Energy Flash: A Journey Through Rave Music and Dance Culture (45 page)

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Authors: Simon Reynolds

BOOK: Energy Flash: A Journey Through Rave Music and Dance Culture
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There’s also the extensive, highly charged history in pop music of ‘jungle rhythms’, as object of both fear and desire. ‘Jungle’ reinvokes the anxieties of the white, elder generation confronted by the ‘primitiv-istic’ repetition and percussive stridency of fifties rock ’n’ roll. Some of the more paranoid anti-rock evangelists hallucinated a Soviet Communist conspiracy to ‘negrify’ the youth, with Elvis the Pelvis as a Pied Piper leading the kids into the ‘dark continent’ of animalistic sexuality. Jungle returns to rock ’n’ roll’s original sin – the priorization of beat over melody – and drastically exacerbates it by stripping it down to just drum and bass.
Underlying the fear of ‘the jungle beat’, of course, was the fear of degradation through miscegenation, the loss of racial identity. In the nineties, such fears were no longer the preserve of white supremacists. The title of Spike Lee’s anti-mixed marriage movie
Jungle Fever
comes from Nation of Islam supremo Louis Farrakhan, who uses it as a derogatory term for interracial relationships. In Britain, ‘jungle fever’ has sometimes been shouted as abuse by black youth at mixed-race couples.
The question of jungle’s musical ‘colour’ bedevils outside commentators and scene insiders alike. Jungle is often hailed as the first significant and truly indigenous Black British music. This notion obscures the fact that alongside hip hop and reggae, the third crucial constituent of jungle is whiter-than-white: the brutal bombast of the Euro-hardcore sound spawned in Belgium and Brooklyn. But even if you concede jungle’s musical ‘blackness’ as self-evident, this only makes it all the more striking that from Day One more than 50 per cent of the leading DJs and producers have been white. Some of the ‘blackest’ sounding, most hip-hop-and-ragga-influenced tracks come from pasty-faced producers like Andy C, Aphrodite, Dead Dred, and DJ Hype. An example of the havoc this can wreak even with scene insiders’ preconceptions is the story of Goldie’s first exposure to Doc Scott’s music. ‘I thought “this guy has got to be a nigger.” When I found out it was a white guy with blue eyes it freaked me out.’ Yet on other occasions, Goldie – himself half-English and half-Jamaican – has described Scott, his ally and mentor, as a true ‘nigga’.
For the most part, junglists de-emphasize the word ‘black’ and stress ‘British’; there’s a weird patriotism, in part a pride-full response to years of having to look to Black America or Jamaica for beats, but also evidence that these second or third generation immigrants feel that the UK is their home. Even Nation of Islam influenced militants like Kemet Crew stress that jungle has always been a black-and-white scene, while Kool FM’s credo is ‘No matter your class, colour or creed, you’re welcome in the house of jungle.’ Far from being racist, as Shut Up and Dance once alleged, the term ‘jungle’ actually codifies the
multiracial
nature of the scene, as contrasted with the mostly white audience for trance techno and ambient. Jungle is a kick in the eye for both white-power organizations like the BNP and for black segregationists, because it shows that trans-racial alliances are possible. Not just because it makes ‘blackness’ seem cool to white kids, but because there’s a genuine unity of experience shared by Britain’s black and white underclass.
So when white producer DJ Hype samples a black orator who preaches ‘we must unite on the basis of what we have in common’, the common experience – inhabiting the same run-down tower-blocks and council estates, being harassed by the police, living for marijuana, breakbeats and b-b-b-bass – may be grim and impoverished, but it’s ‘real’. Even when they live in nowheresville suburbs like Hitchin and Romford rather than inner-city ghettos, junglists belong to a jilted generation who are bored and frustrated, and have little to live for but burning up dead time in a weekend’s worth of ‘jungle fever’. The true meaning of ‘junglist’ is defined not by race, but by class, in so far as all working-class urban youth are ‘niggas’ in the eyes of authority. Junglist youth constitute a kind of internal colony within the United Kingdom: a ghetto of labour surplus to the economy’s requirements, of potential criminals under surveillance and guilty-until-proven-innocent as far as the Law is concerned.
Gangsta Rave
 
‘A “nuttah” could be Bruce Lee beating five guys at once, or someone who fights for a just cause like Mandela or Malcolm X, or it could be a bad-boy who robs banks. It’s just a word for someone who’s a fighter.’
– UK Apachi talking about the song ‘Original Nuttah’
 
 
In many ways, jungle is outlaw music: the scene’s three staples are pirate radio, drugs, and uncleared samples. From late 1992 onwards, the nascent jungle scene rapidly developed an overtly criminal-minded attitude. Tuning into the newer pirate stations like Don FM, you’d hear MCs sending out ‘big shout”s to ‘all the wrong ’uns’, ‘liberty-takers’ and ‘rude boys’. Listen closely to the MCs’ cryptic patter, and you might easily assume that illicit transactions were being conducted in code.
The nefarious vibe filtered into the music too, in the form of samples of sirens and bloodcurdling gunshots, and soundbites from blacksploitation thrillers and gangsta movies. Shy FX’s ‘Original Nuttah’ and ‘Gangsta Kid’ both hijacked Ray Liotta monologues from
Goodfellas
: ‘as far back as I can remember I always wanted to be a gangsta’; ‘Organized Crime’ by Naz Aka Naz sampled the sombre theme from
The Godfather
. Gun-talk pervaded the music, with band names like Tek 9 and AK47, song titles like ‘Hitman’, ‘Sound Murderer’ and ‘28 Gun Bad Boy’, and ragga-derived soundbites like the boast about carrying an ‘oversize clip and carbine’ in Conquering Lion’s ‘Code Red’. Most chilling of the lot had to be Family Of Intelligence’s ‘Champion of Champions’: mid-track, the rhythm halts, and a gruff Yardie voice promises, in a grisly sing-song, to ‘murder ’im, kill ’im . . . full ’im up of copper, full ’im up of lead / ’cos me bad boy vicious’.
Jungle’s ghettocentric vibe reflected the state of the nation. The recession had hit Britain hard, inner-city youth were facing unemployment and a welfare system that had been systematically dismantled by the Conservative government during its fifteen years of one-party tyranny. ‘American’ problems like guns and crack were taking root. Desperate music for desperate times, jungle’s two preoccupations were oblivion and crime. Inner-city kids wanted to get out of ‘it’ (dead-end post-Thatcherite reality) either by taking drugs or selling them. All this made the emergence of ‘gangsta rave’ – seemingly a contradiction in terms – a logical upshot of systemic failure.
As the music changed, so did the mood of the scene. In 1992, the received image of the ’ardkore raver was a sweaty, shirtless white teenager, grinning and gurning, reeking of Vicks and asking for a sip of your Evian. By 1994, the stereotypical junglist was a headnodding, stylishly dressed black twentysomething with hooded-eyes, holding a spliff in one hand and a bottle of champagne in the other. Out went all the trappings of rave – the woolly hats and baggy T-shirts, the white gloves and fluorescent light-sticks. Despite the sauna-like humidity of clubs and raves like Telepathy, Innersense and Sunday Roast, junglists came encased in black flight-jackets (MA1, MA2, Puffa, etc.) For a while there was fashion amongst the more chic black junglists to carry handkerchiefs, in order to dab away every last drop of perspiration and preserve the aura of aloof coolness. Sweat symbolizes rowdy communion, everyone mucking in together, shedding inhibitions and self-consciousness. The new taboo on sweat signalled that the scene’s emotional temperature had dropped. By 1993, eye contact was disappearing from the London hardcore scene; bonhomie gave way to a surly vigilance. Smiling (in black hip-hop culture, often considered a signifier of servility, a desire to please whitey) was replaced by the skrewface, a pinched sneer expressing disgust and derision.
What happened here? As hardcore evolved into jungle, it shed rave’s emotional demonstrativeness and gestural abandon, which had originated in gay disco and entered white working-class body-consciousness via Ecstasy. In its place, a ‘black’ ethos of self-control and mask-like inscrutability was embraced by white and black alike. Paralleling and/ or catalysing this shift were changing patterns of drug use. ’Ardkore’s nudge-nudge references to ‘rushing’, its sniggery E-based innuendos, were replaced by roots reggae soundbites about sensimilla, ganja and herb. There’s a sense in which the disappearance of the Ecstasy vibe allowed young black Britons to enter the rave scene
en masse
and begin the transformation of hardcore into jungle. Ecstasy’s effects of defenceless candour are probably too risky a cultural leap for the young black male, who can’t afford to jeopardize the psychic armour necessitated by the very different black experience of urban life.
As marijuana displaced the E, dancing lost its mania, became less ravey and out-of-control. The half-speed bassline gave dancers the option of grooving to the dub-sway bass rather than flailing to 160 b.p.m. breaks. At a rave in 1991 – 2, you’d see lots of open-body gestures; at climactic moments or cosmic interludes in the music, arms were held aloft, outstretched to the heavens in a universal gesture of mystic surrender. Jungle replaced this openness and vulnerability with more controlled movements, closer to shadow-boxing or martial arts. As the dancehall-reggae influence kicked in, ragga clothing and bodymoves infiltrated the scene. You saw girls in skin-tight hot pants, bustiers and micro-skirts, dropping to a panther-style half-crouch and flexing their abdomens with the kind of risqué, confrontational sexuality patented by ragga-star Patra. The effect – imagine a Zulu go-go girl – was sexy but menacing, seducing the male gaze only to stab it in the eye with every pelvic thrust.
Under Siege
 
Jungle’s ‘creole’ culture could only have evolved in London. Paul Gilroy describes the city as ‘an important junction point or crossroads on the webbed pathways of black Atlantic [political and cultural traffic]’. The assertion of African sonic priorities (polyrhythm, bass-frequencies) caused breakbeat-based hardcore to contract from a nationwide, chart-topping pop music into a regional underground, centred on London and its surrounding counties. This contraction was celebrated by such late 1992 tracks as Code 071’s ‘London Sumtin’ Dis’ and Bodysnatch’s ‘Just 4 U London’. Apart from the odd outpost in multiracial areas like the Midlands and Bristol, the rest of the country shunned jungle. From the rave-will-never-die movement called ‘happy hardcore’ to the club-based house mainstream, the four-to-the-floor kick drum ruled supreme everywhere but the capital.
As jungle bunkered down into a self-sufficient London underground, it developed something of a siege mentality and a sense of persecution. Following the spate of cutesy Prodigy-copyist hits in 1992 based on kids-TV theme tunes (‘Trip To Trumpton’, ‘Sesame’s Treet’ et al), dance-mags like
Mixmag
had proclaimed the death of rave and cold-shouldered hardcore into a long phase of media black-out. During 1993, jungle sustained itself through its infrastructure of pirate radio small independent labels, dingy, off-the-beaten-track clubs and specialist record shops like Lucky Spin, Blackmarket, Unity and De Underground.
The result was a renegade underground economy that ran in the face of all the ‘common sense’ business notions adhered to by the music industry in the nineties. In defiance of the hegemony of the CD, jungle was oriented around vinyl. The 12-inch was an end-in-itself, not an advert for the album (which barely existed anyway). 12-inches were bought mostly by DJs, professional and aspiring; fans bought DJ mix-tapes, available at specialist stores, street markets or by mail order, rather than purchase the few shoddy compilations available. Cheaper still, they taped hours of cost-free cut ’n’ mix off the pirate stations.
The mix-tape and the pirate radio bootleg were so popular because of jungle’s other major break with record biz logic: at any given moment, a huge proportion of the music that’s hot in the clubs cannot be purchased as commercially available vinyl. This is because of the thrall of the dubplate. Producers give influential DJs a pre-release version of a track on DAT, recorded straight from their home studio. The DJ presses up a metal acetate at his own expense (around £30), which lasts about 25 to 40 plays. The dub-plate is a Jamaican idea: seventies sound-systems pressed up their own tracks in order to outdo their rivals. Similarly, jungle’s top DJs are desperate for exclusives to spin, and spend £200 plus a week on dubplates; these might be their own productions, or tracks by other artists who feel an affinity for the DJ’s style. Dubplates are also a way of testing out a new track on a club sound-system, of seeing how the crowd respond and what scope there is for finetuning the record. This sounds ‘democratic’, but unfortunately the net effect of the dubplate system is that fans are tantalized for months (sometimes as long as a year!) until the track’s official release, by which time DJs have stopped playing the tune; some dubplates never get issued at all. Mix-tapes are therefore the only way to get hold of the latest tunes.
Like hip hop, jungle’s anti-corporate, pro-underground ideology was in no way proto-socialist. Rather, it concerned the struggle of smaller capitalist units (independent labels – often a crew of DJ/ producers surrounding an engineer with a home-studio set-up) to prevent their ‘subcultural capital’ (music) being co-opted by larger capitalist units (the mainstream record industry). What gave the junglistic producers/labels their edge was their ability to respond with greater speed and flexibility to the fluctuating demands of the dance-floor audience than the major labels ever could.
Situated in the fuzzy interzone between the criminal, the anarcho-capitalist and the anarcho-collectivist, jungle was by early 1994 firmly established as a self-sufficient economy, with no need of the outside world’s support. So when the outside world started paying attention that summer, the junglist community didn’t quite know how to respond. Having built up such an armature of wariness and suspicion, the scene was torn between its desire for recognition and paranoid fears of misrepresentation and co-optation.

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