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
