Not freed by culture but trapped by it, buried under it
you guys are reading too much into this. yes there is that feel. but it's like mans protesting club closures as gentrification. it's like clubbing existing in this weird social vacuum where the real gentirification and the inflation of the property market can be just ignored to justify milquetoast liberalism. clubs participating in that gentrification process doesn't appear on their radar.
We're insulated and scenes are going into their internal purisms because that's just a reflection of how things are. people are keeping to themselves. so many of my queer and PoC mates are going out much less, if at all. there's no social dynamic to push something genuinely weird like doctor p sweetshop to get played on radio 1 in the daytime.
until the elitist brexiteers etc don't monopolise this countrys public sphere dynamic and write out misfit voices then all ur gonna get is road rap, which, despite some quite interesting innovations a) doesn't really have much to do with grime and B) won't escape the hip hop mc format. if anything more grime instrumentals are being made today. whether thats goldsmiths or not is another story but that's just the way it is really.
It's of course quite hippy to say 'it's all music, maaaan' but the way i look at it is that i just chase the sonic combinations and thrills that are new to me in that specific spatiotemperal instance. I'm not really bothered if they are future or retrofuture so long as they can make mush out of my brain. of course this doesn't mean abandoning the politics but in this current domination of hard 1930s conservativism i don't think it's even right to expect radical culture to penetrate the mainstream. everyone's gonna be mavrics because of the way the social relationships and production relations are organised.