Sorry to wander further off topic (maybe we should move to the Bassline House thread?) but...
I've yet to hear a bassline tune that is remotely similar to any earlier speed garage in vibe, other than maybe stuff like Serious Danger which feels as much tribal house and trance as uk garage. imo things like the DND mix of Reach & Spin and post-2000 grimey 4x4 and such are the only things that come even close, and then its only with the more screwface strands - from what I hear almost all Northern stuff has so little in common with speed garage outside of formal structure. Speed garage always seems to me mutated JA and jungle mashed with a more druggy US soulful house and garage, this stuff is like grime on pills and amphetamines to my ears (forgive my drug reference?). In that regard, someone like Mala is actually a much better candidate as the contemporary exponent of speed garage
An influence which I am yet to hear articulated but which I hear in a lot of Bassline is main-room jump-up drum & bass - does anyone else hear that?
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!
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)...
an (alarmist) overvaluing of drugs’ role in musical subcultures
Ha ha.maybe also due to hearing most of this stuff via 96k/128k DLs or web radio?
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.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.
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.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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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...
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
it can't be entirely fair to blame the people who first started talking about ________ for the massively bloated ________clogging idea it eventually became ... I highly doubt that ________ ... 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
has collapsed into a polyvocal mass of sub-plots ... now more like a multiple headed hydra... None of them exactly replaces the other ... the fact is each can happily reside in their little sub-niche without especially troubling the others...
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.