Hardcore Continuum Autopsy

one of the ironies of the internet is that it is possible to immerse yourself in the past of pirate radio in a much more total, take-it-all-in way that you could at the time

i mean, unless you had more than one radio set (and i'm really not sure why it never occurred to me to do that - buy multiple cheap radio-recorders) you could only listen to one station at a time - and you were also limited to what you could pick up in your corner of London

now there's this overload of archived sets from all across the city (and elsewhere in the UK), almost to the point you could live "there/then" permanently as a listener and rarely listen to the same set twice.

incidentally in the brand new issue of the Wire, Michaelangelo Matos has done a Primer to UK Pirate Radio DJ Sets, starting around 1988 and going through to the end of the 2000s. He's done a good job framing the evolution and found a lot of gems, drawing on his formidable resources of obsessive-compulsiveness and sifting through what seems to have been an insane number of contenders

All I can say is that I plugged into the music quite quick via tapes and later scraps of vinyl you could pick up in mostly house and techno-dominated specialist dance record shops, and this was really circa 93-95. But I was also lucky in that I had access to London in those years as a teenager because my mother would regularly visit her friends there with me and as soon as we got near London on the M4 I would be feverishly fondling the car stereo dial for pirates

I also took lots of blank tapes when inside London and ask for access to 1) a radio 2) a radio with a tape recorder.

This was exactly the most exciting way to access the most exciting music on the planet at that time. I'm a boy from the real provinces - Swansea for fuck's sake - but I have no truck with that sad provincial
mentality. London in that era was the most amazing musical capital in X number of ways.

CORP$EY said:

The ironic thing about London is its this huge cosmopolitan magnet for immigration and yet its inhabitants tend to be basically provincially minded

I can see why btw - since moving here only a few years ago I've basically forgotten the rest of the country exists

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you lot were cool with this when selling us out to community and religious leaders and business magnates.

sell off social housing. rile up antiblack sentiment. pray on internal racism and ethnic tensions.

make the middle class dream palatable to immigrants. insulate them from mixing. keep the unions and political organisations white. white is right!

why didn't asian and north african influences ever seriously filter into the nuum? there must be material explanation for this.

it's an idea of the coloured acceptable to brits. acceptable black british. Keep it christian.

Death to the british!

entirely predictable it ended up whitening out into deep tech.

im sad it died because i liked the idea of depersonalised house music in contrast to the able-ised bravado bodies of rap (not that i have a problem with that its just that i can't relate to it as much from disabled poc experience.)

but fuck it. i'm also glad cos i've never felt fully welcome in a rave without having to drink or get pingered up.

id be happy with music dying as capitalism destroys the planet. let it all go to hell. allow serious musos. no liberating potential of technology. same kind of alienation, isolation. no room for organising. shite. the dream isn't just an E dream now. even the dream of the fortified psyche is over now. such a shame. fruitless consumption. desire you can't even own anymore.

Not sure that I'm racist for the reason that I loved all of this music.

craner said:

Not sure that I'm racist for the reason that I loved all of this music.

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lol where'd i say that? am talking about the smug white m/c eulogising of crap and alienating conditions.

i love hardcore. love it to death. but to pretend it was truly multicultural is doing a disservice to the british experience for most of us.

garage maybe. maybe. but even then it was just a top 40 flavour.

thirdform said:

why didn't asian and north african influences ever seriously filter into the nuum? there must be material explanation for this.

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why didnt other west indian influences enter into it? soca? calypso?

Black and British has never been reducible to Jamaican but those other influences never entered he equation even though many of the artists had family from St. Lucia, Trinidad, Barbados, so on and so forth.

good question.

threads gone quiet lol

The hardcore continuum didn’t go quiet with the introduction of the internet! After Acid House became Hardcore it didn’t lose any of it’s what the fuckness. Hardcore exacerbated it. Jungle was a different side but still as free. Maybe as time has progressed some of the shock of the sound of electronic beats has diminished as we’ve become more used to them. You can probably pinpoint this to the point when indie guitar bands completely went off the radar and hip hop and EDM took over the mainstream completely. Grime is like the generation xenellial of the hardcore continuum in that is straddled both not being internet based and vice versa. Post Grime every new music genre has had the internet to support and spread it. Far more effective in terms of numbers than pirate radio. Now every white middle class person knows about Bass House, Drum n Bass etc instead of isolated London boroughs but that hasn’t had a negative effect. The idolising of driving into London and tuning in to the pirates is all well and good and I know this experience but it doesn’t compare to the same buzz now being available to anyone with an internet connection. It’s just taken a different form in terms of signal carrier. The physical scenes still exist in clubs and festivals. Record shops moved online and so did their clientele. The discussions that took place in those places now happen on forums etc. Today’s hardcore continuum is far more expansive.

Was it London as a magnet for immigration that I was smugly eulogising?

sadmanbarty said:

can you show us which tracks/sets you're talking about here? are you hearing innovation in those things? if so, can you explain what you're hearing?

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Bassline / Bass House wise I've put some stuff up on my blog (link in signature). I'll post some other bits and explain those when I get a moment later on