"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
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.
Always felt this tune by Dev, "In the Dark" - my fave single of 2011 - was a UK garage flashback / rip-off.
And now I realise that the main reason that it has that association for me is the parping synth-horn vamp that comes in at 32 seconds - a UK Garage hallmark.
Not only are those horns horny, the song itself is about being uncontrollably horny.
At this point Dev had the sexiest singing voice in the world, simply on the basis of her sampled cameo in "Like A G6" and her one solo hit "In The Dark", which was constantly on the radio in LA
"In The Dark" is from an era when producers were doing starting to do amazing things * in terms of an architecture of harmonies and multiple interlocking vocal parts, texturizing of backing vocals and what I would call side-vocals - or even aside-vocals: a kind of melodic equivalent to the adlib in rap later on. Working in jitters and stammers and mechanistic syncopations. And voice-as-pure-FX - like the slithery-rubbery vocal ripples in "In The Dark"
It all comes from Dev but with gimmick-attuned producers working with her (the Cataracs in this case), it adds up to the ultimate in ear-candy. An overflowing panoply of hooks - just so many "good bits" that stick in your head,
Other examples of this combo of personality and processing would be Ke$ha songs like "Tik Tok" and especially "Backstabber."
The latter is not the work of the evil Dr but David Gamson, as in Scritti Politti - a fact that just added savor to my enjoyment of the song.
"Backstabber" features an awesome horn part, as it happens, but it's not UKG style - more throwback campy, almost Casino Royale / Herb Alpert. Possibly a sample, as opposed to synthi-horn played on a keyboard.
I should imagine the vocal arrangement virtuosity emerging at that time owes a lot to the late 2000s release by Antares of the Harmony Engine, a studio tool that made it easy to multiple the singer's voice, stack it, spectralize it, situate it within the sound-space of the recording...
An orchestration of the voice alone, even before you get to all the other things going on in the track
Like those horny horns in "In The Dark"
* Yeah, yeah, ABBA did this kind of thing in "Knowing Me, Knowing You" and so many other tunes... and Missy Elliott in a different way. And then there was this from 2005, before the Harmony Engine came on the market
There's a doc about Victoria Beckham on the streamers (not as engaging as the David Beckham one) and that's my cue to dredge up this moment of genius.
The doc doesn't mention this track - which got to #2 in the charts - at all, but according to the life chronology that the doc follows, this would be from her flailing-around-a-bit period, after the Spice Girls split but before she launched her super-successful fashion and cosmetics business. A time when she was some combo of WAG and celeb-without-portfolio, drifting and dabbling, and mostly just existing to be photographed and to be seen at her husband's side.
But if this is Posh Spice flailing... well, all former pop stars should flail so fabulously!
Listen past the Auto-Tune gloss and it's one of the more avant hit singles in UK chart history.
Truesteppers - Jonny L and Andy Lysandrou - mash up the breaks 'n' bass and the stinging techsteppy stabs, but embed all that Nuummy Nuum stuff in a poptastic setting of nu-R&B meets 2step.
There's a tuffer 12-inch mix for the clubs.
"This tune's gonna punish you..."
A remix by credible UKG artists 10degrees below versus X-Men - not nearly as exciting!
Oh I didn't realise she had another intersection with UK Garage
Todd-ified
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What is funny about "Out of Your Mind" to me is that Andy Lysandrou was, only 7 or 8 years earlier, doing things like this track "Pain" under the name Kid Andy, for his hardcore label Boogie Beat Records, which turns around a huge chunk of "Careless Whispers". I remember ads for this track on the pirates, which was surprising because you rarely had a record advertised on a pirate and if you did, it would be compilation. They must have expected big things of it.
Then come 2000 and the astonishing total takeover of pop by UK Garage, he's no longer cheekily and sneakily lifting a pop star's vocal as a sample, he's able to work directly with Posh - a rough female equivalent of George Michael*, both in scale of fame and also regional / class location (George was from Bushey, Posh grew up in Goffs Oak - Hertfordshire massive, both of them - and self-made middle class).
So actually not really "chav-ant garde" although the hypergloss aesthetic of the clothes and the video is totally lumpen-futurist.
The whole look that Posh and Dane Bowers are rocking is very much a peek ahead to Love Island aesthetics. Which as has been established is entwined with the Nuum to a surprising degree.
*Suddenly struck me that maybe Lysandrou chose the George Michael sample not just because it's so chuneful and well-known but because George was of Greek ancestry - he would have been the most successful Greek-British singer ever, I should think, so perhaps a point of pride.
There was a cluster of Greek Cypriot involvement in nuum, UK clubscene, pirate radio - Nick Power, and influential instigator brother George Power (deejay, cofounder of Kiss FM etc etc).
If I was to make an inventory of My Favorite Sounds in Dance Music.... high up would be the horn sounds in UK garage.
"Horns" - because they are nearly always done with synths. The timbre is obviously ersatz and the "action", in terms of playing, is not quite right.
But in this case, they are vastly preferable to the Real Thing. Imagine how awful it would be to have actual saxophonists or trumpeters playing on UK garage tracks!
Oh I know there's the odd example of real soloing and indeed the main one that springs to mind - the musky, languid sax on Groove Chronicles' "Stone Cold" - is great.
But generally the horns in UKG are completely synthetic and all the better for it.
It's one of the defining features of speed garage and 2step, right up there with the woody drum sounds and those xylo-bass percusso-riffs.
I think what I like about the sound is precisely the sophistication-on-the-cheap quality.
They also contribute to the sultry sexiness of the genre.
But because they are played on a keyboard, they have a particular function: parping vamps that propel the groove along, just like every other single musical element in the mix.
But what is he talking about, you are saying?
Well, here's a primo example: Chris Mack's "Get It", flipside of "Plenty More"
Another good one is the parp-riff that kicks in about 38 seconds into New Horizons' "Find The Path" - it's meant to be an alto sax, I think.
There's also a two-note horn vamp in their "It's My House (The Bashment Mix)", from about 48 seconds in.
Another example: the Steve Gurley remix of Baffled Republic's "Things Are Never" - again, just a micro-riff, kicking in about 1.31, Really just a kind of thickening agent to the hyper-syncopated stew.
In this immortally insane track by Stephen Emmanuel presents Colours, a single shrill note of horn - more a beep than a parp - punctuates the madness repeatedly. Jump in at about 47 seconds. And it's particularly clear from 1.50 when the track strips down.
Talking of madness... in KMA Productions' "Kaotic Madness", the pseudo-sax - it kicks in around 1.23 - has slightly more of a melodic trill going on but is still very much a sequenced pattern.
Here in Echo Ltd 9's "Happy Times", there's more of a developed melodic role - starting at about 2.14 - but still mechanistic
Conversely, Dreem Teem's remix of Amira's "My Desire" is largely horn-free but then there's an odd little stunted solo at around 3.56
The Ramsey & Fen remix of Fabulous Baker Boys' "Oh Boy" has an almost-solo coming in at 3 minutes on the dot - and then 3.44, recurs with some slightly different vampige.
Sort of makes me think of an animatronic jazz band...
This Grant Nelson production starts a parpin' at 47 seconds... the horn is basically doing the same sort of job as the "organ" pulse
A modern example, ominously titled "Sax", does indeed deliver at cheesy solo of sorts at 4.30
Can't tell if that's a real horn or still the keyboard approach... A keyboard, I think.
Either way, yeuuch
See, what I like about this kind of thing is that it gestures at jazz but doesn't deliver it
"Jazz" in air quotes.
"Jazzy" is good in Nuum... actual jazz, not so much. The methodologies don't gel.
In all these UKG tunes, the jazziness is subordinated entirely to the groove function.
It's also almost always a chirpy, cheerful, extrovert sound. There's none of the blues aspect of saxophone, the sensual melancholy. It's a brisk, get-busy sort of feeling.
Another thing is the eerieness or just off-ness that occurs when an instrumental sound is played on a keyboard, rather than the sounding mechanism of whatever instrument it is meant to be: strings and horsehair with a violin, brass and fiddly little stops and fingertips with horns (not forgetting the embouchure of the blower).
With the UKG horns, the attack and decay of the sound is wrong. ("Envelope", is that the term?)
But this wrongness then becomes its own kind of rightness.
A similar thing happens with the Mellotron and the Chamberlin (its precursor instrument). Brief swatches of instrumental timbre - brass or woodwind or strings or whatever - are on loops of tape that are triggered by a keyboard. So you have a trumpet or a cello sound but they are played pianistically. Very much proto-sampler, except it's like a Fairlight that only has the preset, built-in timbres, it doesn't have the ability for the user to make new samples.
The classic example of this natural-sound-made-denatured, as heard in all sorts of dance music is vocal samples arrayed on a keyboard and played in a clearly not-what-a-mouth-and-lungs-would-do way
But the estrangement effect works just as well as with instruments that aren't made of flesh and sinew, the external instruments as it were.
See also that other hallmark of the nuum: pizzicato "string" parts.
Even more horny horn examples.
Actually this one, by Doolally, "Straight To The Heart", at 1.46, is different. It's much more like 2-Tone and the trombone sound in ska. With a bit of dubby reverb on it at points.
Actually the Doolally track has the other kind of parping sax vamp in there too - the whole track is, along with everything else delicious about it, an intricate arrangement for horns
More in the classic UKG parptastic mode: Nu-Birth, "Anytime", from 2 minutes in.
Exact same plaintively parping riff pops up in Somore's "I Refuse (What You Want) (Industry Standard Club Mix)" at about 4 minutes in
Maybe it's sampled, not played?
In the Somore, a voice seems to be saying "blow your horn" - sampled from some classic American garage track, maybe?
See, I had been hoping that this was some unique UKG invention, but of course it turns out that the first to do the fake-sax are your American maestro progenitors, like Masters At Work
Okay, then, like always, the Americans start it.
But, like almost always, the Brits take it further.
That would apply to the vocal cut-ups, the hard-swung woodblock snares, too.
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And of course - American sourced, yet a UKG cornerstone, and saxy - there's this
That, I'm almost certain, is real saxophone - there's a lightness of touch to it, and inflection, that's entirely absent from UKG hornery,
Which is usually sort of stubby, is the word I would use to describe those parped toots.
It's real sax in "Gabriel" but I wonder if it is sampled or whether Roy Davis got someone in to play it.
Update 1/13/2026
As pointed out in comments, a/ it's a trumpet in "Gabriel" i.e. the instrument favored by the archangel and b/ it's actually played by the guy who sings on the track, Peven Everett. He's performed with Wynton Marsalis and Branford Marsalis so proper jazz credentials there.
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Started pondering the mystery of the UKG horn and what it connotes while watching this objectively poorly executed doc that is just about worth sitting through for the snippets of old footage...
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Late breaking example suggested by Mark Kenosist in comments - at about 1.15 in this
More of a trill than a parp - a sort of amputated flourish. GIF-like.
Sourced in "It's Over" by The Funk Master - main sample is at 1.56 - "not a little girl anymore / used to be the one I adore / but there's plenty more fish in the sea / for meee".
Also used is "too many times you made the plunder by tellin' me / You'll be with me"
Amazing how Chris Mack turns that "be with me" into this sensually sinister loop...
Vocal science! Vocal sorcery!
The mood and feel of the original is completely transformed
The track's slinky-and-twitchy production is incredible: a sort of sublime fussiness, a palsied panache.
Those dramatic slashes of.... strings? .... are like intensifications of the way staccato strings are used in Chic to slice across the soundscape.
It's avant-pop where the avant and the pop are equally strong
Flipside also fabulous
What do you know, the Funk Master tune was actually a Top Ten hit in the UK
Chris Macfarlane, true hardcore hero and Exhibit A in the Case for Nuumological Continuumity
A playlist I made of his entire uuurrrvvvv (near as dammit anyway - 164 tunes + remixes) running through hardcore, jungle, UKG, 2step
4 Meg Soundboy with some nifty usage of "Can't turn me away" by Sylvia Striplin
Then there's Smokey Joe with a famous vocal lick
The "Special Request" vocal licks are sampled from Shut Up and Dance's "Rest In Peace" - but where did they get them from?
Another iteration of that vocals lick - as well as another, different "special request" - in this Reinforced tune
Those reggae vocal licks from Smokey Joe's "Special Request" et al recur - alongside JVC Force "Strong Island" riffs - in DJ Double G's UKG classic "Special Request"
Ah (bit nuum nummy this) DJ Double G turns out to be DJ Gunshot as in No U Turn, making the same shift as No U Turn becoming Turn U On, but not sticking with the label
Real name Gordon Gummer, a veteran deejay on Don FM and Flex FM
a different "special request" occurs in this track - and the "special" recurs passim
Two of my most cherished 'Mystery Tunes' - 'Do the Right Ting' identified a while ago by a knowledgeable reader, and 'Honey Love' I only just spotted myself
Artist name comes from a Queen Latifah album
But who is Princess of the Posse? Answer to come in a minute
Now Labello Blanco did some fun things
Also the tune I insist on calling "Sexual Feeling Is Mutual" - as 'slow jam' lyrics go that is some clunky writing
And Labello put out some great things - mostly those involvingRogue Unit
Like this unofficial, only-released-on-a-Jungle-Massive-comp Steve Gurley rmx of UK R&B micro-star Princess
And this gorgeous dreamy wistful remix
Labello Blanco - wouldyabelieve I only just twigged it's a play on "white label"!
Labello had a bunch of sub-labels including Urban Gorilla, who did this beauty
Did not realize that Labello was the precursor label to UK Garage stalwart Public Demand (as in Artful Dodger, Steve Gurley, Sticky feat Ms Dynamite etc)
Some serious Nuumy Nuum stuff there, history fans!
There was a 2steppy sublabel called Absolute Corruption
Add that to this long list of Erik Satie "Trois Gymnopedies" rifling tunes
For a second there - in a feat of absolute nuumtinuity - I thought this might be a cover of Goldie's "Kemistry" / "You and Me" - but it seems more inspiration / homage
Labello / Public Demand / etc is-was a tightknit operation clustered around the Low family
Key figure is Jimmy Low, who set up Labello in 1990.
Also known as Macka Brown and MC Kann aka Bug Kann (as in Bug Kann & The Plastic Jam, Labello's most successful act with "Made In Two Minutes") (although Macka's "Go Down Baby" was a big tune too)
But there's also younger brother Dave Low and sister Patti Low
Patti is Princess of the Posse - at least it says that "all tracks created by" her, but "all tracks produced by the Plastic Jam"
Which is Grant Bowden, the key non-family member of the operation.
An interesting distinction - what is the difference between "created" and "produced", in this sort of music?
Nuum nuuumy alert - Bowden became the UKG artist Gass,. Named after the UK garage club I assume.
Back to Princess of the Posse
The other two tracks on the Pun Project EP are solid ruffige with squeakified raggavox
One of Grant Bowden's aliases is Payback, as in "Eastenders' and "Dope"
Huge bass on this tune and nice clangy beat
Monster tectonic rumblizm on this
I'm guessing Bowden's got the lion share of responsibility for the label's early classic "Made In Two Minutes"
1990 and this is almost ambient jungle ahead of schedule - the main lick is a dreamy, chilled version of the 'rave signal' melody-riff
But it also came out as Reel To Reel?
Now is this the same as the Original Bleep version or slightly different?
The famous incarnation of "Made In Two Minutes" is very UKrappy in the Criminal Minds / Genaside II / Rebel MC mode. And presumably that's sister Patti cooing over the top.
And there's raggamuffin bizness at the start (ALLCRU - mouth-mangled it sounds more like ARDKORE) and at points throughout....
Many remixes
Foul Play - a remix by them I missed
And many other versions, including second go's by Gachet and others
And keeping it nuum nuum nuumy here's a coupla UKG remixes from 97
Talking of the UKG era....
It says at Discogss that the younger scion of the Low clan - Dave Low - is "the DJ in Artful Dodger"
But this was achieved in an unusual way
In 2001, Hill and Devereux parted ways due to creative differences and the trademark, name and usage rights of Artful Dodger was purchased by Blessed Records.
Capitalising on the significant live demand for the group, the owner of Blessed Records DJ Dave Low accompanied by MC Alistair adopted the name, in essence creating a cover band. They continue to tour under the name Artful Dodger to this day, performing the music of Hill and Devereux frequently in their sets.
Hill and Devereux reunited in 2017 but were unable to release new music or perform under their own name so formed Original Dodger.
I wonder what the market value of the Artful Dodger brand was in 2001-ish?
They had had a run of Top 10 singles - five of them - and two of those were #2 smashes.
And they must have done a million remixes.
But as a performance outfit... how much would someone pay them for that, as the UKG-goes-pop bubble bursts?
As for Princess of the Posse, it says at Discogs that Patti Low is a
"session singer from Essex, England based in Marbella, Spain.
Now works as a vocal coach and songwriter and performs in an ABBA tribute act."
An exploration of personal and collective histories from the UK garage rave scene of the early 2000’s, from Angel Zinovieff.
This Material Archive brings together a collection of works made between 2014 and 2023. Reflecting on sonic, choreographic and social histories of the UK garage rave scene, it maps themes such as joy in collective movement, transcendence, madness, the power of the imagination and the division of time. Weaving both deeply personal and collective experiences, the work encompasses archival materials, video work, music and text.
Two piece chicken and chips for 99p inside the party
[Verse 2 - Shotta Shah]
It's me; Shotta Shah Khan
Hold tight yes with the garlic naan
Smack Princess Pukka with the back of my palm
Sniff ten lines, that shit's haraam
Uncle will flip but I'll tell him keep calm
It's me and my boy Ali
Coming down Leeds Road at ninety
In my Chacha's Ferrari
I'm a taxi driver
Drive you to my yard for a fiver
Get a sucky off a prozzy for a bottle of cider
Up on the mic ah!
I said I took this bird to the Shimla Spice
Curry and rice on a Friday night
I got a vindaloo and it made me poo
Now I'm at Frame 2 with the Leeds road crew
See rap shows near Hollywood
Get tickets as low as $112
[Verse 3 - Halal Ham]
Stepped in the party, pass me the shisha
Drove to Bradford in my two-litre
Saw a peng ting, I'll go chat to her
Not going to Begum though like Shamima
I moved to this Auntie, Aunti went hanji
Then she went to go make me some handi
It's Shotta Shah and Kutta Khan and we go hard in Bradistan
A couple of apnas, a couple of goras
A couple of tings for a couple of pakoras
Uss bar kidda sohniye
And she's gonna take me home with her
Kasmeh bro it was mental
Spend my Eid monies on a rental
I was like "Boss who wants a Lambo?"
Popping bottles; Rubicon Mango
Shotta Shah is from Bad Boy Chiller Crew and here's another BBCC track that references Chicken Dhansak
What led me back to these was a more recent "Bradford Sound" track by MC Chippy
A real "Danelaw" look to most of the people in this video - red hair, pale skin, narrow eyes
A Scandi-ness that recalls Die Antwoord, the whitest people who ever rapped - until BBCC + crews
(although donkists the Blackout Crew were pretty pasty)
This Chippy fella looks like a mash-up of Catweazle and Jimmy Savile
Looking at these vids (and there's so many of them) I sometimes can't help picturing a post-apocalyptic tribe out of some Russell Hoban scenario.... mutant survivors who've reconstructed "civilization" using a handful of cultural fragments - in this case, a So Solid Crew DVD, a No Limit CD, singles by T2 and DJ Q... a Niche mix-tape pack ... over the centuries the repeated gestures and references devolved into rote ritual, emptied of meaning, original referents long lost....
Hey look - an Irish branch of this bassline/rap fusion
I had a fun and wide-ranging chat with The Underground Is Massiveauthor Michaelangelo Matos at his substack Beat Connection, which is dedicated to deejay mixes. The chat touched on Futuromania, rave, jungle, UK garage pirate radio, digital maximalism, and many other topics, using the structure of five deejay mixes and radio sets: John Peel's legendary Punk Special from December '76, a Don FMEzy D Xmas '92 show, DB's The History of Our World hardcore + breakbeat ultramix from 94, Tuff Jam's CD-mix Underground Frequencies Volume One which captures UK garage at a protean formative moment beforeeither the "speed" or "2step" kicked in, and then Rustie's Essential Mix of April 2012, the frazzling dazzle of digi-maxed nu-progtronica.
My favorite was probably the Tuff Jam set, which reintroduced me to these old favorites:
It reminded me of a period when I owned about three or four speed garage comps, as that was all there was to own - and this was one of them. It was the main way - living in NYC - I was able to hear the music. A handful of 12 inch singles would reach the Manhattan dance specialist stores, and I'd scoop them all up, pretty much - but there was zero demand locally: the local jungle / drum+bass scene was at its strongest then, and they all regarded speed garage as apostasy, a def(l)ection from the True Path, while the New York househeads, as you'd expect, thought it was garbage not garage - too ruff-hewn on the production side, too fast, too bumpy. Not proper.
As I mentioned to Matos, my evangelism - like with jungle several years earlier - involved making tape introductions to the new style for friends and colleagues. But because most of the best tracks I only had on these DJ-mixed CDs, I had to fade them up and fade them down in order to get them to resemble proper tracks, on these cassette compilations. I'm sure this is one of the reasons - all these three or four minutes portions of a track, sometimes with a bit of another tune lingering at the start, or coming in at the end - why these tapes confused my intended converts. But mostly they just couldn't hear the subtle radicalism, the contamination of American lush sexy garage with jungly flavor, the exaggeration of the bump+flex in the original music. I would get responses like "isn't this just house music?". Well, yes, but also no.
On the Tuff Jam ceedee, it's very nascent and early-days-yet indeed - the selection is equal parts American house, emulative British stuff that attempts to sound as smooth 'n' sexy and palatially polished... and then really just a few things that are true speed garridge. There's also stuff by those unorthodox Americans who would help to catalyse the UK thing and then be pulled along by it and pushed further - Todd Edwards, Armand Van Helden.
Great days - I remember the hunger
a/ the hunger just to get hold of the bloody music
and
b/ the hunger, the itch, just to see where it was going to go next.
I couldn't have imagined 2step, even though there was a clue on this Tuff Jam CD right near the end of it.
Along with the sound of the New Thing, what hooks me as a language-fan is also the sense of a new argot creeping in - new buzzterms - "bumpy", Tuff Jam's term "Unda-Vybe"
Crazy to think that's it over a quarter-century since UKG! Well over 25 years, actually, depending on when you date it from (e.g. the pre-speed UK garage tunes)
Below is all my website writing on UKG, 1997-2001, drawn from the annual faves / unfaves surveys. Five of the best years of my listening life.
Actually there's one thing I left out, the theory-slanted, macro-analytic Feminine Pressure Footnotes. Below is the more juicy stuff - rhythmtexture-evoking paeans to particular tunes.
It's a textual accompaniment to this 2step garage playlist and this (much shorter) speed garage playlist (suggestions for expanding that, or indeed the already very long 2step, most welcome)
1997
AMBIVALENCE OF THE YEAR: SPEED GARAGE
Things I like about Speed Garage
1/ It's a composite of potent clichés -- the best, most effective (what some call "cheesy") elements from the last ten years of club and rave culture mashed together: garage's skipping, syncopated snares; house's brassy diva vocals and EQ-ing/filtering/phasing/stereopanning effects that make sounds shiver up your spine; 1992 hardcore's squeaky vocals (hence speed garage covers of Jonny L's "Hurt You So", Urban Shakedown's "Some Justice", that "Sexual Feeling Is Mutual" track); 1994 jungle's ragga-dalek timestretched chants and Dred Bass radioactive-glow B-lines and Omni Trio-style soul-diva plasma-acapella loops.
2/ Such a simple idea--fusing the best of house and jungle--ruffing up house just at the point when it had gotten a little too sedate and glossy, and joy-juicing up jungle just as it lost its rude-bwoy exuberance and (with neurofunk) became utterly desiccated and frigid, what Peter Shapiro called a "cyber-Calvinist pleasure-free zone".
3/ Those lewd, lubricious butt-surging B-lines really erogenize your rump-zone.
4/ The Arthur Russell-like dub-spacious and percussadelic side of the sound (artists like Ramsey & Fen) looks like it might develop into "ambient speed garage", while the ragga-sampling and dirty-bass driven end of the scene (what UK Dance's Bat calls "dangerous garage") has already taken over the role of jump-up jungle. This potential split between "musical"/"experimental" speed-garage and the rougher, darker stuff that appeals to "garage ravers" (once a contradiction in terms) could be highly productive or highly amusing, or even both. Either way it's going to be way more interesting than the song-full stuff that just sounds like a slightly tuffer and faster version of New York garage.
Things I Don't Like About Speed Garage:
1/ Such a simple idea--fusing the best of house and jungle--simple, and once the initial surprise has worn off, kind of obvious.
2/ Precisely because it's a composite of house and jungle, whereas jungle was a mutant of hip hop and techno -- a mutant that warped all its sources (speeding up and chopping to shreds the breakbeats, for instance). I don't hear an equivalent factor of warpage in Speed Garage yet, I don't hear enough future.
3/ Too many tracks with the exact same beat--something you could never say about jungle, at least until 1997 and the tyranny of the two-step trudge. I've heard tracks that interlace and leaven the skipping, wood-chop snares with micro-breaks and percussadelic ticks, but too much speed garage is as rhythmically monotonous as house and trance.
4/ The "politics" of Speed Garage are so much less interesting than those of jungle, which was shadowed by the desperation and darkside gloom caused by the 1992/93/94 recession, whereas Speed Garage is colored by the feel-goodism and living-large of the late Major/early Blair boom. Hence its reversion to the pre-rave clubland exclusivity of the last economic boom, the mid-to-late loadsamoney Eighties; hence its resemblance to the playaz of post-Puffy rap/post-Timbaland R&B, products of the Clinton boom. Same flash clothes (literally--shiny, man-made, near-fluorescent fabrics), designer-label fetishism, champagne-swigging, we-are-the-beautiful-people/we-be-the-baddest-clique ethos. Now, I don't wanna come across like a playa-hater, but as someone who wears trainers, and crap trainers to boot, I resent the return of style codes and the implicit "quality people, quality sounds" ethos.
5/ Its victory has been too easy (coming out of the London underground to conquer the rest of the country and penetrate the Top 30 within less than a year); its appeal too straightforward and accountable. Where's the difficulty, the danger?
Nonetheless, for the curious, here are some killer speed-garage tunes. Shake your ass to:
Gant --"Sound Bwoy Burial (187 Lockdown Dancehall Mix)" (Positiva)
187 Lockdown --"Gunman" (EastWestDance)
Fabulous Baker Boys --"Oh Boy" (Multiply) [sampling Jonny L's "Hurt You So (Alright)"]
D.J. Ride -- "Renegade Bass (Unreleased Mix)" from Power House Recordings
Limited Edition Part 1" EP (Power House) [sampling Renegade's "Terrorist"]
Ramsey & Fen -- "Underground Explosion" from The Off-Key Experience EP" (Very Important Plastic)
The Hornet --"Just 4 U London" from The Hornet Presents "The Rockin' EP" (Sting
City) [remake of Bodysnatch's "Euphony" a/k/a "Just 4 U London"]
The Unofficials Vol. 1 [bootleg of Notorious BIG track]
Underground Distortion --"Everything Is Large" (Satellite)
R.I.P. Productions--"The Chant (We R)" (Satellite) [samples Lennie De Underground's "We Are Ie"]
Ruff Da' Menace -- "Kick The Party Into Full Effect (Ruff & Menacing Mix)" (Obsessive House)
A Baffled Republic--"Bad Boys (Move In Silence)" (One Step/Catch)
Double 99 --"Ripgroove" (Satellite)
1998
2-STEP GARAGE
The book's verdict on speed garage was that it's "a composite (house plus jungle) where drum and bass was a mutant (hiphop times techno)", that where jungle "twisted and morphed its sources; as yet, an equivalent warp factor is barely audible in speed garage". 1998 was when the warp factor really began to make itself heard, with producers reasserting the breakbeat legacy of jungle and creating the strange nu-funk style called 2-step--basically slow-motion jungle, something for the ladies massive.
At the same time as being lover's jungle, 2-step is also like a UK response to American R'n'B. Timbaland's twitchy hypersyncopation has long been widely attributed to a drum and bass influence, something steadfastly denied by Tim 'n' Missy. All through '98 you could hear that imagined (?) compliment being repaid by the children of jungle, in the form of 2-step. Dropping the four-to-the-floor house pulse and replacing it with Timbaland's falter-funk kick drum, producers like Dreem Teem, Dem 2, Chris Mac, Steve Gurley, et al are basically making smoov R'n'B filtered through a post-Ecstasy sensorium: midtempop bump'n' grind; sped-up, succulent cyborg-diva vocals; a playa-pleasing patina of deluxe production. At the same time, 2-step is geared towards the UK polydrug culture (where cocaine has usurped E as the paradigm drug, the vibe-setter), so alongside the sexed-up, VIP opulence there's all these dark-but-sensual elements (warped vocal ectoplasm, convulsive hypersyncopations) that hint at coke psychosis on the scene's horizon.
Dem 2--Dean Boylan and Spencer Edwards--are the outfit whose music makes the most convincing argument that 2-step is a brand nu-funk for the Nine Nine. One listen to "Destiny (Sleepless)" is enough to tell you it's not house music; it barely has any relationship to garage as hitherto known. So deceptively simple is its groove (every element--and they're all simultaneously melodic/rhythmic/textural--dovetails with a Zen perfection) that it's almost impossible to describe. It doesn't sound overtly avant-garde or abstract, but I defy you to name a record before 1998 it resembles or owes much to: the tremulous, heartbroken cyborg vocal faintly recalls Zapp, the darting and stinging synth-lick recalls Gary Numan, there's an electro flavor in there, but that's about it. Crisp and juicy, joyous yet tense, "Destiny" is one of those key records in the hardcore/jungle/speed garage continuum, like 2 Bad Mice's "Waremouse", Renegade's "Terrorist" or Gant's "Sound Bwoy Burial", that announces a paradigm shift, codifies a new style, sets the blueprint.
Dem 2's "Don't Cry Dub" of "Club Lonely"--like the original "Destiny", released way back in late '97--has a similar do-androids-weep-electric-tears? feel. Here you can really hear Dem 2's virtuosity at the diva-manipulation techniques that Bat from ukdance calls "vocal science." Texturally, they scintillate the voice, fluorescize it, make it gleam and refract as though you're hearing it through ears wet with tears; rhythmically, they shred the vocal into micro-syllable and sub-phoneme particles--cyborg-sniffles, sounds as fleetingly iridescent as spit-bubbles in the corner of a sobbing mouth--and make them syncopate against the groove (pure Timbaland twitch-and-bump).
"Grunge Dub" by U.S. Alliance--a Dem 2 alias--shows the duo's darker direction for 1999: a rhythm matrix so assymetrical, angular and stop-start off-kilter it's almost impossible to dance to (this is 2-step's big break with house's E-d up 4-to-the-floor egalitarianism--you have to be really good at dancing to move to these beats), and a twisted, gibbering groan-riff of a male vocal.
CHRIS MAC--Plenty More/Get It [Confetti]
Possibly the most accomplished and inventive producer to arise out of UK garage last year, Chris Mac is doing as much as Dem 2 to prove that 2-step is a new thing. "Plenty More" is silky, svelte sensuality corroded with darkness: a simultaneously brittle and supple rhythm track dominated by squishy, spongy snares (possibly reversed), strings that slash across the stereofield like the orchestral equivalent of a skid, and a mix so shiny you almost have to squint your ears against its harsh gloss glare. The vocal is interesting too, plugging into garage's rapacious appetitiveness (all those divas demanding "give me", "I need it"). The voice is ambiguously pitched, recalling Prince's sped-up alter-ego Camille on "If I Was Your Girlfriend"--the lyrics go "not a little girl anymore/used to be the one I adore/but there's plenty more fish in the sea/for me", but you're never sure if it's a diva putting down a guy and asserting her sexual autonomy, or a playa putting a girl in her place by telling her she's disposable, replaceable. Either way, "Plenty More" evokes the coked-up roving eye feasting its gaze on the sexual bounty of the nightclub's babe-arama. "Get It" is even more rapacious, transmitting an ants-in-your-pants alloy of desperation and desire. Brass stabs and jungalistic sub-bass pressure-drops weave around a dense web of drum some of which (in a typical 2-step sleight of subtle avant-gardism) reveal themselves on close inspection as made of the human voice: hiccups, chokings, winces, gasps and stutters.
OPERATOR and BAFFLED--"Things Are Never (STEVE GURLEY Remix) [Locked On]
LENNY FONTANA--"Spirit of the Sun" (STEVE GURLEY Remix) [public
Demand]
"Things Are Never" is moody. (It actually reminds me of E.S.G.'s "Moody"). Crisper-than-crisp beats, a baleful bass-drop (making your stomach plummet like you're on a rollercoaster), a one-note synth-bleep wincing like a hypertense vein pulsing in your temple. In the new sonic context crafted by Steve Gurley (ex-Foul Play, a/k/a Rogue Unit), the originally romantic-heartbreak themed diva vocal ("things are never/what they seem") becomes a more general statement of existensial instability. The lush-but-dark vibe reminds me of Nightmares On Wax's "Aftermath", the plinkily metallic, melodic-percussive xylophone riff recalls Unique 3's "7-AM". There's a bunch of tunes around in early 99--like "Slamdown" off New Horizons' Scrap Iron Dubs No. 1 EP--that have a clonking industrial feel that harks back to the bleep-and-bass era of 1990: the first time the British merged house, reggae and electro to make a new sound system stylee.
"Spirit of the Sun" has the archetypal 2-step mood-blend of euphoria and tension, retaining garage's overwraught diva histronics but resituating them amid dynamics and drops that are totally un-house. The bit where the beat pauses and the "shine on, shine on, shine on" chorus explodes never fails to send goosebumps prickling up my neck. The lyric is kind of interesting too, the diva talking about how she's going to be infused by "the spirit of the sun"--it takes garage's traditional obsession with summer to the verge of Bataille-style helioatry: his worship of solar extravagance and his exaltation of a "will for glory" in the human soul "which would that we live like suns, squandering our goods and our life." Bataille-style will-to-expenditure, aristocratic potlatch, largesse, and garage 'n' R'n'B's luxury, commodity-fetishism and larging it --same thing innit?
RICHIE BOY AND DJ KLASSE--"Madness On The Street (2 Step Mix)" [Stamp]
Another stunning torsion-and-treatment job on a female R'n'B vocal of unknown (to me) provenance. "I can't stand/All this madness on the street"--this short phrase, pretty funky to start with, is subjected to all kinds of vivisection and resequencing over a sublime cyberfunk groove. Combining the anti-naturalism of R'n'B vocal production with the filtering/panning techniques of late 90s house, producers like Richie Boy and DJ Klasse fracture the vocie into tiny percussive shards, create new accents and stresses, make the vocal haemorrhage or pulse, fold in on itself, buckle, crinkle, or glow uncannily. It's serious posthuman business, you're not listening to a person anymore but a passion that's being enhanced and mutated through interaction with technology. A cyborg, in other words.
SOME TREAT -- Lost In Vegas (JBR)
A tribute to/remake of Shut Up And Dance's 1990 (or was it even 1989?) track "Ten Pounds To Get In," this samples the Suzanne Vega vocal-riff from "Tom's Diner" that SUAD must have got from DNA's unoffical-then-subsequently-sanctioned dance version of the S. Vega track. We're talking multiple levels of citation here, serious intertextuality. On a broader level it's a tribute to the hardcore continuum--getting on for ten years of London's multiracial rave scene, a culture of mixing it up, of hybridising hybrids and mutating mutations; the continual reinvention of flava and vibe. A tradition of futurism. Roots N' Future = the endlessly fresh now.
DOOLALLY--"Straight From The Heart" (Chocolate Boy/Locked On)
A lot of people have said there's a ska element to this tune. There's definitely a skanking vibe-- the trace of a reggae afterbeat, a strange bubbling bassline that winds and weaves around the crisp, push-me pull-you 2-step. So irresistibly poppy and chuneful it made the UK Top 20, "Straight From the Heart"--and its sequel, "Sweet Like Chocolate", released as Shanks and Bigfoot--make the strongest case for 2-step as a millenial update of lover's rock: the UK-spawned hybrid of US soul and reggae that emerged at the end of the 1970s as second-generation Caribbean-British women demanded songs that addressed their concerns (love, relationships) rather than a Rastafarian agenda. As Dick Hebdiges says in Cut 'n' Mix, rather than the fantasy of utopia through repatriation to Ethiopia/Zion, these women's (only slightly less unrealistic?) dream was of a caring man. A song hymning devotion, commitment and holding out for the long-term emotional dividend, "Straight From The Heart" is also a sign that the hardcore nation's grown up and settled down. Borderline cheesy, it reminds me of the way hardcore could alchemize the most cheddary pop hits and make them sublime (c.f. Goldseal Tribe's '92 push-me-pull-you pirate monster "Only The Lonely"). Love it.
JODECI VS CLUB ASYLUM--Freak Me Up (Steppers Vocal Mix) [white label]
US R'n'B gods/goddesses (and some Brit-wannabes) given the now almost obligatory 2-step remix for the London market--sometimes official, sometimes strickly bootleg. "My Desire"--glossy gamelan clatter'n'tinkle of percussion, B-line that hops and skips and flutters like lovestruck butterflies in the stomach, a perpetual forward tumbling flow (pivoting around a micro-second hesitation in the groove that makes all the difference), a trembling-with-joy vocal re-patterned to dovetail with the groove in such snugly funky ways you'll want to leap out your own skin. "Telefunkin'"--slow-burning, svelte menace, hilarious love-junkie phone-sex lyrics ("I've got the fever for your flava", "I'm addicted to you baby/tied to the telephone line"). "Freak Me Up"--simply very, very horny.
NEW HORIZON--"Find The Path" [500 Rekords]
--"It's My House (Bashment Mix)" [500 Rekords]
--Scrap Iron Dubs No. 1 EP" [500 Rekords]
Not 2-step, but a reggaematic and rootical reinvention of house music so marvellous and peculiar I had include it here. '97's "Find The Path" whisks a Gregory Isaacs-style nightingale croon into a falsetto froth of melisma-plasma that quivers and ripples like the fronds of a jellyfish; organ vamps create an almost Gothic-dub atmosphere. "It's My House (Bashment Mix)"--"bashment" is a dancehall patois term for the ultimate, the works--has this amazing dissonant-verging-on-microtonal blare of drones that's somewhere between the Master Musicians of Jajouka and the old hardcore rave blow-your-own-horn classic "One Time For the Foghorn". Scrap Iron Dubs No.1"--killer tune is "Slamdown"-- is part of what Bat from ukdance identifies as the "latest micro-trend in 2-step... weird techno bleepy clanging noises peppered all over the trax", further pointing out that "This is a pretty radical departure for garage, which has stuck to the same portfolio of 'organic' sounds (real instruments, proper singing etc) for yonks. Now we get those organic noises mixed up with all manner of strange vleeps and metallic klungs - something I haven't heard since the heyday of hardcore and jungle around 1994."
KMA--Recon Mission EP (Locked On)
The title declares this EP a probe into the unknown (as does the sample "this is a line to the future/leave a message). From the outfit responsible for the dark garage classics "Cape Fear" and "Kaotic Madness," this is one of the most emotionally and rhythmically confused records I've heard in years. My favorite is the third track, "Blue Kards," a hybrid of the first two: disjointed beats that seem to stampede out of the mix, gaseous swirls of phased vocals (sung by producer Six), stricken guitar licks, and an overwraught doubt-wracked bluesiness of mood. Alarmingly the new KMA jam "Kemistry" is a supersmooth four-to-the-floor tune with a full-on vocal; Six's thinking seems to be that the only unpredictable thing left for KMA to do was make a totally conventional garage track. Shame, but the debut album The Unanswered Question, set for Jan 1st 2000 release, might well rival be 2-step's Timeless .
ANTONIO-- "Hyper Funk" (Locked On)
Crisp-and-spry 2-stepper whose simple drum machine beat, Scritti prickle of glossy funk guitar, and block party MC exhortation ("hype hype hype hype the funk") hark back to early Eighties simplicity. 2-step's very own "Rockerfella Skank"?
Crafted by rising producer Noodles, this languid-yet-foreboding track samples just a few vocal phrases from Aaliyah's sublime "One In A Million" (a Timbaland production which I always though was like a jungle ballad) and totally reinvents them; Aaliyah's hushed devotional tenderness becomes the ghost-of-my-former-self whispers of a love addict going through emotional cold turkey. The key phrase is "desire" (phrased "deee-siyah", putting a sigh in it): in the original, it's Aaliyah promising to do anything her beloved wants, his heart's desire; here, it becomes a floating signifier, pure intransitive craving, and yet another sign of garage's relentless imagery of appetite and neediness ("what you want, what you need', "giving you what you wanted," etc). Killer moment: when the beat and the jazzy sax solo drops out, leaving just Aaliyah's pleas and reproaches ("you don't know, what you do to me"), then in comes the moodiest wah-wah dread bassline ever. Goosepimples a-go-go.
RAMSEY and FEN--"Love Bug" [BUG]
--"Desire" [BUG]
--"Love Bug Remixes" [BUG]
What blows me away about "Desire" is the amazing density of rhythmic information RAF are able to cram in without the groove feeling cluttered. The intricate high-end percussion--shakers, hi-hats (closed and open), tambas, the trademark RAF ultra-crisp fills and rolls --is so dazzling and glitterball spangly that the first time I heard it the phrase "cocaine music" sprung into my mind (and it's not a drug I know much about). Turns out that (according to Kodwo Eshun, who heard it from Portishead's engineer) the "cocaine ear" prefers bright, toppy sounds. "Love Bug" is similarly dense-but-groovy with weird detuned drum fills. There's also an amazing "Love Bug" remix out any day with an electro feel--if it's the track I heard Fen playing out, it's got a Roland 808 bass-drop driven groove that throbs and whirs like a monstrous clockwork mechanism.
CLOUD 9--"Do You Want Me (DEM 2 Steps To Heaven Mix) [Locked On]
CRAZY BANK--"Your Love" [Locked On]
These go together in my head for some reason; "Do You Want Me" is sheer amorous euphoria with great percussive vocal stabs, which are contorted, twisted and clipped short to make for an exquisitely tender frenzy. Crazy Bank does much the same but with a more desperate tinge, making the diva sound like she's about to leap out of her own skin. There's no narrative coherence to 2-step's love songs: sentences are left hanging, the object noun or qualifier snipped to make the phrase fit the funktionalist requirements of the track. Here it's like the lover's discourse in random shuffle mode.
M-DUBS--"Over Here (Sugar Shack Break Beat Funk)" [Babyshack Recordings]
A minimal 2-step roller very much in the "Destiny" mold--crisp snare-kick groove, simple synth-vamp, great organ licks and dub-wise flickers in back of the mix. What really makes it though is the fantastic drawling and nasal ragga vocal from the Emperor Richie Dan, playing a ladeez-man tendering his services ("if you wanna take a chance/I'm right over 'ere") while a female backing vocals seem to be singing "Iron Mike" for some reason.
SKYCAP--titles unknown [white label]
Two tracks in the vein of their awesome dark garage tune from '97, "Endorphin". So wired they're dsyfunktional, they make me think the next step after charley-spliffs might be freebasing. The best side has a gibbering and mewling male vocal (which eventually goes into single-phoneme scatting --imagine Bobby McFerrin reduced to a crackhead) strung around an ultra-brittle 2-step anti-groove. The flip, also good, features a seriously overwraught and accusatory diva and some blues-wracked guitar licks. 2-step's journey beyond the pleasure principle should be as interesting as '93 darkcore's.
VARIOUS ARTISTS Locked On, Vol 3: Mixed by Ramsey and Fen [Virgin]
DREEM TEEM Dreem Teem In Session Volume 2 [Deconstruction/4 Liberty]
Locked On is the best UK garage compilation yet (the full circumference, 2-step to 4-to-the-floor), and also, I'm afraid, the American reader's best chance of hearing this stuff: a few 2-step tunes are slipping through in the speed garage/UK garage bins, but this is a London thing, inevitably if rather sadly.
You can find this comp in American specialist dance stores and also in Virgin megastore. Mixed by RAF, it's the bomb: alongside above-mentioned lovelies "Destiny", "Love Bug," Amira, Crazy Bank, it includes such killers as Dreem Teem's bubblicious proto-2stepper "The Theme," the astounding Dem 2 cyberfunk mix of Aftershock's "Slave To the Vibe," M.J. Cole's slick, Bukem-of-2step "Sincere" and RandF's gorgeous Latin garidge mix of The Heartists's "Belo Horizonti." The Dreem Teem comp has many of the same 2-step classics,, plus New Horizon's "It's My House (Bashment Mix)" and a great woozily vocalized Chris Mac cyberballad, "Set It Off".
1999
2-STEP and U.K. UNDERGROUND GARAGE
The Artful Doger--"Rewind" (Public Demand)
DJ Double G -- "Poison" (DJs For Life)
Shanks & Bigfoot--"Sweet Like Chocolate" (Pepper)
Master Stepz. feat Splash--"Melody" (Outlaw)
Deetah--"Relax (Bump N' Flex Remix)"
U.S. Alliance--"All I Know (Dem 2's Grunge Dub Mix)" (Locked On)
DEA--"Sacrifice" [remake of Rufige Cru's "Menace"] (DEA)
Various Artists--Locked On... The Best Of
Various Artists--Pure Silk: The Album
(to name but a few.....)
Even after the "Feminine Pressure" UK garage epic, I find there's always more to say about 2-step, new twists and folds, contours and crinkles. It's endlessly seductive and thought-provocative. For now, just a couple of thoughts:
A/ I'm always struck by the way the ads for clubs and raves on the pirates go on about the main room playing "house and UK garage". At these events you can be sure you will never hear a house record in any of the commonly accepted senses. You'll be lucky to hear any four-to-the-floor pump, it'll be 95 percent two-step twitch all the way. The latest wave of tunes--by M-Dubs, Groove Chronicles, E.S. Dubs--are moody midtempo breakbeat with evil basslines and dub-spatialized mixes, topped with menacing ragga vocals or pure darkside-revisisted samples. In other words, fuck-all to do with house music or garage. So why this strident prioritisation, "house and UK garage", with the word "house" upfront? Why the reluctance to announce, proclaim, shout from the rooftops, the fabulous novelty of this music? Why the semantic restraint? (M-Dubs actually call what they do "breakbeat funk" but this is really unusual). The insistence on "house" is a re-pledging of allegiance--as if the swerve into jungle, as a named, differentiated genre, distinct from house, was a terrible mistake; the first split that beget all the subdivisions to follow. Yet the re-dedication to "house" is not at all the same as, say, the UK purist house scene's emulation of American deep house maestros, its fidelity to Chicago or New York. It's more about a reinvocation of the spirit (rather than substance) of a specifically British moment, an all-too-brief phase before the subgeneric dis-intergration of the rave diaspora began. This phase, circa 1990, was when house started to get inflected in all kinds of specifically British ways, yet it was still house: the bleep house of Unique 3 and Nightmares On Wax, the hip-house/breakbeat house of Blapps Posse and Shut Up and Dance, the dancehall/dub house of Ragga Twins and Moody Boys, the hardcore house of Congress and Psychotropic. What's being re-proposed is an idea--again British-of a house music that's so elastic, hybrid, and protean, it almost has no stylistic contours, no delimited range of emotion--it can comprehend any influence, any feeling. House as a literally catholic church -- so inclusive and adaptable there's no need for schisms or breakaway heretic sects--because it can be almost anything. And that's what 2-step is--what house sounds like when almost every defining characteristic of house music has been eliminated or tweaked until near-unrecognisable.
In the tradition of hardcore and jungle before it, London's garage scene works as a gigantic laboratory, a permutation space where new hyphenated hybrids and creole micro-genres flicker into life for a few months or even just weeks, then disappear: speed garage, slow jungle, ska-house, acid swingbeat, hyper-funk, breakbeat garage, disco-ragga, grunge dub, riddim & blues, electro-gamelan, divas-in-the-echo-chamber, crack house, tech-2-step, quiet stormcore, sugarshack breakbeat funk, scrap iron dub, bleep garage, wildstyle soul, lover's jump-up. In this music you hear spectral traces of 20 plus years of London "street sounds" culture---the ghosts of Loose Ends, Janet Kay, Ratpack, Buju Banton, Gappa G & Hypa Hypa, Soul II Soul, Public Enemy, Ali G., Anita "It's the Way" Baker, Cherelle & Anthony O' Neal, Smiley Culture, Tina Moore, Mantronix, Leviticus, JVC Force, Deep Dish, Nina Simone, Kaotic Chemistry---not just in the form of assimilated influences, but often as blatant samples, cheekily plagiarized interpolations, even total remakes like the ones of "Mr Kirk's Nightmare" and "Lord of the Null Lines" going around at the moment.
B/ my favorite bit in Artful Dodger's fabtastic "Re-Wind" isn't the "when the crowd say 'bo' selector/re-e-wind"" chorus or the windscreen-smashing beats, but the bit where Craig David croons "got our groove on, dancing yeah, real hardcore." The fact that he can convincingly claim to be "real hardcore" in that silky-soft swingbeat Nutrasweet voice highlights the transvaluation that's taken place; when drum'n'bass started to fall into the grim orbit of techno, the London massive conversely started to feel the gravitational attraction of American R&B--almost as a kind of counter-force. At any rate, what used to be "jungle" got pulled in twain by these opposed gravitational tugs, so that a huge gulf now exists between, say, Optical and Groove Chronicles. The "real hardcore" line, so smoothly crooned amidst the lethal slickness of Artful Dodger's production, emphasizes just how elastic this London subculture is--how it can assimilate pop melodics and R&B smoov-ness and still be ruff, still be hardcore.
2-step is where the musical advances made during 10 years of collectively living at the cutting edge of rave's drug-technology interface (acidhardcorejungledrum'n'bass) are now being folded back into song-oriented house and American R&B (ie. the humanist, hypersexual pop sounds that ravers originally broke with to pursue manic sexless drug-noise).
2000
2STEP AND UK UNDERGROUND GARAGE
CHRIS MAC-- "Dubplate Style" (2step dub mix of 'Baby Gonna Rock Dis')
ZED BIAS -- "Neighbourhood" (Locked On)
ARCHITECHS -- "Body Groove" (Go Beat)
NAPA TAC -- "Dibby Dibby Sound" (white)
TRUESTEPPERS FEAT. VICTORIA BECKHAM-- "Out of Your Mind" (Arista)
SHOLA AMA--- "Imagine"
B15 PROJECT --"Girls Like This"
SWEET FEMALE ATTITUDE --"Flowers"
OXIDE & NEUTRINO--"Bound 4 Da Reload (Casualty)" (EastWest)
CRAIG DAVID--"Fill Me In (Artful Dodger Remix)" (Wildstar)
CHRIS MAC PRESENTS UK APACHI & DAVID BOOMAH--"Beep Beep!" (Metrix)
LEEE JOHN--"Your Mind, Your Body, Your Soul" (Locked On)
DJ ZINC -- "138 Trek" (label unknown)
TEEBONE FEAT. MC SPARKS AND MC KIE (a/k/a TKS) -- "Fly Bi' (ditto)
WOOKIE -- "Battle" (Soul 2 Soul)
VARIOUS MCs-- "Millenium Twist" and "K.O" on the Warm Up EP (Middle Row)
ARTIST UNKNOWN-- "Warship" (Pulse)
STEALTH MEN--"Chapter 1: Behind the Wall" (Phatt Budd)
2 WISEMEN-- "Hardcore Garage" (Ibiza)
SO SOLID CREW -- "Dilemma"
N&G feat. MC CREED AND ROSE WINDROSS--"Liferide"
BASEMENT JAXX--"You Can't Stop Me (Steven Emmanuel Remix)" (XL)
TEEBONE & SKIBA DEE -- "Super S" (Solid City Records)
SECOND PROTOCOL -- "Basslick" (EastWest)
SOVEREIGN -- "There You Go (Pink bootleg)" (All Good)
MONSTA BOY feat. DENZIE Denzie-- "Sorry" (Locked On)
BRANDY VS X-MEN-- "Angel" (white)
MJ COLE---"Sincere Remix" (Talkin' Loud
El-B feat. JUICEMAN -- "Digital" (Locked On)
Y-TRIBE-- "Computer Love" (label unknown)
VARIOUS ARTISTS--- Blackmarket Presents 2Step Vol II (Black Market)
VARIOUS ARTISTS--- Pure Garage: Mixed Live by E-Z and Pure Garage III
VARIOUS ARTISTS--- The Sound of the Pirates (Locked On)
VARIOUS ARTISTS--Masterstepz freebie mix-CD on cover of Mixmag
VARIOUS ARTISTS--- 2Step Pressure mixed by Merlin (www.wiggle.cx)
UK garage/2step enjoyed its fourth fabulous summer in a row, defying both the Law of Subcultural Exhaustion that decrees genres get three years tops before going pear-shaped (e.g. jungle) and the usual problems of over-exposure leading to boredom that accompany mainstream crossover. But I've got to admit I started to lose much of my interest before the summer was out -- assisted by close encounters with the sheer unpleasantness of 2step as club culture (see over-rated of 2000, forthcoming), the mounting drabness of the "breakbeat garage" tendency (see over-rated of 2000, forthcoming), and just personal exhaustion with that sound. If you're really into something, by a certain point, you've accumulated so much of it (and I probably have more UK garage 12's than jungle at this point) that an inverse-ratio syndrome sets in: it becomes harder to be surprised, it feels like the genre isn't moving as fast as it was, fast enough for you. (The same thing happened with drum'n'bass for me around early 97--although I'd argue that was real stagnation setting in, not a perspectival trick). Plus it's tough getting the records in New York, and the excitement doesn't get continually recharged every weekend by being plugged into the electrical grid that is London pirate radio. At any rate, here's an inventory of 2step delights from this year.
Chris Mack's "Dubplate Style", Leee John's "Your Mind, Your Body, Your Soul": love the way the drums on these tracks are so digitally texturized and glossy, it's like the whole track's made from lustrous fabric that crackles, crinkles and kinks with each percussive impact. The way the latter morphs into the former on that Masterstepz/Mixmag freebie is my fave 2step sleight-of-mix this year. Fabulous also to hear Imagination's Leee John again nearly 20 years after "Bodytalk". "Dubplate" has sticky-the-most snares and this fantastic pinging and chiming xylo-bass that's sort of pizzicato and rib-rattling all at once. Chris Mack generally is a supreme exponent of 2-step's art of decentering and spatializing the drums across the stereo-field---so it's like you're moving through a mesh-space of pointillist percussion, your body buffeted and flexed every-which-way by cross-rhythms and hyper-syncopations. Shame he doesn't often have good-enough songs to work this magic through and around, though ("Beep Beep" and "Baby Gonna Rock Dis" don't quite cut it as Tunes).
"Vocal science" seems to have faded a bit from the scene--the cyber-melisma effects, the percussive voice-riffs, the way producers make the diva twinkle, tremble, buckle, pulsate, fold in on herself. Nowadays these deployments tend to be more subtle: like the ecstatic shiver-stutter woven electronically into the word "re-e-e-mix" by Artful Dodger on their version of Craig David's already ultra-warbly "Fill Me In." It's unnerving because the line between what's human and what's artificial isn't so clearly defined.
Oxide & Neutrino's much-detested "Bound 4 Da Reload" --possibly the most tuneless UK Number One ever, but bleakly compelling all the same: those icy staccato strings, that sinisterly bubbling bass. Cool, too, that it infiltrated dancehall's metaphor of the killer track as ordnance in the war of sound versus sound right into the heart of popland. Also on the nu-dark tip, "Warship" which is either by or on Pulse, I'm not sure: the best techstep record since"Metropolis" essentially, albeit substantially slower of course. What's weird is that you'd hear it in the mix with soppy garridge tunes like SFA's "Flowers" orlush musical ones like "Sincere", but this is a track that contains no garage elements whatsoever. Weird also that the scene's getting into the kind of caustic acid-y sounds that originally drove people out of drum'n'bass and into speed garage in the first place. Stealth Men's "Behind The Wall" is in that strung-out coke psychosis mode a la Skycap, and is notable for its creepily effective Tracy Chapman samples --from some song about hearing either wife abuse or child abuse going on in your next door neighbour's flat, but here taking on something of the audio-hallucinatory agony of Coppola's The Conversation. Also plugs into that hardcore continuum of using anything that comes to hand, not being afraid to be cheesy (see also: garage remake of "Tainted Love", the UB40 "One In Ten" chorus borrowed in Suburban Lick's "Here Comes the Lick Again", etc).
B15's "Girls Like This", Shola Ama's "Imagine".... high-pitched melisma anthems that showcase a crucial aspect of 2step: the way that extreme treble can be as intense as extreme bass, triggering a fizzy-dizzy sensation like champagne running through your veins instead of blood. Leading the counter-reaction to chart-step's trebletastic effervescence, Second Protocol's "Basslick", El-B's "Digital", and So Solid's "Dilemma" bring the new bass-2-dark minimalism... Amazing to see how when the high frequencies are stripped away, the ladeez just disappear from the floor ("gir-rls, don't like this, n--n-n-no no"). "Basslick" is just jump-up jungle slowed to 130 b.p.m., right down to the shlocky classical music intro, but the one-note bassdrone of "Dilemma" is bracingly innovative, echoing electro without replicating it. Shame about the cliched martial arts movie samples, though.
Why can't 2step's balance of yin and yang, tweeter and woofer, lite and dark, stay where it's at? Especially when the result is chart smashes as jarring and weird as Truesteppers's "Out of Your Mind". I saw them on this crappy CD: UK pop show on TV the night I arrived in England to do a garage story for Spin: Posh Spice wearing one of those R&B singer-style headset microphones and moving amidst this huge phalanx of militaristic-looking backing dancers shrouded in a sinister cloud of dry ice, Jonny L and the other guy lurking at the back with their keyboards. "Out of Your Mind" is so shrill and jagged-sounding it's almost atonal, R&B-meets-Schoenberg. I love the vocal duel between Posh and the indignant vocoderized male singer. And the way she warns "this tune's gonna punish you."
Wookie's definitely over-rated and liked by the wrong sort (acid-jazzy, Rhodes-fetishising tossers) but the first one-note section of "Battle" is undeniably great, building this fabulous tension. Then it opens up into ghastly Giscomby Brit-Soul. Thank Heaven for the dark mix that's just the tense, terse first part of the song---remixing at its most effective and improving!
Napa Tac's "Dibby Dibby Sound": one of those great tunes that come out, probably get played a few weeks on the pirates, you'd have to be in the shops that week to get a copy (I just happened to be in London), and then it's gone: a glorious composite of tried-and-true elements from across the hardcore continuum 1990-2000 (lovely housey shimmer-riffs, bit of ragga chat, rolling bass, ravey stabs, bleep'n'bass echoes) that for some reason makes me think of Foul Play at their finest. If you ever see it, buy on sight.
Teebone feat. Sparks & Kie's "Fly Bi": my favorite of this year's many MC tunes, boisterous, exuberant, insanely catchy.
What else? The fractured funk of Stephen Emanuel's remix of the Jaxx's "You Can't Stop Me "..... Zed's "Neighbourhood": the plangent roots vocal and twin bass-riffs (a midfrequency blare of drone-swarm distortion and an electro-style battery of sub-low thuds and booms)..... Sovereign's boot of Pink's "There You Go": a tuff little unit, with Star Trek/Lieutenant Uhuru type radio-sonar blips running all the way through.... Monsta Boy "Sorry" with its absurdly weepy and prostate-with-regret sounding Denzie vocal..... Architechs's sultry "Body Groove".... N&G feat. MC Creed and Rose Windross's "Liferide": not sure if this even came out this year, but a melodic/percussive plinky xylo-bass classic, and a good spur to pondering why exactly that garage MC style of prissy, prim, clipped delivery sounds so cool...
There's probably dozens more I've forgotten. Perhaps strangest of all, and the kind of record that will always keep me fixated on "the sound of the pirates", was Middle Row's The Warm Up EP, with the Dickensian dancehall of "Millenium Twist" complete with comical Fagin impersonation and the bizarre boxing-ring MC narrative that holds together "K.O."
A good year, then, but we're overdue another paradigm shift from the London hardcore continuum. Within a year, I expect another "all change" on the part of the pirates. Can't wait, and can't imagine what it could be---always a good sign.
2000
BREAKBEAT GARAGE versus "GARAGE RAP"
When this flavour of "garage" first started to come through--must have been late 1999, with Deekline-- I remember being excited by the way the sultry, swinging R&B-2step flow would be disrupted by this much more raw, stripped down and rhythmically unsupple sound that was disconcertingly similar to Big Beat: 130 bpm breaks, bulbous bass, wacky samples. But what was refreshing about these tunes--"I Don't Smoke", later the more electro-flavored "Dilemma" by So Solid--when they were a brief tang of different flavour, becomes tediously homogenous as a scene/sound on its own. Stanton Warriors's "Da Virus" especially seems to be the drab template for a lot of this stuff, and "138 Trek" wore out its welcome fairly quick. There's some cool-enough stuff, I suppose--like Blowfelt's bippety bassline tune "Lickle Rolla"---but generally it sounds too much like jungle minus the extra b.p.m speed-rush, hardcore without the E-fired euphoria. Or worse like nu-skool breaks (alarming to see Rennie 'Stupid Fucking Name' Pilgrem reviewing 2step tunes in Muzik's breakbeat column).
That said, the last batch of pirate tapes I got, showed signs of a new twist in this breakstep (or whatever they're calling it) direction: not so much jungle-slowed-down, and more like a post-rave, drum'n'bass influenced form of English rap. On these spring 2001 pirate tapes, there's hardly any R&B diva tunes, and every other track features very Lunndunn-sounding MCs or ragga-flavored vocals, over caustic acid-riffs and techsteppy sounds, like some latterday Dillinja production. Unlike with techstep or recent d&b, there's very little distorto-blare in the production, there's this typically 2step clipped, costive feel, an almost prim and dainty quality to the aggression-- a weird combo of nasty and neat-freak. Lyrically, the vibe seems to be similarly pinched in spirit, a harsh, bleak worldview shaped subconsciously by the crumbling infrastructural reality beneath New Labour's fake grin; UKG seems to be already transforming itself from boom-time music to recession blues. The Englishness of the vocals reminds me of 3 Wizemen Men and that perpetual false-dawn for UK rap.
Lots of killer tunes I can't identify, but one in particular stood out that I could: "Know We" by Pay As U Go Kartel. As I say, quite mean-minded and loveless music but sonically very exciting-- a new twist if not quite paradigm shift from the hardcore continuum.
2001
TASTY TRENDS OF 2001: MC GARAGE
Dynamite, "Boo"/Genius Kru -- "Boom Selection"/Pay As U Go Kartel, "Know We"/Gorillaz, "Clint Eastwood" (Ed Case Remix)/Shut Up And Dance, "Moving Up"/So Solid Crew, -- They Don't Know/Oxide & Neutrino, "Up Middle Finger", Execute/The Streets, "Has It Come To This"/More Fire Crew, "Oi!"/etc etc
The new and often genuinely nasty face of UK youth culture. Proof yet again of the endless productivity of "the streets" as both social reality and pop myth. This MC cru thing in 2step seems to confirm the final utter victory of hip hop values over rave ones in the U.K. (although arguably that hip hop/rave border never really existed in Britain, was always porous; maybe the most exciting subzones of UK dance were always permeated with hip hop values, like hardcore/jungle; maybe it's always been just a "street beats" culture, at least in London). At any rate, ain't no love in the heart of that city no more; to be a raver just means you're someone who steps out and parties at the weekend, there's no cluster of values or attitudes attached to it (unless "bad attitude" counts).
(the analysis / recent-history-retracing carried on at Blissblog with this Footnotes to "Garage Rap" I did around a piece I did for Village Voice on what was soon to be called grime)
