Bad influences

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sadmanbarty

Well-known member
UK Funky seems to be the moment in which UK dance music stopped outright innovating and started mildly tweaking previously established genres.

1990-95 produced bleep, hardcore and jungle

2000-05 produced garage rap, dubstep, grime and bassline

2010-15 produced UK Bass, Jackin and Deep Tech
 
Benny Bunter

Benny Bunter

Well-known member
sadmanbarty said:
Name some tracks that you consider display the innovative qualities of Funky.
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you may disagree, but I found plenty of shock-of-the new thrills in ill blu, funkystepz, fuzzy logik, early roska, geeneus, lil silva to name the most obvious. I could post tons of youtubes but its probably a waste of time. OTTOMH: yellowtail, mr bean, seasons, feeline, different lextrix, inflation, house girls, reign, quicktime, funky sound etc etc etc. (bongo jam even! fuck it, especially bongo jam!) all these marked a big break from what had gone before, and came in quick succession after the initial incubative period of playing mainly US stuff. you cant just reduce it to 'mild tweaking'.

you could point to all the obvious direct influences but, if you took, i dunno, MAW for example; its easy to find tons of examples that sounding NOTHING like that type of house. and the same goes for pointing to certain grime or garage or tribal or afro or soca tracks to try and deny uk funky's 'innovatative qualities'. you could play these sort of games with jungle too (as in the recent woebot 'reggae was just a flava' scandal), or indeed any genre you care to name.

or you might say it was closest in vibe to ukg (house/ dancehall/ rnb base, mcs as hosts, width and variety, plenty of vocals blah blah blah) but clearly built on very different rhythms to garage. it pretty rarely sounded much like 2step really. grime, certainly but... (see prev. paragraph)

its had a big hand in paving the way for uk afrobeats, which is bubbling up nicely again right now (even influenced og azonto boom in ghana/naija to some extent) and starting to bear juicier fruit. ive already lolled at this years uk funky veterans 'revival', but when you've got someone as hot as J Hus saying he's on a mission to bring it back, you start to take notice.

and if you're gonna say bassline you have to say funky really, going by (what i think) is your logic.
 
S

sadmanbarty

Well-known member
Like you say, it’s one of those subjective things, so we won’t be able to convince each other.

The tracks you name, while all great, to me feel like direct composites of their influences. That being said, “mildly tweaking” was a stupid rhetorical flourish and definitely an exaggeration.

Agree with the afrobeats connection.

Regardless of whether Funky itself was innovative, I think that fact it reconnected ravers to proper house has had an overwhelmingly bad legacy for UK music.

I can definitely see what you mean about Bassline, but I think it took the dred/warp bass to such an extreme so as to be innovative. The central, rhythmic use of resonant filters and whatnot on bass has become one of the hallmarks of 21st century music so far.
 
Corpsey

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
Personally I've enjoyed parts of house's mainstream renaissance although I've always had problems with the 4x4 drums.

One thing you can't underestimate about funky was the change in mood it brought about. Although there was exuberant music around, funky felt like a real relief after the darkness and self-seriousness of dubstep. Even when it went wobbly, there was something more grinding than ebullient about it.
 
benjybars

benjybars

village elder.
Corpsey said:
One tune I'd cite as a bad influence, though, is 'Rubber Chicken' by Caspa. (Please ignore the following, luka, as you consider all dubstep a priori shite.) At the time we - that is, me and my loefah/skream/dmz venerating mates - all loved it, PARTICULARLY the 'mad as a brush' second drop where the wobbles go so mad it feels like the tempo is warping. But I feel like this tune, even more perhaps than Coki's tunes, opened the door for dubstep to become DEFINED by wobbles, which meant that by 2009/10 you had DJs playing wobbler after wobbler after wobbler. Although really it only became SUPER offensive post 'Spongebob' (although I still think Coki is a genius, many of those gnarly industrial shit-fits included).
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As someone who was equally obsessed with DMZ etc at this time, I 100% agree with this.

In fact, I wrote something pretty similar for my Roots of Caspa mix:

"Mix of old Caspa tracks from 2006-2010. Along with Rusko, Caspa is probably seen as the main cause of dubstep's rapid descent into obnoxious noisy drivel. And, to be fair, they were clearly both pretty happy to take the money and run. Still, a lot of Caspa's early stuff is just sick. Proper ravey and mental. Remember seeing him play the opening set at FWD in 2006 when there were about 30 people there and Rusko was jumping about like a nutter. Anyway yeah, while he (and his label Dub Police) undoubtedly helped dubstep become a load of boring nonsense, no-one can test these early tracks. Also, Velvet Rooms is absolutely wicked! He should've made more 2step garage.."
 
S

sadmanbarty

Well-known member
The reggae revival that started in the 90's and has been going on ever since. Its bad influence is twofold 1) almost every dancehall album needs a token reggae track and 2) top artists like Sizzla, Capleton and Buju put most of there effort into one-drop tracks, when actually their best music is dancehall.
 
Slothrop

Slothrop

Tight but Polite
benjybars said:
"Mix of old Caspa tracks from 2006-2010. Along with Rusko, Caspa is probably seen as the main cause of dubstep's rapid descent into obnoxious noisy drivel. And, to be fair, they were clearly both pretty happy to take the money and run. Still, a lot of Caspa's early stuff is just sick. Proper ravey and mental. Remember seeing him play the opening set at FWD in 2006 when there were about 30 people there and Rusko was jumping about like a nutter. Anyway yeah, while he (and his label Dub Police) undoubtedly helped dubstep become a load of boring nonsense, no-one can test these early tracks. Also, Velvet Rooms is absolutely wicked! He should've made more 2step garage.."
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Isn't this a classic case of an something that works well as long as it's in tension with an opposing force - ie in dubstep, the meditative, pseudo-spiritual side of things and / or the garagey bump n flex - but becomes boring and one-dimensional once people focus in on it to the exclusion of anything else?
 
droid

droid

Well-known member
sadmanbarty said:
The reggae revival that started in the 90's and has been going on ever since. Its bad influence is twofold 1) almost every dancehall album needs a token reggae track and 2) top artists like Sizzla, Capleton and Buju put most of there effort into one-drop tracks, when actually their best music is dancehall.
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If you want to make that argument its Drop Leaf and the One Drop Revival from '05 on that should be the target.

Reggae never really went away after all. Some of the best roots tunes came out in the digital era, Digital B was on top of things from the late 80's. It only slipped out of view as a significant force in the late 90's.

+ Chronixx is the best thing to come out of Jamaica in years.
 
Corpsey

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
Haven't kept up with dancehall/reggae in a long time and was never an aficionado particularly but I always liked Buju and Sizzla's reggae songs. ''Solid as a Rock'' etc...

re wobbles, Slothrop is right. It was the ubiquity of it that galled. It was arguably good to have some subversive, cheeky stuff chucked into the midst of the sometimes rather po-faced ''meditate on bass'' stuff like a hand-grenade stuffed with silly string, but when it was allll night it was just grinding, in the same way that clownstep DNB is... The thing about it was that it was TOO effective, it was like the crack cocaine of dubstep. And despite the stereotypes, when I first started going to dubstep nights in 2006/7 it wasn't all moody men shuffling about, it was a lot of people going mad. And that was actually one of its charms, the shift from a Mala tune, say, to a Skream tune like ''Rottan'', was completely natural.

Also wobblers just became so formulaic. I remember seeing Kode9 b2b with Plastician at DMZ. All the tunes Kode played were different from each other, you didn't know what to expect, and every tune Plastician played was exactly the same structure and sounds.

Funky was a relief from that as much as the more sombre stuff (which by that time had somewhat died off anyway) - it was fun, it was funky, it was celebratory...
 
M

mistersloane

heavy heavy monster sound
Nothing good has ever come from anyone listening to King Crimson. So, I vote for "Court of the Crimson King", and its hideous progeny.
 
trza

trza

Well-known member
daft punk and their tour with the robot masks and the obscenely large lcd graphics was a big influence on deadmau5 and the rest of the edm scene that followed. when they promoted their last album they claimed they were unaware of the edm scene and thought it was just a guy named dj edm but its really their baby from their tour so many years ago.
 
T

thirdform

pass the sick bucket
luka said:
Ignore me if we done this before but I want to nominate Pauls Boutique as a record with a disasterous cultural influence and if I think of anything else I'll share it with you
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What does bad influences mean here? Because bit of what went into the chassy of the 92 nuum was kinda bad, all those italo house pianos sound fucking great in hardcore but if you listen to the original songs they are sampled from they are really flat. Theft to make something better.
 
T

thirdform

pass the sick bucket
Benny B said:
you could point to all the obvious direct influences but, if you took, i dunno, MAW for example; its easy to find tons of examples that sounding NOTHING like that type of house. and the same goes for pointing to certain grime or garage or tribal or afro or soca tracks to try and deny uk funky's 'innovatative qualities'. you could play these sort of games with jungle too (as in the recent woebot 'reggae was just a flava' scandal), or indeed any genre you care to name.
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This is fair enough, and I agree, but when UK funky started coming around 07-09 and especially towards the tail end of 09 when I was researching all the history of house, I realised that the Yanks have a point. UK house history is very selective outside of the chicago/detroit orientated scenes, it's all about NY/NJ garage, which is a small subset of American house, and relatively poppy by US standards. If you go into the whole Robert Armani, DJ Sneak etc end of things, it's actually much closer to European rave music. What happened is the two scenes house/techno became split from each other but if we're being honest, a lot of early Chicago is more techno than early detroit.

Then there's the whole Junior Vasquez tribal end of things, which made more of a dent in the UK garage scene but again, not as much as MAW, Mood2Swing etc.

Anyway, since you mentioned Bongo Jam


1993, really rude shit from DJ Pierre - post-Phuture Pierre is massively underrated.

best shit ever

And of course
proper bunker tribalism. All that DJ Gregory stuff from the 00s Owes its dna to mental chi town basement shit like this.
 
T

thirdform

pass the sick bucket
appreciate I'm responding to a 5 year old post lol but I want to show people what attracted me to delve deeper into house, and it weren't crazy kousins, as much as I enjoyed them at the time. That was just nice, radio friendly music. But there was a darker, dirtier underbelly (for me.)



 
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