So the hardcore continuum would exclude anything a) not London-centric and b)with no links to reggae and it's soundsystem culture at all?
Good call swears. Conceptions of the 'nuum have been warped by too much london-centric writing - much as I love Reynolds, I have to say that his riff on 'a few square miles of east London' is absurd. Hardcore didn't just retreat back into the capital after it's chart pop era. To use just one example, Kinetic in Stoke-On-Trent was firing right through 93-94, booking exactly the same DJs as places like Labrynth, and thier local residents like Pilgrim & Ned Ryder were playing the same darkside and proto-jungle as the London DJs. Stu Allen in particular is an absolutely crucial figure in the development of UK hardcore, who's been practicallly written out of the story because he isn't from London. The only part of the hardcore spectrum that was exclusive to London in 93-94 was booyaka ragga jungle, which was pretty niche and shortlived even in the capital. The style which had lasting influence was darkside/artcore, which was less clunky in deploying the Black Atlantic influence and less suspicious of Belgian bombast, and
that evolved on a national level (which is why a good number of the artcore originators, such as Photek & Doc Scott, are from outside London).
There's another, much larger hardcore continuum in the UK which rarely gets written about because it's outside the capital - white, provincial and working/lower middle class, whose route out of rave took them into happy hardcore and gabba, then on into techstep, acid tekno and breaks: everything starts with a 'B' basically, and the B stands for Beltram. These are the kind of people you get at free parties - not part of the London 'nuum, but definitely not BoBos, or students (in the pejorative way that the word is used in classic 'nuum theory). There is a black atlantic influence, but refracted through northern/provincial prole culture: so the free party scene has memes, like sound system politics & clashes with Babylon (not theoretical ones either!), that citizens of JA or black British culture would recognise; and others that they would most probably find totally alien, such as standing off your head in a muddy field. Jungle's evolution into techstep, bemoaned by 'nuumians like Reynolds & Woebot, can be seen as a
re-appropriation of hardcore by it's original provincial audience, many of whom were bitter at what thay saw as the hijack of 'their' scene by black or black-aligned london producers.
I suppose a lot of writers would argue that they prefer to deal with the London 'nuum because it's constantly changing, compared to the provincial 'nuum which is largely static. That's true, but beware of the feedback loop: if it's true that writers focus on London street music because it's turnover of styles is higher, it's also true that
London music recycles itself so often because it gets so much media attention! Provincial scenes don't have the underground-vs-hipster-vs-mainstream internal strife that characterises movements like jungle or grime, and which cause them to mutate - left to thier own devices, producers in fields like acid tekno or happy hardcore have no impetus to develop the music once it's reached it's perfect functional zenith. This compromises it aesthetically, but the converse is that many of the groundbreaking records feted by london-centric commentators don't satisfy as dance music in the same way, because developing the style means moving it away from the functional.
Even within London, scenes aren't faithful to any one set of influences - Undisputed has a point, because some of the early tempa releases are very breaks-y & I can distinctly remember DMZ being marketed as a breaks night in 2004. Apple records started out as a techno shop and had no real truck with jungle at all (there was a shortlived d&b shop upstairs in '95 but it didnt take off - Wax City was the shop for jungle in Croydon BITD). Producers generally are into all kinds of wierd stuff that doesnt immediately find it's way into thier work. So IMO, tracing the geneology of the 'nuum musically will just result in hairsplitting and tail-chasing - look instead at the cultural impact and the audience demographic, and ask why some shifts in the sound get accepted while others fall on stoney ground.
There, hope that's thoroughly confused everyone
