Det paid / MC Conrad RIP

 I had no idea this ever came out - the first MC-fronted jungle album. 1996.

MC Det' s Out of Det reviewed here by my old Melody Maker colleague Carl Loben - now the editor of DJ magazine. 

This later EP from 2002 has a title that nods towards - perhaps forms a matching book end with - an era-inaugurating album from 1991.

What Ragga Twins and Det had heralded was at that moment reaching fruition with grime

Wonder how this post-SUAD Ragga Twins effort from '95 sounds? Probably not very ragga-y.

As Carl acknowledges in his review,  jungle MCs rarely worked as "feat." artists on record - their style was built for and around the live set at a rave on a pirate 

What are the great examples of a jungle MC doing it in the studio?  

MC GQ is grrrrrrreat on this but it's really just one lick. Well one hook-lick and a bit of chat.

This is an exciting performance by UK Apachi  - it cuts back and forth between a singjay sing-song mode that's quite plaintive and   jabbered fast-chat that's raggaruff.

This from Stevie Hyper D is very early - 1991 - but it's more like a dancehall vocal rather than jungle MC-ing

Likewise this from the next year

Fun but pales next to this

Stevie Hyper D also did EP called Junglist Hooligan and the track "Junglist Soldier" in '95 and '96

A take on "Rub a Dub Soldier" 

Another very early effort - 1991 - is Killer Man Archer - on "Narra Mine"

But it is more like a dancehall deejay guesting than a junglist MC (okay it's points along a line but feels like there's a distinction )

I went looking and found that MCs featuring in jungle records seemed to happen more towards the end of the '90s (which surprised me) and that earlier quite often if I look for say a famous MC like Navigator, they'll appear in discogs as the producer of a track.  Bit like with MC Duke. 

update 7/28 - how could I miss this one? MC Lethal's "The Rave Digger"

Except there's no MC-ing on it - he's one of the rave MCs who moved into production

Ditto this 

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

Suggestions in comments

nominated Anonymously

MC Dynamite on Roni Size / Reprazent's "Brown Paper Bag"

DaveK in comments pointing out the Conrad remix of PFM  - which features his uniquely smoov and serene style of chill chat - reminds me that I have been remiss about RIP-ing MC Conrad.

Conrad's style of emceeing was perfect for the Speed vibe

Meditative indeed... adrift on reverie bliss

the most, cough, Bachelardian of jungle MCs

DaveK also mentions this early effort involving MC Fearless on the Boogie Beat label 

That's rather good and I like the melodic interpolation from "Moments in Love" too

Here's the whole Weekend Rush Part 3 EP

He also mentions Bassman's contribution to this classic 

That's more on the lines of GQ on "Roll Da Beats" 

Going back to Fearless, here's a bunch of later 'feat.s" from around '96

Aha - bit later than the period I'm looking at - but in 2003 Fearless teamed up with Shabba D, Skibadee and Det for this release under the group name The Professionals 

There's a great tune featuring Skibadee but it's UKG

uploaded by yourstrools 4 da commonwealth

Another one that doesn't really count - it's not a release, it's an advert - is this pirate ad for Telepathy, the MC whose name I'm blanking on is also the guy who ran the club, indeed he voiced all their ads 

Sixx maniacs

Sixx of one, half a dozen of the other...

Here's a really interesting piece by Vivien Goldman about Rebel Sixx and what she calls "Bad Mind"  - a musical mood of desolation and distrust emanating from Jamaica and Trinidad & Tobago. The feature is informed by her decades-long relationship with the Caribbean and its music, including a recent spell living in Jamaica.  Along with a rich sense of the economic realities of the region, the piece involves on-the-ground research into the rivalries between different garrison communities, territorialized conflicts that played out in music, in gang strife, and in politics. It draws parallels between the attempted assassination of Bob Marley and the murder of Sixx. 

Until reading this long piece, everything I knew about Rebel Sixx was from Kit Mackintosh's Neon Screams, where his music is extravagantly celebrated in the chapter on trap dancehall and "Trinibad".

What struck me reading Goldman's piece is the huge gulf between the ways in which she and Mackintosh respond to the music of Sixx and similar 21st Century dancehall artists. Which is perhaps not that odd given that a couple of generations separate them. Still, it's surprising that there's almost zero overlap, no point of contiguity between the two sensibilities. 

Mackintosh is a young man intoxicated by the surfaces of the sound, giving himself and his prose over fully to the ecstasies of vocal psychedelia: the unearthly transmutation of the human voice through Auto-Tune, Harmony Engine, and other processing technologies pushed to the extreme. 

A lifelong lover of  and critical champion for Caribbean music, Goldman hears through the surface to the social text. Indeed she finds the songs and singing of Rebel Sixx (and others like Shane-O and Rygin King) haunting "despite its excessive use of vocoder".

Kit Mackintosh on Rebel Sixx: 

"Rebel Sixx... perpetually phases and fluctuates between multiversal realities in his tracks. He's forever suspended in the slipstreams of quantum superposition as he manages to simultaneously manifest in every form imaginable. Like the hall of mirrors visual distortions observers experience near neutron stars and black holes - multiple-imaging, the wavelengths of light stretching and squashing - Rebel Sixx's vocal timbre shifts at every turn.

"In his tracks - like "Evil Me Dweet', 'Quick Evil Pt. 2', 'Dem Know', 'Evilous', Parliament', 'Rifle War', and 'Looney'- Rebel's voice will be shattered and fractal in one moment, then squished and squeaky in the next, but then bulbous and bubble-shaped immediately afterwards as successive layers of multi-tracking, pitch-shifting, reverbs, choruses and fuck knows what else are interfaced with his Auto-Tune. His voice will sound like anything from the radiant curvature of sunshine around the Earth's atmosphere to the jagged layers of off-centre red and blue you see when you view 3-D images without the special glasses on. Rebel Sixx's music is an exercise in bending, refracting and contorting synaesthetic light.....

"To understand Trinibad is to wander through the desolate corridors of abandoned cognition; it has no memories and no associations. The music doesn't harken back to anything, nor does it fill in the blanks. Rather it leaves you suspended in a perpetual year zero... Listening to it you hallucinate states of consciousness but not colours or shapes or places or people.... Nothing really exists in it. Nothing's quite experienced."

Vivien Goldman on Rebel Sixx: 

" A wry intelligence in his voice first drew me in. The way Rebel Sixx sang it, bloody images became a sad seduction, leading to contemplation; his sweet and sour sound poetically, cynically, recounting brutality with a honeyed soprano and heavenly timing.

"He was a musical original, and I had no idea when I first heard his music that he was dead, let alone the circumstances. When I fell for Rebel like any fangirl, I assumed he was Jamaican as he was so popular there. During that year I spent back on the island, his songs were everywhere—the bleak delicacy of his and Travis World’s “No Trust No Love,” and “Rifle War,” “Ghetto Prophet,” “Message to the Heart.” As I adjusted to the feel of this music, oddly bass-free and with an alarming emphasis on the evils of Bad Mind, realizing my favorites were by one artist helped me to absorb and understand the new sound.

"Among the phrases Rebel spread was “Fully Dunce,” a backhanded compliment. When the expression wound up on bookbags and t-shirts, Rebel was accused of spreading anti-intellectualism—whereas he was always encouraging youth to keep studying. His sardonic throwaway had been enough to start a craze and a controversy. His early death disturbed me so deeply, I needed to find out what had happened.

"It was, I soon learned, a direct hit. Two masked men broke in at 11:45 PM on Sunday, July 5, 2020, and shot him 20 times at close range at his home in Bon Air Gardens, Arouca, outside Port of Spain; Rebel hadn’t heard them enter as he was on his Playstation with headphones. Obviously Rebel had upset some people badly – but his music sang so implicitly of humanity with all our foibles! Why would people want Rebel killed, even as his art was deepening?"

I'm from the generation in between Viv and Kit - so it makes sense that I'd be equally attracted to both ways of feeling the music. I'd go further than that, though - where I want to be, critically, is exactly that zone between ecstatic surface and social reality.  I'm interested in the membrane between the mythopoeic sound-shapes and the lifeworld that effuses them.  Roots and future, content and form, truth and illusion:  I wouldn't tip the balance to one side or the other. 

Tommy Lee Sparta, another totemic / talismanic figure in Neon Screams, also crops up quite a bit in Goldman's "Bad Mind Music" piece. 

neon screaming target

Kit Mackintosh whets appetites for his forthcoming Repeater Books debut Neon Screams: How Drill, Trap and Bashment Made Music New Again with a proof-of-concept mix that vaults through four decades of dancehall's phonetic phuturism. Already aired on Repeater Radio, it's archived for your deliriumized delectation here. 

Check out Kit's earlier mixes in this series

https://www.mixcloud.com/RepeaterRadio/kit-mackintosh-neon-screams-01/

https://www.mixcloud.com/RepeaterRadio/kit-mackintosh-neon-screams-mix-02/

neon screams 3

neon screams 4

neon screams 5

neon screams 6 

neon screams 7

erb

minor classic tune i've known for years but not known what it was called - til now

sourced in

 

and also

fashion and style

was listening to a 2step era pirate tape - Ice FM I think - the other day and heard the MC use the expression "fashion and style"

one of those buzzphrases that comes out of dancehall

"Dancehall cyaa dead yeah

Gyal haffi go spin pon dem head yeah

Fashion and style haffi set yeah

Star haffi born wa yo check seh"

It made me think of this drum and bass track by Mr Size 

But also of the UKreggae label Fashion

which had popped back into my consciousness this week anyway because music press archivist Nothing Else On has got to early 1985 and these NME articles came up in his scan-tweet project

a piece on Fashion and Earthworks

and then the following week

Any excuse to repost the videos of Smiley's two top tunes

Here's a TV mini-profile of Fashion Records

becoming-cartoon

young Sadmanbarty has a whole theory about these sprite-like goblin-voiced dancehall singers, to do with digital technology and identity-morphing and transhumanity - the schizo-Gothic proliferation of personae and mask-selves.









i always finds these tunes insanely compelling the first time i listen but for some reason (same goes for Vybz, for Popcaan, for Alkaline) i don't go back to them - whereas the autotuned Afrobeat or mumble rap is much more repeat-listenable... perhaps it's just because the dancehall stuff is so full on, always going for the listener's jugular, the personality-level volume-knob's always pitched to 11

also find the beats in today's dancehall often seem to have a curiously muffled quality, so glossed up and digi-sheened and hi-def huge in girth, it's like there's a blanket of dazzle smothering them

rub a dub

hardcore 'n' rave revenants









postscript 10/7/2019



later re-revenant revisitations





semantically connected (ardkore)






postscript Oct 7
Spiro in comments points out another rub-a-dubby ardkore tune



semantically connected (80s dancehall)

militant step

step-related



not actually one of my fave FPs