Hiya all,
I received an e-mail from a guy recently named Matt recommending I checked out the site due to the interest in our music from the perspective of music lovers in general, rather than hardcore dyed-in-the-wool fans.
This is an interesting debate you have going, and something I could quite easily write a dissertation in haha Although I've just got back from Bashy@Fabric and certainly don't have the energy. I'm only online because I'm burning off 100 cds manually. :|
There's various angles you can approach the "What Is UKG?" question from. The first one is do you consider "Garage" and "UK Garage" to be the same genre. If you do then you would have to back track all the way back to Larry and Paradise Garage's music policy. If you don't then you only have to start from the origins of the scene in London.
I was of the opinion that when the name "Garage" was used for a tune, I forgot the letters "UK". I held this opinion for many years. It meant I could open myself to playing a set with the original ethos of Larry Levan's selection at the place where Garage was born. Play whatever the hell evokes a reaction for you as a dj or music listener. Where a gay black man can play Funk, Disco and Soft Rock to a multi-racial, multi-sexual crowd, then pretty much anything goes. This was my easy explaination for the confusing opposing styles of music that were coming out of the UK Garage scene from the start of the Speed Garage era in 1996. It was merely people drawing on whatever sounds they felt like and anything goes. From the heavily House influenced sounds of Todd Edwards and Grant Nelson, to the RnB 2 Step beat sped up to 130bpm, to the sub bass lines used experimentally by Tim Deluxe and Armand Van Helden in order to fuse House and Jungle into one music form. In the raves though, it was always the tunes with the biggest bass that got the reactions.
While "Dem 2's Step To Heaven" mix of Cloud 9 "Don't You Want Me?" or Tin Moore are often mentioned as the first ever 2 step tunes, it is interesting to note a tune called "endorphins" by Sky Cap which came out at the same sort of time. Instead of adopting a sped up RnB style, this early 2 step track uses some very harsh sounds and a thundering sub bass behind it. Very reminiscent of some of the current sounds used in "Grime" and Dubstep/Fwd.
Over the past few years of being well into the crew scene I have taken on an entirely new perspective. As a white kid living in Essex I spent my early and mid teens mainly listening to the recently deceased Kurt Cobain with fond memories, along with Faith No More, Pearl Jam, The Pixies, Soundgarden and Stone Temple Pilots. Most of the young black guys who are the driving force behind the new "grimey" sound spend their teens listening to their parents old soul and reggae collection, whilst raving to Jungle.
In around 1997 Jungle began to change into something different and for whatever reason, UK Garage with it's sub bass driven 2 step and 4/4 beats became the in sound. Back then the music was purely Dance orientated. Strict bpm ranges, thriving rave scene and strong underground sales as djing was the skill most young men wanted to master. Over the years as more and more inner city kids, who had grown up listening to Bounty Killer, Beenie Man, Super Cat and Capleton as well as Jay Z, Biggie, Tupac, Big Pun, DMX alongside Bassman, Eksman, Stevie Hyper D and Skibbadee, began to migrate over into the UK Garage scene so did the focus move away from djing, to the far cheaper hobby of mcing. Any mc who was big in Garage and is over the age of 20 was a drum and bass mc in their youth. You can name anyone. B Live, Wiley, Godsgift, Riko, Viper, Neat... the list goes on. And while originally the format was for simple hosting, some cheesey lines and a few tongue twisters... much like Jungle mcing, the slower tempo meant that more content could be fitted in. Much like how the under 20's mc's of today tend to move from Garage down the bpm ladder into hip hop tempo beats in order to make themselves "artists" as they feel the slower the tempo, the more pignant and meaningful their rhymes. The fact that Jay Z and Ludacris have been rapping on 130bpm beats for donkey's years not-withstanding.
Now the influence of the mc doesn't have any direct influence on the sound and the actual output of producers. But indirectly it did.
When So Solid formed as a crew from various components of Delight FM and Supreme FM, their level of mcing was far above that of the traditional host mcs, and they wanted to showcase this work they were evidently putting in. So slowly but surely, instead of vocal dub mixes with short vocal hooks in 8 bar bursts followed with breakdowns and drops of instrumental sections, fully instrumental bass driven beats became the standard for their sets. So Solid even began forming their own production camp to engineer beats exclusively for them to ride on dubplate and go on to release. The equipment available to them at the time pre-dates even the standard cracked fruity loops/VST Plug Ins/Cracked Soundforge combination favoured by every 16 year old bedroom garage producer nowadays. Music Generator on the Playstation was used to make Dilemma and Oh No so the legend goes. The Masterstepz track "Melody" was credited as the inspiration for Dilemma. Melody of course sampling the break from Busta Rhymes - Put Your Hands Where My Eyes Can See and coupled with a speaker destroying sub bass.
So there you had the start of the "grime" scene. Following So Solid, SPP and Ladies Hit Squad joined together (already childhood friends) to form Pay As You Go Cartel. Again they had their own production team, and a gentleman named Wiley produced a track called Know We in 2000. Taking the basic formula of So Solid and expanding on it further they also, like So Solid, ended up being signed, but they split up before an album could be released. Had that album came out and done well, tracks like Eskimo and Creeper might have never been made, as their album was very much song driven with a strong yet skippy 2 step sound to it. Again taking the old school garage sound and infusing it with even more hip hop, bashment and jungle sounds and styles, the music carried on evolving.
One of the most famous producers involved in bringing in the Bashment sound and vibe to the garage scene was Sticky. Working with vocalists producing songs over stripped down bass driven tracks with stiff minimal beats, his sound again took the music further down the path towards the sound we have today. The huge success of Booo, which could easily be passed off as a straight up UK Ragga record, saw a great number of immitations as well as bringing the bashment style that was infused into the subconscious of most of the mainly young black audience to the forefront of the UK Garage sound.
At the same time Wookie had been making huge tracks for a few years. While his tunes were always heavily bass driven and with mad beats, he managed to keep his production levels high and his tracks tremendously intricate. Whether they were vocals or instrumentals, they always got a good reaction. From Scrappy to Little Man remix tp Far East, Wookie was smashing the clubs and pirates. His tracks, along with Sticky's successfully gained huge exposure in the club scene, as well as in the burgeoning pirate radio crew scene.
Pirate Radio played a massive part in the transformation of this music from a straight up Dance music to a now uncategorizable genre. While tremendously popular with the small but growing crowd of MC fans, most crews had to rely on self promoted small scale events to get play outs. Large events were still focussed on the role of the Host mc with the limelight falling on the dj. Vocalists may well do a PA, but Artists as we know it were usually unseen on the live scene. When Craig David got to number 2 with Rewind and Neutrino got a number 1 with Bound For Da Reload, it opened the eyes of many people that they could take on a role above that of simply the mc who headlines raves. They could be album selling artists.
As soon as people like Craig David, So Solid, Pay As You Go and Lady Dynamite moved on into the world of mainstream major label album releases, the music changed forever. Not in any noticeable way, but just in the minds of the underground artists. The commercial house formula of superstar djs and producers making one off hits with vocalists who are often never heard of again had been in place in the garage scene for many years, but the successes of artists to have emerged from our scene opened people's eyes as to the potential and to their own importance.
The focus shifted away from the producer slightly and was fully onto the MC. It was this era which saw Wiley and Dizzee reach a level of popularity which had been unseen before on the underground scene. One should note that while both are fantastic live performers and recording artists, both too are ingenious producers. For some reason unknown to myself, we saw a total death in "vocal" songs, and a slew of fully MC based tracks coming out. Had artists like Wiley utilised singers alongside their own mic skills and productions at the time of eskimo and creeper I think this music would be at a level of mainstream international recognition by now.
However I've waffled long enough. I could talk about how producers like El B, Noodles, Jay Da Flex, Wookie and Zed Bias followed by Oris Jay and DnD took a simple sound and extrapolated it into an entire scene existing almost on it's own. But that probably deserves more space than a paragraph and someone more knowledgeable than myself to go through it's history.
And the sun's coming up and I have only managed to get 22 cds burnt as i keep forgetting to swap the burnt ones with the fresh blanks.
So I'll leave you with that. Let the debating continue!
