firefinga

Well-known member
@owengriffiths,

I am referring to the situation in Germany (and austria) of course, there the "serious" media definitley totally ignored Trance. There was a little bit of coverage in the early 1990s with the success of the Frankfurt label "Harthouse" (run by still-jet-setting DJ Sven Väth). But generally the tone was (and still is), this ir rubbish, let's not touch it with a ten foot pole.
 

luka

Well-known member
im sure this has been remarked on many times before but i was just thinking about how you could trace the changing concerns and priorities, the shifting gestalt, of the continuum, even with the sound muted, could trace it through fashion alone, and along all sorts of axes. most obviously perhaps the Blake Innocence-Experience axis with can be identified, to some extent with, variously,
Pleasure Principle/Reality Principle, per-pubescence/sexual maturity, Eden/the Fall, communion/separation, and so on and on ad infinitum.

or the way that what can be loosely referred to as 'hip-hop fashion' is virtually invisible, at best highly peripheral, until grime.

can zoom in on eras such as the casual revival at the tail end of the '90s, the reebok classics, designer jeans and polo shirts, that became a uniform for boys across all ethnic, though not all class, lines, and ask what they represent.

someone must have done a project on this in some way that goes beyond look at this wicked moschino retro-cool.
 

Dr Venom

Wild Horses
Regarding UK Drill.

What I find interesting about it is that it feels like, for the first time a local London scene incubation. Place and provenance is intrinsic to pre-internet subculture (possibly also class lines to a certain extent*) and the advent of the internet gave birth to the first truly post-subcultural forms of uk dance music i.e US/UK brostep.

Here is the thing, I feel like we might be returning to localised versions oddly. I think there is something to do with the re-localisation of networks. The internet has gotten so big, people are returning to small again. Drill is forming on closed social networks that are fast replacing Twitter etc for the gen Z:: Snapchat/ Whatsapp 'dark social'. You are more likely to converse with people from your local community than strangers on an open network.

This is parring with DSPs and streaming lacking that sense of broader community (piracy/file sharing is nothing without something similar to a music forum) makes me feel like these networks are closing off interaction and once again helping that incubation factor that the pirate/dubplate infrastructure that grime ukg etc used to thrive on. This is potentially exciting if you like London-centric music scenes. Also a side note on this, this dark social disconnect probably transposes to the generational/ community disconnect with Tory Brexit Britain blah blah blah.

For me I feel like you could draw a tenuous link from drill to grime, but I feel like the dial has been reset more than ever on the so called continuum, I'm not mainly into it for the cultural theory anyway.

I know this much, when I watch a Harlem Spartans video it makes those grime MCs dressed like beatniks, getting sucked off by gucci PRs all in bed with Apple Music look like embarrassing jungle uncles. I feel like the banality of the sonics and signalling reflects the stark reality of the MCs, but importantly the wordplay and lyricism is sharp as ever, and it is not akin to the banality of the US xanax rappers which I struggle to digest bar a few. I am aware majors are reluctant to touch it at the moment because of the knife crime/gang association but mark my words there is a future diamond in the rough of it all currently. Hearing Loski Cool Kid for the first time gave me similar chills to the first time I heard Wicked Skengman (not saying he is the guy).

I also love a video shot in a chicken shop.

*Note the Vice/hipster/chin-stroker's obsession with Liverpool donk house/then blackpool grime, localised subcultures that seemed to form in spite of internet 2.0.
 
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luka

Well-known member
it makes those grime MCs dressed like beatniks, getting sucked off by gucci PRs all in bed with Apple Music look like embarrassing jungle uncles.

the truth is the music industry has taught grime to sit up and beg.
 

luka

Well-known member
broadly speaking there's 2 types of success
you either beg, make yourself in some way amenable to the powerful,
or you create something outside of that structure which is so big it cant be ignored.
 

luka

Well-known member
(one reason ive never pursued publication is a ((possibly self0defeating)) ideological commitment that 2nd way of
breaking through.)
 

luka

Well-known member
the new can only take shape outside of that power structure. that is the lesson of the hardcore continuum. it's also interesting to compare England and the US in this respect.
 

luka

Well-known member
Here is the thing, I feel like we might be returning to localised versions oddly. I think there is something to do with the re-localisation of networks. The internet has gotten so big, people are returning to small again.

i agree and what i think (or perhaps just what i would like to believe) is that we are moving to a post-star firmament and a rejection of the entire celebrity edifice (which is sinister and bloated and decadent beyond all redemption). a return to people being involved in creating and not just consuming. microscenes.
 

luka

Well-known member
although of course im sure we will always pay tribute to and enjoy
individuals of remarkable ability.
 

luka

Well-known member
basically the prising away of culture from capitalism is what i think the endgame is
(woebot considers capitalism to be the main motor and driver of culture.)
 

luka

Well-known member
so you recover the sense of culture as an exploration and an investigation and a quest, a shared and urgent enterprise,
our collective questioning of what exactly is going on here. our databank. everything. we wrestle that back from the bankrupt model of culture as product. that's finished. it's done.
 

luka

Well-known member
given we need neither manufacture nor distribution it seems the obvious path to take.
 

trilliam

Well-known member
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
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
This is the limitation of dissensus, a disastrous limitation - we're (by and large) so far removed as people from these cultures and movements, we have absolutely no understanding of them, we can only theorise

Reading that book about Southern Hip Hope wot Crowley recommended Shone light on this for me
 

CrowleyHead

Well-known member
The interesting thing about Drill is that its obviously borrowed from American DNA which is the first time this has happened since y'all getting house/techno and hip-hop before that as imports.

I think that because a lot of hip-hop in the UK was traditionally absorbed through East Coast-centric sensibilities, there was never a genuine connection with southern-style (using real broadstroke terms here) production until this last generation of the Grime Nostalgia kida and the Drill movement. Its allowed for production to allow for slow pushes into these other directions that the US artists simply don't think of.

The other big movements were first funky and then eventually afrobeats which has now occasionally dovetailed with drill and you have a generation that has just an absolute comfort with this style and using it as a reference point. So I think perhaps the big issue as to why the nuum was dead for so long is that it requires the insertion of new concepts to cycle into the UK and then gestate into something more. That said it has to be organic because when Dissensian-like organisms such as the bloggers or the press try to insert something as The Obvious New Sound... it doesn't really work. For all the admirable musical qualities of say gqom or whichever, it can't be implemented from a position before the grassroots.
 

luka

Well-known member
The interesting thing about Drill is that its obviously borrowed from American DNA which is the first time this has happened since y'all getting house/techno and hip-hop before that as imports.

I think that because a lot of hip-hop in the UK was traditionally absorbed through East Coast-centric sensibilities, there was never a genuine connection with southern-style (using real broadstroke terms here) production until this last generation of the Grime Nostalgia kida and the Drill movement. Its allowed for production to allow for slow pushes into these other directions that the US artists simply don't think of.

The other big movements were first funky and then eventually afrobeats which has now occasionally dovetailed with drill and you have a generation that has just an absolute comfort with this style and using it as a reference point. So I think perhaps the big issue as to why the nuum was dead for so long is that it requires the insertion of new concepts to cycle into the UK and then gestate into something more. That said it has to be organic because when Dissensian-like organisms such as the bloggers or the press try to insert something as The Obvious New Sound... it doesn't really work. For all the admirable musical qualities of say gqom or whichever, it can't be implemented from a position before the grassroots.

if you can loosely describe everything up until grime as a kind of opening up of dialogue with Jamacians on one hand and cockneys on the other then i think you can say everything after that is a dialogue between the West Indies and Africa. the music definitely codes more black than ever to put it as crassly and bluntly as possible.

and absolutely it has to be organic or its just novelty. it has to be the working out of real issues. whether social, formal or anything else
 

luka

Well-known member
what i was saying, very tentatively and speculatively, about america when grime started is that it represents a 3rd blackness, a neutral zone and common point of reference.
 

CrowleyHead

Well-known member
what i was saying, very tentatively and speculatively, about america when grime started is that it represents a 3rd blackness, a neutral zone and common point of reference.

It's true. It's essentially a several century old 'national identity' and as you can see from discourses and activity between those 3 groups, it's an uneasy umbrella to insist upon the shared bond sometimes. Which is ofc. the fault of non-black forces in the world but yeah.

There's also a thing where.... I don't want to be presumptive about the African influences on the nuum, and it's lofty of me to say it being non-black. BUT.... 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? I don't know, nor is it my place to start scouring, but it'd be interesting to learn if its stauntly differing in this next wave we're indicating.
 
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