Energy Flash: A Journey Through Rave Music and Dance Culture (62 page)

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Authors: Simon Reynolds

BOOK: Energy Flash: A Journey Through Rave Music and Dance Culture
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Just as the commercial success of hardcore in 1992 had prompted the first wave of ‘dark side’ tunes, so the hipster vogue for ‘intelligent’ inspired a defensive, back-to-the-underground initiative on the part of the original junglists. ‘Intelligent’ suddenly became an embarrassing term. Even those who’d most profited from major label interest in ‘intelligence’, like Goldie and Bukem, renounced the word, erroneously and rather disingenuously decrying it as a ‘media invention’ designed to divide the scene. Meanwhile, other producers started talking about ‘darkness’ as a desirable attribute again.
During 1993’s darkside era, when jungle was banished from the media limelight, AWOL had been
the
hardcore club. Especially after the demise of Rage, AWOL was where the scene’s inner circle would gather on a Saturday Night/Sunday Morning to hear DJs like Randall push the music to new heights of ruff-cut intensity. After being dislodged from its location at Islington’s murky Paradise Club, AWOL settled late in 1995 at The SW1 Club in Victoria, and re-established its former role. While some of the drum and bass élite had moved on to Goldie’s Metalheadz Sunday Sessions at the Blue Note, the core jungle audience were still attending AWOL or similar nights like Club UN and Innersense at the Lazerdrome (later renamed Millennium) – havens for all those who refused the lure of ‘intelligence’.
AWOL isn’t an acronym for ‘absent without leave’, but for ‘a way of life’. If you’re not involved in the scene, this article of faith – that buying records at specialist shops, going to clubs at the weekend, wearing MA2 jackets and smoking a lot of spliff, constitutes a set of tribal folkways – can seem a tad overstated. But the frequency and conviction with which the claim ‘jungle, it’s a way of life’ is restated, suggests that for the true disciple, something massive has been invested in this music. It was precisely this question – what’s at stake for the fans? – that began to haunt my mind when I went to the club three times during the first months of 1996.
Ethnological research wasn’t on my mind the first time; fun was. I’m not sure if I found any, at least in the conventional sense, but the visit was a reaffirmation of flagging faith; a confirmation that, despite the surfeit of pseudo-jazzy tracks, jungle was alive and kickin’. It was also a reminder that, for all the success of album-length, home-listening drum and bass, jungle’s meaning is still made on the dancefloor. At massive volume, knowledge is visceral, something your body understands as it’s seduced and ensnared by the music’s paradoxes: the way the breaks combine rollin’ flow and disruptive instability, thereby instilling a contradictory mix of nonchalance and vigilance; the way the bass is at once wombing and menacing. AWOL is a real Temple of Boom; the low-end frequencies are so thick and all-enveloping they’re swimmable. Inside the bass, you feel safe, and you feel
dangerous
. Like cruising in a car with a booming system, you’re sealed by surround-sound while marauding through urban space.
This first night at AWOL, the vibe is neither celebratory nor especially moody, but neutral. In contrast to the rousing exhortations of the MC, the crowd response is subdued (not abnormal for jungle). It’s not long after the tabloid and TV scare stories surrounding Ecstasy fatality Leah Betts (the teenager who died after she took Ecstasy at her own birthday party). That’s initially how I account for the utter absence of any E-vibes in the area, and for the insistent verging on desperate dealer trying to offload her unusually bargain-price wares. Instead, it’s champagne, Pils and ganja that appear to be everybody’s intoxicants of choice. Later, I notice a gaggle of sofa-sprawled punters who do appear to be E’d up, but are struggling to conceal the fact; their flushed but impassive faces ripple and spasm as if they’re trying to hold down the rising high. It’s only later I realize the reason for their restraint: no one else here is loved-up, and it’s as though any kind of blissed behaviour is deemed inappropriate, unseemly, a throwback.
The next time I go to AWOL, a month later, the vibe has subtly changed. The sofa-zone, which had seemed vaguely upmarket, has been moved to somewhere out of the light, and now seems seedy. Overall, the balefulness quotient has increased dramatically. This time, I’m struck by the fact that nobody seems to be having fun; or to put it another way, ‘fun’ doesn’t seem to be the reason everyone is there. It’s old news that the effervescent friendliness of 1992-era hardcore is long gone, but basic civility seems to be in short supply. Even among groups of friends or boyfriend/girlfriend couples, smiles are rarer than hen’s teeth, conversation is minimal. On the dancefloor, I watch a girl expertly roll a giant spliff while her boyfriend ignores her, then hand it to him silently. With incredible rapidity, he smokes most of it, hands it back without a word or glance, and strides off. A few minutes later, I spot a gang of super-sharp stylists, eyes masked behind sunglasses, standing erect and statuesque in the middle of the dancing throng. Their faces are frozen, their arms folded across the chest, 1986 B-boy style, but whether this intransigent posture is a salute to the DJ or disapproval, it’s hard to say; their expressions are unreadable.
AWOL’s resident crew of DJs – Randall, Mickey Finn, Kenny Ken, Darren Jay – sustain a mercilessly minimalist and militaristic assault, all ricocheting snares and atonal, metallic B-lines that bounce joylessly like ball-bearings in a pinball machine. The night stays at a plateau of punitive intensity, no crescendos or lulls, just steady jungalistic pressure. By about 4 a.m., the dancers are jigging about with a kind of listless mania. One girl twitches and bounces mechanically, her limp limbs inscribing the exact same patterns in the air, as if she’s animated by a will other than her own. For a Saturday night out, the compensatory climax of a week’s drudgery, this seems like hard work. I start to wonder if she, like me, got sucked in by 1991 – 2 ’ardkore’s explosive euphoria, its manic, fiery-eyed glee, and then got carried along by the music’s logical evolution only to wind up at another place altogether. Maybe that stunned, dispirited expression on her face comes from finding herself in the midst of an entirely new cultural formation, ‘a way of life’ that can no longer offer release, let alone a redemptive vision.
At clubs like AWOL, the ruling sound is the gangsta hardstep and ‘jump up’ jungle of labels like Ganja, Frontline, Dread, Suburban Base and Dope Dragon, made by DJ – producers like Hype, Pascal, Andy C, Ray Keith, L. Double, Shy FX, Swift, Zinc and Bizzy B. By 1996, jungle had purged almost all of its obvious ragga elements; its ruffneck militancy was now expressed through a conscious alignment with US hip hop, involving the use of melancholy synth refrains from West Coast G-funk like Dr Dre, and vocal samples from East Coast rap, whether boastful (‘raw like Reservoir Dogs’) or threatening (‘hit the deck, I got the Tek right on your neck’).
With its machine-gun snares and landslide/landmine bass, this ‘ruffneck soldier’ style of jungle makes you feel like you’re steppin’ into a warzone; hence rave names likes Desert Storm or Wardance. But jungle’s militaristic streak actually goes back to the early days of hardcore. 4 Hero’s 1991 debut album
In Rough Territory
featured cover images of a commando unit planting a flag on enemy soil. Dego McFarlane told me Reinforced conceived their releases as ‘raids’ on the rave scene; they’d carpetbomb the hardcore market with multiple releases, even putting out the remix on the same day as the original, then disappear from earshot for months. Alongside the idea of urban life as a warzone, there’s a fascination with the military as a sort of avant-garde of science: Goldie, one-time Reinforced A & R, talked of his protégés as ‘prototypes’, like they were secret weapons under R & D. 2 Bad Mice’s ‘Bombscare’ actually employed the sound of a suspect device detonating as part of its bassline, making funky the sound of urban dread. Moving Shadow continued this idea with ultra-minimal 1994 tracks like Renegade’s ‘Terrorist’ and Deep Blue’s ‘Helicopter Tune’, whose roiling Latin percussion evoked the sound of the famous’copter dawn-raid in
Apocalypse Now
.
Predator
and
Predator
2 – ultra-violent movies about an extraterrestrial hunter who goes on safari in zones of human conflict – both exerted a huge influence on early jungle. From the first movie came the sample ‘she said “the jungle, it just came alive and took him” ’, as used in Shimon’s ‘The Predator’; from the sequel, the ‘fucking voodoo magic’ hook in Hyper-On Experience’s ‘Lords Of the Null Lines’. While
Predator
is set in a real jungle that’s also a Central American warzone,
Predator 2
is about the urban jungle of a near-future Los Angeles, where rival drug gangs fight each other and the police. The script obsessively underlines the state of martial lawlessness, with various police officers declaring ‘welcome to the war’, ‘you’re a soldier’, ‘we’re not winning this war’. The underlying scenario is LA as an
internal Vietnam
, with the ethnic gangs representing the Viet Cong and the LAPD losing the ‘war on drugs’ despite their use of military-style raids and helicopter patrols. For British junglists, though, what grabbed the imagination is
Predator
2’s dystopian magnification of contemporary urban chaos – not to mention the clan of dreadlocked-and-ganja-puffing drug warlords called the Jamaican Voodoo Posse, and the fact that the local TV news programme documenting the carnage is called
Hardcore Report
.
By 1996, jungle’s militarism had gotten ever more explicit and upfront: artist names like Soul-Jah and Military Police, track titles like ‘Dark Soldier’, ‘The Battle Frontier’ and, my favourite, ‘Homage to Catatonia’ by Unknown Soldier. The Terradome’s ‘Soldier’ featured the histrionic sample ‘I’m not a criminal, I’m a soldier, and I deserve to die like a soldier’, crystallizing the idea of the gangsta as a one-man army, a rogue unit in capitalism’s war of all against all. Some junglists seemed to be literally in training for Armageddon and the final breakdown of society. Discovering that a gaggle of top junglists had become obsessed with paintball, a war-game,
Muzik
ran a photo spread of the DJs clad in camouflage fatigues and shooting at each other. Listening to gangsta hardstep and jump up – which basically consist of James Brownian funk percussion tightened and toughened into the martial paradiddles and triplets of the parade ground – it was easy to imagine it being used as a training resource by the military; a new kind of drill (with JB barking like a sergeant!) for a new breed of soldier (more improvisatory, less regimented) that will be required for the urban conflicts of the future.
Apocalypse
Noir
 
In 1996, a new sub-genre of jungle began to coalesce called ‘techstep’, a dirge-like death-funk characterized by harsh industrial timbres and bludgeoning ‘butcher’s block’ beats. The term was coined by DJ – producers Ed Rush and Trace, who shaped the sound in tandem with engineer Nico of the No U Turn label. The ‘tech’ stood not for Detroit techno, dreamy and elegant, but for the brutalist Belgian hardcore of the early nineties. Paying homage to R & S classics like ‘Dominator’ and ‘Mentasm’, to artists like T99 and Frank de Wulf, Trace and Ed Rush deliberately affirmed a crucial white European element that had been written out of jungle’s history.
The other important source for techstep was the first era of ‘darkside’, as pioneered by Reinforced artists like Doc Scott and 4 Hero. This was when the teenage DJs Trace and Ed Rush cut their production teeth with sinister classics like ‘Lost Entity’ and ‘Bludclot Artattack’. The name ‘Ed Rush’ sounds like a take on the ‘head rush’, early rave slang for a temporary white-out of consciousness caused by taking too many E’s. There was a big difference between darkside 1993 and techstep, though. The original dark-core had still oozed a sinister, sickly bliss on the border between loved-up and fucked-up. In 1996, with Ecstasy long out of favour, techstep was shaped by a different mindfuck-of-choice: hydroponically grown marijuana aka ‘skunk’, whose near-hallucinogenic levels of THC induce a sensory intensification without euphoria and a nerve-jangling paranoia perfect for jungle’s tension-but-no-release rhythms.
The first stirrings of the return-to-darkness were heard in late 1995 with Trace’s seminal remix of T. Power’s ‘Horny Mutant Jazz’. Working in tandem with Nico and Ed Rush, Trace tore the fusion-flavoured original to shreds, replacing its leisurely glide with slipped-gears breakbeats, spectral synths and a brooding, bruising bass sound sampled and mutated from Kevin Saunderson’s Reese classic ‘Just Want Another Chance’. Meanwhile, Ed Rush’s No U Turn tracks ‘Gangsta Hardstep’ and ‘Guncheck’ took the explosive energy of hardcore and imploded it, transforming febrile hyperkinesis into molasses-thick malaise. The new sound made you feel like you were caged in a pressure-cooker of paroxysmic breaks and plasmic bass.
If Belgian brutalism and early breakbeat ’ardkore resembled sixties garage punk, techstep is like seventies punk rock, in so far as it’s not a simple back-to-basics manoeuvre, but an isolation and intensification of the most aggressive, non-R & B elements in its precursor. Over the six months, as the No U Turn squad honed their sound-and-vision, they accentuated the self-same ‘noise annoys’ elements that punk exaggerated in garage rock: headbanger riffs and mid-frequency blare. Where intelligent drum and bass suffers from an obsessive-compulsive cleanliness, techstep production is deliberately dirty, all dense murk and noxious drones. The defining aspect of the No U Turn sound was its bass sound – a dense, humming miasma of low-end frequencies, as malignant as a cloud of poison gas – achieved by feeding the bass-riffs through a guitar distortion pedal and a battery of effects. Another stylistic trait was the way techstep shunned the frisky fluency of jazzy-jungle’s breakbeats in favour of relative simplicity and rigour. Although the breakbeats are still running at jungle’s 160-and-rising b.p.m. norm, techstep
feels
slower – fatigued, winded, like it’s had the crap beaten out of it. In tracks like Doc Scott’s ‘Drumz 95’, the emphasis is on the 80 b.p.m. half-step, making you want to
stomp
, not sashay.

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