Via Droid, here's an 1989 pirate radio show on which Randall (RIP) talks about "jungle beats" - at about 3.55 mins into this clip.
The track playing is Renegade Soundwave's "The Phantom" - a beat later sampled by Omni Trio for "Stronger"
One thing I've found consistently is that whenever you think you can pinpoint the moment when a musical term or genre name gets adopted, you will always find an earlier example.... there's sort of new-word seep-backwards-through-time syndrome
It applies to almost everything
- grunge (used all through the 1980s and probably has earlier usages)
- punk
- postpunk
- rave
- Britpop
- rock and roll
- boogie
- grime (well, "grimy" was used by Onyx almost a decade earlier)
And don't get me started on "techno"....
Hell, I even found I'd coined neurofunk almost a decade earlier than when I affixed the term to a shit direction in drum and bass
Talking of funk... they used that in the 1950s, as a specifically musical term, in the context of jazz, hard bop and that end of the spectrum. (Obviously it had other meanings - including the completely non-congruent quaint-Brit Rudyard Kiplingesque meaning of "loss of nerve", "fearfulness" - as well as the connotatively proximate ones of body odour, sex-smell, etc)
"Indie" is another one.... color me surprised to see it pop up twice in Nik Cohn's Awopbop:
- describing Apple Records, he says something that started out as the grand Beatles dream of a free space for artists of all kinds, inventors, people trying to do experimental happenings, etc, but then it shrank down to being just an “indie record label”
- he talks about Andrew Loog Oldham, manager of the Stones, starting his own indie label Immediate Records. Admittedly quite a ways from what indie would mean after punk – although only in his early 20s still, Oldham’s immensely wealthy, a record business insider, lots of contacts, and through Immediate signs up acts many of whom have hits. Doubtless it went through major label distribution too. So indie just means there’s just one boss, the guy who founded it, calling the shots.
That said, I would be surprised to find if anyone used the term "arsequake" prior to the, well, Arsequake League
And I feel like "shoegaze" came out of nowhere, as did "trip hop".
The journalistic coinages seem to be more likely to emerge ex nihilo (not always though - post-rock as we know first used in 1967) whereas the ones that come from scenes and populations in an organic sort of way.... you will find more of a semantic prehistory...
"Punk" as a word goes back to Shakespeare's time.
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