viktorvaughn
Well-known member
Just wondering!...
Who or what first coined the terms 'jungle' and 'dnb'?
- Thread starter viktorvaughn
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i read an article referring to this recently in that free dance music mag One Week To Live actually, in which they were saying that there's loads of dispute about how the name jungle came about and that lots of people saw it as a racist thing (as in 'that's the music that jungle bunnies listen to') but i am convinced that the story in that article about how it all came from a sample used by rebel mc referring to 'jungle man dem' or something like that will be the one - jungle is an area of Kingston, Jamaica, and appears in loads of dancehall tunes from the late 80s onwards (possibly even earlier). people from jungle were called junglists from way before what we know as jungle music sprung up. given jungle/d&b started out sampling so much dancehall/ragga, it seems logical that this is where the term jungle came from. inference to best explanation etc. however someone in that One Week To Live article said something different, i can't remember what is was
drum and bass, again, is an old jamaican/reggae term that had been in use for 20-odd years before jungle/d&b music appeared in the uk - basically used to describe the raw ingredients of reggae/dub. i don't know exactly what triggered its adoption for jungle music, but i guess it has something to do with the fact that it's made up mainly of drums and bass, and cos so many people who were influential in the early jungle scene were obviously well into jamaican music!
drum and bass, again, is an old jamaican/reggae term that had been in use for 20-odd years before jungle/d&b music appeared in the uk - basically used to describe the raw ingredients of reggae/dub. i don't know exactly what triggered its adoption for jungle music, but i guess it has something to do with the fact that it's made up mainly of drums and bass, and cos so many people who were influential in the early jungle scene were obviously well into jamaican music!
viktorvaughn said:
i reckon jungle comes from people hearing clash tapes from kingston - where people refer to living in jungle which i think is loosley refers to a really shit poor area around ghost town /tivoli gardens/arnette gardens which was rebuilt and had a high level of political and other wise gang warfare in it. However i think the term is generally used to refer to urban jamaica, so reclaiming jungle is reclaiming jamaican roots in a pretty hardcore way.
nomos
Administrator
an old blissout post on the former. simon's energy flash etymology updated by wayne(&wax) marshall.
http://blissout.blogspot.com/2004_09_01_blissout_archive.html
http://blissout.blogspot.com/2004_09_01_blissout_archive.html
mms said:
i dunno about reclaiming roots, the jungle references in dancehall certainly have always seemed to me to be more of a badman posturing thing. shouts to all jungle man dem in dancehall are basically shouts to jungle badmen, bigging up all the shottas and dons from that area. i've always got the impression that jungle (along with rema, which always seems to go hand and hand with jungle when it's namechecked in tunes) is like THE worst/hardest/baddest place in kingston, somehow more dangerous than places like tivoli gardens. (i don't know much about these areas other from how they're portrayed in songs, but this is an impression i've got from listening to lots of the songs at least)
it's very noticeable that a massively high proportion of the jungle/d&b samples that come from ragga/dancehall are of the clash style - badman this, murder you that, pussyhole/bloodclaat/rassclaat the other. so it would seem to me that picking jungle as the name for the sound is like an extension of that fascination with badmanism - as in, lets name this style after the hardest area in kingston. not to say that the term was explicitly picked for this purpose, but if you're choosing to sample badman tunes and jungle is the big badman place, then the term jungle will become prominent...
but anyway maybe all of that is about reclaiming roots? i dunno really
also, while it may be true that jungle is used in a more general way to refer to urban jamaica (not really sure about this), it's definitely used very very specifically in dancehall songs
viktorvaughn
Well-known member
autonomicforthepeople said:
Interesting! So if things had turned out a bit different perhaps we would be talking about the gardenist massive, banging garden music etc!
the term categorically came from dancehall. ther was never anything racist about it at all. that story always makes me laugh. it's absolutely ludicrous when you consider how much of the music featured dancehall samples in patois talking about "junglists" etc. i'm not sure where the idea of any more sinsister motivation came from.
stelfox said:
what storydo you mean?
i don't think anyone is saying its anything more sinister - just it brought back the ja meme that runs thru urban uk music rather than anything else. most of those samples are from dancehall records and clash tapes int they..
maybe reclaiming is the wrong term - i think i just mean reestablishing that link i guess
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mms said:
the initial story of people thinking it got its name by people referring to it as jungle as a perjorative related to its mainly black audience. my bad, i should have been more lucid but i'm very jetlagged and was replying to the original question, not anything subsequent.
bassnation
the abyss
stelfox said:
thing is, people called it jungle long before those dancehall samples started appearing. i remember back in 1991 all people talked about was jungle tekno or jungle 'ardkore. you did have reggae samples in the tunes, but i don't specifically remember many dancehall samples with that word in, at least that early - so there must be more to it.
hey look i found the article i was talking about in one week to live... my summary:
navigator says it all comes from a 1991 rebel mc track which sampled 'all a di junglist' from a jamaican sound tape (simon reynolds in melody maker). he (navigator) says that he & his friends, as broadwater farm residents (ie in the concrete jungle), "called ourselves junglists long before the music ever came along"
a guy called gerald says: "there's so much colour in [jungle music]. so much rhythm. so much texture. you could go into a [real] jungle and find these things."
i quote: "often cited as the godfathers of the scene, shut up and dance were quick to denounce 'jungle' for its racist overtones. 'jungle' may have had its roots in jamaica, but in its 90s context it was more often employed as a racist term against this mainly black form of rave. indeed 'jungle' opened up a lot of racist attitudes which had rarely been a feature in the days of ecstasy fuelled togetherness. suggesting that it was simply a 'derogatory term', dave stone argues that it came from people's bigotry. 'people were going like, "it's music that the jungle bunnies dance to" and that i think is how it was coined "jungle",' says stone. 'but the people took the word 'jungle' and turned it on its head and made it a positive thing rather than negative. very much in the same way as the word 'nigger' had been reappropriated by the american hip hop scene'"
/end quote
also, fabio says: "what we used to call jungle was Strictly Rhythm - that was jungle because it sounded like a load of jungle percussion sounds, and we used to do house and call it jungle ... we just liked the drums, and a lot of people don't understand - it's not about some fucking ragga lyrics"
navigator says it all comes from a 1991 rebel mc track which sampled 'all a di junglist' from a jamaican sound tape (simon reynolds in melody maker). he (navigator) says that he & his friends, as broadwater farm residents (ie in the concrete jungle), "called ourselves junglists long before the music ever came along"
a guy called gerald says: "there's so much colour in [jungle music]. so much rhythm. so much texture. you could go into a [real] jungle and find these things."
i quote: "often cited as the godfathers of the scene, shut up and dance were quick to denounce 'jungle' for its racist overtones. 'jungle' may have had its roots in jamaica, but in its 90s context it was more often employed as a racist term against this mainly black form of rave. indeed 'jungle' opened up a lot of racist attitudes which had rarely been a feature in the days of ecstasy fuelled togetherness. suggesting that it was simply a 'derogatory term', dave stone argues that it came from people's bigotry. 'people were going like, "it's music that the jungle bunnies dance to" and that i think is how it was coined "jungle",' says stone. 'but the people took the word 'jungle' and turned it on its head and made it a positive thing rather than negative. very much in the same way as the word 'nigger' had been reappropriated by the american hip hop scene'"
/end quote
also, fabio says: "what we used to call jungle was Strictly Rhythm - that was jungle because it sounded like a load of jungle percussion sounds, and we used to do house and call it jungle ... we just liked the drums, and a lot of people don't understand - it's not about some fucking ragga lyrics"
I'm sure people were saying "jungle" before 1991. Definitely in 1991 I can remember the music on pirate being referred to as "jungle techno" - it was the early breakbeat rave stuff, things like R2R etc. when there was still a garagey element to it too.
i had a mate who swore that hms & rob elliot from windowsmashers used to frequently say "jungle warriors on a mission" when they were on pirate around 89 or so (dance fm i think). they used to play what was then called "tribal house" which was pretty basic drum machine and synth tracks with NY garage and chicago house influences (anyone got the windowsmashers album on g force records? i'd love to hear it again)
remember when 120bpm tracks with organ stabs seemed like the hardest, weirdest music ever? funny innit?
i had a mate who swore that hms & rob elliot from windowsmashers used to frequently say "jungle warriors on a mission" when they were on pirate around 89 or so (dance fm i think). they used to play what was then called "tribal house" which was pretty basic drum machine and synth tracks with NY garage and chicago house influences (anyone got the windowsmashers album on g force records? i'd love to hear it again)
remember when 120bpm tracks with organ stabs seemed like the hardest, weirdest music ever? funny innit?
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Logan Sama
BestThereIsAtWhatIDo
I have aproblem with the use of the term Drum & Bass to describe jungle.
Aba Shanti play Drum and Bass
Aba Shanti play Drum and Bass
Jungle is a great name for a style of music. Drum and bass is terrible.
Why the rebrand? Was it to signify the move away from the ragga influence? I remember around 95 a DJ acquaintance came back from the UK, we were chatting and I used the term jungle, he said something like "well noone calls it that any more and the musics totally different. Its called Hardstep now."
haha
Why the rebrand? Was it to signify the move away from the ragga influence? I remember around 95 a DJ acquaintance came back from the UK, we were chatting and I used the term jungle, he said something like "well noone calls it that any more and the musics totally different. Its called Hardstep now."
haha
bassnation
the abyss
gabriel said:
i agree with this - maybe the producers liked the fact that they could find loads of samples with the genre name writ large all over it.