Overrated Records/Artists/Phenomena of 1997

(plus one Ambivalence of 1997)

JUNGLE

Describing jungle as "overrated" is a misnomer, really. Most of my jungle buddies have been grumbling all year. The media has cooled off noticeably, and betrothed itself with indecent haste to the new cool in town, speed garage. Even a back-in-the-day scene stalwart like Dan Donelly of Suburban Base has swapped allegiances, and now devotes his energies to Sub-Base's "yookay undagrahn garidge" sub-label Quench (mind you, he was always a shrewd business-minded geezer --remember "Sesame's Treet"?).

As for myself --well, only a year ago, writing these words would have been like cutting chunks out of heart. Jungle has been my supreme passion and crusade de coeur for so long--six years, nearly a fifth of my life--and yet nowadays I feel a serene indifference to its aesthetic vicissitudes. The state of jungle no longer feel so intimately distressing, such a personal source of dismay and disillusion. And that's a strange relief.

Jungle has had three years in the limelight--a good run, really--and before that three exhilarating years of emergence (always the most exciting phase of any sound/scene). Those first three years--1992/93/94--constitute the most exciting motion I've ever witnessed in my pop life; a runaway process of explosively autocatalytic evolution that by the end of '94 had pretty much mapped out all of the music's future pathways (ragga-jungle>jump up; ambient hardcore>intelligent drum & bass/jazzstep; darkside>artcore>techstep>neurofunk).

Looking back, the writing was on the wall in early 1994--when Moving Shadow started its "2 on 1" series of "experimental" 12 inches (one side by a producer on the roster, the other by a guest luminary). The funny thing about "2 on 1" was that, with a few exceptions, these "experimental" outings were far less radical and infinitely less exciting than the label's "populist" output (Dead Dred's "Dred Bass", Renegade's "Terrorist", Deep Blue's "Helicopter Tune"). "2 on 1"'s self-conscious seriousness spread like a virus throughout the scene, eventually infecting even the most obdurately unassimilable bastions of raw-to-the-core jungle like Hype/Ganja and Andy C/Ram, who this year succumbed to the hyper-technical hygienic-production ethos and scientific rhetoric.

In hindsight, it was the journey out of 'ardkore drug-noise towards "musicality" (1993/1994) that was thrilling, not the ignominious arrival. My favourite jungle tracks ever (Foul Play's "Open Your Mind", Omni Trio's "Vol. 2" and "Vol.3", 4 Hero's "Journey To The Light EP", Rufige Cru's "Darkrider/Menace" EP, Bukem's "Atlantis", Hyper-On Experience's first three EP's) are those in which the first stirrings of musical ambition are still filtered through the rave-drug sensorium, still conditioned and contaminated by rush-culture. But when the E-memories finally wore off, too often what was left was jazz-funk with fast breaks.

In terms of jungle's waning outsider chic, you can count down the death-knells starting from late '94: Speed; Moving Shadow's "audio-couture" slogan; Fabio hagio-ed for the cover of Muzik; the million pound ad campaign for Timeless; Kiss FM's jungle show and One In The Jungle; Logical Progression and Bukem playing the house superclubs; Volume doing for jungle what they did for trance, with the Breakbeat Science series of double-CDs + booklets crammed with trainspotter-friendly facts. The final death-blow was Mixmag's "A-Z of Drum & Bass" cover story in March 1997--a surreally tardy endorsement of jungle's cutting-edge status, conferred only a couple months before speed garage blew up! In America, jungle has gone from ultra-cool obscurity to omnipresent subliminal banality (used everywhere in adverts, MTV links and as get-the-viewer's-pulse-racing, newsflash-coming background music on TV news programmes), without any intervening period of pop breakthrough or even hipster consensus.

None of this would matter, of course, if the music was still regularly delivering the shock of the now. But jungle's muse has been erratic since early 1995; I've been fighting the onset of gloom for three years now. Hopes were revived at the end of 1995 by gangstadelic techstep, by the jump-up exuberance of Hype/SS/Andy C/Ray Keith/Dope Dragon/Swift/Zinc/Aphrodite, by dark revelations at AWOL. But then techstep rapidly degenerated into drone-dirgey noir-by-numbers (Dom & Rob's "Distorted Dreams" being something of a nadir), before veering off into neurofunk's anal-retention zone. As for jump-up--would it be asking for more than two ideas per track, guys?

Speed garage's usurpation of "London underground" status may be the best thing to happen to jungle in a while. It takes the pressure off the scene, and the humiliation may act as a timely corrective to the genre's inflated sense of its own cutting-edge-ness. Jungle is now free to be just another post-rave genre, like techno or house. As such it will produce some great tracks every year, a broad wedge of well-produced "quality tunes" that mainly appeal to DJ's, and an immensity of mediocre material that doesn't even work as DJ-tools. (Hopefully there'll be a long-overdue culling of lesser lights and unnecessary labels, as average sales drop below 1000). Like techno and house, jungle will go through periodic phases of resurgence and self-reinvention. There's also the possibility that the next phase will come from outside London, or even outside England (although I'm sceptical, given the infrastructural importance of pirate radio). Whatever the case, jungle will always remain a favourite form of music for me, but it's no longer a creed or cause celebre. Like everybody else, I'm waiting for the next convulsion.... and in the mean time, listening to loads of old records.

PRIMAL SCREAM

Even if Vanishing Point was half as good as it's cracked up to be (and it's not), I'd have serious problems taking Bobby Gillespie's latest aesthetic turnabout seriously. From their first album's it's-1967-again-acid-child-fragility to the second's cocksucker-blues, from born-again house fiends circa "Loaded"/"Higher Than The Sun" to raunchy rock'n'soul fundamentalists circa "Rocks Off", the Primals have changed their tune one time too many. Now they're supposed to be into trip hop, dirty dub and pre-millennium tension; hence the embarrassing faux-Tricky drug-paranoia lyrics. Maybe it's heart-felt, an organic evolution, "we just happened to be hanging out at those sort of clubs, digging that vibe"... who cares? Where is the aesthetic spine to this band? I have more respect for the Black Crowes, who've at least stuck with the music they believe in.

The problem with Primal Scream is that they're not really a band, in the sense of having a sound that evolves, a rhythmic engine. Primal Scream is an elaborate support-system --extending beyond the singer's musical sidemen to encompass record company bosses like Alan McGee, A&R men, press officers, producer pals like Weatherall and music journalist allies like Kris Needs--designed purely to accommodate Bobby Gillespie's fantasies about being a rock star. The musical component of this support-system has no aesthetic integrity but fluctuates in accordance with Gillespie's record collection and current hang-outs. That so many people collude in maintaining this ego-massaging milieu around Bobby I can only attribute to his winning personality and the fact that he's such a passionate fan of music. So these people want to believe he can pull off his fantasies, and they sort of identify with him (being themselves fans rather than artists, collector/curators rather than creators).

SQUAREPUSHER/DRILL & BASS

The only outraged reactions I got from the 1996 Over-Rated list were from 'Pusher fans, so it's partly out of malicious perversity that I'm nominating him for the second year running, and partly out of a simple desire to clarify my objections. When drill & bass first reared its head, I was admittedly quite enamored--I really liked the first two Plug EP's and Aphex Twin's "Hangable Auto Bulb" efforts, and was generally enthused by the notion that these artists were freer because they didn't belong to the drum & bass community, didn't have to service DJ's and dancefloor. But Squarepusher was a turning point. Partly because so much of his stuff sounds irritatingly daft to my ears (that said, there were three tracks on Hard Normal Daddy that sounded engagingly strange), but mainly because of the attitude of his supporters--the sheer arrogance of these folks who just assume that Tom Jenkinson's programming is so much more radical than "formula-ridden" junglists. This assumption, I strongly suspect, stems from the fact that they've never actually heard mad-sounding mash-ups like DJ Hype's remix of Remarc's "RIP" or Dillinja's "Warrior". These records are "avant-garde" and fucked-up but still manage to make you dance--to me, a much greater achievement than just freaking out all over the shop. In a lot of Squarepusher-related discourse, the underlying assumption is that if something has no funktional aspect, it's somehow more radical; that this makes it food-for-thought rather than mere dance fodder. Which would seem to replicate the old Cartesian mind/body split, a la prog rock, no?

Another turning point was going to various freestyle/"eclectro"/illbient type clubs in London and New York, where I was struck by the absence of "vibe" compared with more "blinkered", tunnel-vision clubs that cater to very specific tastes (jump up jungle, 'aving it house, gabba, and so forth). Partly the vibe-less thing is down to the absence of drug energy, partly the absence of class-based energy/antagonism. But I also think it stems from the very rhetoric of border-crossing, style-hopping, "united mutations"--which tends to attract a rather uncommitted consumer: the proverbial chin-scratcher/head-nodder/trainspotter. Having been that sort of margin-walker myself for so long, I've kind of gone to the opposite extreme: the belief that the apparent "samey"-ness of jump up jungle or gabba or hard house actually produces something very strong and undeniable: a consistent mood, a highly charged affective atmosphere that truly pulsates with "meaning" (for want of a better word).

Where you fall in terms of allegiances depends a lot on how much you value the concept of "being an individual". Squarepusher's stance depends on maintaining a disdainful distance from the jungle scene while parasitically pirating and caricaturing its ideas (I've read Jenkinson actually talk of his relationship with jungle as similar to the difference between "those who lead and those who follow"--ARSEHOLE!!!). This attitude is reflected in many Pusher-fans reluctance to get involved in club culture, seemingly based on the rather adolescent notion that being an individual means refusing to lose yourself in the crowd.

Where you fall in terms of allegiance also depends on what you are fundamentally looking for pop music. If you just want weird noises to play on your stereo at home on your lonesome ownsome, then the margin-walkers artists are the ones you'll go for. But if your fix is that whole subculture-matrix where music is part of "a way of life" (e.g. jungle with the MCing and the pirate radio and the crowd rituals etc.), then ostensibly more formulaic scenes and sounds just seem "stronger".

My ultimate beef with the Squarepusher-type drill & bassologists is that they've decontextualised the music, stripped away all the aspects that give it resonance and affect and subcultural meaning. They've responded to jungle's complexity rather than the feelings it induces and the struggles it embodies. In true prog-rock fashion, they've taken that complexity (the breakbeat science) and turned into a baroque form of virtuosity. It's a typical white boho progressivist syndrome, from freeform jazz to prog rock to avant-funk---turning a popular dance music into an unpopular head music. And so those super-accelerated, pitch-shifted, scratchy-rustly-scrapy breakbeats that Squarepusher over-uses work as a trebly timbre element that you listen to, rather than funktional, kinaesthetic beats that work your body. But the real give-away about Squarepusher is what he does with the bass (possibly even more crucial to jungle than breakbeats), i.e. replace the low-end seismology with noodly Jaco Pastorius slap-bass. How anybody who'd ever viscerally experienced jungle sub-bass in its true context (at massive volume through a huge low-end intensive sound-system) could prefer Squarepusher's frilly filigrees of bass-twiddle to the "real thing".... Well, it beats me.

JEFF MILLS

Underground Resistance deserves its legendary status, and Mills' two Waveform Transmission albums are pretty fuckin' intense, but the last couple of years worth of Purpose Maker "DJ tools" and concept-burdened Axis tracks are purist techno at its most austerely anhedonic. (Anhedonism being an inability to derive joy or pleasure from anything, and one of the major symptoms of depression that Prozac alleviates). Worse still are the legions of Mills copyists churning out minimalist techno by the yard, music crippled by its sobriety and sublety. The truth is that UR were best when they sounded just like Belgian hardcore, all ravey-davey oscillator-vamps and fuck-off riffs a la Cubic 22 and Set Up System..

WU TANG CLAN

The RZA is capable of flights of inordinate genius--"Glaciers of Ice", "Cold Cold World"--but most of the time he has hammered flat-as-a-pancake his hip hop noir formula: phat bass, simple and unchanging looped break, off-key piano motif left deliberately unresolved to create hair-raising suspense, maybe a bit of strings or a shrieking diva. The critical canonisation of RZA-as-wizard and Wu Tang as rap saviours represents a kind of morale-raising spiritual bulwark for hip hop patriots on both sides of the Atlantic, a reason to keep on believing in hip hop in the face of G-funk slickness and Puffy's Eighties retreads.

What continues to blow my mind for at least half of Forever, though, is the lyrical invention and rhymin' fluency--the density of imagery, the lateral leaps, the martial metaphors, the cinematic vividness. But for most of the album, RZA's soundscapes are just barely funktional parchment, as it were, for the textual miasma.

DILLINJA

There was a time when Dillinja was untouchable for me, perhaps the greatest drum & bass producer--there was no jazzed melancholia to compare with "Deep Love" or "Sovereign Melody", no beats as malevolently headwreckin' and body-baffling as "You Don't Know (Remix") or "Warrior". With "Angels Fell", "Brutal Bass", "Jah Know Ya Big", "Muthafucka" and "Sky", the Armored D maintained the pressure and his profile well into 1996. Wh'appen? He's gone right off the boil, as far as I'm concerned. After all the fanfares and long delays, "Violent Killer" and "Acid Trak" were seriously underwhelming, neither as headbangingly dirge-tastic as No U Turn and Nasty Habits nor as neurotically accomplished as Optical/Jonny L/Codename John. Maybe, like Roni & Reprazent last year, the D-man is holding back all his good stuff for the major label debut, resulting in an unnatural quality-dip. (Worrying to read him talking about working with real musicians for the album, though....). But it might just be that like other former heroes of essentialist drum & bass--Aphrodite, SS, Andy C, Hype & Crew--he's simply lost it.

POST-ROCK

I hereby disown my unpopular child (loved least, it seems, by those whose careers it gave a massive boost, but that's another bunch of gripes altogether). Oh, I still think it's a good idea in theory--it's just the praxis that's left me cold these last eighteen months. Too much post-rock fails to supply what people get from trad rock (iconicity/iconoclasm, charisma/neurosis, big riffs, catharsis, meaning, something to look at on stage, tunes you can hum in the bath), without ever really rivaling what dance music offers either (kinaesthetic kicks, hedonic science, surrogate drug-sensations). The most adventurous post-rock types --your Techno-Animals, Thomas Koners/Porter Ricks's and Third Eye Foundations--have gone all the way into the studio-bound aesthetics of hip hop/techno/house/jungle, and abandoned the live-performance model altogether. The rest of the post-rock fraternity (and you can count the number of women involved on one hand) have remained stuck in a profitless intermediary zone, a sort of mildly dub-inflected math-rock. (And math-rock really is rock with all its good points removed -- prog rock with the grandeur stunted, punk without the visceral release).

WITCHMAN

If No U Turn are Killing Joke circa Revelations, Witchman is Alien Sex Fiend.

EXTREMITY

There's a certain strain of argument being touted in which the extremities (global as well as musical) are where it's all happening--from freeform improv to Jap-core noise, from NZ drone-scapes to quirked out neo-Krautrock to Skullflower-style fuzzadelia. Apart from the insufferable cooler-than-thou attitude that often seems intrinsic to this stance, my aesthetic objection to all these initiatives is their tendency to end up as pure abstraction. And pure abstraction isn't really that interesting. You can't do anything with it, or to it--apart from just lie back and take it (in).

"A scribble effacing all lines" is how Deleuze & Guattari put in A Thousand Plateaux, talking of the tendency of avant-garde artists to reterritorialise around "the child, the mad, noise"--the aesthetic equivalent to such "fascist or suicidal" lifestyle choices as heroin addiction, terrorism or joining a cult. Musically, the quest for chaos can easily end up as a black hole of undifferentiated, maelstromic miasma--as vast as the cosmos maybe, but in the absence of any figure-ground perspective, it's effectively as claustrophobic as a cubby-hole.

I subscribe to the D&G/Manuel Delanda line that the most interesting work happens "on the edge of chaos". I'm interested in abstraction where it works as a component of a groove ('ardkore, darkside, techstep) or an element within an architectonics of audio-space (Chain Reaction). It's the thresholds, the intermediary zones, that are really magical -- melody bleeding into noise, songcraft struggling with psychedelics (My Bloody Valentine, Husker Du); distortion + raunch (Hendrix's "Crosstown Traffic", Royal Trux's Cats and Dogs); the Bataillean excess and surplus-to-requirements extravagance working within and against the funktional minimalism (Prince, swingbeat); space + groove + timbre (Can, Neu!, Miles Davis, Seventies dub). Punk to funk, the ethos is the same: "restriction is the mother of all invention" (Holger Czukay).

Extremism? Well, on what scale are we measuring here? Very little out-rock, avant-jazz, left-field electronica, etc. being perpetrated today really ranks with, let alone exceeds, the outer limits probed by the Sixties freeform brigades, electro-acousticians, and so forth. There's also the question of ego: so much out-rock or avant-improv seems to partake of the Expressionistic Fallacy (e.g. Caspar Brotzmann's scrofulously self-preening theatre of pain). This interferes with the listener's ability to derive machinic use-value from it. You just have to sit there and gasp in awe. It's about marveling at the Artist's depth and intensity of feeling, rather than using the music to trigger sensations and intensities in yourself. The impersonal, "objective" approach to constructing rhythmic engines or kinaesthetic audio-sculptures can create just as powerful feelings in the listener as the "subjective" school of Romantic outpouring creativity. The idea that the former is mere artisanship whereas the latter is true Art is, like, half a century out of date, at least. This is the age of the engineer-poet, the imagineer.

Although drum & bass can make some preposterous claims about its experimentalist reach, the truth is that its radicalism is always constrained with a quite rigid set of parameters: at any given season, certain kinds of bass-sound, certain kinds of breaks, and a specific tempo, are required by DJ's and dancers; invention takes place within and against those constraints. The resulting friction creates sparks. In hardcore dance scenes, constraints are a strength, not a liability. At the very least, these parameters are no less likely to produce strikingly listenable and intensity-productive results than the total absence of constraints. Extremism can be as fruitless as any musical stance; simply embarking with an experimental mindset does not guarantee results.

Leaving the rhetoric of extremity for those still interested in playing the cool game (the fun wears off about a decade or so, lemme warn ya; there's always something more marginal and listener-unfriendly than whatever outer limit you set up shop upon) is a tremendous release. I can now confess that the song-oriented Faust IV is my favourite of their albums rather than the hipper Faust Tapes, that I prefer the boogie-fied crossover stab Clear Spot to Trout Mask Replica, that the almost-funky Strange Celestial Roads is my fave Sun Ra, that the Sly-and-Jimi influenced Seventies Miles pleasures me more than Ayler or AMM screeching to the converted. I can consign those Merzbow CD's to that cupboard marked "possibly someday, probably never".

Other over-rated bands:

YO LA TENGO

CORNERSHOP

SPIRITUALIZED

SLEATER-KINNEY

and in conclusion, here's my

AMBIVALENCE OF THE YEAR: SPEED GARAGE

Things I like about Speed Garage

1/ It's a composite of potent clichés -- the best, most effective (what some call "cheesy") elements from the last ten years of club and rave culture mashed together: garage's skipping, syncopated snares; house's brassy diva vocals and EQ-ing/filtering/phasing/stereopanning effects that make sounds shiver up your spine; 1992 hardcore's squeaky vocals (hence speed garage covers of Jonny L's "Hurt You So", Urban Shakedown's "Some Justice", that "Sexual Feeling Is Mutual" track); 1994 jungle's ragga-dalek timestretched chants and Dred Bass radioactive-glow B-lines and Omni Trio-style soul-diva plasma-acapella loops.

2/ Such a simple idea--fusing the best of house and jungle--ruffing up house just at the point when it had gotten a little too sedate and glossy, and joy-juicing up jungle just as it lost its rude-bwoy exuberance and (with neurofunk) became utterly desiccated and frigid, what Peter Shapiro called a "cyber-Calvinist pleasure-free zone".

3/ Those lewd, lubricious butt-surging B-lines really erogenize your rump-zone.

4/ The Arthur Russell-like dub-spacious and percussadelic side of the sound (artists like Ramsey & Fen) looks like it might develop into "ambient speed garage", while the ragga-sampling and dirty-bass driven end of the scene (what UK Dance's Bat calls "dangerous garage") has already taken over the role of jump-up jungle. This potential split between "musical"/"experimental" speed-garage and the rougher, darker stuff that appeals to "garage ravers" (once a contradiction in terms) could be highly productive or highly amusing, or even both. Either way it's going to be way more interesting than the song-full stuff that just sounds like a slightly tuffer and faster version of New York garage.

Things I Don't Like About Speed Garage:

1/ Such a simple idea--fusing the best of house and jungle--simple, and once the initial surprise has worn off, kind of obvious.

2/ Precisely because it's a composite of house and jungle, whereas jungle was a mutant of hip hop and techno -- a mutant that warped all its sources (speeding up and chopping to shreds the breakbeats, for instance). I don't hear an equivalent factor of warpage in Speed Garage yet, I don't hear enough future.

3/ Too many tracks with the exact same beat--something you could never say about jungle, at least until 1997 and the tyranny of the two-step trudge. I've heard tracks that interlace and leaven the skipping, wood-chop snares with micro-breaks and percussadelic ticks, but too much speed garage is as rhythmically monotonous as house and trance.

4/ The "politics" of Speed Garage are so much less interesting than those of jungle, which was shadowed by the desperation and darkside gloom caused by the 1992/93/94 recession, whereas Speed Garage is colored by the feel-goodism and living-large of the late Major/early Blair boom. Hence its reversion to the pre-rave clubland exclusivity of the last economic boom, the mid-to-late loadsamoney Eighties; hence its resemblance to the playaz of post-Puffy rap/post-Timbaland R&B, products of the Clinton boom. Same flash clothes (literally--shiny, man-made, near-fluorescent fabrics), designer-label fetishism, champagne-swigging, we-are-the-beautiful-people/we-be-the-baddest-clique ethos. Now, I don't wanna come across like a playa-hater, but as someone who wears trainers, and crap trainers to boot, I resent the return of style codes and the implicit "quality people, quality sounds" ethos.

5/ Its victory has been too easy (coming out of the London underground to conquer the rest of the country and penetrate the Top 30 within less than a year); its appeal too straightforward and accountable. Where's the difficulty, the danger?

Nonetheless, for the curious, here are some killer speed-garage tunes. Shake your ass to:

Gant --"Sound Bwoy Burial (187 Lockdown Dancehall Mix)" (Positiva)

187 Lockdown --"Gunman" (EastWestDance)

Fabulous Baker Boys --"Oh Boy" (Multiply) [sampling Jonny L's "Hurt You So (Alright)"]

D.J. Ride -- "Renegade Bass (Unreleased Mix)" from Power House Recordings Limited Edition Part 1" EP (Power House) [sampling Renegade's "Terrorist"]

Ramsey & Fen -- "Underground Explosion" from The Off-Key Experience EP" (Very Important Plastic)

The Hornet --"Just 4 U London" from The Hornet Presents "The Rockin' EP" (Sting City) [remake of Bodysnatch's "Euphony" a/k/a "Just 4 U London"]

The Unofficials Vol. 1 [bootleg of Notorious BIG track]

Underground Distortion --"Everything Is Large" (Satellite)

R.I.P. Productions--"The Chant (We R)" (Satellite) [samples Lennie De Underground's "We Are Ie"]

Ruff Da' Menace -- "Kick The Party Into Full Effect (Ruff & Menacing Mix)" (Obsessive House)

A Baffled Republic--"Bad Boys (Move In Silence)" (One Step/Catch)

Double 99 --"Ripgroove" (Satellite)