Energy Flash: A Journey Through Rave Music and Dance Culture (44 page)
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Authors: Simon Reynolds
BOOK: Energy Flash: A Journey Through Rave Music and Dance Culture
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Through 1993, these rhythmic innovations matured into a veritable
breakbeat science.
Sampled and fed into the computer, beats were chopped up, resequenced and processed with ever-increasing degrees of complexity. Effects like ‘time-stretching/compression’, pitchshifting, ‘ghosting’ and psychedelia-style reverse gave the percussion an eerie, chromatic quality that blurred the line between rhythm, melody and timbre. Separate drum ‘hits’ within a single breakbeat could be subjected to different degrees of echo and reverb, so that each percussive accent seems to occur in a different acoustic space. Eventually, producers started building their own breakbeats from scratch, using ‘single shot’ samples – isolated snare hits, hi-hat flutters,
et cetera
. The term ‘breakbeat science’ fits because the process of building up jungle rhythm tracks is incredibly time-consuming and tricky, involving a near-surgical precision. Like gene-splicing or designing a guided missile, the creative process isn’t exactly fun; but the hope is that the end results will be spectacular, or devastating.
breakbeat science.
Sampled and fed into the computer, beats were chopped up, resequenced and processed with ever-increasing degrees of complexity. Effects like ‘time-stretching/compression’, pitchshifting, ‘ghosting’ and psychedelia-style reverse gave the percussion an eerie, chromatic quality that blurred the line between rhythm, melody and timbre. Separate drum ‘hits’ within a single breakbeat could be subjected to different degrees of echo and reverb, so that each percussive accent seems to occur in a different acoustic space. Eventually, producers started building their own breakbeats from scratch, using ‘single shot’ samples – isolated snare hits, hi-hat flutters,
et cetera
. The term ‘breakbeat science’ fits because the process of building up jungle rhythm tracks is incredibly time-consuming and tricky, involving a near-surgical precision. Like gene-splicing or designing a guided missile, the creative process isn’t exactly fun; but the hope is that the end results will be spectacular, or devastating.
Breakbeat science transformed jungle into a
rhythmic psychedelia
. Unlike psychedelic rock of the sixties, which was ‘head’ music, jungle’s disorientation is as much physical as mental. Triggering different muscular reflexes, jungle’s multi-tiered polyrhythms are body-baffling and discombobulating, unless you fixate on and follow one strand of the groove. Lagging behind technology, the human body simply can’t do full justice to the complex of rhythms. The ideal jungle dancer would be a cross between a virtuoso drummer (someone able to keep separate time with different limbs), a body-popping breakdancer, and a contortionist. Jungle demands extravagant, impossible, posthuman responses – it makes me wanna sprout extra limbs, rotate my upper torso in an 360 degree arc round my waist, morph into a springheeled panther, bounce off the ceiling, go all Tex Avery.
rhythmic psychedelia
. Unlike psychedelic rock of the sixties, which was ‘head’ music, jungle’s disorientation is as much physical as mental. Triggering different muscular reflexes, jungle’s multi-tiered polyrhythms are body-baffling and discombobulating, unless you fixate on and follow one strand of the groove. Lagging behind technology, the human body simply can’t do full justice to the complex of rhythms. The ideal jungle dancer would be a cross between a virtuoso drummer (someone able to keep separate time with different limbs), a body-popping breakdancer, and a contortionist. Jungle demands extravagant, impossible, posthuman responses – it makes me wanna sprout extra limbs, rotate my upper torso in an 360 degree arc round my waist, morph into a springheeled panther, bounce off the ceiling, go all Tex Avery.
Alongside its kinaesthetic/psychedelic effects, jungle’s radicalism resides in the way it upturns Western music’s hierarchy of melody/ harmony over rhythm/timbre. In jungle, the rhythm is the melody; the drum patterns are as hooky as the vocal samples or keyboard refrains. In Omni Trio’s classic ‘Renegade Snares’, the snare tattoo is the mnemonic, even more than the three-note, one-finger piano motif. The original versions of ‘Renegade’ focus on a bustling, ants-in-your-pants snare-and-rimshot figure, like a cross between James Brown’s ‘Funky Drummer’ and an Uzi fusillade. The subsequent remix and re-remix by Omni’s allies Foul Play make the snares snake and flash across the stereofield like a streak of funky lightning. On all four versions, Omni and Foul Play make the drums sing inside your flesh.
This rhythm-as-melody aesthetic recalls West African music. It also parallels the preoccupations of avant-classical composers like John Cage and Steve Reich, who drew inspiration from the treasure-trove of chiming timbres generated by Indonesian gamelan percussion orchestras. Jungle fulfils the prophesy in Cage’s ‘Goal: New Music, New Dance’ of a future form of electronic music made by and for dancers. ‘What we can’t do ourselves will be done by machines and electrical instruments which we will invent,’ wrote Cage, seemingly predicting the sampler and sequencer.
Alongside breakbeat science, the other half of jungle’s musical core is its radically mutational approach to bass. Until mid-1992, the bassline in hardcore generally followed the 140 b.p.m.; on tracks like Xenophobia’s ‘Rush In The House’, the effect was as jittery as a shrew on the verge of a coronary, or, more to the point, a raver’s heartbeat after necking three E’s. Gradually, a slower bassline sound came in: at first, a seismic, sine-wave ooze of low-end frequencies; later a dub reggae bassline that ran at about 70 b.p.m. beneath the hectic breaks. The half-speed bassline transformed jungle into two-lane music, tempo-wise. Just as if you were driving on the motorway, you could enter in the slow lane, and groove to the skanking B-line, then shift to the fast lane when you felt like flailing to the drums.
As the beats grew ever more complicated, the bass took on a sophisticated melodic and textural role that broke with the metronomic, pulsating basslines in techno. Making a parallel with forties bebop, David Toop described this role: ‘bass is returned to its function as a physically felt harmonic/rhythmic component rather than a stun-gun which punches home the chord changes’.
Physically felt
is the key phrase: jungle’s sub-bass frequencies operate almost below the threshold of hearing, impacting the viscera like shockwaves from a bomb. ‘Rumblizm’ is how DJ Nicky Blackmarket designated jungle’s low-end seismology. New effects and new kinds of riffs emerged every month: stabbing B-lines that updated the ‘sonic boom’ effect that rap producers had got from detuning the Roland 808 drum-machine; reversed B-lines emitting a sinister, radioactive glow, a sound dubbed ‘dread bass’ after the Dead Dred track which made it famous; shuddering tremolo effects like a spastic colon; metallic pings and sproings like syncopated robot farts. Just as they had meshed together multiple strands of percussion, producers eventually deployed two or more basslines simultaneously. In jungle, bass – hitherto dance music’s reliable pulse – became a plasma-like substance forever morphing and mutating. Like the jittery breakbeats, this new
dangerbass
put you on edge – it felt like trying to dance over a minefield.
B-Boy Meets Rude BoyPhysically felt
is the key phrase: jungle’s sub-bass frequencies operate almost below the threshold of hearing, impacting the viscera like shockwaves from a bomb. ‘Rumblizm’ is how DJ Nicky Blackmarket designated jungle’s low-end seismology. New effects and new kinds of riffs emerged every month: stabbing B-lines that updated the ‘sonic boom’ effect that rap producers had got from detuning the Roland 808 drum-machine; reversed B-lines emitting a sinister, radioactive glow, a sound dubbed ‘dread bass’ after the Dead Dred track which made it famous; shuddering tremolo effects like a spastic colon; metallic pings and sproings like syncopated robot farts. Just as they had meshed together multiple strands of percussion, producers eventually deployed two or more basslines simultaneously. In jungle, bass – hitherto dance music’s reliable pulse – became a plasma-like substance forever morphing and mutating. Like the jittery breakbeats, this new
dangerbass
put you on edge – it felt like trying to dance over a minefield.
How did this martial music emerge out of rave culture, with its loved-up, peacedelic spirit? Where did all the junglists come from, anyway? Some were original British B-boys who’d gotten swept up in the hardcore rave scene; others came from the reggae sound-system subculture of the eighties, whose music policy ran the spectrum of imported ‘street sounds’ from dub and dancehall to electro and rap.
Take the trajectory followed by Danny Breaks, the white whizzkid from Essex behind Sonz of A Loop Da Loop Era and later Droppin’ Science. As a schoolboy, Danny was into electro, breakdancing and ‘cutting up breaks on the turntables’. By the late eighties, Danny had decided that UK rap wasn’t ‘really runnin’. Even when the UK crews were rapping about everyday English life, ‘it didn’t come ’cross, ’cos so much of the flavour of rap is the American voice.’ Rap also never developed the political role (what Chuck D called ‘black folks’ CNN’) that it did in America, because, Danny argued, ‘black and white are more integrated in Britain, at least amongst the young. There’s outposts of racism like skinheads, but most of the youth don’t care about your colour.’ Because of this, British youth were always more interested in hip hop’s sampladelic sorcery and breakbeat-manipulation, rather than the verbal, protest side of rap.
Like other ’ardkore junglists with roots in the electro/bodypopping/ graffiti era – DJ Hype, Aphrodite, DJ Crystl, 4 Hero, Goldie, DJ SS – Danny’s desire to ‘do instrumental stuff with breaks and weird sounds’ drew him gradually into the rave scene. When acid house hit in 1988, this first generation of British B-boys were swept up in rave fervour; acieed’s phuturism eclipsed an American hip-hop sound already retreating to trad funk ’n’ soul grooviness. This rave-revelation coincided, for many, with their final alienation from American rap, which had taken a turn towards the grimly serious – from the ‘niggativity’ of gangsta rappers like NWA and the Geto Boys, to the righteous ‘edutainment’ of KRS 1 and X-Clan.
Infiltrating the hardcore rave scene, these lapsed B-boys came up with their own hyperkinetic mutant of hip hop. Suppressing the storytelling and rhymin’ skills side of rap, they reactivated a neglected legacy: the frigid futurism of electro, the cut ’n’ mix collages and jarring edits of Davy DMX, Steinski and Mantronix. Sampladelia taken to the dizzy limit, ’ardkore was basically hip hop on E, rather than a debased form of techno (as its critics supposed). But consider the fact that MDMA is not exactly a B-boy drug (can you imagine a loved-up Chuck D?) and you’ll have some idea of how strange a hip-hop mutant ’ardkore was. On tracks like Hyper-On Experience’s ‘Thunder Grip’, like DJ Trax’s ‘Infinite Hype’ and ‘We Rock The Most’, breakbeats swerve and skid like the automobiles in
Penelope Pitstop
; melody-shrapnel whizzes hither and thither; every cranny of the mix is infested with hiccupping vocal-shards and rap chants sped up to sound like pixies. The vibe is sheer Hanna-Barbera, but beneath the smiley-faced ‘hyper-ness’, the breaks and basslines are ruff B-boy bizness.
Penelope Pitstop
; melody-shrapnel whizzes hither and thither; every cranny of the mix is infested with hiccupping vocal-shards and rap chants sped up to sound like pixies. The vibe is sheer Hanna-Barbera, but beneath the smiley-faced ‘hyper-ness’, the breaks and basslines are ruff B-boy bizness.
’Ardkore producers like Hype and 2 Bad Mice even revived scratching, an old skool technique which had virtually disappeared from US hip hop as it evolved from its DJ-and-MC-oriented street-party origins into a studio-based art geared around the producer and rapper-as-poet. Danny Breaks christened this ’ardkore sub-genre ‘scratchadelic’; a classic example is 2 Bad Mice’s remix of Blame’s ‘Music Takes You’, where a squelchy scratch-riff slots right next to the Morse Code keyboard-stab, piano-vamps and staccato blasts of hypergasmic diva (which sound like Minnie Mouse in the throes of coitus).
Although it started as a breakbeat-fuelled offshoot of techno,’ardkore jungle had devolved by late 1992 into a speedfreak cousin of old skool hip hop. ’Ardkore was the messy birth-pangs of Britain’s very own
equivalent
to (as opposed to
imitation
of) US hip hop: jungle. That said, you could equally make the case that jungle is a raved-up, digitized offshoot of Jamaican reggae. Musically, jungle’s spatialized production, bassquake pressure and battery of extreme sonic effects, make it a sort of postmodern dub on steroids. As a subculture, jungle is riddled with Jamaican ideas – like ‘dubplates’ (exclusive tracks given to DJs far in advance of release), ‘rewinds’ (when the crowd exhorts the DJ to ‘wheel and come again’, or spin a track back to the start at high velocity, producing a violent screech by rubbing the stylus the wrong way). By the end of 1992, junglist MCs were adding patois buzzphrases from dancehall reggae – ‘big it up!’, ‘brock out!’, ‘booyacka!’ – to their repertoire of ravey rallying cries and B-boy boasts, and exhorting the crowd to raise their lighters in the air (the ragga fan’s traditional salute to the DJ). And by early 1994, the most popular jungle tracks were those based around vocal licks sampled from raggamuffin stars like Buju Banton, Cutty Ranks, Ninjaman and Spragga Benz, whose rasping, grainy voices and self-aggrandizing insolence fitted perfectly with the rough-cut rhythms.
equivalent
to (as opposed to
imitation
of) US hip hop: jungle. That said, you could equally make the case that jungle is a raved-up, digitized offshoot of Jamaican reggae. Musically, jungle’s spatialized production, bassquake pressure and battery of extreme sonic effects, make it a sort of postmodern dub on steroids. As a subculture, jungle is riddled with Jamaican ideas – like ‘dubplates’ (exclusive tracks given to DJs far in advance of release), ‘rewinds’ (when the crowd exhorts the DJ to ‘wheel and come again’, or spin a track back to the start at high velocity, producing a violent screech by rubbing the stylus the wrong way). By the end of 1992, junglist MCs were adding patois buzzphrases from dancehall reggae – ‘big it up!’, ‘brock out!’, ‘booyacka!’ – to their repertoire of ravey rallying cries and B-boy boasts, and exhorting the crowd to raise their lighters in the air (the ragga fan’s traditional salute to the DJ). And by early 1994, the most popular jungle tracks were those based around vocal licks sampled from raggamuffin stars like Buju Banton, Cutty Ranks, Ninjaman and Spragga Benz, whose rasping, grainy voices and self-aggrandizing insolence fitted perfectly with the rough-cut rhythms.
Even the name ‘jungle’ comes from Jamaica (as does its more baldly descriptive synonym, ‘drum and bass’). According to MC Navigator from London’s ruling pirate station Kool FM, ‘jungle’ comes from ‘junglist’, and was first heard in 1991 as a sample used by Rebel MC, who pioneered British hip-house in the early nineties, then formed the proto-jungle label X Project. ‘Rebel got this chant – “’alla the junglists’ ” – from a yard-tape,’ Navigator told me, referring to the sound-system mix-tapes imported from Jamaica (Yard is the slang term for Kingston, and the root of ‘yardie’, a hustler or hoodlum). ‘There’s a place in Kingston called Tivoli Gardens, and the people call it the Jungle. When you hear on a yard-tape the MC sending a big-up to “alla the junglists,” they’re calling out to a posse from Tivoli. When Rebel sampled that, the people cottoned on, and soon they started to call the music “jungle”.’
Africa Talks to You, the Concrete Jungle‘When I first heard jungle, it seemed full of possiblities in a way I hadn’t encountered since hip hop. Hip hop’s main influence on My Bloody Valentine was that it re-educated us about rhythm; now jungle’s re-educating everyone again. I’ve been inspired by the way the rhythms shift and inverse on themselves, the way there’ll be ten different beats at once, or effects like the beat’s exploding. Someone wrote that black American music, being born of oppression, is downbeat, even when it’s meant to be lifting your spirit, but that African music is always stepping off the ground. I think that’s what jungle rhythms do . . .’
– Kevin Shields, My Bloody Valentine, 1995
Actually, there’s no real conflict between the jungle-as-twenty-first-century-hip-hop and jungle-as-cyber-dub theses. Jungle completes the circle in that it reconnects hip hop with one of its multiple sources: Jamaica. Like a high proportion of Bronx denizens, DJ Kool Herc was a Jamaican immigrant; as well as inventing breakbeat-science, Herc imported reggae’s tradition of mega-bass sound-systems. Reconnecting the Bronx to Kingston, jungle is the latest and greatest of the ‘post-slave’, post-colonial hybrids hatched within what Paul Gilroy has dubbed ‘the Black Atlantic’. Jungle is where all the different musics of the African-American/Afro-Caribbean diaspora (the scattering caused by slavery and forced migration) reconverge. In jungle, all the most African elements (polyrhythmic percussion, sub-aural bass frequencies, repetition) from funk, dub reggae, electro, rap, acieed and ragga, are welded together into the ultimate tribal trance-dance.
Beyond the idea of the entranced dancer being possessed by the spirits, ‘voodoo’ has another resonance with jungle, in so far as Haitian
voudun
is a hybrid culture, a mix ’n’ blend of black and white. Like Cuban
santeria
,
voudun
is a syncretic religion combining elements of West African animism and Catholicism. Even more striking is the centrality of drums in
voudun
ceremonies and rites. Just as African drums were used as signals for slaves to escape or rebel in the Deep South, similarly
voudun
fuelled the revolt of the Haitian slaves, leading to the founding of the first black republic in the Western Hemisphere.
voudun
is a hybrid culture, a mix ’n’ blend of black and white. Like Cuban
santeria
,
voudun
is a syncretic religion combining elements of West African animism and Catholicism. Even more striking is the centrality of drums in
voudun
ceremonies and rites. Just as African drums were used as signals for slaves to escape or rebel in the Deep South, similarly
voudun
fuelled the revolt of the Haitian slaves, leading to the founding of the first black republic in the Western Hemisphere.
Of course, this isn’t the reason London youth ‘cottoned on’, as Navigator put it, to the word ‘jungle’. First and foremost, the term just seems to fit the music like a glove. When you’re on the dancefloor, it feels like you’re
inside a jungle
of seething polyrhythms, a sensation at once thrilling and scary. Then there’s the ‘urban jungle’ metaphor, which runs through black pop history in a thread that connects The Wailers’ ‘Concrete Jungle’ (1972) and Sly and the Family Stone’s ‘Africa Talks To You (The Asphalt Jungle)’ (from 1971’s
There’s A Riot Goin’ On
) to the prototypical documentary-realist rap, Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five’s ‘The Message’, whose chorus runs ‘it’s like a jungle sometimes / It makes me wonder / How I keep from going under.’
inside a jungle
of seething polyrhythms, a sensation at once thrilling and scary. Then there’s the ‘urban jungle’ metaphor, which runs through black pop history in a thread that connects The Wailers’ ‘Concrete Jungle’ (1972) and Sly and the Family Stone’s ‘Africa Talks To You (The Asphalt Jungle)’ (from 1971’s
There’s A Riot Goin’ On
) to the prototypical documentary-realist rap, Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five’s ‘The Message’, whose chorus runs ‘it’s like a jungle sometimes / It makes me wonder / How I keep from going under.’
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