[ldn] 'ardkore continuum event

mms

sometimes
yes you can start your own continnum and you should if youy can, but this is about the hardcore continnum which s reynolds wrote about in his energy flash book and expanded on his blog.
also here are a bunch of fallacies he wrote on the subject/;

http://blissout.blogspot.com/2009/04/you-and-me-and-continuum-i-cant-be-at.html#links

which just about covers it i think.
as he says yep attend to your own continnum - so mr dubalina you really should go and write it.
 

mms

sometimes
...and it goes without saying that so should every critic of it...yeah ?

i'm not really a critic of it, like that, the book is very good and the same personel do come up again and again, the hardcore continumm is related, it's in a tradition, its empirically testable etc, its not a theory, all that stuff mentioned in the blissblog post upthread, ( i realised this when i re-read the book recently, the theorising is something thats come after and on the blog a bit more)

it also allows for other continumums which is something you want to do yes?
is this what you want to do rather than criticise the existing continumm which as a history of a certain british dance music still works fine to an extent, although it seems to self serve simons musical pallette more now than it seemed to back when it was written. like donk is supposedly part of the continnum and bassline but dubstep and funky aren't really etc, that's something i don't really get and that's his position, plus other things i won't go into.

i'm never sure what you want to do and what your postion is tbh, i know you're a music fan that has a liking for specific sounds and champions certain artists that might be overlooked, so doing ur own well researched continnum might be interesting.
 
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john eden

male pale and stale
...and it goes without saying that so should every critic of it...yeah ?

It's up to everyone what they do, I just think it would be particularly great if your continuum of nu school breaks and acid jazz and madchester was more fully expounded.

Personally I don't have to actually write a continuum myself because I think the history of uk soundsystem culture pretty much includes all the stuff I like and indeed all this johnny come lately 'ardkore continuum stuff. But that is obviously quite conservative compared to what you seem to be proposing.
 
There is nothing mediocre about a breakbeat and there is nothing more i'd like to do than to devote a lifetime exploring how a simple beat globalised the masses to dance like none had danced before, then writing about it.

Hiphop being the perfect example. Kool herc and grandmaster flash looped the breaks in records and stretched them out to pioneer turntablism and scratch breaks and inspired sampling technology to form various musical continua. The breaks also inspired a radical new form of dance with the b in b-boy standing for break later to be misnomered as break dancing.

When you link continua, they become a lattice. Northern soul/acid jazz and to a certain extent hiphouse was as much about breakbeats as madchester was also about drugs, all of which preceded hardcore/jungle.

To truly invoke the 'breakbeat' lattice you'd have to isolate it within the context of afrofuturism and ultimately allow for the cross cultural exchange across the black atlantic thru music. Something which trancends the importance of the simple history of UK sound systems and the ardkore nuum. True, you could also invoke a lattice of ‘4 on the floor’ house by way of chicago and detroit but with breakbeats you start with the godfather of soul and the funky drummer as opposed to cybertron and clear. That firmly ensconses the breakbeat within a timeframe of significant change for a black identity.

That line about the beat co opted by white intellectuals deals in an ever so glib fashion with the influence things like JA sound system culture inspired dub in the UK and the genesis of hiphop thru kool herc and possibly forming social movements like widespread rasta beliefs and hiphop as a valid culture.

With that in mind, it seems music as a bridge across the racial and class divide within the broadest geographical spectrum at the lowest level, that of the ghetto never seems to gain creedence until couched in intellectualism by middle class whites. Using jungle, dubstep and grime as examples it appears that it takes a simon reynolds, a logan sama or a kode9 to almost legitimise what is essentially black music whitened up for airplay.

ummm yeah... well beyond conservatism eh and to be honest i'd probably need a ghost writer, which if i could decipher hauntology in any meaningful context relating to breakbeats i'd need, especially to interview james brown.

...and for what its worth there is more i like to do than explore breakbeats and write about em
 

john eden

male pale and stale
Wow, we obviously have completely different understandings of what a continuum actually is in this context, then.
 

mms

sometimes
nah i'm not eh...

...i think you're hopelessly misinformed

no, you really have very little understanding of it, sorry, I don't blame you, you live in new zealand and have never been to the uk, but you're off the mark, what is it you really want to do, it seems sometimes all this stuff about white intellectuals etc, which is incidentally groundless.
Is just an underhand way of attacking other bloggers and posters on this forum, or have you enough evidence, interviewed enough people, done enough groundwork to back up this conviction, which you repeat an awful lot i must say?

Do you think if you came up to artists in the uk for interviews and you repeated your theory to them they'd take you seriously? Or even want to talk to you?
 
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oh right, like its really difficult to understand how to draw a tenuous line of continuity between genres based on eltist Uk journos attitudes towards music coming primarily out of london.

and on it goes, with dubstep and funky being the latest. I'd also like to add blackdown to the list that whitewashes black music, sub genrefying wonky out of dubstep.

its the classic, america didnt exist until columbus "discovered" it and named it scenario which is followed inevitably by colonization.
 

mms

sometimes
oh right, like its really difficult to understand how to draw a tenuous line of continuity between genres based on eltist uk journos attitudes towards music coming primarily out of london.

And on it goes, with dubstep and funky being the latest. I'd also like to add blackdown to the list that whitewashes black music, sub genrefying wonky out of dubstep.

Its the classic, america didnt exist until columbus "discovered" it and named it scenario which is followed inevitably by colonization.


gold
 

Tentative Andy

I'm in the Meal Deal
Note to self: pause and think the next time I feel like making a lame pun.
Mista dub, I really don't see where you're getting the racial politics angle from. In fact I'm finding it hard to make sense of what you're saying at all.
 

rouge's foam

a deadly secretion
I was there, hiding at the back. It was an amazing day all in all. Some kid called k-punk "bitter", he replied that he was sorry she'd been born into a world where "everything is flattened out".

Some brilliant, more flexible approaches to the nuum from a range of speakers. Kodwo Eshun and Steve Goodman's talk was fascinating. They identified recurring features in lots of different music - nuum, non-nuum and near-nuum. 2000F and J Kamata's "You don't know what love is" was linked back to Zapp's damn gorgeous "Computer Love". Even Prince put in an appearance. Identifying stylistic hallmarks in this way is so much better than some of ways the nuum is handled: as cordoning off a particular area of a very complex milieu of interrelating scenes, sounds, places and people, then carrying on angrily about 'progress' (whose parameters?) or lack thereof and letting it become a dodgy, restrictive ideological value-judgment machine (which is not necessarily all Reynolds's doing).

There was also a long, faintly ridiculous discussion about whether the nuum was an actual 'thing'. Personally I believe it can't be.

I was hoping to get hold of Eshun and Goodman's talk actually - any leads?
 
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have you enough evidence, interviewed enough people, done enough groundwork to back up this conviction...

Do you think if you came up to artists in the uk for interviews and you repeated your theory to them they'd take you seriously? Or even want to talk to you?

Of course not if i asked any dumfuck producer whos never even thought of where their ethnically misappropriated music comes from. Maybe benga would if he really thinks of himself as an afro warrior. Maybe megaman from so solid would after the establishment built them up then destroyed them.

Thing is brits in no way want to face up to their percieved cultural superiority and racist attitudes and it would be career suicide for any black academic or musicologist to suggest it but history is riddled with examples of validation only by caucasians from eric clapton shooting the sheriff to lady sovereigns fake patois to grievous angels noodlings.

yet even in kodwo eshuns writings or paul gilroys its subvertly hinted at but never overtly discussed.

http://www.darkmatter101.org/site/2007/05/07/paul-gilroy-in-conversation/
 

massrock

Well-known member
I was there, hiding at the back. It was an amazing day all in all. Some kid called k-punk "bitter", he replied that he was sorry she'd been born into a world where "everything is flattened out".
The accusation from some quarters is that there's a good deal of 'it was better back then' from the oldies, particularly K-Punk and Blissblogger. But to be fair I don't think that's quite it. I'd agree with K-Punk that if you played even some of the better post-dubstep (look, just trying to avoid the w word) stuff to someone in 1989 or whatever it wouldn't sound startling or 'impossible' where jungle sounded like a rupture or a phase transition. But also as he says it's just so difficult to get that across after the fact - we can't go back, jungle has happened.

And Joe Muggs asks if anyone thinks those Joker or whatever records are not 'exciting'. Well, they're nice enough tunes but I do think some perspective is in order. The very fact that they are so readily digestible is your clue.

But then again I did briefly have the intro to The Fall's 'Just Step Sideways' go through me head so who knows. But I don't think it's that really.
 
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