Hardcore Continuum Autopsy
sadmanbarty
Well-known member
my whole life is me discovering all the brilliant shit i've come up with has already been done by cleaver blokes 20 years ago.
sadmanbarty
Well-known member
cause he's secretly from basildon
sadmanbarty
Well-known member
pretends to be irish to give him a veneer of charm
Julian Cope's next book.
luka
Well-known member
do you remember corpsey from dubstepforum? he was one of the leading figures on that forum.
Yup.
sadmanbarty
Well-known member
in africa you don't have the wedding of 'urban' and dance music like you have in jamaica. where dancehall serves as both, you get naija/azonto for dancing and nigerian/ghanian rap. so as london's become more demographically african it's lost this jamaican tradition of wedding the two; hence drill and to a lesser extent grime not being dance music.
I get bored and delete stuff all the time. I'll type it out again just for you.
When did it die?
2011
What killed it?
The internet
How did this happen?
The 'scene' migrated online and gradually splintered due to no longer being bound by or requiring specific geographical points of reference or real world interaction. The physical locations that acted as hubs - Blue Note, FWD, DMZ etc - were replaced by sites like Dubstepforum and Dubplate.net which only really lasted for a few years before everything became so sprawling and unfocused that the centre just sort of collapsed and everyone floated off in different directions, engaging with outside influences. These days people are either making house and techno or they're just rehashing jungle, garage, grime and dubstep.
blissblogger
Well-known member
i think "inquest" would be a more appropriate word for the thread title than "autopsy"
a phenomenon that is multi-determined in its genesis will have multiple causal strands involved in its de-genesis - and all that have been mentioned so far contributed to its fading away
but if there was a single pulse that you could track as the life-line, the vital sign, i'd argue that it's the vibrancy and the essential role of the pirates
there is something about real-time terrestrial broadcast to a geographically restricted audience that creates community and a sense of synchronisation - everyone within the same forward-surging temporality
as soon as it became about the internet and netradio, you are leaving behind analogue culture - you are into geographically scattered audiences whose identity is primarily through identification with genre (whereas with jungle, UKG, grime et al - the identity came from the genre-identification but also a host of social and racial factors).
you are also into desynchronisation - the ability to listen to shows when you feel like, when it's convenient, as podcasts or archived shows
this is just my experience, but living in NYC and then in LA i could never bring myself to listen to netradio of nuum-type music - it just felt wrong - i was listening too far away from the source, and at the wrong time of day
i think hardcore continuum is fundamentally an analogue-era culture - you can see that with the way it stuck with vinyl and with the dubplate long after other kinds of music had abandoned those for digital modes (there were still really shitty-sounding bassline 12 inches you could buy in 2008 - a phenomenon of persistence completely different from the vinyl revival going on elsewhere, which was the musical equivalent of artisanal cheese - almost literally, given that you could buy 40 dollar vinyl albums in Whole Foods here)
also feel like the broadcast nature of pirates contributed to a certain (delusional?) grandiosity - the DJs and MCs could actually say and feel, "this one goes out to the London massive" or whatever - the music is addressed to a whole city and its population (in potential, at least) - a lot more people were aware of the pirates than actually liked them (indeed they found them a nuisance)
in that sense it was a public culture
internet is narrowcast
a phenomenon that is multi-determined in its genesis will have multiple causal strands involved in its de-genesis - and all that have been mentioned so far contributed to its fading away
but if there was a single pulse that you could track as the life-line, the vital sign, i'd argue that it's the vibrancy and the essential role of the pirates
there is something about real-time terrestrial broadcast to a geographically restricted audience that creates community and a sense of synchronisation - everyone within the same forward-surging temporality
as soon as it became about the internet and netradio, you are leaving behind analogue culture - you are into geographically scattered audiences whose identity is primarily through identification with genre (whereas with jungle, UKG, grime et al - the identity came from the genre-identification but also a host of social and racial factors).
you are also into desynchronisation - the ability to listen to shows when you feel like, when it's convenient, as podcasts or archived shows
this is just my experience, but living in NYC and then in LA i could never bring myself to listen to netradio of nuum-type music - it just felt wrong - i was listening too far away from the source, and at the wrong time of day
i think hardcore continuum is fundamentally an analogue-era culture - you can see that with the way it stuck with vinyl and with the dubplate long after other kinds of music had abandoned those for digital modes (there were still really shitty-sounding bassline 12 inches you could buy in 2008 - a phenomenon of persistence completely different from the vinyl revival going on elsewhere, which was the musical equivalent of artisanal cheese - almost literally, given that you could buy 40 dollar vinyl albums in Whole Foods here)
also feel like the broadcast nature of pirates contributed to a certain (delusional?) grandiosity - the DJs and MCs could actually say and feel, "this one goes out to the London massive" or whatever - the music is addressed to a whole city and its population (in potential, at least) - a lot more people were aware of the pirates than actually liked them (indeed they found them a nuisance)
in that sense it was a public culture
internet is narrowcast
Last edited:
CrowleyHead
Well-known member
Also Continental (as in European, not UK) dance music essentially lobotomized both the US and UK scenes.
Trance won. We're all dead and in the balearic heaven.
Trance won. We're all dead and in the balearic heaven.
craner
Beast of Burden
Cardiff Bay has a community radio station that pumps out soul, R&B, reggae, ragga, house, hip hop etc; Birmingham has the same in multiple. Both have the appetite for that music, neither produced any series Nuum music to compare to London, or even Bristol, Sheffield or Leicester.
I agree with Luke though, London had the population mix, infrastructure, and crucial atmosphere to be the centre, the energy. The information centre
and it was something unique and special.
I agree with Luke though, London had the population mix, infrastructure, and crucial atmosphere to be the centre, the energy. The information centre
and it was something unique and special.
Last edited:
I don't listen to radio at all these days, but something I started to notice when I did was that there didn't seem to be as many "big" tunes or anthems. At one point you'd have specific tunes everyone was battering that people would pass around rips of, upload to Youtube and discuss. That doesn't seem to happen anymore and the last time it did - from what I can tell - was around 2010/2011 when stuff like Girl Unit's 'Wut' and Sicko Cell were doing the rounds on Rinse.
craner
Beast of Burden
Also the geographical and media limitations were crucial for the mystery, flavor, sound, atmosphere, etc, so agree with Simon too.
Having said that: hardcore was around the country: via raves, illicit tape recordings of raves, Dreamscape etc tape packs (which persisted into the 2-step era), so the styles and energies were more media-fixed and influenced than UK geography. The Internet was the real killer.
Having said that: hardcore was around the country: via raves, illicit tape recordings of raves, Dreamscape etc tape packs (which persisted into the 2-step era), so the styles and energies were more media-fixed and influenced than UK geography. The Internet was the real killer.
sadmanbarty
Well-known member
the incentive structures are all wrong too. the only way for a lot of nuum acts to make money is to cater to students (a good 10 years after the music they're making's innovative), which isn't really a breeding ground for the kind of innovations the hardcore continuum's supposed to produce.