"My purpose was simple: to catch the feel, the pulse of rock, as I had lived through it. What I was after was guts, and flash, and energy, and speed" - NIK COHN -
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- "When the music was new and had no rules" -LUNA C
Everyone knows about Moving Shadow coming from Stevenage
But I hadn't realized that Ruff Kut! Records was from there
As in The Good 2Bad & Hugly
Variously spelled - sometimes there's a comma, sometimes it'se "The Good", sometimes it's Hugly and sometimes the Hugly, and sometimes there's an ampersand and sometimes nothing at all
Like The Criminal Minds, the ruff-cut origins are in Britrap
Those are all from Ruff Kut!'s debut release from 1991, which wasn't a single but an album - a sort of scene sampler, mixing MC tracks, street soul, fast breakbeat instrumentals that aren't quite jungle yet, and some bleepy acid-y tunes
On Discogs it says the LP came out of a youth project - "thanks to Prince of Wales Trust"!
Now I think about it - actually I did know Ruff Kut! was from Stevenage. Because that's the label that put out Gappa G and Hyper Hypa's "The Information Centre" - and I discovered not so long ago that GG and HH played on a Hertfordshire pirate, Perception FM, whose existence I couldn't have imagined back in the day (on visits to my hometown to see the family, it would never occurred to me turn on the radio). (There was also Pressure FM in Luton).
But then again Stevenage was an London overflow town, like Hemel and Hatfield - and in that sense a kind of outpost of nuum demographics. In fact it was the U.K.'s very first New Town - albeit having existed in much smaller form for centuries before it.
However I hadn't realized that Good 2 Bad Hugly was the main driving force behind the label
At a certain point Good 2Bad Hugly reactivated and has been churning out nu-jungle releases including New Town Sound Boy, Vol. 1.
Never give in, never give up, indeed - still hurling out EPs, with New Town Sound Boy, Vol 3 out just this January
There's also been a bunch of reissues, including Ruff Kut Reissue, Vol. 3, whose cover shows a famous pair of modernist landmarks in Stevenage - the Joyride statue and Clock Tower in the town centre.
There's some similar but not quite as impressive statues in the New Hemel bit of Hemel Hempstead as it happens
G2BH did a track called "Wuthering Heights', sampling you-guessed-it the twittertastic vocals of Home Counties girl Katy B
Well in recent years G2BH went back to the Bush source for "Running Up The Road"
A different twist on 'hardcore' - laced with porno moans
"You Know How To Love Me" is the stone classic but the rest is a very solid body of ruffige
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Here's a whole interview with Jimmy Ryan of Ruff Kut! and Good 2Bad Hugly at Gone To A Rave
some key snippets:
"I used to work in a youth centre in Stevenage called Bowes Lyon Centre. From the age of 11 up to 16 or 17 I was there literally every day. I’d gone to the director of the place and asked him if there was anything I could do, and he said, ‘yeah we’ve got a music project going’. The project was to produce an album using all the youth that go to the centre. This first album was called Ruff Kut.
"... There was a group of us who were really into hip hop from an early age. We were all DJs and MCs, we were into stuff like Public Enemy, Rob Base and EZ Rock, all the electro albums. Bowes was a youth club – if you imagine a youth club that every Friday had 500 kids from all over Herts and Beds. It was quite a melting pot of people. For example, we’d have crews from Luton, St Albans, Letchworth, Stevenage, North London, they’d all go to this club. If you ever watched Grange Hill, it was like that, but the music was current.
"..... Just to give you an inkling of the heritage of the place, Rob Playford from Moving Shadow, and 2 Bad Mice used to go.
".... with what I gained knowledge wise [from doing the album], I went to Princes Trust to start a recording studio, I’d got a bug for the recording side of things. The youth leader at Bowes said, look I know you’re interested in starting up a studio, I’ll let you do it here until you get yourself going. I couldn’t believe it! I got the grant from Princes Trust, then I got approached by two… I’ll call them partners now. They said they were looking to invest in something, and they knew I had a recording studio, so they suggested we start a label."
"before I’d created what I’d call my first rave track, a guy took me down to a rave club called Milwaukee’s. I walked in and was like, wait a minute, this is me! Hahaha… I’d gone, ‘everything I love about music is here, its getting played right now!’ And that was it. I knew that it was my music, what I wanna do. Literally coming home from Milwaukee’s, I went straight into the studio and produced my first rave track. I think that was You Know How to Love Me – although it gets a bit foggy in my memory…
On The Good 2 Bad and Hugly -
"It was supposed to be like Soul II Soul at the time, people would drop in and out – I was the main person, some people would drop in – for example, when we did PA’s there’d be 5 of us working keyboards and samples, scratching and DJing, and MCing, then we had about 15 dancers. It was all people who used to dance at Bowes, it was just a natural thing, we’d say, oh we’re going to do a rave next week, whose coming?"
Presented yesterday at the EMP conference, it's titled "We Can Be Free”: The Pirate Radio Explosion of Ezee D on Don FM (February 20, 1993) and can beenjoyed in script form at MM's Beat ConnectionSubstack.
I once gave a talk titled "Just 4 U London" at EMP, back when it took place in Seattle every year - I can't remember if I played any pirate radio snippets, though....
This pair had a Top 10 hit with a song that is basically about an intra-scene war - the nu garage rappists (Oxide + Neutrino, So Solid) versus the old guard. Represented here by the sour faced, jowly, paunching-out a bit deejays who get their comeuppance thanks to a G-Force rippling blast of noise.
Portion of the lyric
The garage scene well it's really fucked up
Certain guys can't, won't keep their mouths shut
All they do is talk about we
Something about we're novelty cheesy
Smelling your top lip stop the jealousy
What, 'cos we didn't start from 1983
Oh, I was in my nappy
Did I mention we're only 18
Carnival '99 DJs put up a list telling other
DJs not to play this
But when I asked a certain DJ why
He gave me a shit of a reply
If I recall right, there was actually a kind of steering committee of scene elders - called maybe The Council - that was formed or mooted to ensure that UKG was run correctly, in terms of media coverage, who got to represent the scene etc
An echo of the Committee (I believe that was the name) formed during jungle over the whole General Levy fracas...
Maybe the jungle era one was The Council, and the garage one was the Committee
Videos from this era of UKG (see also Truesteppers) have a cheap-and-nasty digi-quality (obviously age and wear have worsened it in this case, making it look really los-res - like an ancient 128kps mp3). Feels like it was clumsily processed to have a sub-Hype Williams gleam to it. Actually what it looks like is a Nathan Barley episode.
Mark Fisher thought "Up Middle Finger" was the spirit of punk reincarnated as UKG.
Here is a piece he wrote for Hyperdub when it was a website rather than a label, under the name Mark De'Rosario
Hyperpulp: It's All the Rage 2001
by Mark De'Rosario
Oxide and Neutrino's Up Middle Finger is as important for 01 as the Pistols' Anarchy in the UK was in 76. Like Anarchy, Up Middle Finger is both a call to arms and an darkly exuberant gesture of joyful defiance. Alongside Ms. Dynamite's Booo! (an instant classic, surely the biggest tune in the last year), Up Middle Finger demonstrates that UK garage's efforts to ethnically cleanse the genre of all impure' elements has failed, big style. Everything exiled from the snooty, purocentric higher echelons of UK garage - jump-up ragga-chat, abstract numanoid electronix, frenzy-inducing MCing, deep darkcore bass, film samples, kiddiecore refrains - has returned to terminate its former masters. With extreme prejudice.
Up Middle Finger captures a mood, a growing undercurrent of rage in the country about the discrepancy between the sunny vistas projected by managerialist PRopoganda and the webs of corrruption and incompetence that are lived everyday reality. Neutrino's fury will resonate with anyone who has the misfortune to have tangled with Style London's sad coterie of promoters, PR zombies and A and R people. But, more generally, his invective also speaks to and for anyone who has been blocked and patronized by the complacency and arrogance of all the bullet-pointed, empty-headed drones who officiate in the blurry liar lair of Blair's Britain. Neutrino brings back an edge, an aggression, that has been lacking for too long in a British culture that has seemed to pride itself on its tolerance of mediocrity.
Whilst totally contemporary, Up Middle Finger (and the Execute album from which it hails) sound like a return to the vibe - if not exactly the sound - of jungle in its earliest, most fissile and molten phase, when the sonic contours of the new genre were first becoming audible.
Effectively, O and N have rejected everything 'progressive' that's happened since then - they have rescinded the supposedly inevitable maturation process which proceeds from bolted-together, frankenstein-monster cyborgianism towards the smooth and seamless surfaces of the painstakingly simulated organically 'pure' sound that has enjoyed dominance lately. Listening to O and N, you're reminded of the cargo-culting, skip-scavenging exuberance of Rufige Kru, Tango and Ratty, even the early Prodigy. You're taken back to that vertiginously exciting moment, or series of moments, when rave's synthetic hyper-energy was swept up into the sorcerous vortex of timestretched breakbeats and hyperdub bass.
Ms. Dynamite and O and N are being sold as 'garage', but as their interviews on this site show, they are themselves uneasy about the classification. The currents passing through them belong to ragga, rave and hip hop as much as to garage. Essentially, like early jungle, they are hyperpulp. Hyperpulp is a mode of hyperdub, but defined by a particular relation to mass culture; it is a cybernetic monster that feeds on pop culture and trans- [or de-] forms it into a blobby, seething multiplicity.
Hyperpulp culture finds its model not in the club scene, with its cult of the DJ, but the Jamaican soundclash, with its ruff and rugged indifference to smooth mixing, and the pivotal role it accords to the MC. Oxide and Neutrino - the DJ and MC team - re-effectuate this abstract machine. For those schooled in a white European post-romantic tradition, MCing sounds like something supplemtary to the 'primary text' of the music itself. But in hyperpulp, there is of course no primary text, only an intense multiplexed libidinal experience, which includes and is intensified by the MC's chatting on the mic. The MC's melting of dominant english into the lyrical flow of patois sloganeering functions as an excitation-heightener for those who want to get hyper.
Like NYC hip hop in its early days, Jamaican dancehall culture is fuelled by the antagonistic energy of competing crews. (It's no accident, of course, that Oxide and Neutrino are part of the So Solid posse.) Whilst the intense competition between collective groups is sometimes transected by hard war gangsta/ yardie territorialized violence, it is essentially a soft war - a gift exchange in which no-one loses, and the pressure to outdo the other crew produces a spiralling intensity of experience for da massive.
Da massive is crucial in all hyperdub genres, but it is especially important in hyperpulp, which feeds on and amplifies hype-waves. Witness Oxide and Neutrino's sampling of 100,000 Scottish ravers on Up Middle Finger. The sheer size of the collective body is used as an audio-weapon targeted against the closed-system entropy of scenes which pride themselves on their disdain for popularity, as much as it is directed against the dismal tastefulness of overground popculture. O and D's use of samples of the Casualty TV theme and of dialogue Lock, Stock... are acts of audio-abduction or sonic viracy, in which existing mass cultural associations are radically deterritorialized and minoritized; the certainties of spectacular culture are de-faced, contaminated with traces of rogue semiotic virus.
Where pop tends to interpellate the lone consumer, the solitary spectator, hyperpulp dissloves private subjectivity in the oceanic bassdrome of collective delirium. In overground capitalist popular culture, maturity is signalled by the move from impersonal collective pulp-out into privatized, facialized emotion. Goldie's career offers an exemplary map of this dreary trajectory. Beginning with Rufige Kru and Metalheadz, in which he anonymized/ pseudononymized himself into the collective while simulating the synthetic POV of the terminator and the replicant, he ends up sold as a 'solo' artist, hangs around with saddoes like Noel Gallagher, and devotes much of his last album to baring his soul.
Soul and soulfulness are of course crucial terms for the anti-pulp purists. It's worth remembering here Foucault's remarks in Discipline and Punish on the production of the modern soul. The soul, Foucault tells us, does not precede modernity's disciplinary institutions: it is precisely constructed by schools, prisons, and factories, all of which act to extract an individual subject from the dangerous, teeming multiplicity of 'compact masses.' Baudrillard's arguments in Symbolic Exchange and Death take Foucault's position further. According to Baudrillard, the arrival of the immortal soul marks the imperialistic triumph of monotheism over primitive cultures, which transforms its swarming pantheon of warring entities into 'demons.'
The tyrannical domination of Dance's SS - the Style and Soul gestapo - has kept the demons out, but they are everywhere in hyperpulp. (Even Goldie, never fully seduced by the soul paradigm, was still invoking Demons on Saturnz Return.) Hyperpulp trades in sonic fiction, and as such feeds upon pulp modes effectuated in other media, especially Horror and SF video. Video samples, once so conspicuous in jungle and speed garage, have been noticably absent in the re-musicalised, soul-dominated phase of garage.
Over the years, there has been a remarkable consistency in the sonic textures of the various reactive, boracratic genres Style London has tried to foist on the rest of us. From rare groove through to acid jazz, from 'intelligent' drum and bass through to soulful garage, the same sonic traits are always evident : there's a preference for melody over rhythm, for 'real' instrumentation over the synthetic and the samploid, for personalised emotion over dehumanised abstraction. Naturally, these are reinforced by snooty social codes based on snobbery and exclusivity, which are diseminated by the scene's lapdogs in the depressingly hedonistic dance music media and in the style press - all of whom are dissed, hilariously, by Neutrino on Up Middle Finger.
The so-called garage wars are nothing new, and in fact date back at least as far as the emergence of jungle. Jungle, don't forget, was so named as an insult. Devotees of the original US garage sound - that finessed-to-the-point-of-body-numbing-tedium 'lush' production identified most closely with that high priest of sonic bureaucrats, David Morales - decried the use of breakbeats, essentially for exactly the same reasons that Style London's current hipoisie are cussing Oxide and Neutrino - lack of purity.
Purity is no more real in music than in ethnicity, and no more desirable. It is only ever a retrospective simulation, something hallucinated after the fact by a group of control freaks resentfully anxious about its fading status. Inevitably, purity has no positive features of its own, but is defined negatively, by what it excludes. What purocrats hate about hyperpulp is its ruffness, its refusal to close down into a well-formed aesthetic object. But this is precisely what is exciting about hyperpulp - its dubtractive removal of all that we thought we knew about identity, genre, about where sonicultures had come from and where they are going. Subtract identity, contaminate 'purity', and potential is produced. Now that Soul and Style are losing their grip on garage, something new can be heard emerging.
Hyperpulp has come back to corrupt its illegitimate offspring. Celebrate its return.
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"Up Middle Finger" full lyrics
(Up middle finger I show dem)
Didn't wanna back we
Now they beg friend
Up middle finger I show them
Back in the day, they didn't wanna know
They wanna dis bound 4 da reload
They wanna talk to Neutrino, no no no
They wanna dis so solid so, no no no
Didn't wanna back we
Now they beg friend
Up middle finger I show them
Back in the day, they didn't wanna know
They wanna dis bound 4 da reload
They wanna talk to Oxide no, no no no
They wanna dis so solid so, no no no
The garage scene well it's really fucked up
Certain guys can't, won't keep their mouths shut
All they do is talk about we
Something about we're novelty cheesy
Smelling your top lip stop the jealousy
What, 'cos we didn't start from 1983
Oh, I was in my nappy
Did I mention we're only 18
Carnival '99 DJs put up a list telling other
DJs not to play this
But when I asked a certain DJ why
He gave me a shit of a reply
Later a bitch said to me
We'll never make it with Casualty
Ha ha ha, he he he
Now the silly bitch wants to try and hire we
Didn't wanna back we
Now they beg friend
Up middle finger I show them
Back in the day, they didn't wanna know
They wanna dis bound 4 da reload
They wanna talk to Neutrino, no no no
They wanna dis so solid so, no no no
Didn't wanna back we
Now they beg friend
Up middle finger I show them
Back in the day, they didn't wanna know
They wanna dis bound 4 da reload
They wanna talk to Oxide no, no no no
They wanna dis so solid so, no no no
Certain guys can't face the fact of
What we've done
Sold over a quarter of a million Casualty went
Straight into No 1
And they still wanna cuss come on
Oh yeah about the Casualty theme
Well no one controls the scene
So you do what you want
And you do what like
And you do what you please
Yeah, guys want to cuss our tunes, say it's shit
Think other people don't like it
But boy we don't care
And we got something for you
This is DJ Oxide playing in front of about a hundred thousand people
Listen to this
When I say you say we say they say make some noise
When I say you say we say they say make some noise
When I say you say we say they say make some noise
When I say you say we say they say make some noise
Didn't wanna back we
Now they beg friend
Up middle finger I show them
Back in the day, they didn't wanna know
They wanna dis bound 4 da reload
They wanna talk to Neutrino, no no no
They wanna dis so solid so, no no no
Didn't wanna back we
Now they beg friend
Up middle finger I show them
Back in the day, they didn't wanna know
They wanna dis bound 4 da reload
They wanna talk to Oxide no, no no no
They wanna dis so solid so, no no no
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Ed in comments makes a good point about the middle finger thing - when we were kids, the V-sign, the two-fingered salute, was the universal expression of hostility and disrespect.
