Hardcore Continuum Autopsy

Grime is interesting as a midway point. You haven't had the total regression to song form that acts as such a brake to evolution in drill. The instrumentals are allowed an independent existence and are the primary motor for the form's development. But the conservative aspects of the turn to rap are already there.

America is a difficult one cos within that field you can locate several very different attractors exerting a pull and different records veer closer to one or the other while whole genres are energised by being tensions held in unstable equilibrium between a multitude of these attractors (plus Europe, plus Jamaica) you have to be careful not to oversimplify or fall into cheerleading for one or another.

Matthews jungle=tekno with no reggae influence whatsoever adheres to Bartys insistence that only provocation can get people talking but obviously overdoes it a bit. You need a touch of subtlety! Easy does it.

luka said:

Grime is interesting as a midway point. You haven't had the total regression to song form that acts as such a brake to evolution in drill. The instrumentals are allowed an independent existence and are the primary motor for the form's development. But the conservative aspects of the turn to rap are already there.

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This is it, isn't it? Grime is kind of a weird Neurtral Zone of disparate energies (dancehall, rap, house, jungle, etc.) where there's forced hybridity emerging.

Also w/ the US stuff I always think of it as sort of like... The UK is just naturally smaller than the US and therefore the energy circulates the musical tropes in a diff. way. So like, in the US by the time jungle and hardcore blending with rap happens, NYC is on more polished Pete Rock type beats but the rest of the US (because the information is literally traveling and developing over much greater distance and at a slower rate) is still bass beats. Likewise because rap was occupying the same space as dance music and these european influences because of the intensity of cycling in such a geographically smaller area, there was less opportunity not to occupy the same spaces.

I'm saying this with a certain accreditation to the US (though not to ignore Jamaica as you pointed out) but a recognition that the intensity of the UK is what leads to the fracturing. So like, even backing away from rap, you look at how much more advanced UK Garage is compared to the US variants (hell even in the case of Todd Edwards) and you go back to that intensity of cycling that the US cannot function in the same way.

To round it out, that's why the US cannot make anything that functions the way grime did, because there's so much space to ostracize and seperate. The brief moments of dance music and rap existing in parallel were dispelled rather quickly and if anything had to be forced or contained into localized niche realms, thereby unable to properly thrive as a widespread genre dialog.

With grime you still have vinyl, you have record shops, you have pirate radio, you have raves, you have the dj-mc relationship still active, you have instrumentals as records in their own right, all of that still active- but you also have wretched attempts to impose song form, you have (post puff daddy and jay z) personal ambitions of stardom, you also have a huge reduction in audience size and geographic reach, a more explicit American influence and other indicators of a new conservatism running counter to the radicalism of the early music.

sadmanbarty said:

luke's restrictionist view of what counts as nuum-proper is (presumably subconsciously) defined by a couple of things. the first is demographics; the grime lot were a new generation in a way the garage lot weren't. they were younger and more african . the second is the sound world that the 90's stuff luka likes occupied. as he said it all had acoustic drums sounds, then there's ragga vocals, certain synth pads, certain bass timbres that aren't there by the time it gets to grime.

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It's not subconscious I've talked about this a lot. Who else was talking about Africa in relation to grime in 2003? I've said on here before that I'm more and more inclined to view that continuum, which stops with garage and has grime as a midway point to the next era, a fade out and fade in, as, to a large degree, a conversation between cockneys and west indians. That's a simplification obviously and replace cockneys with white working and lower middle class if you want to make Stevenage and Bristol and Sheffield feel included. That conversation is no longer the motor of music in this country. Again grime is a midway point having room for Danny Weeds and Discardas and obviously Slimzee plus on an infrastructure level, the crews behind rinse fm and heat fm for example.

sadmanbarty said:

what it really comes down to is reynolds picked the wrong terminology; it's not a 'continuum', it's a shockwave.

the hardcore continuum was not a recurring phenomenon but rather a single event that had resonance for a couple of decades after it happened. like any resonance it's intensity diminished the further away it got from the initial impact. it had half-lives.

The 'impact' was the musical innovations of the late 80's (sleng teng/punnani, golden age rap and house/techno) hitting the uk.

so grime is still in a sense a response to those things but in a far less intense form; it's after a few half-lives.

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This is the best way of putting it. Reassuring to know you haven't lost it.

I guess so. In a self-conscious and therefore mannered way. There's nothing more cringey than reggae vocal samples in dubstep. Makes you want to shrivel up and die.

sadmanbarty said:

what it really comes down to is reynolds picked the wrong terminology; it's not a 'continuum', it's a shockwave.

the hardcore continuum was not a recurring phenomenon but rather a single event that had resonance for a couple of decades after it happened. like any resonance it's intensity diminished the further away it got from the initial impact. it had half-lives.

The 'impact' was the musical innovations of the late 80's (sleng teng/punnani, golden age rap and house/techno) hitting the uk.

so grime is still in a sense a response to those things but in a far less intense form; it's after a few half-lives.

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I like the idea of it being a shockwave but I still think there is a continuum stretching from its inception to now.

Grime marks a seismic change being as it was the first continuum genre to embrace the internet but, for me, ultimately it was the take up of digitalism which is the true meaning behind the continuum. The hardcore (or acid house) continuum is the beginning of a long sonic marker of humanity's traversal into the digital epoch. Not understood fully while it was happening but as time progresses becoming more and more clear. Hence, perhaps the lessening of unbridled creativity and innovation.

Now we are at a point where the innovation has slowed right down but it is still there. The current preoccupation seems to be to infiltrate and maybe take over the existing trad house scene which you are seeing with deep tech and tech house. You still have drum and bass and bassline holding court at the big festivals and what not but they are just rehashes of the best of what went before. In bassline you are seeing innovative producers like Flava D making tunes that can played at both a house and bassline tempo. Flava D is also making drum and bass now and perhaps one further option is combining all the digital dance musics into one genre at some point?

Shockwave theory makes sense, but surely it was *also* a continuum rooted in pirate radio - both things can be true, two structural principles operating both in combination and in conflict with each other. The continuum would not necessarily have ended without the shockwave of new technology, and the obsolescence of pirate radio as a creator and sustainer of subcultural artistic and listening communities. Seems way too much of a coincidence. And grime would never have had a second life without the feedback loop of internet age nostalgia.

The other thing about the shockwave theory is that the shock was at least partly about mixing stuff up and creating entropy. Which is why the history of the continuum is full of branches that separate out and largely settle down into something much more predictable.

Also - obviously the London / pirate continuum existed before hardcore - do we think deep tech (say) is something that might have evolved directly from the 80s warehouse party / Kiss FM type scene if hardcore had never happened? Is it basically an example of reversion to the mean?

sadmanbarty said:

what it really comes down to is reynolds picked the wrong terminology; it's not a 'continuum', it's a shockwave.

the hardcore continuum was not a recurring phenomenon but rather a single event that had resonance for a couple of decades after it happened. like any resonance it's intensity diminished the further away it got from the initial impact. it had half-lives.
.

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ah but you see you are making this cardinal error that so many make which is to talk about it in entirely sonic terms - as a genre, rather than a scene or subculture

it's both

the continuum-ness is there in the sonic make-up, but gets less pronounced over time as other influences from external genres filter in

but the continuity is about much more than merely music - it's the infrastructure of pirate labels, particular record shops, dubplate cutting places, sometimes promoters or booking agencies -- it's also rituals (rewind, the role of the MC)

it's a continuity of personnel - certain DJs and MCs and producers who keep changing with each phase-shift - but also the population of people who are on the journey - some drop out, new recruits come in, but surprisingly large number of people carry on as fans of successive stages of this thing

it's also a continuity of geography - certain cities, certain parts of cities

as with any cultural formation, the start point is blurry (when does rock'n'roll start? in one sense, with Elvis and Bill Haley... in another sense with Big Mama Thornton 'Hound Dog' several years earlier - but some would trace it to the end of 1940s) and the end point is unclear, the formation starts to crumble slowly

there's definitely something proto-nuum about the bleep moment, and there are nuum-characteristics persisting in various musics right up to the present - half lives and quarter lives

and then there are musics being made now that are meta-nuum: commentaries on what is now history (a lot of post-dubstep will reactivate certain elements of jungle or whatever)

i would compare the post-dubstep producers to figures like Ry Cooder or The Band - eclectic pasticheurs who were making music that was a commentary or tribute to r'n'r (and adjacent musics) from relatively recent history - a scholarly or educated revision of music that in its own time was juvenile trash, beneath serious consideration

and then the people doing replica jungle or ardkore-retro tracks are equivalent to rockabilly revivalists like the Polecats or Stray Cats

it probably makes more sense to talk about a prime of the nuum - the shockwave and then the almost as strong secondary waves of energy

each person would necessarily have their own sense of when it became past its prime

if i was thinking about it structurally as opposed to in terms of my own taste, i would think there's a point where the internet becomes really enmeshed with how this music circulates and finds an audience, and the pirates start to fade in terms of their role as drivers of the whole thing - that seems like a crucial shift, pointing to irreversible ending of something

but i can remember a time when grime for instance had very little presence on the web at all, that seemed to go on quite deep into the 2000s. i was still relying on the kindness of such as Luka in terms of tapes mailed across the Atlantic to me in NYC.

snatch the pebble from my hand, grasshopper.