mms

sometimes
B: The elephant in the future garage room for me is that you can very effectively argue that UK funky is future garage, or certainly UKG mark II. For me any move to revive garage ideas should do its best to work with the energy and ideas of the funky scene, as it has grass roots support in London and tons of momentum. But I sense you're not so keen, what's your feeling on if or how future garage and funky could interact?

W: Yeah your right, I'm very uncomfortable with UK Funky. I don't particularly like the idea of UKG pt2 and I can see the same patterns repeating already that happened back with UKG pt1, the dress codes, the mc's, the "cheesey crossovers", except that its all happened in a year and a half, rather than over 5 yrs. I do however really like the fact that there is UK Funky, as it "leaves us alone" to build our thing without "scensters" trying to jump on it. I guess if pushed to make UK Funky and future garage interact I would have UK Funky in one room and future garage in another. Thats how I would envision it.

I personally dont hear UK funky as being very "garagey." I dont often hear the "swing" and even less "the shuffle", plus tropical beats and soca patterns have never really been my thing. Most UK funky I've ever heard has been either very housey or too broken beat for my taste. I actually hear a stronger Acid House era influence to a lot of UK Funky than a garage one. Future Garage has that indescribable something that I want from tunes, funky hasn't given me that. And trying to "cash in" on the success of another scene also seems slightly wrong, I'd rather future garage do its own thing, on its own terms.


Full interview for context: http://blackdownsoundboy.blogspot.com/2009/11/wot-do-u-call-it-future-garage.html

all very odd stuff
 

mms

sometimes
what part of what i said do you ever so politely find fault with exactly? if you read various posts on dsf at any point in time you can usually read stuff that has a somewhat patronising attitude to overtly black scenes. its not exactly a great leap to think most people into future garage prob didnt like it back then, and prob still dont (though many will have changed their minds, as i said before).

i don't care if dubstep forum has twats on it i know that, so what, dubstep forum is as much a consensus as any other set of fans of a genre.

i sometimes wonder if it's possible for a discussions of a dance genre to exist without these weird rather cynical and spiteful accusations of authenticity based around race and class to exist, as if thats consistent with anyone's actual experience of dancing to music. As if you know that they're posh, and if you could credibly make these characterisations, if you'd not seen their faces.

i'm wondering why in your first post you seemed to be saying people who are trying to recreate garage didn't like garage, are doing it for the money, ( as if!) that people will find it superior essentially cos they're white etc, that seems far fetched and horribly cynical. Also the other stuff where you do a daft job of trying to make out whistla etc are eric clapton well
 
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mms

sometimes
of course the people making this stuff were too young to be into garage at the time, my cheeky 'posh boy' comment was more about how the landscape for garage-related music has shifted wholesale. I remember calling into this IDM-type shop on Old Street (forget it's name?) early last decade and overhead the owner boasting that when people call in and give him garage records, he went out the back and smashed them up. That kind of view of garage was pretty widespread amongst that electronic muso crowd and I guess it's just funny how everything has changed. Undoubtedly, IDM trumped by garage should be viewed as a triumph, until you realise its an IDM version of garage...all the interesting bits bleached out, stuff that really doesn't make you want to dance

some guy in a long closed niche record store doesn't reflect anything now though really, he's just an obnoxious twat. That whistla interview suggests he's a big garage fan, and i would imagine it's hard to make garage if you didn't like it, idm's as long distant a genre as garage is now too, those politics are as much a 90's revival as anything else we're duscussing here!

Furthermore if you look at alot of the micro house stuff etc and all that from just after garage started etc, its dance music that seems to be heavily invested in garage's beat science or extended concepts, even if producers didn't directly acknowledge it or weren't from the scene or the uk, it's there, and that stuff probably wouldn't have happened without idm happening too.
 
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mos dan

fact music
of course the people making this stuff were too young to be into garage at the time, my cheeky 'posh boy' comment was more about how the landscape for garage-related music has shifted wholesale. I remember calling into this IDM-type shop on Old Street (forget it's name?) early last decade and overhead the owner boasting that when people call in and give him garage records, he went out the back and smashed them up. That kind of view of garage was pretty widespread amongst that electronic muso crowd and I guess it's just funny how everything has changed. Undoubtedly, IDM trumped by garage should be viewed as a triumph, until you realise its an IDM version of garage...all the interesting bits bleached out, stuff that really doesn't make you want to dance

i'm glad that was just meant to be cheeky, because i was about to call you on a comment i felt was quite profoundly and uncharacteristically reactionary.

who are these posh boys pushing garage? oneman? do you want to tell him he's posh or shall i? do you also want to tell him he wasn't into garage the first time round? who else are these straw djs or producers making garage? deadboy? whistla? what do you know about their backgrounds?

sorry i'm not annoyed with you, but i worry this is an echo of the same patronising middle-class armchair-marxist bullshit in reynolds' post about how jam city wasn't viable cos he was too articulate, too musically literate - as bok bok said in response "whereas if he called himself cityjamz and talked road, he'd be fine"

it makes me pretty angry, to be honest - not cos of what it says about joy orb or jam city or anyone making what is actually mostly house, not garage.. but because it reeks of noxious, patronising paternalism to everyone else.
 

mos dan

fact music
anyway you're all missing the point - attitudes to garage 'the first time around' for the vast majority of people mentioned in this thread is irrelevant - BECAUSE THEY WERE TOO YOUNG!!

whistla being the notable exception
 

mms

sometimes
anyway you're all missing the point - attitudes to garage 'the first time around' for the vast majority of people mentioned in this thread is irrelevant - BECAUSE THEY WERE TOO YOUNG!!

whistla being the notable exception


well it would have been listened to in different contexts, ie not in a soclal context of going out which could explain why for alot of these producers they only want the beat science in a new social context.
 

mos dan

fact music
well it would have been listened to in different contexts, ie not in a soclal context of going out which could explain why for alot of these producers they only want the beat science in a new social context.

yeah that's a fair point - i just meant in the sense that they would've been too young to make a choice about getting into/going out to ukg raves - or to reject the genre, equally
 

Tim F

Well-known member
Blackdown's recent interview with OneMan suggests that it's "common ground" that a good deal of OneMan's success lies in his old UKG selections effectively being "dubplates" given so much of the audience never would have heard them before. Obv OneMan's own knowledge is pretty deep and curatorial, and he's got the right attitude to it I think (from my perspective anyway), he doesn't try to "slant" UKG in any particular fashion.

Dan I'd disagree with you on Jam City in this specific sense: it's pretty obvious that he's going for a "deep"/"serious" vibe musically, it's not like if you heard him sans FACT interview you would assume that he was essentially interchangeable with Sticky, say (in either his garage or his funky incarnations).

If Jam City actually was called CityJamz and talked "road" it would be a massive case of mis-marketing - b/c his music wouldn't work in that context, he wouldn't suddenly find his tracks turned into skanks on youtube, whereas the people open to the idea of a deep/serious version of quasi-funky wouldn't be nearly as compelled to check him out.

Reynolds' point is not that Jam City is rendered irrelevant by his name and his interview responses - rather, that these things point to and articulate the vibe that his music creates. No-one would suggest that the name determines the music - it's the other way round, the name is an expression of the music.

It's the same with "future garage" obviously - none of these dudes are gonna market themselves as the new Bump'n'Flex b/c musically they don't fit that lineage, it's more a Wookie/El-B/Horsepower Productions lineage.
 

UFO over easy

online mahjong
Dan I'd disagree with you on Jam City in this specific sense: it's pretty obvious that he's going for a "deep"/"serious" vibe musically, it's not like if you heard him sans FACT interview you would assume that he was essentially interchangeable with Sticky, say (in either his garage or his funky incarnations).

If Jam City actually was called CityJamz and talked "road" it would be a massive case of mis-marketing - b/c his music wouldn't work in that context, he wouldn't suddenly find his tracks turned into skanks on youtube, whereas the people open to the idea of a deep/serious version of quasi-funky wouldn't be nearly as compelled to check him out.

i dunno, this sounds very logical but there's a lot that's so weird and unpredictable. even in retrospect Don't Panic isn't an obvious backing for a big skank tune, but aside from HSKT that was the biggest one yet right? and that's cool, i think
 

baboon2004

Darned cockwombles.
I know that the way society is structured lends some credence to grouping people, but there are a lot of false dichotomies flying around on these threads, no? Someone can be a bit posh and a bit road, or a bit neither/inbetween....someone can like chart 2-step but choose not to make it etc etc...

edit: same point as with the 'unpredictability' in x-post, come to think of it

edit 2: didn't we havethe label 'future garage' before, in 2002?
 
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mos dan

fact music
i dunno, this sounds very logical but there's a lot that's so weird and unpredictable.

indeed. i'm getting increasingly bored with the generalisations on dissensus - not because they're generalisations per se, but because they're generalisations that don't really make any sense, and are grounded in very weird prejudices or blind guesswork.

tim that's not directed at you - sure, i take your point about the name being an expression of the music.. it wasn't a detached, value-less observation though, there was an implicit judgement in the joy orbison/jam city post, about class, intelligence, and musical background

edit: yes, what baboon said
 
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Sick Boy

All about pride and egos
I've met Whistla before, and he seemed like a lovely bloke, but this whole "future garage" thing is the biggest load of wank. The difference between UK Funky and "future garage" is as follows: UK Funky has the spirit of old UKG, but not so much the sound, and is a natural sort of progression from a dissatisfaction with grime that was remedied by house DJs in Ayia Napa. Future garage does not contain a lick of the spirit of UKG, sounds like a contrived, effete, too-little-too-late version of it, and was born out of some calculated and totally unconvincing manifesto made by the owner of an independent label.

Right? Or no?
 

bun-u

Trumpet Police
i'm glad that was just meant to be cheeky, because i was about to call you on a comment i felt was quite profoundly and uncharacteristically reactionary.

who are these posh boys pushing garage? oneman? do you want to tell him he's posh or shall i? do you also want to tell him he wasn't into garage the first time round? who else are these straw djs or producers making garage? deadboy? whistla? what do you know about their backgrounds?

sorry i'm not annoyed with you, but i worry this is an echo of the same patronising middle-class armchair-marxist bullshit in reynolds' post about how jam city wasn't viable cos he was too articulate, too musically literate - as bok bok said in response "whereas if he called himself cityjamz and talked road, he'd be fine"

it makes me pretty angry, to be honest - not cos of what it says about joy orb or jam city or anyone making what is actually mostly house, not garage.. but because it reeks of noxious, patronising paternalism to everyone else.

I dunno Dan, these argument reeks a little bit like those saying that 'it doesn't matter that cameron, boris et al were at eton/part of the bullingdon club, they're just people like you and me blah blah'. The point is that a fairly significant socio-demographic change of the people involved in this scene has affected the dynamic/motivations /and therefore how it sounds... I can't account (and I'm not interesting in accounting) for individual backgrounds other than to say that I think there has there has been a fairly significant change, and I think this is worth commenting on in relation to the music.
 

Tim F

Well-known member
I simply don't know the class background of producers so I don't make assumptions about it. Terms like "effete" seem a bit too loaded IMO, especially when it comes to instrumental beat heavy dance music. It makes more sense to me to use terms like "serious", "abstract", "deep", high production values etc, because these are the terms I'd imagine producers of (say) "future garage" themselves would use to describe their own work - they can seem like positive or negative values depending on whether and how you structure a heirarchy of musical qualities. Whereas "effete" has negative connotations whichever way you look at it.

I tend to think the class background(s) of audiences are more important than that of producers, to the extent that this kind of thing is important (which I'm not sure of - it's more likely to be indicative rather than determinative IMO).

D&B is a good example of this in that, while the audience for early jungle might have decamped en masse to speed garage, most of the big producers stayed with d&b and adjusted themselves to its new sound and (mostly) new audience. The preoccupations of the audience seems to have had a much greater impact on the stylistic decisions the scene has taken "as a whole".

There tends to be consensus, too, that dubstep changed when its audience changed, though given there was never a dubstep scene in Australia prior to its embrace by a kind of uni student crowd from either d&b or minimal backgrounds, I'm basing that only on what I read about the UK.

"Don't Panic" is a great example of accidental crossover - can't imagine DJ Gregory ever guessed it would form the basis of an R&B tune (Donae'o's "Love To Happen"), let alone a skank rap. And the unpredictability of funky in the way it performs such transformations so often and so successfully is definitely one of its most loveable qualities.

But, by the same token, you don't see DJ Gregory himself pretending he's from the ends (which would be even odder than if, say, Whistla did). In fact the success of "Don't Panic" within UK Funky is almost premised on erasing what "we" know about the producer's background or its original context (how many people who love "Migraine Skank" are necessarily even aware of DJ Gregory's existence? Same story with Suges' "We Belong To The Night"), allowing it to become free-floating musical data to be seized upon and redeployed.

Ultimately I think (and people in a better position to say please jump in here and correct me) that most producers want to establish a line of communication with their audience, to feel that what they are trying to convey with their music is what is being picked up on by their audience. I don't think many producers actually feel that comfortable with the idea that their music was being enjoyed by people in an entirely new context and with the credit going to someone else - however much this idea might appeal in the abstract from a DJ or music critic perspective.

I mean, it's nice to imagine a situation where a Jam City track or a Whistla track might become a crossover hit in a similar fashion to "Don't Panic", but almost by definition, it would occur at the expense of the kind of artist-centric narrative that both seem to want to push - a scene like UK Funky is pretty callous w/r/t paying producers their dues.
 

luka

Well-known member
im going to stay out of this for the time being....broadly speaking slackk expressed my main problem with this music, but i do think there are other issues involved and i thiink this is a discussion that is worth having. just needs far more tact and delicacy than i am used to displaying. i think tim is right in saying that the background of the audience is more important than the background of the artists though. its a sensible point.
 

luka

Well-known member
i thinkk its fair to point out that a lot of the funky i like is trying to be 'deep' too. i must be getting old.
 

Sick Boy

All about pride and egos
I have to admit I'm getting a little bit confused about what the term "deep" even means. Is Terror Danjah "deep" in relation to, say, Jon E Cash? It seems when people say "deep", they usually just mean different to whatever is normally expected within a style of music, perhaps occasionally with a bit of emphasis on the experimentation involved. The result is always either going to be good music or shit music, but I don't see how it will be that simply by virtue of being different.

If there are only two forces that take a good idea and make it shit it's purism and reactionary attempts to make everything more refined. People who wish to "protect" funky from imaginative re-interpretations fit into the former category, people espousing "future garage" in spite of funky into the latter.

I don't really see artists like Pearson Sound, Bok Bok, Cooly G, etc. fitting into either of these categories.
 

Tim F

Well-known member
I have to admit I'm getting a little bit confused about what the term "deep" even means. Is Terror Danjah "deep" in relation to, say, Jon E Cash? It seems when people say "deep", they usually just mean different to whatever is normally expected within a style of music, perhaps occasionally with a bit of emphasis on the experimentation involved. The result is always either going to be good music or shit music, but I don't see how it will be that simply by virtue of being different

If there are only two forces that take a good idea and make it shit it's purism and reactionary attempts to make everything more refined. People who wish to "protect" funky from imaginative re-interpretations fit into the former category, people espousing "future garage" in spite of funky into the latter.

I don't really see artists like Pearson Sound, Bok Bok, Cooly G, etc. fitting into either of these categories.

No I don't think Terra Danjah counts as "deep" really. Basically "deep" almost always means heightening the resemblance to one of the following:

- deep house
- detroit techno
- basic channel

So if you wanted to make "deep" 2-step the archetypal reference points are Horsepower Productions and stuff like Zed Bias' remix of 2 Banks of Four's "Hook & A Line".

Also Sick Boy I'm all for funky's wide-ranging stylistic diversity, and like Pearson Sound and Cooly G productions in particular a lot.

I'm not quite sure what an actually "purist" stance on funky would be... Circle I guess? It strikes me as pretty difficult to square liking Lil' Silva and Fuzzy Logick and Funkystepz and Crazy Cousinz with any kind of purism.
 

bassbeyondreason

Chtonic Fatigue Syndrome
Couple of points:

Tastefulness/Deepness/Whatever: You actually listened to much of Whistla's stuff? A lot of it is full of these near-cartoonish vocal cut-ups, I guess plugging back into the old rave lineage. Yes there's a lot of FG stuff that's going for classically "deep" signifiers, but there are people like KingThing/Gremino/me who are clearly trying to make raw, ravey dance music. Of course it runs the risk of falling into blog-house pastiche but I think it's a tightrope worth walking.

Class/Race: I wasn't around at the time, but on the production end, wasn't 2-step a pretty heavily mixed scene? Not so much class-like I guess, but I refuse to accept that I'm any less road than Steve Gurley. Like has been said, the audience demographics may be far more important, but I'm not sure that's something that can be laid at the feet of producers/DJs/etc.

I think there are definitely problems with parts of the "Future" "Garage" "Movement", particularly with the parts that just sound like a straight revival of Horsepower or whatever, but I think there's definitely potential coming through.
 
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