Energy Flash: A Journey Through Rave Music and Dance Culture (79 page)
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Authors: Simon Reynolds
BOOK: Energy Flash: A Journey Through Rave Music and Dance Culture
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Propped against the counter of Uptown Records in D’Arblay Street just a few minutes’ stroll from Oxford Street, a black girl complains bitterly: ‘S’like I was sayin’, garage is all commercial now. Nobody’s keepin’ it real.’ The real-ness is coming. Just like drum and bass when it reacted against LTJ Bukem-style coffee table jungle, the next wave of garage producers are stripping the music down to bass and beats. You’re even starting to hear the kind of caustic industrial noises that originally drove the girls dem out of the techsteppin’ main arena and into the garage side room in the first place. It smacks of cutting your nose off to spite your face, but it’s an inevitable cycle. UK garage’s sublime equilibrium between yin and yang, treble and bass, light and dark, has been maintained for an improbably long time. 2000 is UK garage’s
fourth fabulous summer in a row
– an eternity in the high-turnover world of British dance culture. Now the scene looks set to plunge into wintry darkside mode, as if girding itself for the next recession.
fourth fabulous summer in a row
– an eternity in the high-turnover world of British dance culture. Now the scene looks set to plunge into wintry darkside mode, as if girding itself for the next recession.
At the club Liberty, you can hear this taking effect. ‘Here come da basslick,’ shouts the MC, and when the B-lines drop, the girls shimmy downwards to a crouch, ragga-style. Thing is, there actually aren’t many ladies on the dance floor, probably because the music’s nothing but sandworm-wriggly low-end frequencies. ‘As soon as the treble and the big vocals disappear, suddenly it’s all blokes,’ says garage scenester and vocal scientist Bat. ‘Usually, it’s like this all-girl moshpit up in front of the DJ booth.’
Liberty’s atmosphere is a strange mix of swanky and skanky – it’s the kind of place you stumble on champagne bottles left treacherously underfoot. An alarmingly skinny blonde, Uma Thurman on a hunger strike, grinds her jaws (a telltale sign of cocaine abuse) as she ‘bogles’ with her black boyfriend, grinding her scrawny butt against his crotch. Everywhere eyes are cold, faces barred like shop windows in a run-down area. Garage fans still call themselves ravers, but Ecstasy’s loved-up vibe is an ancient memory. It’s not that people don’t do E, it’s just not a special thing anymore. People take it along with whatever else is around – drink, spliff, cocaine. In the chill-out room, Luke, a pasty nineteen-year-old, chews furiously on a lollypop and confides that he’s dropped ‘three Mitsubishis’. Most people would be a melting blob of love on just one, but Luke’s totally impassive. Garage’s behavioural codes enforce restraint and deem abandon unseemly.
Somewhere between Liberty’s unsmiling gloom and Twice As Nice’s collective superiority complex, Cream of Da Crop is UK garage perfectly poised midway between ruffneck moodiness and pop effervescence. You’ll hear baleful B-line dubplates next to Posh Spice promising ‘this tune’s gonna punish you’ as guest vocalist on Truestepper’s chart smash ‘Out Of Your Mind’. The club’s vibe is pleasant, too, thanks partly to a sizeable contingent of Asian youth, who tend not to project as much attitude as their white and black counterparts. It’s the latest stage in the long-running infatuation between Indian kids and Caribbean culture, from bhangramuffin MC Apache Indian to Talvin Singh’s tabla-laced drum and bass. Cream of Da Crop’s dance floor is like backstage at Miss Asian Subcontinent. Small and dapper, the boyfriends weave bhangra moves into their dancing, bringing a sinuous fluency to garage’s characteristic taut sashay.
This slice of 2step heaven is sandwiched between nasty slices of reality, though. On the way to the club, I witness the aftermath of a racial attack: sheltering in the entrance of a 7/11, an Asian boy clutches a tissue to the back of his head to staunch the blood while his friend tells their story to a policeman. Leaving Cream of Da Crop at 6 a.m., I’m stalked by a junkie beggar who eventually threatens to jab me with an AIDS-infected syringe – this, after I’ve already given him a pound coin and a cigarette!
UK garage’s good times are hard won, precarious. Underneath the positivity veneer of songs like Brasstooth’s ‘Celebrate Life’, there’s a premonition that global capitalism, aka Babylon Inc., is gonna knock the ground from under you again, real soon – so grab the high life while you can. There’s an image that crystallizes the scene for me: a black guy, supersharp in an ankle-length leather overcoat, shadowboxing with a bottle of Moët clenched in one fist. The soundtrack is a chart-bound anthem that’s played at least once an hour at every club I visit: Wookie’s ‘Battle’. Its staccato, one-note melody is tense and militaristic; the lyrics warn about wearing masks and the struggle to survive. The radio mix goes into full-on uplifting Brit-soul, promising ‘we will overcome’. But the mix that rules the clubs is darker – a roiling, ominous bassline and just that first, white-knuckle verse, the one that starts ‘Every day is like a battle’ and ends ‘Your soul it will be lost’. The redemption, the release, never comes.
TWENTY-ONE
IN THE MIX
DJ CULTURE AND
REMIXOLOGY
REMIXOLOGY
What is a DJ? Someone who plays other people’s records – for a living, for love, ideally for both. The majority of DJs – at weddings, parties, bars, rock clubs, discotheques – ‘play’ records in the rudimentary sense of the word: slap them on the turntable one after the other. But in hip hop and house, and in all the rave and club-based hybrids of those two black American musics, the DJ
plays
records in a different sense – one that’s closer to playing an instrument, or playing with a plastic, mutable substance. As this element of ‘play’ got ever more re-creative, the DJ came to be considered an artist.
plays
records in a different sense – one that’s closer to playing an instrument, or playing with a plastic, mutable substance. As this element of ‘play’ got ever more re-creative, the DJ came to be considered an artist.
The ascent of the DJ-auteur began as early as the mid-seventies. The wind beneath his wings (then and now, it’s too often a ‘he’) was technological: the invention of the 12-inch single, and the development of turntables and mixers specially designed for the DJ’s needs. The first 12-inch singles started to appear in 1975 as DJ-only promos. Not long after came the first commercially available 12-inch, Double Exposure’s ‘Ten Per Cent’, on the New York disco label Salsoul. With its deeper grooves spread over a broader span of vinyl than the 45 r.p.m. 7-inch single, the 12-inch offered better sound quality and made it easier for DJs to locate precise points in the track, thereby enabling accurate mixing. The extended versions of tracks on the 12-inch offered a plethora of stripped down, non-vocal passages and percussion-only breakdowns, which in turn provided entry points for mixing into the next record.
If the 12-inch was the software element of the DJ revolution, its hardware equivalent were the DJ-oriented turntables developed by companies like Technics, whose SL-1200Mk2, launched in 1979, rapidly became the professional jock’s deck of choice. With the SL-1200Mk2, the key DJ-friendly innovation was ‘pitch adjust’ (a slider that allowed the DJ to slow down or speed up the r.p.m. of a disc by a factor of plus or minus eight) and a high-torque direct-drive motor which could take a record from standstill to full speed in less than a second. Pitch adjust facilitated the synchronizing of records of different tempo. The quick-start function is useful when bringing in the new track on beat, and is used in tandem with ‘back-cueing’ – rewinding the track in slow motion and listening through headphones until you find the precise drum hit from which you want to kick off.
Synchronizing and seamlessly segueing tracks of different b.p.m. is called ‘beat-mixing’, and it’s the basic DJ skill. Beat-mixing is comparable to driving a car: with enough practice, most people can learn to do it. ‘It’s not that hard,’ says DB, one of America’s top drum-and-bass DJs. ‘But it is hard to be good at it, to hold a mix for a minute or more without wavering, without the kick drum and the snare drum falling out of synch and sounding like a drunk guy falling down the stairs.’
There are basically two different kinds of mixing: smooth and rough. House and trance, styles based around the pump and pound of the four-to-the-floor kick drum, are oriented around ‘the long mix’, says DB. ‘The records are constructed so that they fit together very well. As one track is ending, the bassline will drop out, just as the bassline on the next record is about to drop in. The drums will naturally break down – the middle chunk of the record will be the full drum kit, but then gradually the percussion and the hi-hats will stop, and you’ll end up with just a kick drum. And the other track will usually start with just a kick drum.’
The other major style of mixing is the choppy, cut-up mode associated with the hip-hop tradition of breakbeats and syncopated basslines, as extended by jungle. Here the cross-fader on the mixer (the machine that allows the DJ to fade or cut between two turntables) is used to hurl into the mix brief snatches of the coming track, teasing ear-glimpses that whip up anticipation, or to oscillate violently back and forth between the two tracks. With jungle, the duration of the mix – the period when both tracks overlap – is usually much shorter than with house or trance.
If beat-mixing is the basic skill that most can master, there’s a whole dimension of turntable trickery that’s perhaps comparable to stunt driving. Using two copies of the same record, DJs can set the second disc running a beat behind the first and cross-fade back and forth to create stutter effects, where a beat, lick or vocal is doubled or even tripled. Keep the fader dead centre, and the two copies of the same record running out of synch creates a woozy effect called ‘phasing’, ‘flanging’ or ‘swirling’. Then there’s the array of hands-on tricks that involve the direct manipulation of the disc’s speed of rotation. ‘That’s my trademark,’ says techno DJ Richie Hawtin. ‘I do a lot of spinning things up faster and then slowing them back down. I’ll slow records down to about half their original speed, ’cos when you slow rhythms down, other rhythms start to emerge out of them. In some ways, you’re bringing the energy down, but in other ways, at half speed, more notes and sounds become apparent, and it becomes
more
intense.’ Then there are DJs like Carl Cox and Jeff Mills who use three turntables rather than the standard pair; and whose strenuous slam-jam sets involve the lightning-fast concatenation and cross-hatching of the most explosively exciting sections of a huge number of tracks.
more
intense.’ Then there are DJs like Carl Cox and Jeff Mills who use three turntables rather than the standard pair; and whose strenuous slam-jam sets involve the lightning-fast concatenation and cross-hatching of the most explosively exciting sections of a huge number of tracks.
Virtuoso DJs like Hawtin, Cox and Mills are quite scarce, though. Most of the time, what separates top DJs from the rest of the pack isn’t so much their technical skills as their sensibility. If DJing is like driving a car, what counts is the DJ’s ability to ‘take you on a journey’ (which is how DJs tend to describe their art). And that comes down to taste, combined with an intuitive sense of what the ‘passengers’ (the audience) want to experience. The DJ constructs the raw material of sundry tracks into a meta-track, an abstract emotional narrative with peaks and lows (alongside ‘journey’, the other metaphor favoured by DJs is ‘telling a story’).
‘There’s a lot more to DJing than just mixing two records together on beat,’ says Paul Oakenfold, one of the most successful DJs in the world. ‘Anyone can learn that, like you can learn to play guitar. You’ve got to know keys and arrangements, structure and depth. That’s what makes a good DJ stand out.’ Like a lot of veteran DJs, Oakenfold waxes nostalgic for a bygone golden age of DJ artistry, before the business became so lucrative that soulless artisans entered the field looking for glory and big bucks. Derrick May, a veritable DJ-philosopher, has a similarly mournful take on the ‘lost art’ of set-building and mixing. ‘Most of that philosophy has been lost. There’s very few guys who really follow the art of mixing, the art of
blending
. Anybody can slash, cut and do all that fun stuff with the cross-fader. But not many people really know how to blend records and make records
speak
to each other. Make music
out of
music . . . You can elevate people just from the power of a mix, you can make people truly
believe
in you. Nowadays, most people go to a club and the DJ is like a jukebox. Even if he’s playing the best records, he’s not playing them with any sort of emotion or any sort of personality.’
blending
. Anybody can slash, cut and do all that fun stuff with the cross-fader. But not many people really know how to blend records and make records
speak
to each other. Make music
out of
music . . . You can elevate people just from the power of a mix, you can make people truly
believe
in you. Nowadays, most people go to a club and the DJ is like a jukebox. Even if he’s playing the best records, he’s not playing them with any sort of emotion or any sort of personality.’
What can it possibly mean to say that a DJ playing someone else’s records – music in whose creation he had no part whatsoever – can exhibit a
personality
that makes all the difference? For DJs, the expressive element of what they do resides in the juxtaposition of these already finished artworks, the connections made between different tracks, the transitions and contrasts between moods, the up-and-down dynamics of a set. With their juxtaposition of classics, obscure tracks, unjustly neglected oldies and new tunes, the best DJs are constructing a sort of argument about the historical roots of the music and where it should head in the future. In this respect, DJs are closer to critics than the traditional conception of the artist. Indeed, DJs love to talk of what they do in terms of ‘educating the listener’. This means exposing the audience to music they might not have encountered, pushing the envelope of a particular scene’s collective sensibility, and hipping newcomers to the roots of that scene’s sound.
personality
that makes all the difference? For DJs, the expressive element of what they do resides in the juxtaposition of these already finished artworks, the connections made between different tracks, the transitions and contrasts between moods, the up-and-down dynamics of a set. With their juxtaposition of classics, obscure tracks, unjustly neglected oldies and new tunes, the best DJs are constructing a sort of argument about the historical roots of the music and where it should head in the future. In this respect, DJs are closer to critics than the traditional conception of the artist. Indeed, DJs love to talk of what they do in terms of ‘educating the listener’. This means exposing the audience to music they might not have encountered, pushing the envelope of a particular scene’s collective sensibility, and hipping newcomers to the roots of that scene’s sound.
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