In defence of post dubstep

Slothrop

Slothrop

Tight but Polite
Corpsey said:
I wonder also if the tendency of higher education is to complicate things and on some level that feeds into how you make music (or any art)
Click to expand...
I'd guess that it's less about education and more about peer group - I mean, it's probably true of biochemistry students as well as philosophy of art students, and it's probably true of sixth formers as much as students.

Another factor might be the sort of influences you are taking in - e.g. middle class kids might be more likely to be exposed to classical music and so on
Click to expand...
I once heard an interesting comment from Robert Wyatt to the effect that everyone assumes that prog rock is all about looking down on basic rock and roll and despising it, but from his point of view he absolutely loved it but also felt that he couldn't just play that sort of stuff straight up himself because that would mean "pretending you've never heard Albert Ayler", which wasn't something that he felt he could do in good faith.
 
Corpsey

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
Depends what you're making doesn't it

Brian Eno is quite posh and also a genius

But could he make limb by limb by cutty ranks - and sing it as convincingly?
 
Corpsey

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
Actually Eno is a good one to bring up cos he uses those sort of flash card thingies in the studio to stop himself from doing certain things (incredibly well explained)

That's sort of being hyper aware to the point of recognisig your hyper awareness and having to write some sort of I Ching to stop yourself adding a harpsichord solo to a ragga jungle song
 
pattycakes_

pattycakes_

Can turn naughty
Haha sure, but man is he fucking tedious nowadays. There are definitely ways to hack it. Drinking for one. Approaching it like an actor would a part another.
 
droid

droid

Well-known member
As I referenced above, Rob Haigh is hyper intellectual and that didnt stop him making some of the biggest bangers in dance music history.
 
B

blissblogger

Well-known member
droid said:
As I referenced above, Rob Haigh is hyper intellectual and that didnt stop him making some of the biggest bangers in dance music history.
Click to expand...

an experimental probe towards an answer to this:

perhaps when a scene is really really strong, it can cope with a few middle class types? it can absorb, assimilate - bend them to its collective will.

historically there are actually quite a number of M/C creatives in rave / hardcore / jungle / UKG etc - and punters too obviously.

(in the piece i did earlier year on Rob Haigh I remark on the Hertfordshire connection with jungle - St Albans, Hatfield, Stevenage boys playing their part - Rob Playford isn't posh but he's also not exactly a street solja - Moving Shadow's publicist for many years, Lady Caroline was actually a Lady lady, had a title!)

You would run into all types on the dancefloor and in the chill out spaces... barristers who were off their nuts on pills all weekend

Yet the dominant values and vibe of rave/ jungle / etc were determined by its working class majority. and by black values.

But when you get a scene that is very largely composed of M/C, products of higher education, people whose day job might be in information technology or something like that... the vibe is going to be different.

it's to do with function and internal dynamics, energy flows and thresholds of dis-inhibition... how quickly things get released or ignite

The music doesn't serve the same purpose as it does for people working 9/5 in jobs that are unrewarding in both the financial and satisfaction senses

(as for bad boys, crime is hard work - even more need to let off steam at the weekend)

I got a sense of this viscerally when i went to a mnml house-techno thing in Berlin some years ago, everything puttering along at the same level of intensity, no feeling of a peak being surged towards, no sense of anything being vented through the music). no sense of a crowd identity. there were no rituals like rewinds or even hands in the air moments. it was diffuse on every level from the approach to mixing, to the internal composition of the tracks, to the energy levels in the crowd. lot of people standing around talking or drinking.
 
pattycakes_

pattycakes_

Can turn naughty
The vast majority of the scene in Berlin is pitiful. And it kind of mirrors the post dubstep thing in that the creators and consumers are aspiring to this high art aesthetic as excellently expressed by i-f and legowelt around 5:40 here: t

which just ends up with that flat lined vice/i-d/all black vibe where you walk away feeling totally empty, asking yourself if anyone truly had a good time. It's like clubbing by numbers. And that by numbers thing is my main take away when it comes to most things from dubstep onwards in the underground these days. Aside from a lack of actual dancability, there's no real subversion, the darkness is conservative and there's no sense of humor. These were all key elements in the shit that got us excited when we were young.

*lol at them dissing berghain even though they have a gig there a few weeks later :)
 
Last edited:
Benny Bunter

Benny Bunter

Well-known member
I spent a lot of time bashing this music at the time, so i'm gonna try & be positive and post two marcus nasty-certified uk funky bangers made by post dubstep bods


 
T

thirdform

pass the sick bucket
Corpsey said:
Yeah this is interesting

I wonder also if the tendency of higher education is to complicate things and on some level that feeds into how you make music (or any art)

Another factor might be the sort of influences you are taking in - e.g. middle class kids might be more likely to be exposed to classical music and so on

Wary of stereotyping here of course there are a million exceptions to such 'rules' but it's worth thinking about i suppose, especially as this 'goldsmiths students are incapable of genuine emotions' meme spreads like wildfire from luka's infernal centre 🔥
Click to expand...


Goldsmiths students are not incapable of emotion cos they're economically middle class, they're incapable of emotion because of todays narcissistic polite culture. too afraid to express anything that'll rock he boat. selfies and sex = politics.
 
T

thirdform

pass the sick bucket
the thing with the grime/minimal techno/indie thing is like:

There's nothing more middle class than being into grime and trap these days. maybe 15-20 years ago that idea of having to fake it/weird it out was true but not so much today. dance music as the psychedelia of machines is dead. In fact irony of ironies Alvin Toffler's dystopia is reality. Capital now gives an endless extension into the future but never satisfies the craving. 1) because the future is now and 2) we are being automatised whilst the limits of capitals valorisation will probably end up destroying humanity. any hope for transhumans to get us out of this mess would even more despotic than what we have. same with fully automated luxury communism. capital could easily distribute free goods after deducting a manditory amount of coercive labour. We're much more fucked than people think. It's not coincidental that scenes with working class values hardly exist anymore. workers don't want to be workers anymore. being a worker is the problem, in fact.
 
C

CrowleyHead

Well-known member
thirdform said:
There's nothing more middle class than being into grime and trap these days.
Click to expand...

Grime has occupied the browbeating insistent dad role of Jungle "WE DID ALL THIS FOR YOU" despite the fact that the musical cultures afterwards such as Road Rap have nothing to do with Grime or the "nuum" beyond their weird parasitism of Road Rap for cultural signifiers. Grime has eventually fragmented itself into an artificial street culture (the way a lot of US rap has similarly done so) where there's a lot of self-consciousness posture and pose that transcends class limitations. You can be incredibly working class or even lower class and still have music pierced with piecemeal references of the culture of Nerdisms that are usually seem as a dumb affluence (AJ Tracey's precious hyper oscillations of "My shank looks like the sword Future Trunks used to cut apart Freiza in the Android Saga... BUT I'M REALLY IN THE TRAP DOE!!!!" demonstrate that frantic insecurity).

You also look at the elders of Grime like Skepta, and Wiley... They know Grime itself has no real culture because it was a brief sort of negotiation between diff genres like garage, jungle, rap, dancehall etc. and so they become ungainly culture vultures (themselves recognized and incorporated by the arch culture vulture Drakk recently) desperately insisting that they're old but still young enough. Look at Skepta desperately trying to hang w/ Playboi Carti who is at least a decade and change his junior and make his sort of strange desperation for youth and clout seem normal. It's commonplace, but it's certainly not dignified.

This is related to the post-dubstep phenomenon because Grime is so desperate for acceptance for all the "Middle Finger of Rave" talk that it will accept and incorporate any bastardization. Grindie. The Not Quite IDMification of them (which starts really with the dubstep crowd brainwashing people into thinking Joker was a dubstep artist). This new modern attempt to turn them into the Actual UK Rap Culture (a resignation that the previous generations of UK Hip-Hop hadn't quite shaken the spectre of the US psychologically along with another push against the 'dangers' of Road Rap).

Grime as a culture is spiritually weak and it makes perfect sense that it became this sort of host for the Goldsmiths types. Look at what the Instrumental Grime Revival was in so many paths. For all the revived legends and the newfound talents you had 19 year old students calling themselves "Air Max 97". And they were so overtly self-referential and self-celebratory of the history of grime as preserved by the access of Youtube. Strange stuff.
 
T

thirdform

pass the sick bucket
i guess the question to ask is at what point do splits and differentiations actually dumb the music down into a bread and water regime.

ive always thought about what would have happened if the jungle/happy/techno split happened later, like say 95 or 96. would have things escalated in the same way? would we have had jump up jungle during mid 95? that would have beenhard to imagine tbh.
 
T

thirdform

pass the sick bucket
I guess for me the thing that puts me getting back into contemporary uk dance music is not that people don't shake a leg or brockout *(although that is a big part of it.) it's just an endless cycle of a hyped non-event, this forced feeling that you have to feel pleasure that there is something wrong with you if you are critical.

I said this for years this idea of it being like an authoritarian spectacle that you are imprisoned in but everyone cussed me out. so i gave up. which is sad because the scene was one of the few social interactions that i had. but what can you do hey.
 
pattycakes_

pattycakes_

Can turn naughty
@thirdform, The concept of haters allowed so much shit to fly that the bar eventually broke off and there is no such thing as too low anymore. Dignity doesn't even come into it. This doesn't stop at music. What you're describing is much bigger than that. Reality is gaslighting us. Culture is dead. We're being left behind. And no-one gives a fuck because the young are totally fine with it as it is and they're going to happily go along with everything they're fed. And they're going to keep eating the bread and going to the circuses because they don't know (or want to know) any better. Pavlov won.

Partly inspired by Luka on here I've been jotting down ideas for shit to write about. One of the first points was how reality is becoming less and less convincing. Totalitarian spectacle nails it. The scariest part for me is how well it's defended by the hive minded masses. Anything said contrary to the consensus flow needs to be destroyed.
 
Last edited:
luka

luka

Well-known member
i agree, we're being gaslighted.

theyve worked out that the spectacle can be untethered from reality completely.

so that the fact of, say, climate change, is unacknowledged so that contingency plans can be made in private and concrete actions made in secret. so that the debate about appropriate measures doesn't involve the general public because the general public, at this point, has no future.

trump is a psy-op not a president. turn-key fascism is in place and the walls keep closing in.
america is trying to finish what manson started and ignite helter skelter. african americans are being murdered with impunity and muslims are demonised.

google and by extension the american power-structure has kompromat on the entire world.

the infrastructure for cashless societies is already here.

pop music openly proclaims allegiance to the luciferian pseudo-religion and the eye atop the pyramid. youth culture is a corporate product.

top down culture is not culture, it's propaganda. as mcluhan learned from lewis art is a closed and controlled environment. a teaching machine. standardise input to standardise output.

and dance music has gone shit.
 
firefinga

firefinga

Well-known member
pattycakes_ said:
One of the first points was how reality is becoming less and less convincing. Totalitarian spectacle nails it. The scariest part for me is how well it's defended by the hive minded masses. Anything said contrary to the consensus flow needs to be destroyed.
Click to expand...

I blame social media for this. The swarm intelligence of the early to mid 2000s have became the total opposite in the 2010s - swarm idiocy - when "discourse" is done via emojis you get a definite Spenglerian moment.
 
luka

luka

Well-known member
CrowleyHead said:
Grime has occupied the browbeating insistent dad role of Jungle "WE DID ALL THIS FOR YOU" despite the fact that the musical cultures afterwards such as Road Rap have nothing to do with Grime or the "nuum" beyond their weird parasitism of Road Rap for cultural signifiers. Grime has eventually fragmented itself into an artificial street culture (the way a lot of US rap has similarly done so) where there's a lot of self-consciousness posture and pose that transcends class limitations. You can be incredibly working class or even lower class and still have music pierced with piecemeal references of the culture of Nerdisms that are usually seem as a dumb affluence (AJ Tracey's precious hyper oscillations of "My shank looks like the sword Future Trunks used to cut apart Freiza in the Android Saga... BUT I'M REALLY IN THE TRAP DOE!!!!" demonstrate that frantic insecurity).

You also look at the elders of Grime like Skepta, and Wiley... They know Grime itself has no real culture because it was a brief sort of negotiation between diff genres like garage, jungle, rap, dancehall etc. and so they become ungainly culture vultures (themselves recognized and incorporated by the arch culture vulture Drakk recently) desperately insisting that they're old but still young enough. Look at Skepta desperately trying to hang w/ Playboi Carti who is at least a decade and change his junior and make his sort of strange desperation for youth and clout seem normal. It's commonplace, but it's certainly not dignified.

This is related to the post-dubstep phenomenon because Grime is so desperate for acceptance for all the "Middle Finger of Rave" talk that it will accept and incorporate any bastardization. Grindie. The Not Quite IDMification of them (which starts really with the dubstep crowd brainwashing people into thinking Joker was a dubstep artist). This new modern attempt to turn them into the Actual UK Rap Culture (a resignation that the previous generations of UK Hip-Hop hadn't quite shaken the spectre of the US psychologically along with another push against the 'dangers' of Road Rap).

Grime as a culture is spiritually weak and it makes perfect sense that it became this sort of host for the Goldsmiths types. Look at what the Instrumental Grime Revival was in so many paths. For all the revived legends and the newfound talents you had 19 year old students calling themselves "Air Max 97". And they were so overtly self-referential and self-celebratory of the history of grime as preserved by the access of Youtube. Strange stuff.
Click to expand...

this is not untrue but it also raises the question of who is speaking for and representing the audience jungle/garage and grime spoke for and represented? is it a sign that that audience no longer exists? is too fractured essentially. that large young, multi-ethnic, predominantly working-class urban audience. or that it exists but it's lifestyle patterns have changed. are no longer tied to a rhythm of 5 days work and weekend release (due to shift work and unemployment?).

drill, regardless of it's musical merits or deficiencies, doesn't and can't because it is too centered on violent criminality and a lifestyle lived only by a tiny, tiny minority.

the landscape has changed but i'm too far removed from it to make sense of it. you'd have to be born in the '90s at the earliest to really talk with any authority.

the centre cannot hold?
 
Last edited:
You must log in or register to reply here.
Top