Energy Flash: A Journey Through Rave Music and Dance Culture (88 page)

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Authors: Simon Reynolds

BOOK: Energy Flash: A Journey Through Rave Music and Dance Culture
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‘Urban/funky’ was a literally reactionary development: it expelled the MC as a reaction against grime. Long before the term ‘grime’ took hold, the genre was emerging in the form of 2step tracks featuring rapping instead of singing, and where the MC had equal billing with the track’s DJ-producer. Soon this style became a genre in its own right, a movement dominated by teenage boys rather than mixed-gender adults (2step’s constituency). In some ways, grime really lies beyond this book’s remit, as it’s barely dance music. Aggressive and high-energy, the physical responses it inspires are closer to pogoing or moshing than winding your waist. That, or people at grime raves just stand stock still, nodding heads intently to the word-flow. Grime DJs don’t mix, they slap track after track on the decks in the style of dancehall DJs, dropping quick adrenalin-jolt bursts – rowdy chorus plus hottest verse – sometimes as soon as one minute. Yet in another sense grime is totally a product of the rave continuum: it represents the true and final flowering of the artistic potential I detected earlier in
Energy Flash
, all those hardcore MCs spouting ephemeral but sublime nonsense over the pirate airwaves.
The MCs’ status had grown steadily through the jungle and garage years, but their role still remained supportive to the DJ. Even when they appeared on records, their careers were largely based around a few trademark catchphrases or signature vocal licks. Then MCs started to write actual verses, extended takes on traditional boasts about their own mic skills, gradually getting into narrative and soliloquy. Suddenly, circa 2001, the scene was swarming with MC collectives – So Solid Crew, K2 Family, Genius Crew, Pay As U Go Kartel, Heartless Crew, Roll Deep. It was as if only by ganging up for sheer strength of numbers could they shove the DJ out of the spotlight. Grime’s torrential wordiness reversed the aesthetic priorities of rave music. Rave had always been about the non-verbal sublime, but now verbose and swollen egos trampled over the loss of self that was originally house music’s premise. Grime inverted rave in other ways. Aggression and cynicism replaced loved-up bonhomie. Lyrics teemed with imagery of ‘slewing’ and ‘merking’, slang for killing and maiming that mostly signified the destruction of rival MCs in verbal combat, but sometimes spilled out into real-world violence. In one ghastly case, the rising young MC Crazy Titch was sentenced to life for his role in the murder of
the friend
of a rival MC who had insulted Titch’s cousin Durrty Goodz (another top grime MC).
Anti-rave in spirit, grime’s sonic substance is nonetheless an extension of the rave continuum. The beats that MCs spit over are full of sounds that hark back to particular phases of the techno-rave tradition – snaking miasmas of mentasmic noise, gabba-like stabs, bruising bass-blows in the jump-up jungle style. Grime beat-makers like Wonder, Wiley, Terror Danjah and Dizzee Rascal have produced some of this decade’s most inventive electronic music. On Terror Danjah tracks like ‘Juggling’ and ‘Sneak Attack’, the intricate syncopations, texturized beats, hyper-spatial production and ‘abstracty sounds’ (Danjah’s own phrase) reveal the producer’s roots in drum and bass. Other tunes like ‘Creep Crawler’ and ‘Frontline’ – all bass-blare fanfares and ominous horn-like stabs pummelling in the lower mid-range while high-pitched off-key synths wince like the onset of migraine – constitute a sophisticated response to the bombastic club bangers built by American street rap producers such as Swizz Beatz and Lil Jon.
In its early, protozoan stage, grime recalled the 1993 era of darkcore. The music retreated from the glossy poppiness of commercial 2step into a murky underworld of gritty, lo-fi tracks in many cases bashed out, legend has it, on PlayStations. Much early grime was submusic – unfinished experiments, prototypes thrown onto a rapidly shrinking marketplace just for the hell of it – but it nonetheless possessed a compelling ugliness that was inadvertently avant-garde. The scene was flooded with ‘eight bar’ tunes: skeletal instrumentals similar to the ‘tracky’ aesthetic in minimal techno except that these weren’t DJ tools, they were MC tools, designed to simultaneously enable and test the rapper. The rhythm switched every eight bars, allowing MCs to take turns dropping sixteen bars of rhymes using both beat-patterns. Musical Mobb’s gabba-like ‘Pulse X’ was the original eight-bar classic. Then came Wiley’s endless series of low-key, skeletal instrumentals themed around ice or snow (‘Igloo’, ‘Frostbite’, ‘Eskimo’, ‘Ice Rink’). These asymmetrically structured grooves, with sidewinder B-lines that ‘slinky downstairs’ (as DJ Paul Kennedy puts it) and glinting melody-splinters, were peculiar enough to work as stand-alone aesthetic objects. But most grimestrumentals were strictly functional fare that only came alive with a great MC riding them.
Like the electro-influenced Dirty South rap it resembled, grime’s sound-palette was cheap and nasty, sourced in the digital synthesizer timbres of pulp-movie soundtracks, video-game music, and mobile-phone ringtones. The genre’s deliberately clunky and lurching rhythms represented a pendulum swing away from the lithe, nubile swing of UK garage to a hypermasculine stiffness. The one thing that survived from the 2step era was the belief that grime belonged at the top of the charts. A peculiar byproduct of this blazing ambition was the scene’s craze for DVD releases like
Risky Roadz
and
Lord of the Mic
, which contained documentary material, shoddily filmed single promos and live footage. It was as though the scene was DIY-ing the sort of TV coverage it felt it deserved but wasn’t getting. Yet while some leading MCs got signed to major labels and the scene scored a few hits, the reality of grime is that it’s a micro-culture, oriented around small-run vinyl-only pressings and CD mix-tapes sold directly to specialist stores. Just like breakcore, it is an ‘engaged’ culture with a high ratio of performers (aspiring MCs, DJs, producers) to punters.
Dubstep, the third offshoot of UK garage, is something like grime’s taciturn elder brother. It carried on the darker, more experimental side of 2step represented by producers like Groove Chronicles, Dem 2 and Steve Gurley. The dubstep style in its early days was a moody and minimal garage mutation that dropped the songs and the pop-fizzy euphoria in favour of . . . empty space. The swing was still there, but everything else was stripped back to concentrate on 2step’s tense, textured snares and warm, sinuous bass. Key figures at this emergent point were Horsepower Productions and the Ghost label, founded by ex-Groove Chronicler El-B. As Philip Sherburne noted, there were plenty of parallels between what these early dubsteppers were doing and the microhouse producers – the minimalist aesthetic, the neurotically intricate production full of tiny details – to the point where an alternative moniker to dubstep could be microstep.
Just as microhouse began to sprawl stylistically – ‘not just one sound . . . 1,000 micro-trends’ observed Mayer in 2003 – to the point of becoming meaningless as a term, dubstep evolved into coalition of subgenres: the clinical technoid tracks of Plasticman (a name revealingly close to Richie Hawtin’s alter ego), the No U Turn-like caustic bombast of Vex’d, the digital dub of Skream and Kode 9, the jazzy drum-and-bass echoes of Boxcutter. What united them as a genre was that certain DJs played all these flavas in a single set, while most producers had at least one stab at each style. Once again the parallel was with microhouse. Dubstep bore the same relation to the hardcore continuum that microhouse did to the Eurotechno tradition. A consolidation sound rather than a great leap forward, the constituents of dubstep came from different points in the 1989 – 99 UK lineage: bleep’n’ bass, jungle, techstep, Photek-style neurofunk, speed garage, 2step. These traces worked through their intrinsic sonic effects but also as
signifiers
, tokenings-back addressed to ‘those who know’.
You could see microhouse and dubstep as two parallel homeostatic systems, where the music keeps shifting internally but the entity as a whole isn’t really moving forward. In microhouse, elements of techno and disco, electro and house, acid and trance, get shuffled; in dubstep, the repertoire mostly concists of the stuff that microhouse would never touch: reggae, jungle, speed garage. The genres are homeostatic systems because it’s as though an internal pendulum seems to pull the music back if it goes too far in one direction – a self-correction mechanism motored by the popular demand for variety and by the impulse of producers to do something different (both for creative satisfaction and to make a name for themselves). These internal flavour-shifts are compelling if you’re deeply immersed in the scene, but the further out you get from total involvement, the more inconsequential they seem.
With my personal history I really ought to belong to dubstep’s prime constituency but I’ve never quite succumbed to that totally immersed state of involvement. My stumbling block is that for all the reams of discourse that have surrounded dubstep, I’ve yet to read anyone pinpoint precisely what dubstep’s One Big New Idea is. The closest contender is the style known as ‘half-step’, which for a couple of years back there became oppressively hegemonic to the point where fans started complaining about the overload of torpid tempo tunes with tremolo basslines (the subgenre is also nicknamed ‘wobblestep). Pioneered by the crew Digital Mystikz, the half-step style is, as its name suggests, ponderously slow and bass-heavy. An early landmark was ‘Bombay Squad’ by Loefah, the most talented of the Digital Mystikz trio. The track’s groove feels half finished or partially erased: massive echo-laden snare-cracks, a liquid pitter of tablas situated in a corner of the mix, and that’s it, apart from the track’s sole melodic colouration, the plaintive ululation of a sampled Bollywood diva. Oh, and not forgetting the dark river of sub-bass, which is what really gives the tune any propulsive power, given the weirdly lateral, rim-of-a-crater feel of the drum track.
Dubstep’s fetish for ‘bass weight’ plugs it into the Jamaican sound-system tradition – as with roots ’n’ dub, this is music that’s only really heard properly through a massive sound system (or in dubstep’s case, at temples of booms like FWD and Digital Mystickz’s own club DMZ). At its least, the rolling rootical B-lines and clanking skank drums make dubstep merely a marginal update of On U Sound and digidub, that despiritualized British version of reggae that amplified the head-fuck element of FX and sub-bass while stripping out the songs and the vocal yearning. There are also parallels with (and in some cases direct influences from) the German style of dub-house pioneered by Basic Channel and artists like Pole.
Apart from its somewhat fatigued theology of bass, the other defining aspect of dubstep is its self-mythos as a London sound. Where grime defines itself as an East London thing, dubstep presents itself as a product of its South London environment – specifically that dowdy interzone stretching from Brixton (where the Victoria Line halts) down to Croydon on the edge of the Greater London area. In the early days of dubstep, activity was clustered around the Croydon record shop Big Apple, which in time-honoured hardcore tradition was also a record label that put out tracks by local boys Skream and Benga. Like the E3, E15 et al postcodes that spawned grime, this area of South London is only reachable by car, bus or the old Victorian railway system, which has slowed gentrification and meant that the area remains an internal suburb secreted within the city, lacking the leafy semi-rural attractiveness of classic suburbia but equally devoid of the glamour and excitement of central London.
That area of South London is where I lived when I first moved to the city after university, places like West Norwood and Streatham. So when I heard early dubstep tunes like Mark One versus Plasticman’s ‘Hard Graft’ and heard the talk of Croydon as the New Detroit, it was easy to project sense memories of that area onto the music – to hear the slabs of dismal sound and the leaden beats as depictions of the psychogeography of shopping schemes and deck-access low-rise housing blocks, concrete walkways and underpasses. Dubstep’s emptiness definitely evokes urban desolation rather than pastoral isolation: the music’s timbral palette of cement-grey tones and the production’s cold, dead echoes conjure the vibe of built-up areas that are normally bustling but are now eerily deserted, creepily quiet.
J. G. Ballard pops up regularly as a reference point in discussions of dubstep, with people comparing that area of South London to the Shepperton/Heathrow interzone of semi-suburbia where
Crash
takes place. Critically acclaimed dubstep producer Burial invited the comparison with his debut album’s concept (South London flooded New Orleans-style, due to global warming, a scenario which recalls Ballard’s
The Drowned World
) and the way he tests his tracks by driving through South London at night, making sure the tunes have the right atmosphere, ‘the distance’ he’s looking for. Burial localizes his music with titles like ‘South London Boroughs’ and ‘Southern Comfort’, whose rippling canopies of amorphous sorrow-sound do for SE19 what Gas’s
Konigsforst
did for the woodlands near Cologne. ‘Night Bus’ alludes to the arduous public transport options available to Londoners who’ve gone out clubbing but don’t have the resources to afford a cab back to Zones 3, 4, 5 or 6, the low-rent areas where they live. A beat-free Gorecki-like waft of mournful strings, the track captures the poignancy of these small hours treks across the slumbering metropolis, the gloom of a bus full of disappointed revellers coming down from the high or entering the sour stage of drunkenness, offset by the majesty and romance of London seen from the top deck, neon twinkling like a recumbent Milky Way.
From tracks like ‘Pirates’ to the artist alias itself (an almost scholarly allusion to the reggae soundclash and the ‘burial tunes’ that slay the rival sound system), Burial’s album could almost be an audio essay about the London hardcore continuum. Yet in another sense Burial’s music, and dubstep in general, could equally be about any city anyway. The tension and dread, the sensations of grandeur and possibility battling with desolation and entrapment, would be familiar to any metropolis dweller across the globe. Which must surely explain dubstep’s success in spreading across the world, helped through blog buzz and uploaded DJ sets. It’s managed to proliferate more effectively than grime, which is so bound up with local character (and characters). Grime is about mouthy MCs spitting in thick accents and impenetrable slang; more often than not, their subject matter is parochial business, feuds with other MCs and such like. Instrumental music goes international so much easier. Dubstep has a far better fit than grime with all those old nineties notions of techno as a post-geographical sound, a musical force that is actively deterritorializing and border-crossing.

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