This cheeky hip-hop collage approach is what Dee Kline is all about. Based around samples of a TV comedian imitating a Rasta, Dee Kline’s ganja anthem ‘I Don’t Smoke’ was a pirate anthem and then reached Number Eleven in the pop charts after being licensed by major label EastWest. The canny Warners subsidiary also picked up the sample-laced ‘Bound 4 Da Reload’ by Oxide & Neutrino, which did even better: straight in at Number One. Hanging out at EastWest, this eighteen-year-old duo look like archetypal garage kids: Caesar haircuts, flash mobiles, gold bracelets, spaceship Nikes. Together with their clique So Solid Crew, a thirty-strong MC/producer/vocalist collective, Oxide & Neutrino also run a pirate station, Delight FM. It was while DJ-ing on a pirate show that Oxide got the idea for ‘Reload’, his very first track. Someone phoned in a request, and when his voice went on the air, you could hear Casualty, the TV show about a hospital emergency room, on in the background. When DJ Oxide faded up the track on his deck, Casualty’s theme fitted perfectly over the beat.
Tunes like ‘Reload’ and ‘I Don’t Smoke’ are polarizing the UK garage scene, creating an instant generation gap. The old-guard axis of garage DJs like Tuff Jam and The Dreem Teem regard these sample-based tracks as ‘novelty tunes’ devoid of the sexy swing that the scene was originally founded on. ‘There’s a committee being set up by all the UK garage dons, just like the top jungle DJs and producers did back in ’94 when the music was crossing over,’ says Zed Bias. These scene elders are blocking the new music – a futile and pre-doomed attempt to arrest the very mutational process that spawned UK garage in the first place. ‘They’re trying to control things, but they haven’t kept their finger on the pulse. All they’ve done is shut themselves up in this exclusive little room.’ Meanwhile, the younger audience who grew up on jungle and pirate radio love the new, rough-hewn style of garage – what Dee Kline calls ‘future rave’.
Neutrino attributes the snide comments made by established DJs about ‘Bound 4 Da Reload’ to sheer jealousy at its astounding success. But it’s probably as much because the track sounds less like garage and more like a new-millennium renovation of electro topped with nagging and nasal rapping from Neutrino. All it really has in common with the garage played at swanky clubs like Twice as Nice is the 130 b.p.m. tempo. ‘Reload’ doesn’t actually sound like a cheesy novelty song at all. It’s bleak and ominous, from the doom-booming sub-bass palpitations to the morgue-chilly echo swathing the track and the ice-stab pizzicato violins. The latter are ‘Strings of Death’, maybe, given the samples of gunshots and an agonized voice pleading, ‘Will everybody please stop getting shot!?!’ – a black humorous allusion to the rising blood-tide on London’s streets. Taken from the UK gangsta movie Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, the sample in ‘Reload’ plugs into the grim realities of a Britain where crime is soaring, despite or maybe because of the boom-time prosperity. Wealth remains unevenly distributed through society, and kids are under enormous peer pressure to own status commodities like mobile phones, expensive clothes and jewellery.
Propped against the counter of Uptown Records in D’Arblay Street, just a few minutes’ stroll from Oxford Street, a black girl complains bitterly: ‘S’like I was sayin’, garage is all commercial now. Nobody’s keepin’ it real.’ The real-ness is coming. Just like drum and bass when it reacted against LTJ Bukem-style coffee-table jungle, the next wave of garage producers are stripping the music down to bass and beats. You’re even starting to hear the kind of caustic industrial noises that originally drove the girls out of the techsteppin’ main arena and into the garage side room in the first place. It smacks of cutting your nose off to spite your face, but it’s an inevitable cycle. UK garage’s sublime equilibrium between yin and yang, treble and bass, light and dark has been maintained for an improbably long time. 2000 is UK garage’s fourth fabulous summer in a row – an eternity in the high-turnover world of British dance culture. Now the scene looks set to plunge into wintry darkside mode, as if girding itself for the next recession.
