Hardcore Continuum Autopsy

luka

luka

Well-known member
i dont know a thing about afrobeats. way out of my field. too old, too not african.
i cant overstate how much the landscape has shifted since i was young.
anything after 2004ish and I'm done as a first hand source really and truly.
trilliam and barty grew up in a different and vastly more cosmopolitan London.
Turks, Viets, Somalis, Eritreans, Gambians, Poles... when i grew up you were black,
white or asian pretty much and all three groups were roughly balanced in terms of
numbers in Newham.
 
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sadmanbarty

Well-known member
CrowleyHead said:
There were a lot of baggages for black people in the US to fully embrace House/Techno as their personal culture, based on maybe class lines? Does that exist in afrobeats?
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the punters for afrobeats are more middle-class than drill. afrobeats was/is far more of an explicit cultural signifier than drill. it's functional in that sense; to a lot of people it's consciously a source of ethnic pride or at least a deliberate expression of ethnic identity, drill's a lot more organic than that.. also the music and the listeners are aspirational where drill is nihilistic and defeatist.
 
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CrowleyHead

Well-known member
I meant more of the people kind of exporting the music to the scene like... If you go to Ghana, is there a kind of perception of a person for listening to artists who have crossed over to the UK in any way? Like does Wizkid get you the :rolleyes:, I wouldn't know obv.
 
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thirdform

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"I've written about this before but it's worth re-stating: what people think of "dubstep" right now is merely what became the most dominant of the many strains and style of music played at FWD."

Yeah well that's cultural nomadism in it. it's a journalistic consensus but it doesn't correspond to EG Spooky on Mode or Slimzee's new darkside sets or even Trends and Grandmixxer. Like you can jst say it's regurgitating past trends but that's a different debate. not to mention antisocial/deep medi/sicaria sound crews and on and on.
 
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thirdform

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trilliam said:
hardcore continuum never dies, it's black music from ends, you lot didnt get it with deep tech either, ima type some shit when i get back but for now co-sign luka, lol @ at the drill posts
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Absolute fucking tosh, the nuum started in sheffield, the merger of reggae with house music. i say that as a proud londoner. this is not getting into all the midlands and Bristolian jungle, manchester grime and bassline/bass house.

And actually deep tech connects back to Sheffield. I hate that adage of things going round in circles but in this case its true. I just prefer the cavernous 3d design of Rob Gordon's engineered records though.

But go on, if we didn't get it with deep tech, ever so enlightened home counties man trying to pretend he's from ends, what happened to deep tech after 2014? It became identical to bait euro tech house.

Really the continuum as ontology was dead by 2007 anyway. Not that that is a bad thing just the way it is. now you have derivations and recombinations. whether that is good or bad is another debate.
As for drill, it kind of doesn't really occupy the same space because it is not premised on that initial merger. there are echoes of grime and jungle but those are an influence, not a driving force.
 
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thirdform

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this is nuum. most of our people were still in hip hop or ragga. so-called 'acid house' was more properly balearic house for white leather trousers boys. hype plays quite a few of these records on old fantasy FM tapes.

 
luka

luka

Well-known member
It's proto nuum in the way you could label any number of authors proto modernist in as much as they anticipate one or more aspect of modernism proper. Nuum beginning with the breakbeat in any meaningful sense.
 
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thirdform

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well if the nuum started with breakbeats then how does deep tech even fit into the nuum? Let's take drum breaks out of the equation it doesn't even have broken beats. It's a steady thump thump that is even less dubbed out than bleep and bass, which actually anticipated jungle (not hardcore) in many respects. I don't have the terminology to describe it but the basslines in hardcore are very weedy but in jungle they do the same half time boom thing you get in bleep.
 
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thirdform

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hardcore is still quite belgian (aka. white) with those huge stadium synth stabs. bleep could be called skank house, if i wanted to be a pretentious dickhead. but you get my point.
 
luka

luka

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People draw the brackets in where they want them don't they. I end it at 2 step. I think grime starts a new thing though the continuity is obvious and undeniable.
 
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thirdform

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i mean if you just want to make the nuum the blimmin obvious hardcore>jungle>garage then ok yeah but u don't need a theory for that. if we wanna be more analytical we have to look at points of rupture and contestation. if we're talking about hardcore in terms of black music then the early bleep and suad stuff was blacker than 92 piano.

Not that i think that heuristic is useful its ofc black music but restricting it just to the ends gets into the issue re when it actually becomes too white. to be fair some genres like techstep make that quite easy by looking at crowd dynamics but I'd still call it fundamentally black music. adrian sherwood et al were still making black music.
 
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thirdform

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luka said:
People draw the brackets in where they want them don't they. I end it at 2 step. I think grime starts a new thing though the continuity is obvious and undeniable.
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I tend to end it at funky and grime and dubstep going their separate ways. funky mostly expunged all the tension and since then that tension has expressed itself mostly in puristic ways. in the sense that what i like is volts of electricity but most contemporary developments outside of rave continuum do not have that. If you listen to drill, yes, it's new and shiney, but only in the sense of buying something new you've caved into. it's not a battered old thing you treasure with the memories. in that sense my musical listening is a kind of historical enquiry.
probably not expressing myself very well sorry.
 
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luka

luka

Well-known member
I think I'm following you although I've always been uncertain as to what heuristic means in this context. Never bothered looking it up.

The edges are where any genre gets contested. Look at our early grime threads with logan sama trying to police what is grime and what is lady sovereign for instance.
 
luka

luka

Well-known member
Part of the reason I chose to start with breakbeats is its when I was around 10 and tuning into the pirates and taking an active interest. The rest is retrospective for me. It's always partly personal.
 
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CrowleyHead

Well-known member
There's also an element of how heavily one defines the amount of US Influence isn't there? Not to sound like the barbaric stars and stripes waving lunatic or whatever but you can contest as to how much of these nuum moments are American? Obviously house and techno are imports, but you have individual perspectives such as the Woebot one from a few years ago where he argues that the more close to hip-hop Jungle is the better it is as opposed to Ragga? How much of an influence does say, Southern Rap hold on Grime like it reads in Dizzee's obsessions with Three Six Mafia and UGK or whatever? Likewise with drill, it's become its own sort of thing here in the UK (as much as certain afficianados might deny) but the origins are v. clearly based out of the US.

In the meantime is there a similar sort of real "European" influence beyond say... the occasional influence of Belgian Techno or what third is gesticulating to?

evel_knievel.jpg


Self-Reflexive jokes aside here
 
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thirdform

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Well no there isn't but Europe does not really have its own musical hegemony after the industrial continuum folded into itself does it. It's either metal or southern rap for youngsters these days isn't it. like yer average person is not gonna be into front242.
 
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thirdform

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i mean thinking about it i get what trilliam is saying now but really then luke's right it stops at 2step and early grime really. if we just want to make it an east london thing. otherwise we just stretch the concept to so much...

Oh, Matthew was right to have reservations about the term wasn't he? end of thread for me really.
 
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