jamaica has been coopted, it's SOLElY naff now

sadmanbarty

Well-known member
it's cultural riches are completely depleted just as it's influence is at it's most widespread.

https://www.theguardian.com/music/2017/sep/06/stormzy-theresa-may-is-a-paigon-gq-awards

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt5862902/




the widespread 'tropical' edm pop sound. timbale karrang-kangs and all that.

all of us here all love music that draws from jamaica; we all to some (often large degrees) view jamaica as a signifier of coolness and innovation. is that no longer the case though? is it now the complete opposite; if something's drawing from jamaica as a cultural influence it's going to be conservative and naff?

dancehall itself has even gone all thomas cook in the last few years.
 

sadmanbarty

Well-known member
this was a guide track i essentially had to rip off for some work i did with a big cosmetics company a couple of years ago.


it disgusted me how much all these middle-aged german brand managers loved it. salvation for squares. letting loose in some berlin office.
 

luka

Well-known member
One of the ironies, we've talked abput it before, is that a lot of the African artists here are making better dancehall inflected music than the londoners of Jamaican descent.

I don't think Jamaica is done but that axis is no longer the primary one. Its a different situation now, far more complex, entangled, hybrid and polyglot
 

blissblogger

Well-known member
I was at this music summit Loop this weekend - organised by Ableton - and I was on a panel with Equiknoxx. Gavin from the group said that in the mid-2000s there was this whole new wave of dancehall that was faster - about 120 bpm - and with a soca-ish vibe. Which certainly fits my faint, from-a-afar recollections - the sound seemed to get more bouncy and knees-up almost - and in fact that was when i switched off listening to it.

But anyway what he said that was interesting was that it was a new style, "but we never called it anything" - and then it changed to something else. So there was an almost a new genre there, or name-worthy direction, a new rhythm - but nobody really noticed in the outside world because it was not identified as such.

i think he said what followed was similar in sound / tempo but less party-up, more political and serious.

What did happen with dancehall in the last 10, 12 years? the auto-tune thing went nuts, but then it went nuts everywhere in the world really.

Bit like grime, it feels like a fairly static genre to me - like it got fixed as what is is at a certain point and just stayed there - but no doubt this is due to ignorance on my part.
 
Bit like grime, it feels like a fairly static genre to me - like it got fixed as what is is at a certain point and just stayed there - but no doubt this is due to ignorance on my part.

All genres are static, the creative engine seized up when smartphone social media put sugar in the tank. It's going to take a Carrington Event or big cyber war to get things moving again.
 

firefinga

Well-known member
All genres are static, the creative engine seized up when smartphone social media put sugar in the tank. It's going to take a Carrington Event or big cyber war to get things moving again.

There is more than a grain of truth to this, and the phenomenon is even much wider - it's eating into so many aspects of life. Social media & the smartphone craze have frozen cultural life in a big way - pretty much the whole 2010s.
 
I think its laying the groundwork for something hugw.

I hope so. The widespread availability of cheap samplers, Ataris and all that, was instrumental in the explosion of rave and jungle a generation ago. Those technologies were a lightning conductor that helped discharge bevawatts of pent-up creative energy. It's all been somewhat shagged out ever since. But as I suggested, it may require an equal and opposite flip mode away from mass technology. Secret technology or no technology or the machines chattering among themselves.

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I think its laying the groundwork for something hugw.

Arguably the huge happened in 2011, with the Arab Spring and UK riots and livestreaming tsunamis and TEPCO reactors exploding. Since then the lid's been screwed on tighter by governments and big tech. Smartphones are a block, a grounding of creative energy. It needs limiting. We're living in a world with effective telepathy and it's diluting creative endeavour, minds hosed clean by dopamine. There hasn't been a good record in any genre by anyone in years now.

There have been good movies though - it's sinful to use your phone in the cinema and that's a good thing, by some tenuous and not really thought through chain of cause and effect smartphones haven't ruined movies yet.
 
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luka

Well-known member
I gave up smartphones the same time I gave up drinking, in September last year. I think the telepathy point is useful. I think there is a rewriting of the rules going on as we speak. magic reentering the circuit. Reality made malleable in ways which will become increasingly obvious and undeniable in the years to come. The discovery and investigation of this fact is what I expect to underpin the next psychedelic culture wave. Sometimes, quite often in fact, I think it will go as far as a new religious revelation.
 
I gave up smartphones the same time I gave up drinking, in September last year. I think the telepathy point is useful. I think there is a rewriting of the rules going on as we speak. magic reentering the circuit. Reality made malleable in ways which will become increasingly obvious and undeniable in the years to come. The discovery and investigation of this fact is what I expect to underpin the next psychedelic culture wave. Sometimes, quite often in fact, I think it will go as far as a new religious revelation.

I know I keep going on about it, but the ibogaine trip report (scroll down to the phone pic) where the experience is mediated by a smartphone interface might be a clue to this (the delicious irony being that her phone was packed away somewhere else at the time, she was imagining it). Obviously spending your time at the peak of your trip fucking about with a phone is not in any way cool but replacing the effective telepathy with effective omniscience while in a psychedelic state would be new and interesting. I suspect a novel form of easily-administered ibogaine will be the substance that will realise what you're hinting at.

The idea of a smartphone could be the mental totem people take with them to finally make sense of the psychedelic experience, properly organise and classify it without killing it. I recall a dream I had when I was about 10. The headmaster from the Bash Street Kids gave me a book which contained everything i wanted to know, i just had to think of a question, turn a page and there was the answer, with moving pictures, and page number links (a la choose-your-own-adventure books) to more information. Google basically. I was so disappointed when I woke up back in 1984 and it wasn't true. Point being, the book of all knowledge is a mental archetype that has now been almost fully realised and could be a useful tool for exploring the psychedelic realm. Networked, collaborative tripping. Maybe those machine elves are out-of-time people using this technology in the future. Or maybe not, don't know, never met any.

Getting back to main point - if nothing else, the last decade or so of smartphone addiction will prove very useful for navigating one's mind the next time the psychedelic cultural tide comes in.
 
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firefinga

Well-known member
Smartphones, Social Media and Auto-Tune are the three Apocalyptic Riders. Who/What's the fourth though?
 
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