Scarface on "I Seen A Man Die"

Check especially the little lad at 54 seconds

Now Kids + Breaks reminded me of this inevitably

The rapping though - as an example of Very White Rapping + high energy dance beat (the breaks are not very breaksy, more bouncy - ultra-linear NRG surge)  makes "The Spark" seem more like an outcrop of  this kind of thing and this kind of thing.

Blimey there's a whole bunch of this stuff featuring children - as performers, and prominently in the videos

"nee-naw nee-naw ... the bobbies coming / let's get running" - surprised this is still current slang for the police (it's as ancient as calling them the Peelers) 

Little crims (is there really a market for knocked-off dustcaps?)

"Mush" is a real throwback piece of slang - I remember that being a term used on Till Death Do Us Part.

Bleak vistas of new built Britain - and shrouded in fog too. 

The parent-in-me is troubled by just how many of these kids on these dirt bikes and quad bikes - doing alarming skids and backwheelies - are not wearing helmets

Many, many of these bassline + rapping tunes seem to be set on this same bike run  

Something a bit unsettling about all these pre-pubes acting gangsta -

"Been a baller since nursery"

"Ten years old and makin' wages"

"I don't wanna work, I'm a full-time G...  I like Nike and Max on my sneakers / truth is, I don't like my teachers" 

"Thirteen, making my own paper"

"I go school but I don't really need ta / Cos I got more money than all my teachers"

Little G's - and ladeez men too

"Let's take it step by step as we're only ten years old"

That's some haircut.

Like the comic strip styling of the video - puts it squarely in the Cartoon Continuum as well as the Toytown Techno lineage

MC Chippy seems to be a sort of Fagin-like figure with all these Artful Dodgers

Back to where we started... and which by default (not really been keeping track of tracks) is now my Single of the Year too

You can practically smell the Chicken McNuggets wafting off this 

The backing adlibs give off an unruly classroom, hapless supply teacher vibe. 

Only thing that mars is that whole "chase your dream" motivational thing....    find it disheartening how early these ideas are ingrained nowadays....  manifest your desire  replacing the manifesto as party program, privatized hope displacing collective advance 

time domain affects

 Chris Richards at Washington Post on South Florida "fast remixes":

"Clock-torquing has always been central to rap music, with DJs and producers perpetually tweaking the speeds of their samples, treating time like gobs of Silly Putty. Houston’s DJ Screw changed the trajectory of rap by famously slowing records down, loosening the tempo until it melted into a beautiful ooze — so it makes sense that a fast remix does something like the opposite. Instead of liquefying, the details crystallize. The beats become light and delicate. The rhymes get tight and Smurfy. Give a fast remix your most undivided attention and it’ll start to sound like a double-refusal of temporality and corporeality — a sort of metaphysical protest music."

Nice

although hearing them I think he kind of oversells a bit...

Some examples he cites: 

DJ Fetti Fee's rmx of WizDaWizard's "Don Dada's"  and rmx of  Wam SpinThaBin x Rico Cartel "Risk Taker"

DJ Frisco954's rmx of YN Jay "Summer Time" and remix of Kodak Black "Senseless" 

 

superhero / superantihero

Looking at the 4 Hero early EP The Head Hunter, with its back cover cartoon of the group as malformed beings grotesquely mutated owing to their experimentation with speeding up the bpm... 

It struck me they had one thing in common with The Groundhogs 

But there must be many other examples of musicians becoming comic-strip characters or animations. 

Well, there's the animated sequences in The Great Rock'n'Roll Swindle - a ruse around the non-participation of Johnny Rotten in the movie, the virtual nonparticipation of Vicious, and lack of documentary footage of certain key episodes 

                                                            original cel for Rotten

And here's that whole cartoon sequence from tGRnRS 

another sequence involving Vicious and his mum (plus smack and incest) (not actually in the finished movie) seeded these images on the left of the Great Rock'n'Swindle gatefold

which in turn reappeared on the front cover of this single and its music press adverts

kiddykore

 

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