the nuum back lash
- Thread starter ether
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viktorvaughn
Well-known member
The big difference for me between the late 90s 'Mad on Speed Garage', 101% Speed Garage' stuff and bassline is how inorganic bassline sounds. In the earlier stuff you can hear an earthy wood-blocky sound you can imagine has been sampled from a real instrument whereas bassline sounds so synthesised and as you say, like grime on pills. I like the fact that even at it's most cheesy 'up' moments bassline still has an evil undercurrent!
bassnation
the abyss
i don't think that reverse bass predominant in speed garage (and first pioneered in jungle tunes like "whats the time of the dread") sounds in any way natural, does it? or is it just me?
Yeah but I think what Viktorvaughn was trying to say was that 'nuum music pre-proto-grime had a certain thickness to the sounds- even where they weren't acoustic samples there was a certain grain to them. Whereas in Grime and Bassline everything has a kind of cheapo-nasty dayglo neon plasticness to it (ie- redolent of the soft-studio/synth technology behind the creation of the tunes) -- certainly old skool speed garage had artificial elements in it, but it had more sonic depth to it (again due to the technology). Although I would add the Cheap n' Nasty aesthetic of Grime and Bassline is actually what makes them interesting, THAT is one of their twists which escapes a mere reduplication of the continuum in a sense.
Leo
Well-known member
maybe also due to hearing most of this stuff via 96k/128k DLs or web radio?
in addition to what most people are saying, "yes, useful in some ways, but limited and annoying when writers use it as a closed system to self aggrandize", etc., this comment i've been meaning to make myself:
but i think Jace means "alarming" though?
i've never understood the "jungle sound like that because of the weed" or "house sounds like that because of the E" arguments... sure there is connection between substance culture and music, and a direct one if it's screwed or dub, but it is off the mark to say that drugs influence the sounds THAT much. for one thing, everything sounds good on E or weed.
but i think Jace means "alarming" though?
i've never understood the "jungle sound like that because of the weed" or "house sounds like that because of the E" arguments... sure there is connection between substance culture and music, and a direct one if it's screwed or dub, but it is off the mark to say that drugs influence the sounds THAT much. for one thing, everything sounds good on E or weed.
Slothrop
Tight but Polite
Ha ha.
Actually, I take the basic point, but I'm not sure how much it's about technology actually making the music sound shiny and plastic as about people not being afraid to use cheap shiny plastic sounds - maybe it's just being another couple of generations down the line and a bit further from the 'organic = natural = authentic = good' mindset. I'm never quite sure how much of this "softsynths don't sound as grainy and organic as older technology" stuff is just the romanticization of old technology...
also, like most over arching theories, the danger lies in the multitude of OTHER "continuums" that THE continuum misses and marginalizes.
in addition to the Northern Soul connection someone mentioned, there are loads of Egyptian, Morrocan or Algerian music that use positively junglist beats. and in traditional musics from southeast asia to middle east and africa, you can find predessessors for EVERY kind of rhythmic pattern and tempo used in modern dance music.
in this light, to focus on such a regionally and temporally specific tiny, tiny continuum within the much larger, indeed universal "continuum" is not only of very limited value, but also very much distorting and fosters narrow definitions and ethnocentrism.
EDIT: just read someone's mention of Ghanian or Angolan styles influencing Grime. perfect.
in addition to the Northern Soul connection someone mentioned, there are loads of Egyptian, Morrocan or Algerian music that use positively junglist beats. and in traditional musics from southeast asia to middle east and africa, you can find predessessors for EVERY kind of rhythmic pattern and tempo used in modern dance music.
in this light, to focus on such a regionally and temporally specific tiny, tiny continuum within the much larger, indeed universal "continuum" is not only of very limited value, but also very much distorting and fosters narrow definitions and ethnocentrism.
EDIT: just read someone's mention of Ghanian or Angolan styles influencing Grime. perfect.
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Slothrop
Tight but Polite
Well, precedent doesn't neccessarily mean influence of course (I wouldn't try to put Paint It Black in a continuum with happy hardcore based on their use of 4x4 kicks and repeated riffs, for instance), but yeah, I broadly agree.
It's only neccessarily focused on in terms of nuum specific criticism, though. Maybe SR originally claimed that the nuum contained a lot of what for him was the most exciting music to come out of the UK dance scene, but he was still basically talking about the UK dance scene.
But again, I agree with what you mean about the larger continuum - why do we only ever talk about a continuum linked by one specific set of features and another. It made a lot of sense when it really was a continuum (ie pre garage) but speed garage and its successors could equally be fitted into a continuum of dressy working class saturday night music based (originally) on US imports and so on. It made sense to talk about a single continuum between hardcore and jungle because they had a lot more connection with each other than with any other scene, but once you start expanding it to include UKG, grime, dubstep, bassline, funky it's not clear why you should privilege jungle in their ancestry rather than more recent house...
On a side note, I think the originally posted articles have a second point which is kind of tangential to the notion of the continuum - specifically the sort of theorising that people writing about it tend to slip into, whereby their opinion on the music seems to follow from how it fits into their structural theory rather than vice versa - 'grime is no longer interesting because although it's producing lots of great records it's no longer the current mutation of the hardcore continuum' sort of thing, or airbrushing out elements of a scene that don't fit the picture you're trying to paint.
Maybe it should just be called the 'East London effect': what happens when urban, multicultural, working class london latches onto a certain sound and mutates it into something they can call their own. So the 'continuum' would just be products of this process arranged on a timeline without direct causal links between them other than perhaps new technology, boredom and the police.
I know I'm oversimplifying by restricting it to East London but you get what I mean.
I know I'm oversimplifying by restricting it to East London but you get what I mean.
Its possible to sound grainy using softsynths... but the temptation is not to (or rather, the decision). Whereas with old Jungle records there was a certain analogue Fatness to the sound which is absent from current Grime and Bassline. But actually, given that the 90s sonic is so utterly played out, this is a GOOD THING. Its not an authenticity issue, but technology definitely creates tendencies and opportunities- ie: in this case the slightly shonky feel of early Grime gave it an avant garde edge totally missing from (lets say) sample-based Brit-hop. And with bassline the cheap'n'nastyness gives it a definite deranged E-head quality, (but in a different manner to that of rave).
Also: to be fair its probably more useful to talk of a garage continuum than a Hardcore continuum (ie in terms of the potential interoperability of tunes and direct parentage). Though obviously Bassline, Funky, Grime, and Dubstep are not merely reducible to aspects of UKG/Speed garage, and suck in various influences from outside, they all exist to some extent in relation to their precursor (in a far more explicit way than to jungle or hardcore/rave)...
Gabba Flamenco Crossover
High Sierra Skullfuck
I think there's often a tension between the crowd, a lot of whom don't want much more than a drug soundtrack, and the producers who want to explore ideas as artists and get some credit for doing that.
Its a wierd thing, but I've noticed that in a lot of genres of music, the very best tracks are almost too good to play out. They're so original and brimming with possibilities that they stand out too much and break up the mood. Lots of other people besides me have experienced clearing the floor with an absolutely amazing track after holding it through several merely good ones.
Music journalists love using Drugs as metaphor/guiding principle whenever they can (even in rock music). It functions as a way for them to talk about sonic alterations without any proper knowledge of how the music itself is constructed- so drugs function as a shorthand ("this is very coked out" etc). Whilst there is obviously some interrelation between the two (either at the level of the producer or the consumer) its vastly overplayed. Though equally it could be thought of the other way around (ie- finding a drug to suit the music). Or alternately a third way sociologically as being determined by the certain demographics involved, or economically (ie merely the contingent coexistence of a narcotic reaching a market equilibrium at the same time as a given form of music). Or any admixture of the four...
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N
nomadologist
Guest
This is what kept jumping out at me as I read through these blog posts and the articles they linked to--I've been pretty outspoken (on Dissensus, at least) in questioning what the fuck a "continuum" could possibly look like w/r/t pop music, but even if this concern could be addressed, it's still only half the problem with the way the discourse around "continuum" has expressed itself.
For example, in K-punk's Fact piece, he seems to talk up the interesting and relevant and "good" aspects of bassline house, but has do to so at the expense (theoretical, of course) of grime and dubstep. The picture he paints of historical shifts from "yang to yin" and back again is too dialectical, imo.
Isn't there a third way where we can admit grime and dubstep have/had their moments, but acknowledge that the development of bassline (and its current popularity) is not some strictly linear development *out of* grime and dubstep? Anyone who's been a student/appreciator of music for any length of time has observed this sort of thing again and again, right? Since when small regionally-based "scenes" done anything but give way to new ones over time?
N
nomadologist
Guest
Also, it can't be entirely fair to blame the people who first started talking about the continuum for the massively bloated blogosphere-clogging idea it eventually became, can it? I highly doubt that SR, for one, meant for so many people to take what he said so literally and use it as a sort of amped-up authenticity narrative stamped with cred establishment approval.
This is a common phenomenon in and of itself--I've seen quite a bit of blogosphere theorizing on music get turned over into "prevailing indie-media narratives" seemingly overnight by the rushing tide of involved readers and scenesters who become involved readers and vice versa. This is the risk one runs when they decide that the internet and its media are direct correlates to "popularity" or "popular opinion" vis-a-vis this scene or that one. Everyone ends up contributing. It's like mass hysteria.
This is a common phenomenon in and of itself--I've seen quite a bit of blogosphere theorizing on music get turned over into "prevailing indie-media narratives" seemingly overnight by the rushing tide of involved readers and scenesters who become involved readers and vice versa. This is the risk one runs when they decide that the internet and its media are direct correlates to "popularity" or "popular opinion" vis-a-vis this scene or that one. Everyone ends up contributing. It's like mass hysteria.
And anyway the current state of play in post-garage music in the UK kind of works against the idea of a continuum per se whatsoever--- the "grand narrative" of hardcore as such has collapsed into a polyvocal mass of sub-plots, garage now more like a multiple headed hydra... None of them exactly replaces the other- this is old-style thinking: in the multi-band era there is less competition for limited media space... the fact is each can happily reside in their little sub-niche without especially troubling the others...
N
nomadologist
Guest
It's difficult to make parallels, because the scale is so different between music markets in the U.S. and the U.K., but the situation you describe (where one scene doesn't "replace" another) has been pretty readily acknowledged in the U.S. as the way music genres, subgenres, etc. interact with the music market nowadays.
but surely you would put Paint It Black in a continuum with mid 70s disco-funk-rock? which is obviously in a continuum with house music? get me?
and Paint it Black is especially a good example because the melody is absolutely derivitive of Middle Eastern music -- i think from their visits to Brian Gyson in morroco.
replace "continuum" with "deconstruction" or "post structuralism", substitute SR for MF or D&G, and what you have said works perfectly as well. this happens with all theory -- the literal and often twisted interpretation turns the ideas into limiting and narrow perspectives sometimes completely divorced from and even antithetical to the original intentions ---- theory as tool for taking apart master narratives becomes an oppressive master narrative itself.
this certainly applies to much more than current UK dance music, and is an apt description of the state of "pluralist" art, literary, filmic, and indeed maybe all cultural production in this age and time. (see this earlier post)
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N
nomadologist
Guest
No, it doesn't work if you replace those terms. And "all theory" doesn't get twisted and become oppressive, theory misapplied to music and then feverishly reappropriated by every blogger on the internet does.
Who is MF? I'm drawing a blank.