Showing posts with label mystery of subcultural persistence. Show all posts
Showing posts with label mystery of subcultural persistence. Show all posts

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



Thursday, August 22, 2013

old news, a/k/a the mystery of subcultural persistence


I wrote about psy-trance in 1998. and again a couple of years later (for Spin), but even in 1998 it was hardly a new phenomenon, it had been going for several years already

but here's Vice magazine trying to present it as newsworthy!

funny, people still doubt me whem i suggest that there is something eerily inertial about pop (and semipop and unpop and antipop) culture in the 21st Century

movements that don't move, that stay stuck

gabba coming back more or less the same, but with different names(hardbass, jumpstyle etc)

oh and crikey, here's Vice / Noisey trying to make GABBA newsworthy too!


Gabba, which STARTED IN 1992!!

what's up for Episode 3? Drum 'n' bass???!???