THE NUUM AND ITS DISCONTENTS, # 5

MASCULINE PRESSURE

or,

(REAP)PRAISING THE "HARD" IN HARDCORE


Quite often during hardcore continuum discourse there'll be an invocation of "the feminine"--as a depleted or suppressed quality in the music, and sometimes in the discourse about the music too. This deplorable deficit will prompt calls for an irrigation of fluidity to counteract the encroaching inflexibility, whether it's a stiffness and riffness afflicting a particular nuum genre, or the "ossification " [fnote1] syndrome caused by excessively rigorous theorizing.

Now the person invoking "the feminine" in these debates (if they're well-read they might even mention Helene Cixous's ecriture feminine) is always male, and not the least bit hesitant about recruiting "the feminine" to support their argument (generally aimed against some other male, an old fashioned iron fist wrapped in the velvet glove of quasi-feminism). Compare that with the way that few people nowadays would be sufficiently unaware to do a similar rhetorical move using "blackness": over time it has sunk in that few things are more undignified than two white guys squabbling over whose has the better understanding of/ relationship with musical "blackness." (I speak, wincing, as someone who has in the past been one of those two white guys). Despite this it's still permissible to do the inverse racism move and complain about an excess of "whiteness" in the music. Indeed nuum-discourse participants do this quite regularly, railing about particular subgenres that have gotten too "whiteboy" , which usually means too rocky/riffy, which in turn means too masculine/phallic. Taking us right back to all those invocations of "the feminine".

Now I did actually feel slightly self-conscious about invoking the Mighty Yin during my Liverpool talk--the passage on hypersoul/diva vocal science/"feminine pressure". As the paragraphs approached it suddenly felt awkward to be talking about this stuff in a room that contained a fair number of women: what would they think? But I ploughed ahead--had no choice, since those points were central to my argument, and furthermore were (as far as these things can be gauged) "true". There is a diva-fabulous, "feminine presha" undercurrent running through the nuum that every so often totally swamps the music (2step being the supreme example).

But in terms of my becoming intrigued by gender-coded discourse games [fnote2], the seeds of this essay go back a couple of months, when my interest in Caspa was sparked, having been startled by the vilification of the man and his music. All that incredibly vivid revulsion for wobble's mid-frequency blare as the sound of "someone jizzing in my face" and "bukkakestep"! All that anxiety about dance music degenerating into rock: "rigor mortis mid range shite… punching the ceiling and moshing rather than dancing… shouty soulless gack… big chunks of riff meat".

Here's a recent deployment of this kind of rhetoric, albeit calmer in tone: Louis Pattison spotlights as Guardian single of the week "Narst"/"Love Dub" by Cooly G (an actual woman! on Hyperdub!!).

"As dubstep begins to resemble, quite literally, a boy's club -- one that pongs of a pungent mix of spliff and locker rooms -- Hyperdub, the label behind the murky, underwater two-step of Burial, ups the ante once more… 'Love Dub' and its remix are a reminder of UK bass music's capacity to sooth and seduce, all gently massaging sub-bass, breathy vocals and woozy synth that collects like warm pools of sunlight."

Stop press: and here's another one, same newspaper, different writer, same rhetoric from scribe and artists alike (Bristol's new "purple" sound purveyors Joker, Guido, Gemmy--all men as it happens):

"There's a gender issue here, too: since the sexy vocals and pop sensibilities of garage disappeared, British club music has become dominated by bland masculinity. Guido says that is reflected on dancefloors: 'The low-end sounds carry the power, bass, and aggression, and the mids and highs carry the sexy melodies. Without the melodies, dubstep and grime clubs have lost the girls. But the girls get up and dance to our stuff'.... For too long, British dance music has been po-faced, masculine, drab...."

Stop Stop Press: in the big dubstepforum July 2009 discussion about wobble versus post-dubstep, one commenter referred to the low-frequency-oscillation riffs of wobble as "LFO rape":

"its not even the fact that the wobble is hated. Its just the LFO Rape I dont agree with.. My Defininition of LFO Rape... the process in which subject uses an LFO preset to create soul-less, machine music."

Stop Stop Stop Press: and still they come: in the second issue of Loops, Kev Kharas bigs up the in-touch-with-its-feminine-side aqua-step of Joy Orbison's "Hyph Mngo" versus the Swarzeneggerism of Coki's "Spongebob" ("a workout in thugstep cliche that womps along tediously doling out nuggies and farting the word 'generic' into air stale with dead sweat reek and 'roid fumes... pumped and solid to the extent that it leaves no room for any response other than a moody grimace and a flailing fist" followed by numerous references to the "generic thugstep" it spawned (Caspa, Rusko, etc), music "that only seems to make sense to moshing males with a heavy sadness in their loins".

Stop Stop Stop STOP press: and yet more--reviewing the Ikonika album in the Wire, Adam Harper sets up the familiar bogeyman of wobble a/k/a brostep: "at a time when what many hold to be dubstep has taken steroids and left London to conquer the world as the new Heavy Metal, rattling (almost exclusively) male students' bedrooms with its gargantuan sub-bass"

Stop Stop Stop STOP STOP press: and for once, here's a woman actually voicing this complaint, Ikonika herself, interviewed in FACT, says of wobble and the big room/big drop mentality: “I’m not into jumping about, moshpit kind of stuff.... I have played after some big headliners who’ve caused a moshpit, and you can smell the set... I dunno if I should say this, it’s pretty explicit, but from a girl’s point of view, whenever I hear really big wobble sets, I find it offensive. ‘Cause I’m picturing sex, and when these guys are playing big wobble sets it’s like coming on a girl’s face. And you’re reloading it, and you’re doing it again.”


Yes, the potent whiff of man-stench has been giving the custodians of dubstep the jitters recently. Is it going the way of drum 'n' bass post-1997, they worry? Actually what I hear, at least in potential, is something closer to slowed-down gabba. Complete with gabber-like cartoon bad-boy samples and puerile abjection/pulp horror yuk-yuks (track titles like "Diahorrea," "Putrid Creature," "Puking Over", "The Mong Song"). The handwringing dismay of the cognoscenti has a curiously déjà vu quality. Dubstep, six years into its existence, has become a hardcore, headstrong, having-it scene, with a following of punters and munters, not just pundits. Its original fans, scholars of the history of hardcore to a man, are repeating the exact same kind of attack lines the Balearics and house heads spat in 1991: ardkore as "the new heavy metal" for shirtless sweaty hoolies, "all the curve and swing has been squeezed out… all it seems to be about is boys, bass and bother".

At the time there was a counter-view: another Caspar (Pound, young boss of Rising High Records, RIP), proclaimed: "Hard as fuck! It's the rock of the future… The best thing about hardcore is that all the soul's been taken out. We’ve had 200 years of human element in music and it's about time for a change…. It's not about happiness, it's more aggressive, more intense."

Those words were uttered in early '92, the nuum's dawn (bliss twas to be alive and rushing your nut off). What Pound identified as an emergent force in the music--aggression, apocalyptic darkness, a soul-less mechanistic coldness--would prove to be a massive current within the hardcore continuum all the way through its existence. It's hardly ever gone away completely, and often it's flared up to completely take over the music.

Yet strangely it's become almost impermissible in recent years to say that what attracted you to this whole area of music was--in large part--its qualities of hardness and darkness, its ability to overpower and dominate the listener. In a peculiar twist, "macho" has replaced "poppy" (code for "girly") as the way cognoscenti diss(miss) things that aren't tasteful or "progressive" enough. As I noted in the Caspa column, people refer to the macho, noisy dubstep as "commercial".

Now all these gender-codings and "feminine pressure" moves [fnote3] would be irrelevant if they didn't have some correlation with what's going on within the scene itself. Handily corroborating what I'm addressing here is currently hot tune "Too Many Man", a grime/funky hybrid by Boy Better Know:

"We need some more girls in here/We need some more girls in here/There's too many man/Too many many man"

So at last we arrive at the crux: the lugubrious concept of the "sausage party", a social gathering where hardly any women are present. Jeremy Gilbert described the UEL seminar as the most male-dominated academic event he'd ever organized. I wasn't surprised to learn this, not in the least. In my second reflection I noted that "the majority of us appear to be boys, regrettably" and suggested "the reasons deserve further investigation". What follows is my attempt to probe that mystery.

First thing to note is that no one ever voluntarily and with foreknowledge goes to a sausage party. It's something you end up at inadvertently and discover with slowly mounting dismay. In the case of nuum-discourse, I don't believe women are excluded so much as they simply don't turn up. Some do, obviously, but the sexual imbalance is marked. Begging the question: if this music is so crucial, and the discussion about it so compelling, why don't we have something much closer to gender parity?

I'm not sure this is a nuum problem exclusively. It's probably even worse in some other areas of discussion about dance music--deep house snobs, Detroit techno purists. It's possibly a fairly uniform syndrome across the music nerdosphere. Even in the poptimist milieu--where the whole premise is "letting in and privileging the music of the teenage girl"--there's a rather high density of sausage. This doubtless relates to a common mode of engagement with music that cuts across genre divisions: competitive expertise, the drive to mastery and knowledge, curation, collecting/classifying, canon guardianship, taste and taxonomy battles, etc.

I can get weary of all that, like anyone. But I get equally weary when blokes go into auto-flagellation mode about their blokeishness (especially when the self-reproaches quickly subside and it's back to blokey business as usual). I don't believe that obsessiveness and hyper-seriousness are somehow discredited by this gender imbalance, that it reflects badly either on Obsession in a general sense or on the specific musical area being obsessed about, over-interpreted, etc. I think these activities have an intrinsic value. Nerdishness has some things going for it: knowledge, enthusiasm, the capacity to get carried away by ideas. I'm just curious why relatively few women are drawn to engage with this particular form of music in this particular mode.

One possibility, of course, is there is something about this music that has a particularly strong attraction to males, or to a particular subset of males.

Right up front it ought to be acknowledged that lots of the key moments of the nuum have been, if anything, hyper-masculine: ragga-jungle, techstep, grime, and certain strains of dubstep (early on, the colder, techno-y side of the music; more recently the rowdy wobble yobbery). (I'm trusting here that people will allow me to use the conventional codings of masculine and feminine in this essay for the purpose of argument--obviously I'm aware of their culturally constructed nature). There have been peak phases within the trajectory of the nuum that have only really been celebrate-able in terms of their hardness and aggression, through recourse to notions of music that tests the listener, to an ideology of the underground as anti-pop. Terms that are conventionally negative, that are unappealing in life and in entertainment--cold, severe, militaristic, machinic, emotionally armored, tense, dread-full--are valorized within this music culture. More than that: they're glamorized. You only have to look at the slanguage of praise generated within the scene itself: tracks or DJ sets that are slammin', kickin', tearin'…. deejays or MCs who smashed it, tore it up, killed, slew… music that is rude or ruff, sick or disgusting…

And then consider the sonic currents percolating all the way through the music's history. The gruff swagger of hip hop and dancehall reggae doesn't require elaboration, and in nuum history these flavours generally overpower or at least balance out the influence of house (diva vocals, groove, the disco tradition). But pushing things further to the yang, you have the fourth cornerstone of the nuum: hard techno [fnote4]. The "Dominator"/"Mentasm" sound of Belgium and Beltram… the clanking, mechanistic industrialism of Meng Syndicate and 80 Aum plus the harsher bleep exponents like XON and Forgemasters… the riffy-ness of Frank DeWulf and CJ Bolland… even the darker side of Detroit (early UR, Suburban Knight, Kevin Saunderson's Tronikhouse alter-ego) creeps in a bit… This strain of cold, punitive bombast, rooted partly in Electronic Body Music and Euro industrial, is something that resurfaces periodically: in the techstep brutalism of No U Turn and Dom & Roland and Renegade Hardware, in early grime and sub-lo, at various points in dubstep. Hell, there's some Human Resource-style sicknoize on "Mind Is A Gun" on the recent Newham Generals album!

So running parallel with the current of feminine pressure within the nuum there's an equally strong current of masculine pressure [fnote 5]. Crudely diagrammed, you can track a dialectic here, a pendulum-like oscillation, or (more frequent, actually) the fissile coexistence of opposites:

Yin / Yang
Pop / Anti-pop
Song / Track
Maximalist / Minimalist
Swing / Stiff
Cheesy / Dark
Sentimental / Cold
Groovy / Machinic
Human / Inhuman
Pulse / Riff

A point worth making at this juncture is that the yin terms are very much forces within the music. It's feminine pressure. What could be more formidable than the diva? I make this point because many who call for the nuum to get back in touch with its "feminine side" confuse that with a sort of aquatic androgyny, a metrosexual mildness. Hence the recurring error of the Dolphin Move, where the "logical progression" for this music is to make it sound more like Carl Craig or a Nu Groove B-side (something you can see with a lot of the wishy-washy, watery dubstep of recent years that converges with Basic Channel/Chain Reaction…. Don't get me wrong, that Martyn album is splendid home listening, but mash up a dancehall?). Or you'll get people bigging up deejays for mixing with slow blends and gradual builds rather than the wham-bang pander-to-the-massive style, with its orientation towards "the drop". But "true" nuum music is about the dynamic co-existence of equal but opposed forces (dark/light, minimal/ maximal, etc), rather than a Derek Smalls-like "fire + ice = lukewarm water" half-measure.

Looking back across the history of this music, it seems to me that even during those periods when you might say that fem-presha was ascendant (speed garage and 2step), the darker, harder undercurrent still lurked balefully within the slinky sexiness. Early UK Garage had tunes like "Gunman" and "Sound Bwoy Burial" (the raucous dancehall MC christens the track's genre-of-one as "ruffhouse"!), like "Cape Fear" and "Bad Boys Move In Silence". Even 2step--nuum at its slickest, most mature and melodic and sugarsweet--had its fair share of rudeboy MCs and dutty bass-2-dark. On one of 2step's most poptastic crossover hit ever--Truestepper's "Out of Your Mind"--Victoria Becks taunts: "this tune's gonna punish you".

So what I'm talking about is how the nuum (and dance music in general) has this secret side that's raucous and ruckus-oriented and, face it, rockist. And this is disavowed, even when it might have been the very thing that drew some of us into the music in the first place. Certainly in my case it was Beltram and Bolland and the Belgian bombast-blare that pulled me into rave, before I turned on to the breakbeat direction…. the mid-range riffage of what was then just called "techno" was the first time that I heard something coming out of the house music area that had the full-on bliss-attack and engulfing (over)power of MBV and other neo-psych bands I worshipped…. or rather it was the first thing since the original
acid house (another hard, cold, mechanistic music that had certain parallels with rock).

I don't think I am alone here. Some of us are pulled in by this rockist/testosterone-y element in the music and then later on veer away from it; our tastes evolve or we learn to think of it as less sophisticated or advanced or something.

Now I hasten to add that I'm not suggesting this kind of aggy, hard-as-hell stuff has no appeal to women. I was always surprised by how many girls were into the post-97 drum'n'bass, after the supposed defection of Womankind to speed garage; indeed one female friend of mine only got into D&B in a real heavy-duty fanatical way after I'd switched over to UK garage (but then she was from a kind of rocky, indie background). When you get female deejays in these seemingly macho-land genres like jungle or gabba, often they play it as hard or harder than the men. (I'm flashing on DJ Rap one time at the Paradise, scourging the audience with a set of ruthlessly stripped-down, hard-as-nails jungle, out-blasting the likes of Hype and Randall on the same bill). Or think of someone like Mary Ann Hobbs, who was into heavy metal and motorbikes before she became the first lady of dubstep.

Nonetheless, one has to say that a lot of this music--resorting to gender designation as conventionally understood, seen--it's quite… manly, isn't it? And it's not just about the sound of the music, it's about the imagery that surrounds it: the track titles… the artist names picked by producers, DJs, MCs… the samples used… There's a steady stream of masculine archetypes, of heroics and anti-heroics. The rude boy, the gangsta, the thug, the soldier… It's all very Clash, to be honest! Grime was the culmination of this funk-to-punk tendency within nuum music, and how right that the genre virtually begins with a song titled "'Oi!".

I'm going to seize the opportunity to talk at some length about grime here because it got somewhat neglected at Liverpool and in the subsequent discussions. In my case this was partly because it seemed so recent it almost didn't need to be accounted for, unlike the Nineties stuff. But grime is a totally crucial phase-shift within the nuum narrative: in some ways the most drastic transformation (from a dance/deejay oriented sound to a verbal/MC dominated culture) but undeniably continuum-ous from what came before (the flowering of rave/pirate MCing as a latent artform, the fact that the grime artists were all inspired by jungle MCs). Grime represented the remasculinisation of the music after 2step's girls-like-this shift. All the supple slinkiness of 2step rhythm was reversed, with cold, stiff beats that merged aspects of electro, ragga, even gabba. The sound-palette became vastly less "musical" in the conventionally understood sense (a marked diminishment in "played" feel; tonalities that are glacial, dry, thin, redolent of video games or ringtones). All this makes grime ideally suited for a discussion of the play of genderised terms within nuum music.

It's also overdue for me to grapple with grime again because the fact is I was as excited by that "moment"--from the summer of 2002 to the summer of 2005--as I was by jungle or 2step; as much of a believer. It's only the bruising failure of its push to crash-over (rather than cross-over) into chartpop that led to the emotional exhaustion with grime candidly recorded in the 2006 blogpost that Dan Hancox wheeled out at UEL and which he seems to almost take personally. I also eagerly grab the opportunity to discuss grime because I think it's one of the most potent arguments against the nuum-is-over case. The fact that grime has endured through the entire Noughties, that in crossover terms it's bigger than ever while the underground is healthy, as triumphantly noted in this piece by Man Like Dan
(which I could almost imagine as belated riposte to my 2006 blogpost!)… all that would seem to prove that the nuum remains relevant both as an actually living body of sonix/scenius and as a model that retains some purchase on current musical reality. So I'm delighted to direct the spotlight of my mind on grime once again.

And the first thing to say about grime is to acknowledge how much of its compelling aesthetic qualities and its sheer pleasure is related to the flexing of power and violence.

Let's look closely at two tracks that have claims to be absolute zeniths of grime both formally and in terms of a cultural moment rising to its peak:

"Pow (Forward)", by Lethal B featuring Fumin, D Double E, Nappa, Jamakabi, Neeko, Flow Dan, Ozzi B, Forcer, Demon and Hot Shot
which you can watch as a video here


and

"Destruction (VIP)" by Jammer featuring Wiley, D Double E, Kano and Durty Doogz
which you can listen to here

The title of "Pow" comes from comic book superhero violence--"Biff! Bang! Pow!" --but there's nothing very cartoon-like about the lyrics, which are at pains to convey the gritty specifics of their various threats:

Nappa promises:
"I'lllll....crack your skull
Leave you fucked up in a wheelchair
If you try to clash this evil brer"

Jamakabi describes how he's going to
"draw fi da metal
Not da gun, me draw for da belt buckle
I make a bigger boy feel so likkle
Just swing my belt round like a nun chuckle
Bus you head and make your blood start trickle"

Neeko and Flow Dan both vow to cock back their steel and bun fire, with Flow Dan adding the grace note of
"Man I go step in a him face with my new Nikeys"

Then there's Demon's immortal verse:
"You don't wanna bring armshouse
I'll bring armshouse to your mums house
You don't wanna bring no beef
Bring some beef and lose some teeth"

"Destruction VIP", while more direct in its title, is less bloody in its verses, but does feature the bravura Wiley sequence where he dresses down a wannabe bad-boy, a fake-gangsta:
"I know Trouble
Trouble said he don't know you
I know Beef
Beef said he don't know you
I had War
And War said he don't know you"

...and so on, through a long list of Personified Essences of Grime Reality… Crime, Street, Empty Belly, Robbery, .38, Hustler, Ghetto Life, Bad Boys… all of which Wiley's intimately familiar with. (Which leaves your typical middle class bloggerati grime-lover in a strange place, since he's unlikely to have made the acquaintance of any of these fine fellows).

Lyrics like this--boasts and threats; the verbal articulation of relationships of dominance and humiliation; invidious contrasts between the MC's street knowledge with the fronting of rival MCs, the MC as man of experience exposing the empty talk of mere boys--all this is standard business in grime. You could pluck a record at random almost and you'd likely as not find some variant. So here's "Bruzin" by Bruza featuring Footsie. Triple Threat and Shizzle:
"come on bruv let's ave it, let's war….
"bare left hooks to your jaw…
"to your bredrens you look poor/ there the reason you don't wanna war"
"bring bodily harm, leave you in a mess"
"we're bruising/against us, you're losing/we're the microphone ooligans/ with higher powers/we spit fire showers."

Even if grime words are taken as metaphorical, about verbal maiming, the use of rhyme skills to slay rival MCs… you'd have to say that grime was a gladiatorial art, each sixteen a flurry of verbal blows, cracking egos like skulls.

To quote Bruza's classic track about boy-men pretending to be tougher than they are, I'm "not convinced" by an argument that would propose grime could be reformed, that all it would take would be to get grime artists to drop the gun talk, the murking and feuding, etc, and spit about… other stuff. It's not just about the content. The form of the music is violence, or at least combat.

Take D Double E's performance on "Destruction". His words are usually riddled with descriptions of ultra-vivid violence, but here the lyrics are virtually inaudible. The violence is the delivery itself, the mangling and shredding of language. Here's how I described the first six bars in the Grime Primer for The Wire --"a gargoyle-like gibber closer to hieroglyphics than language… seemingly emanating from the same infrahuman zone Iggy plumbed on “Loose” and “TV Eye”.

I actually met D Double E in 2005, doing a feature on grime for Spin, and was as thrilled as if I'd met Iggy Pop. I was struck by the fact that he was this soft-spoken, dreamy guy with an astonishingly skinny frame, seemingly unlikely to hurt a fly, and yet his rapping is almost non-stop carnage. Here's some of his most famous and frequently recycled lines, which appear on the Terror Danjah tunes "Cock back" and "Frontline" [fnote6] and probably other places too:

"Think you're a big boy cos you got a beard/Bullets will make your face look weird"
"For what I just done/I could get years/Heart is cold and I got no fears/Shed no tears"
"Think you're a big boy cos you go gym/Bullets will cave your whole face in"
"Tip of the gun straight up your nostril and pull"
"Head get mangled and then dangled just like I wear my kangol"
"Who do you resemble?/Face looks fucked up like Michael"
"Never going to go away/Permanent scar"

But listening again to some of his other performances--"Signal", "Birds in the Sky"--what strikes me is the odd fusion of wimpiness and thuggishness. With its lack of definition and edges, his voice is actually weak ("seemingly battling multiple speech impediments" is how I described it in the Wire primer), but there's this sense of tremendous inner turbulence bubbling up through the delivery. (See also the feral gnashings, growls and roars that serve as "backing vocals" in tunes like "Not Convinced" and Flirta D's "Warpspeed"). This gives D Double's utterance an almost involuntary quality, a quality of possession or trance. Seeing Double live onstage in New York and later at the Rinse FM studio, both times I was reminded of Ian Curtis; Double stares sightlessly into the middle distances, makes these strange dainty carving and slicing gestures with his hand, which hovers by his chestbone like a hummingbird.

Some time ago, listening to A Guy Called Gerald's "28 Gun Bad Boy", I suddenly heard the breakbeats as a ballet of violence [fnote7]. Listening now to the jagged syncopations of D Double on "Destruction," to the "Pow" MCs spitting across and against the "Forward" riddim, to the growling distortions and mouth-manglings that transform all these MC's voices into slashes of pure texture ("sixteen bars, sixteen scars"), I started to hear grime rhyming as breakbeat science given voice. In another sense, grime is literally the verbalization of jungle's submerged "content" : society-as-warzone. In jungle that content was audio-allegorised as rhythm and bass and atmosphere, with occasional articulation in the form of samples about darkness or street knowledge. With grime, this became a lot more stark and in-your-face: the lyrical content, the delivery, the performative stance, are all about
mayhem style-ized.

Jungle and grime: martial art forms.

You're not feeling this music if you don't understand it viscerally as the violent assertion of self. Everybody knows this but it doesn't get talked about much because the implications don't bear thinking about too closely. You might start to become aware of uncomfortable stuff, like the way that the knowledge prized in our little subculture is so often related to being down with the minutiae of social destructiveness. E.g. youngers took the piss out of me a few years ago for taking my eye off the ball and missing the rise of the praise term "showa." What they were proud of was being au fait with slanguage derived from the shower of bullets rained down on their enemies by an infamously ruthless Jamaican gang! Another e.g.: a mini-debate triggered by my Caspa piece, where I'd talked about a double standard of black grime MCs acting thuggish on record being deemed cool whereas Caspa was considered both a lout and a poseur. Martin Blackdown effectively argued in defence of the double standard, saying that Caspa's Cockney shtick was all front whereas your grime youth were walking it like they talked it, and going on to cite various acts of real violence perpetrated by certain grime figures. What a fucked-up world where fake thuggery is worse than the genuine article! But not to be the kettle calling the pot black, I've verged on similar logic myself, e.g. semi-dissing dubstep by saying the reason it would always be somewhat lacking for me was related to the reasons why you would never hear anyone utter the words "police are locking off dubstep raves." Yet on some level that is simply true, and sometimes you have to say stuff like this however close to the bone it is. There has been a certain tension and menace at nuum-related raves that's inseparable from the vibe and from the very qualities of the music that make it so powerful.

Yet (no surprise here) I've never voluntarily been involved in violence in my life. The few times it's come calling, it's only been the pure adrenalin-rush of fear, plus dormant capacity left over from my schoolboy cross-country running, that's saved my skin. So why the attraction to music that is actually the opposite of how I live my life and to a large extent opposed to my values?

Of course, the kind of ruff-housing, second-person-directed hostility, megalomaniac energies present in grime are far from unique to it. Think of rap [fnote8] , metal, hardcore punk (and also, within dance music, gabba). Now, once again I don't want to underestimate here the female capacity for aggression, albeit more often of a non-physical sort. You only have to look at the behaviour of teenage girls towards each to see the fairer sex's flair for competitiveness, status games, verbal cruelty, and so on. Nonetheless it seems reasonable to generalize that there isn't quite the same intense attraction towards theatricalised violence in art and entertainment. I'm guessing that by and large women watch movies like The Godfather or Goodfellas (movies which I am incapable of not watching for the umpteenth time if they happen to be on TV) despite the violence, not because of it [fnote9].

I don't know if I'd go as far as saying men, myself included, enjoy watching violence. But there is a compulsion there that feels gender-specific. With this sort of movie it is probably similar to what goes on when you listen to gangsta rap: a dizzy-making double identification [fnote10] with the perpetrator and the victim simultaneously. Plus a pornographic aspect, seeing what should not be seen, what in fact (in our relatively orderly society) most of us don't ever get to see (thank God). But, to take another example, when I read Bill Buford's Among the Thugs, it was fairly obvious that I was not reading about the activities of these soccer hooligans entirely to inform myself about a peculiar subculture or to disapprove, but because there was a certain appalling thrill. Buford places his own voyeuristic/vicarious fascination for these brutal boors right up front, he becomes a particant-observer in fact and the narrative of the book shows him getting swept up in the mob rampages, leaving behind his civilised, literate self in a kind of tribal group-mind, and then taking the brunt of an almighty comeuppance (he's taught a lesson at the hands and truncheons and boots of riot police in Italy, if I recall right). That's the moral at the end of the story that retroactively washes clean the body of the book as a whole, justifying the prurient pleasure in ultraviolence the reader has taken. (I wonder how many female fans that book has?)

Sports itself, as opposed to sports fan hooliganism, offers another analogy, since a lot of sports are forms of aestheticized warfare. The more gladiatorial and war-like--boxing or team-based contact sports like American football and ice hockey--the greater the proportion of the audience are male, I think it would be fair to say.

So what is going on here? In the case of this discourse around grime and other nuum genres, as opposed to the composition of the subcultures themselves, it's a rather nerdy fraternity we're dealing with, by and large. I'm guessing, owing to the level of literacy and the general left-leaning bias, we are talking about a constituency that is pretty aware of feminist issues and therefore has some ambivalence about conventional notions of masculinity and gender, a degree of confusion about what it means to be a man in the 21st Century (a common predicament anyway in this era of the "kidult"). Through this music, though, we have access to dramas of strength and power, survivalist sharp-wittedness and prowess, that temporarily resolve--or rather, work through--or maybe just put in play--these doubts and confusions.

Now this is nothing new, actually. It's one of the oldest stories in popular culture: white, mostly middle class men working their identity issues out through an intensely felt, deeply confused, slightly problematic identification with black masculinity as manifested through music. It goes back at least as far as The Rolling Stones and John Mayall's Bluesbreakers. Probably a lot further back. This kind of projection towards black music may well be more than slightly problematic, but there's no doubt it's hugely significant as a historical phenomenon. As a syndrome it's something impossible to feel comfortable about, let alone affirm unreservedly, but equally it seems to have certain things going for it and be broadly preferable to the alternatives (the de fact apartheid/monoculturalism of indie-rock, for instance).

Nor is it, when looked at in the grander historical scheme, just about black masculinity in the "street soldier" sense as laid out in the Wiley verses on "Destruction". Not at all: there's a whole range of things that your white male has sought and found in black male musical expression, things that have filled in holes in their own culture or upbringing, that have provided a "way out" (especially in Britain, where the projection towards Black American music is especially intense). These things include:

-- an emotionalism that isn't "wet" or "weak" but powerful, a form of strength (soul)

-- worldly wisdom, life-tested toughness (blues, etc)

-- grace, elegance, gentleness, urbanity (softer soul, cooler jazz)

-- gnostic cool, cosmic suss (certain jazz, the boho styles of hip hop)

-- protest, spiritual-political critique, militant pride, purity, prophecy, preacher (conscious rap, roots reggae, etc)

-- exuberance, joie de vivre, sass, earthiness, vitality, energy, style (funk, etc)

And doubtless a bunch of other things too.

Running through all this stuff, the Bad Boy side of it and the Good Man side of it, is the fact that these forms of musical expression offer heroic images of masculinity (even when anti-heroic, as in the gangsta/Staggerlee/rudeboy mode). They are also quite often models of authority. That applies whether it's a Jay-Z or DMX or Clipse talking in worldly-wise, world-weary tones about the game, the paper chase, the things a man does to make it in this world, or whether it's James Brown in soul statesman mode, or Bob Marley as prophet, or the great reggae producers as sound-wizards, or Miles as dark magus… (See also the I Am the King thread running through black music pinpointed by me and Joy in The Sex Revolts.) If you're a left-leaning type then the idea of authority may well be discredited by its association with authoritarianism, etc. But in black music you can find images of authority and stature that aren't about being a cop or colonel, a priest or politician. Perhaps they are images of authority untarnished by actual real-world power, in a similar way that the violence in gangsta rap and grime is inoculated by the justification of its being true-to-life, it's given an alibi and a pass on account of oppression, inequality, racism, etc.

I'm thinking now of Chuck D, the way his commanding cadences and gravitas called on the traditions of black oratory, all those preachers who blurred religion and politics. In a 1991 interview with me, Chuck D described Public Enemy as being rap's "positive hardcore," as opposed to--and in conscious opposition to--the "negative hardcore" of gangsta. In some ways my last essay on the partly political nature of the nuum was about the failure of nuum musics to make the transition from negative hardcore to positive hardcore.

So what I'm playing with here is the idea of a history of white men looking to all these heroic/anti-heroic images of masculinity that run through black music… attracted to those images, inspired by them, confused by them… all at a time when nobody knows what being a man is [fnote11] , and where there aren't actually that many images of positive manhood in the mainstream culture. Well, you can find heroism in action movies and CGI thrill-porn pablum of every sort, but I don't think that provides the same function that earlier forms of mainstream culture did (hardboiled fiction, say, or the war film). [fnote12]

The MCs in jungle and garage often seemed to have an aura of authority, they were the hosts of the dance, the vibe controllers, with deep baritone voices, sonorous and commanding. With grime, you get that surrogate father aspect here and there, but mostly the vibe is boy-men, shriller and less poised than the UK garage MCs. Power here flexes itself primarily as verbal assault and intimidation. And unfortunately what goes on in the music doesn't always stay within the bounds of sound but spills out into real life. Feuds have turned fatal, damage done to self-respect and public status have led to deadly reprisals. Grime seems particularly obsessed with the battle rhyme [fnote13], even more so than American rap with its young pretenders like Canibus taking pot shots at legendary elders, or Jay-Z versus Nas / Prodigy.

It makes perfect sense that you find some of the same dynamics paralleled in the (mostly male) discourse around nuum music: the murkage, the alpha male clashing, the territorial pissings. There's the same odd combination of collectivity and competition, fraternalism and fratricide. And occasionally a bit of patricide. Even this essay, as much as it’s a sincere quest for truth, has a war-like component [fnote 14].

So we're right back to where we started: the boys-own atmosphere enveloping this music and this discussion.

I promised last time to explore the reasons why music with such intense "power" seething within it proved to be a narrowcast phenomenon. I'm not sure I've got answers but here are some thoughts.

The sheer assaultive intensity of the music (thinking specifically of jungle and grime) limits the appeal. If you're not totally of the demographic that makes this music, it's going to take a special combination of factors to enable you to hear past the menace and moodiness of the music, and--specifically with grime--hear the harshness as a kind of sensitivity, the hostility and rage as the expression of legitimate social demand.

Raw uncut grime is more than most people are prepared to deal with in an entertainment context. Grime was only able to really prosper when it could present itself as genial and good times oriented ("Wearing My Rolex") or just innocuous. It amazes me, looking at the video for "Pow," that the track even managed to get to the edge of the Top 10. It's not just the fact that the MCs are physically attacking the camera much of the time, raining down blows on the viewer, nor that the lyrics are so graphic and gory. It's the sheer ferocity of each MC's hunger and ambition as he tries to squeeze through the miniscule aperture of opportunity presented by his guest verse in this sure-to-be-big scene anthem/potential crossover hit. Sixteen bars to be grabbed and smashed as a display window for their talent. "Spotlight's on me" Fumin gloats, before asking "how you gonna bust if there's no room?": a striking image of an ego expanding to crowd out the entire space-for-stars-to-shine that is grime. If you're not already a grime convert, the series of intense eruptions of egomania that constitutes "Pow" must be as alarming as witnessing a volcano go off at close quarters. Disturbing, for many people, at least on a subconscious level, because it's the expression of social energies they don't want to deal with: each sixteen bar burst, a miniature riot. So they flinch, turn away.

Another aspect that limits nuum music's appeal concerns its "militant modernism", the interface between masculinism and the avant-garde. Fredric Jameson discusses how modernism is characterized by negatives: fragmentation, disorientation, stridency, and (quoting Hugo Friedrich) "bolts of annihilation", "brutal abruptness", "depoeticized poetry." Yet another crucial aspect of modernism's negativity, says Jameson, channeling Adorno, is its penchant for interdiction, its creation of new aesthetic taboos, its "ever keener distaste for the conventional and outmoded". This dynamic (out with the old, in with the new) leads to the >>FWD>> propulsiveness of modernism and nuum alike. Warp speed.

Then think of the soldierly subtext of modernism: the fact that "vanguard" is a military term, the idea of the shock troops of the avant-garde repeatedly blasting the new in the public's face. Art as bombardment, assault course, confrontation, challenge, test.

Factor in all these hallmarks and character traits of the nuum: its modernism (as both an inherent sonic narrative within the music and as a third-hand, filtered-down-from-on-high rhetoric of innovation and futurism), its "playing soldiers" aspect, its relationship to the streets as both UK socio-cultural reality and US hip hop cartoon fantasy, the scene's internal hyper-competitiveness, the influence from pulp fictions of all kinds (with their superheroics and dystopian darkness), the cult of technology… It all goes a good way towards accounting for
both the man-stench surrounding this culture and the narrowcast appeal of its musical output. Strictly hardcore.

for the footnotes, go here

FOOTNOTES to THE NUUM AND ITS DISCONTENTS, PART 5: MASCULINE PRESSURE

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Footnote 1

… "ossification" effect of excessively rigorous theorizing…

Prior to its acquired derogatory meaning of overly rigid thought patterns, "ossification" meant the natural process of bone formation, or the hardening of soft tissue into a bone-like material. So there is a parallel here between nuum-theory's orientation towards "bones" (the structuration principles that make up the music's rhythmic exoskeleton, and that determine the contours of genre) and anti-theory being sensuously attuned to the subtleties of "flesh" (the prettifying flava-surface that makes each auteur, each track even, unique, a genre-of-one.). "Bones" might as well be "boner" as far as some folk are concerned: rigour is equated with rigidity, the theorem seen as a kind of mental erection.

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Footnote 2

…gender-coded discourse games…

Another thing that got me interested in the gender-ised discussion surrounding the nuum was this straw man wielded against the theory-mongers (me and K-punk), the nuum generalisers with their wood-not-trees bias: a bizarrely off-base accusation of being unwholesomely fixated on some East London ghetto hardman mythos. But Mark doesn't like grime much at all, as far as I can tell! The real irony here, though, is that the whole death-to-Nuum kvetch-fest started approximately eighteen months ago when me and K-punk did the classic invocation of "feminine pressure" move. We were blogging, very enthusiastically, about bassline, celebrating its diva-fabulous euphoria, giddy fairground thrills, fizzy poptasmic cheese-power. K-punk argued that this was a dialectical reaction to dubstep's masculine ploddiness and solemnity; I demurred, as it seemed unlikely bassline was even much aware of dubstep, let alone reacting against it, and besides dubstep and bassline had evolved in parallel, as diverging strands from UK garage, starting in the early Noughties. Some flak was thrown, an uncharitable response you might think to highly positive commentary (but you know, these dubsteppers have thin skin!). This was the start of the anti-nuum campaign, so it's amusing to be later painted as exclusively obsessed with all things ruff tuff and street-creddy.

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Footnote 3

… "feminine pressure" moves…

Course it was me who invented the "feminine pressure" critic-move in the first place, with 1999's 2step epic Adult Hardcore, which was originally titled… Feminine Pressure. Taking the name of a pretty obscure female DJ team I'd stumbled upon, I used it to symbolise the spirit of UK garage/2step. It was perfect for encapsulating into a slogan the creation-myth of the scene as the result of women departing the drum'n'bass dancefloor to dance in the garage side-room. A myth based on participant-observed data (all the scene rhetoric about "this one's for the ladies", "the girls love this tune" etc) as well as changes in the music, so a "true myth". And a narrative with legs: it's most recently been wheeled out for funky house, celebrated by one and all for its percussive sinuousness and female appeal.

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Footnote 4

..fourth cornerstone of the nuum: hard techno…

All praise to the Mighty Yang for "Dominator" and "Fairy Dust", "Here Come the Drumz" and "Terminator", "Sonic Destroyer" and "Death Star," "Terrorist" and "Super Sharp Shooter" , "Shadowboxing" and "Squadron," "We Have Arrived" and "Apocalypse Never", "Pulse X" and "Anger Management"'…..

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Footnote 5

… masculine pressure…

I recall a conversation with Tim Finney in the early days of grime in which he said there was a need for a "Feminine Pressure"-style thinkpiece on grime. I considered doing one but couldn't come up with a good-enough antonym ("Masculine Armour" was the closest I got). But some of this gender-stuff is dealt with in the very earliest bloggage I did on grime, a time when lyrics could get very misogynistic (remember "Swallow"?).

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Footnote 6

… D Double E's freestyle over "Frontline"….

I'm playing this and the wife says "what's this?" and then adds, before I can open my mouth, "Not liking". I'm, like,"it's only one of the greatest grime MCs of all time!!" Her face--a frown of skepticism -- says it all. I consider trying to explain the artistry of D Double E… but then, thinking of the lyrics, think better of it.

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Footnote 7

… ballet of violence…

See also "Gloc": a song written, Gerald Simpson told me, as a kind of symbolic retaliation, against this Gunchester bad boy who'd taxed Gerald's studio of some valuable equipment. There's a sample from Robocop and he conceived the track as a kind of serve-and-protect warrior-droid of his own design and construction, a sonic act of displaced and sublimated vengeance.

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Footnote 8

… combative, second-person-directed hostility, megalomaniac energies … rap…

One of my long running problems with much hip hop criticism (going back to the almost very first things I wrote about rap in the mid-Eighties) is that it is so keen to establish the socially redeeming value and artistic worth of the genre that it glides past the nastiness. For as much as it is the music of black male youths, this is also music of male youths, and your adolescent male can be fairly nasty under the best of circumstances. A good example of this is how hip hop criticism in the academy looks at graffiti--it will talk about it as an artistic expression (the aesthetics of wildstyle), or in terms of urban politics, reclaiming hegemonic space, the assertion of a subaltern identity, "bombing" etc. But an important component of graffiti as a practice is that it is vandalism. And that it involves risk-taking activity (trespassing, sometimes involving risk of physical harm; running the gauntlet of police and security guards; in some cases shoplifting the aerosol cans). It finds and creates adventure in the urban environment in ways that are similar to the things that all teenage boys do when they are bored and frustrated, full of hormonal energy they can't find an outlet for. (Tagging also parallels MCing in the same of it being about having a Name, rising out of the anonymous urban multitude).

Boys do irresponsible stuff, dangerous stuff; they take delight in pure mischief and destruction; they have a remarkable ability to not see the consequences of actions, and to temporarily suppress of empathy in favour of the pure kick of the moment. I'm a bookish sort but I did some mildly wicked things as a teenager. Some of them would be glossed up with a bit of Dada or reading about the Situationist's political graffiti and pranks. But really these minor feats of delinquency were just anti-social, un-neighbourly, a nuisance. There is just something in men that enjoys destruction for its own sake. Boys (actually young men in the scenario I'm now thinking of, Oxford graduates no less) will look at a TV that's finally broken down after a long struggle to stay alive and their gaze will wander to the open third storey window and the next thought is "let's chuck it out the window, watch it explode". Somehow I can't imagine that many women I know reacting the same way.

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Footnote 9

… despite the violence, not because of it…

I asked the missus if she enjoyed the violence in movies such as these, and she said "no". Which surprised me because it was she who wanted to watch Kill Bill, but then again the violence there is so fantastical and choreographed, it's more like watching a musical's dance routine. Of course there is a mass public appetite, probably reasonably mixed gender, for the carnage and destruction of Hollywood action films, which is violence without real-seeming costs, without reality. But when it comes to movies that feature genuine brutality depicted with some attempt at realism… I do suspect that the missus is not alone among her gender here, in watching the film or TVs despite this aspect.

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Footnote 10

… dizzy-making double identification with the perpetrator and the victim
simultaneously….

One thought I came up with a long time ago in connection with metal, rap, industrial, etc is the idea that it offers a "'deconstruction of masculinity" akin to movies like Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, The Wild Bunch, The Godfather, Apocalypse Now, etc, which take you inside the hollow-souled paranoia of hyper-masculinine psychology but also rub your face in the results of its depredations. But the truth is as much as there's a critique--rich in historical reverberations in many of these films (the pimp played by Harvey Keitel in Taxi Driver is "symbolically" a Red Indian), there's a intense, disturbing jouissance in these images of violence. The final carnage of Taxi Driver is the "orgasm" the film structurally requires after so much tension. The way the camera lingers over the bloody aftermath is appallingly ambiguous: rubbing our faces in the gore, but also allowing us to delectate over it. "You wanted this", the camera says, "so here it is"--more vivid and prolonged than any film before it, even Peckinpah's.

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Footnote 11

…at a time when nobody knows what to be a man is….

For many of us becoming a father is the first time when the idea of manhood starts to make some kind of liveable sense, to lose its negative connotations… authority and self-sacrifice and sticking-with-it take on not so much lustre as functionality, a can't-get-by-without quality.

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Footnote 12

…. the war film…

It was a shock recently to realise that my son, now nearly ten, has never watched a World War Two movie and has very little idea of what that conflict was about. When I were a lad, there was a constant stream of World War Two movies on the telly, beaming into my impressionable mind all kinds of notions to do with sacrifice, teamwork, loyalty, determination, stoicism, etc. But heroism in a believable, non-cartoon sense--heroism outside a pure fantasy context--is rather a cornered commodity in today's culture market. At the quality TV end, with series like The Wire, it is presented in its rare instances as impotent, thwarted by bureaucracy and power games by malign authority figures. Either that, or the vocational compulsion to be a hero is presented as a form of pathology, as with the New York firefighter series Rescue Me, where the firemen are all damaged and dysfunctional boy-men, incapable of having relationships, addictive personalities, and so forth. The title is ambiguous: these professional rescuers all needed to be rescued from themselves.

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Footnote 13

… grime seems particularly obsessed with the battle rhyme….

Here' s an old Martin Clark piece
that looks at the murking lyrics and the hyper-competitivity of the scene: the importance of having a name, how the biggest way to build a name is to diss an established Name. Anonymity is what the MC is really battling against. I'm reminded (as so often in connection with hip hop) of Robert Warshow's famous essay on The Gangster As Tragic Hero, which explored how the movie viewer takes vicarious pleasure in the ruthlessness of the mobster's quest for prestige--to be top dog, to be Somebody as opposed to a no-mark-- and then how we are relieved (of complicity and guilt) by the inevitable reprisal taken by Society against him.

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Footnote 14

…A war-like component to it…

It's also something of a preemptive strike, but in a very precisely targeted way.

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THE NUUM AND ITS DISCONTENTS, #4

PARTY, POLITICAL / PARTLY POLITICAL

"Power" was where I left off last time…

I've been trying to think of a more suitable analogy for the hardcore continuum than "Australia". Some sort of "actually existing entity" that's historical rather than geographical; something of real world-historical heft that lasted for a substantial duration before crumbling away and leaving barely a trace of itself… Then it struck me: the political party. History is full of political organizations that were massively consequential for a period but then gradually disintegrated as demographics shifted and the economy transformed, causing the various interest groups and social alliances that held the party together to dissolve and form into new clusters.

In mid-19th Century America there was the American Party (a nativist, anti-immigration party). Later that century there was the Populists, a major political force who threw their weight behind Democratic presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan in the landmark election of 1896, but in vain. I'm sure there are some U.K. examples. Political parties of this kind may never get hold of the reins of government, but they represent hugely significant mobilizations of energy---donations, volunteers, political capital, powerful backers. They hold assemblies, draw up manifestos, campaign, and they exert pressure by their existence on other, more successful parties that affect their electoral strategy and sometimes what happens at a legislative or governmental level. But in the end these parties crumble away leaving nothing but yellowing historical documents.

So too with the nuum… one day all that will be left of it will be… records.

I got quite taken with this idea of the nuum as a political party and in semi-whimsical fashion tried to map out its lifetime in terms of electoral struggle *… Hardcore 91/92 as a landslide victory over chartpop; jungle, a sharp turn to the left, resulting in years of exile, despite promising by-election results (Timeless; Logical Progression; a Mercury for New Forms); 2step, tacking back to the pop centre, embracing song and sexy midtempo grooves, resulting in a landslide return to chart power circa 1999-2001; grime, another swing back to uncompromised militancy, looked for a while like it could win power on its own terms but….

I came up with this better-than-Australia analogy thanks to Jeremy Gilbert's contribution to the UEL seminar: for me the most thought-provoking intervention, because the least expected. See I kinda guessed what the other angles would be, having seen the advance blogging, FACT articles and 1200 word letters to The Wire. I also somehow sensed Kodwo & Kode would deal with the nuum…. by changing the subject, talking about something else altogether! (Is that a tactic they got from Sun Tzu? ;) ). But Jeremy's critique came completely out of left-field. His argument was that, as glorious and mighty as the nuum had been as a musical force, it could equally be seen as a series of "failed politicisations": missed opportunities to translate the multiracial unity, localised collective energy and "sense of purpose" that the music mobilized into anything constructive.

I felt the sting of this rebuke and recognized its pertinence even as a gut-level, knee-jerk response--"come off it!"--kicked in. Seriously, could this ever really have happened? Struggle organized at the site of the means of entertainment -- dream on, John!

There's two moments when this kind of politicisation seems to have been faintly plausible: jungle and grime. Both had powerful currents of anti-systemic awareness, seethed with paranoia and rage that it's just conceivable could have been tapped, channeled, brought to mature ideological consciousness. But jungle was still partially mired in the drugginess and dissipation of rave; it was waking up from the Dream to face harsh reality, perhaps, but unlikely to embrace anything that smacked of didacticism or worthiness. The scene was fueled by the anarcho-capitalist energies of fiercely competitive rivalry, and there was also a shady undertow of crime… All in all, its impulses were as close to anti-social as proto-socialist.

Grime, a movement of inner city youth literally finding their voices, seems to have more potential than jungle, whose moments of consciousness were largely restricted to roots reggae samples like "alla the youth shall witness the day that Babylon shall fall". But I can hardly recall any conscious rhymes in grime. One stands out in the memory for being so unusual: a freestyle on a tape someone mailed me and which I titled "Black Man Freestyle" because of its roll-call salute to black icons (one line went something like "Biggie 'n' Tupac two powerful black men")(I think it was by Durty Goodz). Grime did have its positive side, but it was invariably couched in that hyper-individualist, chase-your-dreams, work-hard-you-WILL-make-it mold… pure American ideology in other words… inspiring and poignant with tunes like "Chosen One" , but a long way from collectivism. Far more often you got the opposite: a reveling in socially destructive negativity. Factor in the often rancorous rivalry between crews, the currents of gangsta-bling false consciousness, the 1000-to-1 stacked-odds-against dreams of crossover fame and privatized salvation… It all agitated against a political perspective. The best grime could offer was what Martin Clark neatly dubbed a "reflectist" approach---better than escapism, but resigned to a reality believed to be impregnable to any attempts at changing it.

So my initial response to Jeremy's critique was "let's be realistic, this was always going to be outside the bounds of the possible, and politics is the art of the possible, right".

Then again, as Mark K-Punk pointed out, to say that is to acquiesce to the logic of capitalist realism.

How could it have gone down differently? What were the potentials that were allowed to remain dormant? There were figures in the early days of the nuum who were quite political--Shut Up and Dance, Rebel MC/Conquering Lion/Congo Natty/Tribe Of Issachar, Kemet Crew. Jeremy mentioned Exodus, the sound system organization in Luton, who threw illegal raves but then moved into activism and community work, setting up a youth centre, getting embroiled in local political struggles, becoming targeted and persecuted by local authorities and the police. I'd never thought of them as part of the jungle scene particularly, although hearing Jeremy refer to them in those terms I flashed on that Hackney Festival in Clissold Park, going there in 1994 and hearing Exodus's system play a junglized version of Marley's "Exodus" (presumably their theme tune). But overall they were too peripheral to have an influence on jungle proper.

Why couldn't a pirate station in London have become an Exodus-like force, though--a real community radio station? Pirate radio was a noticeable absence from the discussion at UEL; I wish I'd talked more about the pirates in Liverpool. After all, they got a whole chapter in Energy Flash, celebrated for staging a kind of "power surge" against consensus reality; the pirate MC's creativity and crucialness is bigged up in a kind of foreshadowing of grime. Pirate stations are already political simply by their hijacking of swathes of the FM spectrum, invading the mainstream media and asserting the existence of a subaltern class within the UK. Think also of the considerable organizational skill involved in keeping a pirate running. The pirate station as an engine fueled by volunteerism: DJs and MCs and support personnel not just giving their time and energy but actual money, weekly or monthly dues to keep the station on air.

Pirate radio in other countries is as often, or more often, political as it is about music. In America, the sense I get is that most pirates are short-range broadcasters of left-wing counter-propaganda. I think as always of Radio Alice in Bologna during the anarcho-communist turbulence of the late Seventies, memorably celebrated by Felix Guattari.

In Britain, though, it's always been music that's almost entirely been the raison d'etre of radio piracy, give or take the occasional pirate set up during a strike… from the Sixties beat music and psychedelia beamed into the mainland by the off-shore stations, to the Radio One-neglected black music output of the Eighties tower block pirates (servicing a marginalised community), to the acieed-and-after stations that kept the nuum massives locked on. That emphasis--music taking precedence over politics--seems to encapsulate the role that music has played in Britain: a deflection of radical energy from its proper target, revolutionary impulses and the appetite for change fatally aestheticized.

Pirate radio is where the idea of "underground" in the musical sense shades closest to "underground" in the political sense. (They have also at times been where "underground" shades into "underworld", in the criminal sense). The operations involved in operating a pirate station--reconnaissance, staking out locations, trip wires, maneuvers and raids done under cover of night, dodging enemy patrols--take on a paramilitary or urban guerrilla air. Pirates have been and continue to be treated as enemies of the state. This sort of quasi-militarism runs through much of the nuum: the idea of being a soldier, of the ad break as a "pause for the cause". But for all the antagonism towards the police, the gleeful apocalyptic anticipation of Babylon's fall… the nuum has primarily and ultimately been an aesthetic opposition party. Its objection to the corporate mainstream has not been anti-capitalist but because it believed that major labels represent dilution and blandness, they move too slow to do justice to the protean turnover of the music.

But then, if it was always just about the music, how is it even thinkable for Jeremy to highlight this short fall in potential? What is it that makes it possible for him to pose this issue of the nuum as a series of failed politicisations?

The power.

The power that anyone felt, anyone who was there--meaning 1992, or 1994, or 2002--any year where a new phase of the nuum kicked off.

The power in the music **, at once purely sonic and yet emanating from outside it, passing through the music from the world of the Real and the Social, and going back out there, spilling the bounds of music as a segmented-off category.

I'm thinking of the electrifying sample that kicks off DJ Crystl's "Warp Drive"--"feel the power". (Apparently from the movie The Dark Crystal). The power is the breakbeat--which at the time "Warp Drive" was getting heavy play on the pirates seemed just about the most jagged and mashed slice of breakbeat science yet unleashed upon the world. It feels like a sculpted riot, a paroxysmic portent of social collapse. If I recall right, on "Warp Drive" Crystl was inspired by the ominous humming drone and beats-and-bass minimalism of Doc Scott's "Here Comes The Drumz," a track which samples Public Enemy, the original "fast rap" group so inspiring to the Brit B-boys who would build ardkore from the ground up ***.

There was a feeling this music gave off, not unlike the forcefield aura emitted by "Rebel Without A Pause" and "Bring the Noise" and "Welcome to the Terrordome", a feeling that this was both the ultimate dance music and much more than dance music. I think of Disco and the Halfway to Discontent, the album by Cornershop alter-ego Clinton (whose name--George or Bill?--further plays on the ambiguity of party-hard and party-political). I recall also the sleevenote on Rufige Kru's Ghosts of My Life EP, Goldie writing, "For those who don't quite understand, 'Ghosts' isn't about 'Disco'… It's about life and my experience, The memories, the haunts, the people, the places. All of us have ghosts in our lives." Both these inflections--the idea of a politicized party music, and of artcore, dance music that's both experimental and expressive--are claiming that there's more going on here that just celebration and letting off steam, the temporary utopia of weekenderism.

What was this power in the music, amorphous and yet real like a punch to your gut? It evoked forward-motion, violence given focus and discipline. The feeling of being in the vanguard, in both the artistic and military senses. In other words, the same "militant modernism" recently invoked by Owen Hatherley. Modernism, in its early 20th Century prime, almost always burst the enclosure of Art to take up one form or other of political commitment -- mostly (not always) left-wing, which in those days usually meant Communist.

I think of the hardcore continuum as a flashback to--or unscheduled recrudescence within popular culture of--modernism. But with a muffled or absent sense of the imperative felt by its High Art precursors that art had to escape the category of the purely aesthetic and spill out into the world if it was to truly realise itself. Or as Adorno put it, "in order for the work of art to be purely and fully a work of art, it must be more than a work of art."

You could see rave as a whole, and the nuum in particular, as modernism's last stand, or unexpected comeback, long after the ideals of modernism had been abandoned, eroded, questioned, everywhere else (including in pop music). Various factors enabled the nuum to evade the general drift towards postmodernism (factors perhaps shared by other black musics such as hip hop and dancehall). Amazingly it was able to evade the blight of postmodernity (irony, referentiality, citational aesthetics) even as it embraced and explored to the hilt the potential of what would on the surface seem to be the ultimate postmodern sound-machine, the sampler.

Miraculously holding pomo at bay, the nuum preserved within itself, within its own partially cordoned off space, the heightened temporality of peak-era modernism: a sensation of hurtling into the future. Like modernism before it, the nuum propelled itself headlong thanks to an internal temporal scheme of continual rupturing; it kept breaking with itself, a reactive dialectic that pushed it ever FWD. As a result it qualifies as one of those "steadily fewer" examples of "combative, collective movements of innovation" (Perry Anderson) that managed to withstand the onset of postmodernity and its culture-pervasive sensibility of eclectism, historicism, and cosmopolitanism.

"Pulp Modernism" is how K-punk classes this renegade aesthetic. With my more Subcultural Studies bent, I prefer the term "Street Modernism". But we're basically talking about the same thing.

According to Fredric Jameson, what defines the modernist artwork is a relationship to time. It enacts the break with the past forms of art within itself. "The interiorization of the narrative [of modernity/modernism]…" becomes an integral element of the artwork's fundamental structure. "The act of restructuration is seized and arrested as in some filmic freeze-frame" such that the modernist work "encapsulates and eternalizes the process as a whole."

What could that mean in music? Precisely a genre that involved a kind of suspended clash of sampling/digital processing with the analogue/hand-played, such that the uncanny time-warping of digital technique coexists with and permeates the hands-on, real-time musicianship. Thus breakbeat science captures the moment of superhumanisation, the funk of flesh-and-blood drumming (just eight seconds of G. Coleman's life-force from "Amen, My Brother") mutating into something beyond itself. Likewise with vocal science. Jameson, again: "the older technique or content must somehow subsist within the work as what is cancelled or overwritten, modified, inverted or negated, in order for us to feel the force, in the present, of what is alleged to have once been an innovation." The shock of the new, eternalized.

People regularly refer to Plato's wary conception of music as inherently subversive, his idea that music in its very essence is a threat to social stability, and therefore something the state needs to control tightly. Actually what he wrote is slightly more complicated , and even more interesting, in the present context. In the imaginary philosophical dialogues of The Republic, speaking through the historically real but here fictionalized figure of Socrates, Plato warns that "the attention of our rulers should be directed so that music and gymnastics [dancing, presumably?] be preserved in their original form… any musical innovation is full of danger to the whole State, and ought to be prohibited... For the modes of music are never disturbed without unsettling of the most fundamental political and social conventions."

Could that be true? I don't know, it seems far-fetched, at this remote vantage point. It's almost a struggle to remember that this, precisely, was the affective sensation generated by this music, in its various heydays. The shockwaves of the beats and bass passing through your body seemed to herald equivalent tremors passing through the body politic. That must be the promise in the music that Jeremy is responding to with his question about the nuum as a series of failed politicisations.

But if the power was really in the music, intrinsic to it, what kept it from spilling out into the wider world, boundless and unstoppable? What made it in the end a narrowcast transmission? I will return to speculate about this and other mysteries in my final reflection.

footnotes

* is this a sort of reverse Carmodyism?

** Jeremy tells me that the next book he plans to write is actually titled Music is Power is Music

*** odd that in writing about submerged politics within jungle I should happen to fasten on two producers who are white but could be seen, and were heard as, "culturally black"... that fact in itself could and should be counted as a significant political achievement on the part of the nuum

THE NUUM AND ITS DISCONTENTS, # 3
"WOT U CALL IT?" versus "THIS IS WOT WE CALL IT!"


So I was talking before about the importance of scene, about how it gets neglected in favour of talk about genre.

Now there's this bloke who has an uncontrollable antipathy to my writing; imagine Tourette's syndrome if the condition was only triggered by one person, it's almost comic to behold. In derisive response to my infamous WonKy blogpost, he declared that W***y was

"not a scene, barely a genre."

Now this chap was hardly looking to give me ammunition in my arguments, so I give the remark credence. And anyway it fits with what the W's most theoretically sophisticated champions have been saying is cool and significant and new about it. They pretty much say that not being a scene and barely being a genre is the actual central point of W***y.

When I say theoretically sophisticated advocates, I'm basically talking about Alex Splintering Bone Ashes aka Gek-Opel, who conveniently is one of the few speakers at the UEL Hardcore Continuum Conference to post his talk on his blog.

The talk is a development of the line pursued in blog posts from earlier in the year. In those posts and in the recent talk, there is an invocation of principles of non-rigidity and boundary-lessness and drift, of lines of connection that cut across genre borders and geography. The valorized and libidinised terms in his talk are words like "crossing", "flexible", "transnational", "not a box… but operates between boxes", "liquidation" (did he mean to write "liquefaction"?) and above all the hot sexy new concept "transversal". The negative, yuk-yuk terms are "solidify", "sedimentation", "codified", et al. Now I don't want to say this is just a resurgence of ye olde Nineties talk about deterritorialisation, fluidity, connectivity, nomadism, etc etc. Still they do feel pretty close to some ideas that I contested back in 1998 in Energy Flash, in the process of which I formulated some tenets about dance music that I still feel hold:

* "generic" is not a negative in dance music: on the contrary, it's a measure of functionality (for the deejay, the mix), and a reinforcer of vibe and identity (for the scene)

* geographic location is not a constraint but a source of strength and scenic identity

* scenius is a concentration of power and energy; it consistently gets better results (in the sense of fiercer, more full-on vibes and weirder, more innovative music) than the post-everything transgeneric omnivores.

W***ky is defined by its dissolution, evasion, and transcendence of genre constraints and scenic location. Its shape-shifting slipperiness eludes the net of the nuum model. Alex says the nuum is "inadequate" to wonky. Well, I'd prefer to put it the other way around, naturally! But basically we agree! It makes no sense to squeeze this octagonal peg into a square hole. Any genre-not-genre that includes Flying Lotus, glitch-hop from California, can only have a tenuous connection to the hardcore continuum.

Now that is emphatically NOT a black mark against W***y. As I've said on many occasions (people steadfastly refuse to absorb this information, because it's not in their interests to) I like some of the music labeled W***y rather a lot. Long before this nonsense started I said some highly appreciative things about Neil Landstrumm
and about Zomby. The latter featured in last year's faves while Landstrumm featured in my 2008 and 2007 faves . Zomby, some of you may remember, was also paid a high compliment in the form of me imagining there was a correlation between his trippy, dislocated grooves and extreme drug states. (You thought that was derogatory? I'm the chap who wrote Energy Flash, named after a tune that's named after a drug-rush and that features a voice going "acid… ecstasy"! The entire bloody book is a paean to the drugs/music/technology interface!). Joker's done some excellent stuff; FlyLo have their moments. I can live without the other Dilla epigones. But the fact is, the nuum and the W only have a slight overlap, which is Hyperdub, pretty much.

What's curious is the slippage in people's arguments where the tenuousness of connection to the nuum migrates into the nuum itself, so that it's the nuum that becomes tenuous as a concept! At the extreme, in some minds, that tenuousness seeps backwards through history and undoes the links between genres that anyone with an ounce of sense--anyone who was there--experienced in real-time.

The most interesting move in Alex's argument--the new bit in his talk--is the "Wot U Call It Moment" concept. He acknowledges that he's not the first to talk about the "Wot U Call it Moment" (that was Paul Autonomic, while others, including myself, have also addressed this syndrome of semantic indeterminacy in grime and in earlier nuum phases). But Alex deploys it in typically provocative and thought-provoking fashion, saying that the phase just before Wot U Call It is when the most interesting music happens, because it is protean, or even protozoan, has to yet to become codified as a new genre. He argues that W***y freeze-frames that moment, hovers in the pre-nominalist phase.

Would it be churlish of me to point out that he would never even have had this phrase Wot U Call It to play with without the incredible culturally generative power of the nuum?

Would it be cheeky of me to suggest that perhaps, taking a grander time-scale, the entire history of the nuum to date has been one long Wot U Call It Moment?

Across its timespan, the issue of what to call this music has come up repeatedly, because the music's frenetic rate of stylistic mutation has obsolesced the previous genre term over and over again.

The nuum as macrogenre could be conceived as a possibility space* for genres to solidify and then rapidly undergo dissolution. (C.f. postpunk). Wot U Call It then is not so much a recurrent moment of semantic "crisis", as an integral functioning element of the nuum, which re-fluxes itself as soon as things ossify.

Looking back over its almost-twenty year history, it can sometimes seem like there's been more phases of Wot U Call It than nomenclative stability.

Look at the period 1990-1993: in rapid succession, jostling and overlapping, you had terms like bleep, breakbeat house, hardcore house, hardcore techno, rave, ardkore, jungle house, jungle techno, jungalistic hardcore, hardcore junglism, darkside, darkcore, jungle, drum and bass. …

But even when a single genre term has achieved dominance--as with jungle--underneath that term roiled an ever-shifting semantic blur of sub-flavas: ragga jungle, rinse, jazzy, ambient, intelligent, artcore, hardstep, jump up, techstep, dolphin, nu-dark, liquid funk, probably lots I'm forgetting.

What's going on here is what Fredric Jameson called, in reference to early 20th Century modernism, "a process of unnaming and refiguration" .

But this is only half the story. Just as important as Wot U Call It is the This Is Wot We Call It moment. The two phases are welded together, inseparable. And when a name does get settled on, it's like a sudden power surge. Popular will condenses around the new name and it has a powerful centripetal effect. Suddenly the massive has an identity, junglists or whatever. (See Tribe of Isaachar's "Junglist").

A name is also crucial in terms of having any impact in the world beyond the scene, any traction in the media or mainstream record industry. That's by the by, perhaps; a downside, some would argue, the prequel to formularization and commercialization; a form of self-branding and thus capitulation to marketing culture. But even on the underground level there is value to tribal identity being crystallized in a new scene/genre name. It's identity politics; in the case of jungle, I'd say it was literally the sign of the emergence of a new post-racial race, a people.

In the Noughties there seems to have been a discernible ebbing in the nominalist mania that characterized the preceding decade. The fact that grime's name has just stuck as the genre moniker, that there's been no convulsion within the scene that demanded new coinages, suggests a degree of homeostasis. The violently lurching oscillations that convulsed the macrogenre through the Nineties have evened out into a steady-state pattern (perhaps because the initial massive jolt of Ecstasy culture, the original "energy flash" hypercharging the system, wore off long ago).

Funky house seems indicative: here it's almost like the scene couldn't be arsed to come up with its own name but took on a second-hand one laden with prior association and lameness. The "house" has gone now but "funky" too is pretty unevocative and weak. (Misleading too, sez Dr Paul Gilroy, who's in remarkable concurrence with me about the sound: the "small island rapture" of soca, spot on, Doc!).

And then wonky itself--a name with a couple of prior owners, quirked-out pop and mindbent techno. (It's also over-coded with a drug meaning that almost invites misunderstanding).

But let me reiterate: I'm not "dismissing" W***y as music. What I am doing is raising a question. If this music is--as its advocates insist--"not a scene, barely a genre"--and this is the new paradigm for dance music, it is worth considering the implications of what would then be an epochal shift, the closing of one chapter and the opening of another. Is it possible for a not-scene and barely-genre to achieve the level of impact and sociocultural traction that marked earlier dance subcultures? (Including those outside the nuum lineage, from gabba to trance to acieed back in 88 to whatever). W***y, if its theorization is accurate, seems to be not only on the side of the centrifugal but to enshrine centrifugality as its principal virtue.

Perhaps the "bye bye nuum" contingent are right. In the ever more webbed and post-geographical future that we've already entered and are moving deeper into by the day, it could well be that music will be about "flavours" or modalities that drift transversally across the global infosphere, liberated not just from the confines of space but of time too (zigzagging across the archival space of music history… a kind of day-glo hauntology, a hauntology without ghosts or yearning?). In these new conditions, it seems unlikely that the concentrations of focused energy that characterized the era of scenes and genres will occur. Will we ever witness again anything with that kind of mobilizing power?

"Power" is a subject I'll return in my next reflection.


* Footnote: I think the paragraph below is the first time I used the concept of "possibility space," although it's phrased as "permutation space", for the echo of "mutation". From my Faves of 1999 Round-Up, it's a celebration of 2step Garage as a machine for inventing micro-genres (some as small as a single track).

"In the tradition of hardcore and jungle before it, London's garage
scene works as a gigantic laboratory, a permutation space where new hyphenated hybrids and creole micro-genres flicker into life for a few months or even just weeks, then disappear: speed garage, slow jungle, ska-house, acid swingbeat, hyper-funk, breakbeat garage, disco-ragga, grunge dub, riddim & blues,
electro-gamelan, divas-in-the-echo-chamber, crack house, tech-2-step, quiet stormcore, sugarshack breakbeat funk, scrap iron dub, bleep garage,
wildstyle soul, lover's jump-up…"

THE NUUM AND ITS DISCONTENTS, # 2
GENRE versus SCENE

Strange that my innocent analogy with Australia should prove such a stumbling block with the assembly!

The choice of Australia was arbitrary, but I almost seem to have been guided to it by my unconscious, as it's perfectly suited to my argument.

I was referring--and I thought this would be obvious--not to Australia as a political unit, which is obviously a man-made convention, nor to the population, but to the land mass denoted by the word Australia. No one, surely, would deny that this land mass exists and would exist whatever we had decided to call it?

What makes it such a fitting analogy for the hardcore continuum is that it is a substantial body of land, large enough to have several different climate zones in it, but in the grander planetary scheme of things it is eclipsed by much vaster, more densely populated continents. Australia is also relatively isolated. There are territories quite near it--the Philippines, New Zealand--but it is cut off from the other continents. And as a result its ecosystem has a number of animals and plants you don't find elsewhere in the world. Evolution took a different path there.

Until really quite recently this has been one of the striking things about the hardcore continuum: its relative insularity and its evolutionary peculiarities. Note the word "relative". Nonetheless I believe it operated in a relatively self-contained way through the Nineties and a good way into this decade. It assimilated stuff from outside--as influences or through sample theft--but this was funneled into its own internal dynamic of evolution and the creative war of all against all. The scene's focus was inward; centripetal, you might say.

But what about my contentious assertion that the hardcore continuum is an entity, some kind of thing?

I'm not a philosophy student so don't have the squeamishness about certain words ("empirical"; see also vitalist, Romantic, etc) that seems to come with that training. I have what I suppose must seem like a rather literalist/realist--even commonsensical--approach, in so far as I think that things I've witnessed and participated in actually… existed. Perhaps if I'd used the word "phenomenon" rather than thing it would have gone down better. Probably not, there are so many forbidden words in philosophy, aren't there? (Such that certain texts often seemed to be produced out of the contortions made to avoid contamination by certain yuck-yuck concepts or unclean bodies of thought!).

The philosophy students haven't actually had too much to recoil from in this discussion, though, because the experiential and empirical have mostly been eschewed in favour of musical taxonomy. So far the discussion has almost entirely been on the level of genre as opposed to scene. The scenic aspects of the hardcore continuum--the stuff you can see (and feel and smell)--hardly came up at all at the UEL seminar. My Liverpoool talk had a bit more on this aspect, especially at the start but quickly fell into the typical mode of genre-focused talk, tracking the evolution of the music, etc.

Genres can exist without scenes, but it doesn't happen often and in the case of the hardcore continuum the two things are virtually indivisible. When you contemplate the scenery of the hardcore continuum, the analogy with Australia makes complete sense, merely states the obvious. The scene is everything that surrounds and supports the music: the clubs and raves, the media (pirate radio primarily) and the retail network of independent specialist record stores, the labels and DJ agencies. The scene consists of flows of money and of drugs, of energy and emotion. The scene is everything that the music catalyses in terms of behavior and discourse: dance moves and crowd rituals, clothing styles and the graphic imagery of flyers/zines/ record sleeves. And finally the scene consists of the punters, the individuals who come together to form the massive(s).

In a nutshell, "scene" contains and refers to everything in the hardcore continuum that isn't music.

(I think I could make a case for the music as a thing, to be honest: soundwaves have material impact on the ear drums and limbs and other body parts of the dancing crowd; until it's activated the music is trapped inside various recording formats, vinyl or mix-tapes; the music has discernible patterns and structures in it. But we'll leave that argument for now).

So when I say the hardcore continuum is like Australia, what I'm saying is that for a period of some duration, multitudes of people gathered repeatedly, participating in a great number of events that took place at various geographical sites--sometimes one-off parties, more often regular locations--where they behaved in particular ways, expending energy and passion and time and money in a fashion that had direct consequences on their day-to-day lives, and, indirectly, incalculable (meaning hard to calibrate but also "big") effects on the society they lived in; that there was a material infrastructure supporting this through which substantial revenue passed, ranging from the legal (promoters, retail, record labels) to the criminal (drug trade, etc). The nuum was (maybe still is) a socio-economic force in the world and a cultural force (maybe even a proto-political one, more on this in a later post).

In all these senses, the hardcore continuum was (maybe still is) a concrete, material entity of real consequence and impact. By all means stop using the term; that won't unmake the referent it was coined to describe, any more than a worldwide ban on the use of the term "Australia" wouldn't cause that isolated continent in the Southern Hemisphere to cease existing, let alone cause it to never have existed. The only difference is that the hardcore continuum was a historical entity as opposed to a geographical one.

Of course there's another difference, which is that the term "hardcore continuum" is a specialist one as opposed to a generally used term like "Australia". True, it has currency only within a milieu of people who enjoy analyzing music and subculture, and if you went up to most actual inhabitants of the nuum they would look blankly if the word "hardcore continuum" was uttered. But the thing that it describes--a family tree of genres + scenes that runs, in the simplest formulation, hardcore/jungle/UK garage/grime/dubstep--is material and consequential in the same way (if not degree) as Australia is.

"Scene", then, is everything in a musical subculture that isn't the music itself. Scene, but not heard.

Why did we hear so little about "scene" then, and so much about genre?

Genre is easier to talk about. To illustrate a talk, you can play examples of the music much easier than you can convey what it's like to be in the thick of the scene, what the vibe is like (although I tried to get some of that across with the flyers and other ephemera projected on the FACT big screen). There isn't much footage and what there is doesn't really convey what it was like to be on the dancefloor, the sensory overload, the crowd reactions, etc.

At UEL, as Dan Hancocks was quick to point out (and pat himself on the back for), he was pretty much the only person in four hours to actually mention dancing, what this music is ostensibly created for. And the snippet he offered--that the rhythms of funky prompt a different kind of dancing than dubstep or earlier nuum genres--was fascinating. It actually gave me a way into funky, to learn that moving to it involves the hands and arms and shoulders much more than hips or feet. (Perhaps it's the case that different zones of the drum kit activate different zones of the body, so that the higher in tone/timbre percussion sounds tug at the upper body? Or is it just the intricate flickering rhythm patterns invite sinuous finger and arm movements?). This one, brief morsel of data opened up funky for me much more than all the detailed breakdowns of influence-constituents in Track X or Track Y, the micro-taxonomic analyses of miniscule eddies of style-flava within the genre. (Such a pity he immediately went back to dredging up 2006 blog posts of mine!).

Here's an article from early 2008 where I talk about dance music journalism's strange silence about dancing.

"Scene" is the most objectively undeniable and vividly concrete aspect of the nuum, yet it's the thing we habitually neglect to talk about, instead wrestling endlessly over genre theory, tracking various auteur-hero musicians and the influence they had or the influences that made them, discussing intricacies of technology and production. Meanwhile, the affective, the experiential, the behavioural, the social, the participatory… all these "aspects", which are less aspects and much closer to being the whole raison d'etre of the music, get short shrift. Why do we do this?

The pro-nuum camp tends to fall into this approach because of the emphasis on theory, which abstracts the music from the experiential; it will talk about scenius dynamics in an abstract and machinic way, but rarely about the specific ways that the massive create the screenplay to the music's soundtrack; it will celebrate "energy" but in a depersonalized way, as though it was not embodied or enacted by flesh and blood people. The anti-nuum camp has little motivation to evoke the vividness of the nuum as lived historical reality, since it wishes to wish it away. Besides, as I pointed out in my previous reflection, anti-nuumers tend to have an auteur-ist bias and are therefore less interested in scene reporting or participant-observer type documenting of the scene.

Plus, it's what boys do, and the majority of us appear to be boys, regrettably (and the reasons deserve further investigation). Boys like getting stuck into the aggy business of taxonomic disputation and border skirmishes.

Thinking again of Australia (a small continent or large island, who can say?) led me to another analogy with the hardcore continuum that may be less contentious and even more apt. A smaller island that is (or was, until really quite recently) also a relatively isolated music culture. Jamaica. Yes yes, reggae starts with New Orleans R&B misheard, rhythmically inverted. But the focus of Jamaican music culture was inward: the sound systems in the early days might have sent people to the U.S. mainland to scoop up obscure R&B singles but the systems were warring with each other and very soon the music evolved into a totally indigenous sound. There are obviously historical links between Jamaica and the hardcore continuum (transplantation of the sound system/MC, rewinds, dubplates culture to the U.K.) but the parallel works on a more abstract level, in the sense that you have a relatively insular music culture that becomes a kind of pressure-cooker of runaway musical evolution. And what you have in Jamaica is both a macro-genre and a macro-scene. The two things are tightly tethered to each other but they are not identical, which means that the genre can slip out of alignment with the scene and even have a kind of lingering post-scene afterlife. The classic example here is what happened to reggae. It's commonly thought that reggae is synonymous with Jamaican music but strictly speaking it's a phase--after ska and rocksteady, before 80s digital dancehall and ragga. What happens is that reggae-as-genre slips away from the scene that spawned it and becomes a global music, thanks to Bob Marley, The Police, et al. In response to this internationalisation, the native scene renamed itself dancehall, as if to acknowledge that the local audience must always takes primacy over any specific genre of Jamaican music; it named itself after the social spaces in which the music is heard, where its audience gather. At first dancehall was just digital reggae but then it gradually becomes what we think of dancehall today. And that is based around rhythms that actually predate reggae and predate ska, folk rhythms from rural Jamaica. Ultimately though "dancehall" means whatever the Jamaican audience dance too, which includes dancehall-as-genre, old style reggae riddims now and then brought back into favour, hip hop instrumentals from the States, other Caribbean rhythms like soca, and now, it's said, even some funky from London… But if the Kingston massive started shimmying to Radiohead instrumentals that would become "dancehall" too.

I think the relationship between nuum-as-macrogenre and nuum-as-macroscene is similar to Jamaica. The paradigm example in nuum terms is the switch-over from drum & bass to speed garage--drum & bass becomes untethered from the scene, becomes a UK-nationwide and increasingly international genre, while the scene itself, the nuum heartland of London, embraces a new genre that restores some of the junglistic things that D&B had lost but in a new slower and sexier rhythmic template.

So if not Australia, then perhaps we can accept the notion of the hardcore continuum as a sort of Jamaica-like entity within the UK… a nation within the nation, without borders in the conventional political or geographic sense, but certainly with privileged sites, gathering spots, centripetal zones. The fact that the idea of "nation" even rises to the discursive surface of nuum culture sometimes, with names like Jungle Nation and Garage Nation, suggests this analogy is sound. A tribe is a small nation, and likewise a subcultural tribe is a form of micro-nation organised around musical affiliation.

Finally, I have to disagree with a notion several people have brought up, the idea that the concept of the hardcore continuum is motivated by a canonic impulse, and therefore rooted in snobbery (boo, hiss! Critics should never say what's good and bad, should they?). This is a misconception. A canon--as with Harold Bloom's The Western Canon (which I've actually read in its entirety--meaning his book, as opposed to all the books he anoints therein!)--is the selected masterworks within an art form. In terms of the nuum, the canon would be the tracks that a community of informed opinion nominated as groundbreaking, innovative, epoch-defining anthems, or just plain killer. But the hardcore continuum is the sum total of all music made in this macro-genre during its historical span (1990-to-20??), not just the first division but the second and third division too, the mediocre and substandard. (The hardcore continuum also consists, as I've argued in this post, of the sum of all the behavior, the socio-economic and infrastructural etc--it's the macro-scene as well as the macro-genre).

The nuum is not equivalent to the canon of Western Literature; it's equivalent, in this argument, to Western Literature itself. Or to sculpture, or cinema, or... any vast body of artistic activity that varies widely in quality. The nuum is that entity itself, in its entirety, prior to the filtration exercise of aesthetic judgement and fan debate (which creates a canon).

To say that the hardcore continuum never existed (as a lunatic fringe now propose) is to me as silly as saying Western Literature never existed. The latter is a category that humans invented, for sure, if you really want to be pedantic. But it exists in the sense that millions of pages of "Western Literature" exist in the world, millions of hours were spent on the writing of it by real persons in the belief they were contributing to it and a similar amount of time and energy expended in the criticism of it by people who believed they were furthering it or protecting it; it led to billions of hours of enjoyment and also non-enjoyment by innumerable real readers who really existed. That's real enough for me.

Ditto (on a much smaller scale) for the hardcore continuum.