Reynolds hardcore continuum event
- Thread starter heva
- Start date
jambo
slip inside my schlafsack
Listening to the radio a bit last weekend, not sure what station, I did feel that it was clear that UK funky is indeed a part of the same hardcore lineage. What does it mean? I don't know, there's a certain spirit there in the music? Hardcore will never die, it just mutates.
maybe the ?! bit at the end signifies he (reynolds) is joking, but this is one of the stupider things anyone's ever written:
"isn't an album largely based around dancehall really kinda early Noughties?!"
john eden
male pale and stale
STN
sou'wester
I don't know. Isn't he just referring to self-concious shoehorning of dancehall into your other productions? I'm not saying people shouldn't do it, but 'a mixture of X, Y, Z and dancehall' was par for the course back then, like Baile Funk a couple years ago.
subvert47
I don't fight, I run away
no great revelation, no
it's just a proposed link or progression between various genres, identified retrospectively
personally I think it's meaningless bollocks
i'm glad you were annoyed too john! let's send him a petition signed "Annoyed, N16". i think he'd be happy if someone made a donk album.
maybe - self consciously shoehorning anything into your productions cos it's trendy is definitely lame. i'm not a massive fan of The Bug but i wouldn't say that's what he does (self conscious shoehorning i mean). if anything, his shift to dubstep in the last few years seems more criticisable (not that i'm criticising it) than his dancehall style.
maybe - self consciously shoehorning anything into your productions cos it's trendy is definitely lame. i'm not a massive fan of The Bug but i wouldn't say that's what he does (self conscious shoehorning i mean). if anything, his shift to dubstep in the last few years seems more criticisable (not that i'm criticising it) than his dancehall style.
My suspicions confirmed, then.
bassnation
the abyss
one mans shoehorn is anothers exquisite fusion though, gabriel. i don't really feel the bugs dancehall stuff at all really, apart from that nutty track he did with wayne lonesome and the odd track on the new lp. i know he comes from an industrial background, but its just too much fucking white noise involved for me. i liked techno animal though.
indeed. i'm not saying it's exquisite fusion either, i find a lot of it too abrasive as well, but he's clearly not making dancehall-style stuff cos it's trendy or whatever, he obviously loves it, and reynolds's comment just seemed a bit snide.
totally off topic now, unless industrial->dancehall is another hardcore continuum lol
john eden
male pale and stale
well Paul Meme's "music for menstrual males" might fit into that actually:
industrial -> dub and shaka -> acid house happened to a few people
also there were a few industrial acts who ended up doing dance music
My issue with Reynolds comment is that he just seems stuck on what was relevant to him at a particular time - i.e. dancehall is relevant as a precursor to jungle in the 90s maybe? It's the same blinkered attitude which allows him to write off grime after 2003.
That's a big problem with the continuum and its adherents, the stress on new eruptions replacing the "old" ones.
If someone likes or doesn't like London Zoo then that's fair enough, obviously!
Slothrop
Tight but Polite
I think I've asked this before, but what was where the nuum is now before hardcore? What was on east london pirate radio in 1987, say?
It seems like now we've got to grime / dubstep giving way to bassline / funky in terms of whatever it is qualifies something to be part of the nuum, we've more or less reverted to some sort of underlying East London working class dance music thing that's pretty much free from the aftershocks of hardcore and E and orbital raves. Like the natural state of the system is some sort of cheesy <-> dark oscillation and always has been, but hardcore represented some sort of peturbation of the system that gradually dispersed and reverted to the original pattern...
It seems like now we've got to grime / dubstep giving way to bassline / funky in terms of whatever it is qualifies something to be part of the nuum, we've more or less reverted to some sort of underlying East London working class dance music thing that's pretty much free from the aftershocks of hardcore and E and orbital raves. Like the natural state of the system is some sort of cheesy <-> dark oscillation and always has been, but hardcore represented some sort of peturbation of the system that gradually dispersed and reverted to the original pattern...
padraig (u.s.)
a monkey that will go ape
On-U Sound yeah? Not dancehall, but still. Plus Ital Rockers/Iration Steppas, Renegade Soundwave, Jah Shaka as mentioned, and so on.
Also, aren't people taking Reynolds a little too seriously? I mean, flip comments on a blog post. I dunno, but I suspect he's fully aware of how potentially absurd some of the things are that he says, donk and all that. Yeah, he's kind of lost the plot the last couple yrs. Hey, it happens. Christgau, The Source, they all lose it sooner or later. It's the nature of music journalism innit.
I guess I'll always have a soft spot for him cause we don't really have a SR/Eshun/Toop type tradition in the States of intellectual types who can inject a ton of critical theory and still write in a compelling fashion. As far as the nuum theory, is there even a point to rehashing its validity and/or (continuing) relevance? It seems like it was probably a useful tool at a time when the music it covered wasn't taken very seriously by critics. Beyond that, whatever. I do think it makes a good deal more sense if you locate it geographically/culturally as a "underground London musics continuum" rather than trying to find signifiers in everything that link sonically back to ardkore.
bassnation
the abyss
there were a lot more reggae pirates back then. in terms of what people danced to, before acid house and rave it was pretty much soul and rare groove.
padraig (u.s.)
a monkey that will go ape
As far as what was pre-nuum, wasn't that the whole big deal of Acid House, that it brought all the different subcultures together? Whereas before it would've been largely separate, albeit with some overlap in places, scenes like rare groove/soul boy, electro/b-boy, industrial/avant-garde, UK dancehall/dub, etc. Perhaps some people who were actually there would care to chime in on this? And that's what I meant by a place/time/culture continuum as opposed to soundwise one.
Even if you do toss out the nuum I think a lot of Reynolds' (well, they may not be his per se, ones that I associate w/him I guess) other concepts hold up pretty well; Feminine Pressure, Scenius (obv. influenced by a lot of the crit theory stuff there), etc.
jambo
slip inside my schlafsack
Very true. Jungle and Garage had the recognition and it was a way of saying, hang on, that music came from this music which you dismissed at the time.
Yep, that sounds about right as well. Don't forget rock / indie / psychedelic kids too though.padraig (u.s.) said:
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Slothrop
Tight but Polite
But that's almost totally gone now, isn't it? I mean, afaict funky and bassline basically have a core working class urban audience and a fringe of neophiles for whom it's one of many things going on... there are crossovers but it's basically a different crowd from, say, mnml or jump up dnb or UK hip hop or electro house or whatever. So in that sense the nuum is spent.
My basic point is that I've never heard a criterion for nuumishness that makes currently exciting music definitely part of the nuum but makes it clear why it started with hardcore and why UK soundsystem stuff or whatever isn't a part of it...
If nothing else, his reputation stays standing because he was one of the first people to stick his neck out and take an interest in the cheesy disposable side of dance music and to actually start thinking seriously about stuff that most critics were writing off as lowest common denominator trash. The fact that we're having this conversation at all speaks volumes for his influence.
Having said that, if I was going to ask him a pointed question, it'd be whether and why he still feels able to comment on the UK underground dance scene from the other side of the atlantic given that part of what he was originally railing against was people who write about dance music without getting their hands dirty and getting first hand experience of the culture...