Ardkore is so utterly canonized now, so thoroughly written into history, that it can be understandably hard for people today to imagine how demeaned and even demonized it was back in the day.
A colleague of mine at Melody Maker - who later would co-found a dance music monthly - once declared indignantly: "jungle's just not music!"
Here's someone at the other paper with a page-full of vintage UKdance discourse circa May 1993.
Kris Needs pens a round-up of recent house, techno, progressive, garage, trance compilations, pretty much uniformly laudatory, and then squeezes in some swipes at the ardkore:
He is slightly less condescending to a dark side compilation.
That joke with the twists on Various Artists is continued all through the page, with compilations being attributed to Various Switched-On Clubbers, Various Future Foragers and Trance-Trousered Supermodels, Various Techno Warriors and Acid Scientists, etc, complimentary for the most part.
Tracklisting on the first of those comps:
Jungle House Crew– King Of The Jungle (Bamboo Mix)
Cool Hand Flex– Lock Me Up
Noise Factory– Behold The Jungle
Ellis Dee & Swan-E– Roughneck Business
Macka Brown– Go Down Baby
Satin Storm– I Think I'm Going Out Of My Head
DJ SS– OH! Master
Naz A.K.A. Naz– Organised Crime
Acen– Trip To The Moon Pt III
Killerhertz – Distant Dream
Noise Factory– We Can
Four classsics there I think... an era-characterful funny one (the first tune) and the rest is solid stuff.
Tracklist on the Darkside comp
Doc Scott– Here Comes The Drumz
Mega City 2– Darker Side Of Evil
Babylon Timewarp– Durban Poison
D Force– Original Bad Boy
Kaotic Chemistry– Illegal Subs
Metalheads– Terminator
DMS– SOS (Unreleased Baby D Mix)
Edge Of Darkness– Come Together (Original Mix)
DJ Seduction– Sub Dub
Darkman*– String Of Darkness
Noise Factory – Survival
NRG*– I Need Your Lovin' (Real Hardcore Mix)
Seven absolute classics of the era plus five solid second-rank tunes = a classic comp. A swathe across the greatest and the most near-future predictive music of the era.
So basically the Rushed-Up Nutters and especially the Gothic Nutters are spot-on about what's hot and where the cutting edge is
Now funnily enough I reviewed the second of these compilations for Melody Maker, but the bloody reviews ed never ran it. (Possibly an indication in itself that this kind of music wasn't taken seriously - or perhaps they were just tired of me banging on and on about it! ). Here's the paper print out of the review as faxed from NYC to IPC Towers (the disk file itself long corrupted and gone)
The odd markings across the page are from when I later went through it looking for lines to use in Energy Flash.
At that time there was just a couple of record shops in New York you could find these CD comps as imports, I think I found these two in a store in Greenwich Village. Because of the neighbourhood and its population, a lot of the record stores there had a kind of reflexive Anglophilia and would stock a few of anything from the U.K.
This incidentally is Needs's pick of the season, a Tresor comp, which is good-to-great stuff for sure (mostly for the Detroit inclusions).
Couldn't resist another swipe at the 'core cru - "squeezed under techno's abused umbrella, the dozen tunes on show here display a depth and diversity light years removed from both hardcore and the handbag-jiggle so often passed off as dance music in our charts and media".
Personally I preferred the previous Tresor comp
3 comments:
one thing that's interesting and I've come to realise this is generally dance music cognoscenti who aren't djs (no not calling you out here) tend to have uniformly backwards taste because it's not like rawk music with a surrogate literature cannon to obsess over, until the gravitational pull of the senius forces them to adapt. here's a hilarious interview where fabio disses progressive
"You always find the real deal underground, the bigger clubs are always there to please the crowd and the underground clubs are where you go to hear the DJ play a set really. Thank God, the scene now is going back underground. When ‘Sesame Street’ came out, that really killed Breakbeat because no one could take it serious any more, all the big record companies picked up on it and forced people to make more pop Breakbeat, SL2 came along and they have all been so badly treated. We were on the verge of getting signed up by London records until they dropped the Breakbeat stuff because they weren’t in to it any more. That’s the problem, trends, things go in and out of fashion and Mixmag jump on Progressive and tell every one Progressive is wonderful. Progressive is like Progressive Balearic, back then there was the House, the Acid which is like Techno, or even Breakbeat, and the Balearic which I see Progressive, light music, it’s just not got enough energy for me, like watered down Techno, I’m not really a fan of Progressive. A lot of people playing progressive today, back in ’89 were into the Stone Roses and Happy Mondays and totally diing the whole dance scene. Then they were slagging us off calling Techno music ‘Bone Head’ music. The likes of Andy Weatherall and Danny Rampling came along a few years later playing Techno "I was really surprised, the Happy Mondays had just been a trend and they wanted to start dancing again and go back on what they had said."
http://web.archive.org/web/20160101021133/http://www.fantazia.org.uk/DJs/fabinterv2b.htm
Although the converse of that of course as Fabio illustrates in that interview is people becoming dj followers.
I do think there's a tendancy to downplay the triumvirate of chicagonewyorkdetroit (I abbreviate it to one word to illustrate the nature of it being a street beats continuum) in hardcore discourse though, a residue from punk trash aesthetics and an enduring love for the more white(er) provincial toytown end of things. But in a way darkside was also an attempt to bring swing back into hardcore, to make if (if not so much cool) to make it more in the pocket. I speak to some euros sometimes and they don't get how the darkside evolved into the ambient vibes, but for me it's perfectly clear.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XDEIIFSidio
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cFPzUVUkc78
On that note, the lack of soul and swing is kinda where post-93 hardcore ended when it clung tenaciously and avoided jungles moody bass weight, it became entirely bouncy.
I think this is an enduring thing for me with black music forms received in Britain actually, that before I read any critical journalist/officially published account I'll always seek out the views of the punters. Even with yer good self I was reading jungle reviews on cogs long before I picked up your book. Which is the world of the mm/nme dance cognoscenti still seems so alien, so bizarre to me. Sometimes I wonder if your colleagues have even gone to a rave and seen a detroit dj drop campy italodisco.
not that those attitudes didn't exist in the actual dance music scenes, E.G: no breakbeats, no lykra etc. Although knowledge was probably the euro hardcore club of London at the time, far from detroit pietism, although yes very militantly anti-chipmunks and munchkin voices. big burly men in kamo etc.
You know Loftgroover was a resident? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E9aqH3_VT80
Not having ever gone to see an Oi! band, I can say honestly that I have never seen so many young men with bald heads in a single room as when I went to Knowledge - elective baldness, the close-shaven tekno slaphead look
(and a functional look it was apart from any symbolics of austerity and rigour that it conveyed .. for if you are going to be dancing your nut off for six hours straight, you would want to be as streamlined and ventilation-open as possible up top... how well I remember that sweat soaked hair back on the neck sensation... and, shudder though it is to remember / admit... on a few occasions being forced to pony-tail with a rubber band... I had long hair then, it was the early '90s, everybody looked like Kevin Shields for a moment there)
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