Corpsey
bandz ahoy
Prodigy did do "Ruff in the Jungle" on the debut album - which is great, but not really jungle
Done five seconds of research
Admits Liam, “There’s loads of quality jungle tracks around. The problem was that a lot of people thought it was so easy to make hardcore that they just knocked out white labels and flooded the market with crap. But this year there’s been a lot of intelligent jungle. Moving Shadow are the leading label.”
But Liam still doesn’t like the attitude and moody atmosphere that so often surrounds jungle ’94, and which is so different from the nutty, luv’d up vibe of ’ardkore ’92.
“The reason I got into rave was that hip-hop had gotten too much into attitude. To me, the jungle scene now is really confused. One minute they’ll play something really uplifting and the next it’s dark and gloomy. Also, that music’s lost a bit of energy. Because it’s so fast, people don’t dance to the 160bpm drums, they lock into the reggae baseline, which is half speed. So you dance really slow. With techno, you dance to the full-on beat. The stuff I really rate is European, like CJ Bolland and a lot of the German artists.”
https://www.theguardian.com/music/2...e-prodigy-classic-interview-1994-melody-maker
and
Liam Howlett: I haven’t listened to that album in its entirety since I made it. When they played it the other night I listened to it in my car and took a detour just to take all of it in. I just couldn’t believe how long it was! There are bits that I actually can’t remember how I did it. I obviously did, but I couldn’t remember how I made the sound. That record was a reaction to everything that was going on around us, even the jungle scene. The tempo was going up and up, so I thought fuck that we’ll go down and we wrote ‘Poison’, which was a hip hop track. ‘No Good’ was a reaction to the shit Euro dance thing that was going on. It’s an angry album.
http://www.dazeddigital.com/music/article/20659/1/liam-howlett-lord-of-the-dance
Sounds like he didn't like the tempo, primarily. The 'confusion' over mood thing is interesting, insofar as that's one of the things I love about jungle. The loved up intros and breakdowns and the stripped down aggression of the drops... And actually, it arguably all went 'wrong' for some people when it became full-on dark time during the Metalheadz/TechStep era. (Coexisting with the jazzy shit, up to the end of the 90s, I guess?)
DNB, whcih I did used to be into, for my money went wrong because it DID go so fast, up to and past 170bpm, at which point the beats become necessarily formulaic and rigid.
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