Leo

Well-known member
funnily enough, I've actually enjoyed lots of muggs' writing over the years, we actually have a Venn diagram overlap in some of the music we enjoy. yes, his TED talk is cringeworthy, but he's turned me on to some good tunes over the years. and I'm a long-time wire subscriber as well.

I guess everyone has a brain fart from time to time. in this case, it was muggs-wire synchronized farting.
 

thirdform

pass the sick bucket
You seem to have invented a man to be mad at, and I'm sorry to tell you he bears no resemblance to me.

Sorry, but I can quote something you wrote which is entirely bollocks and shows your ignorance of hardcore, (yes 91-93 hardcore, is astounding.)

This might not sound like it has much in common with Corbyn the manhole-cover-loving constant gardner and parliamentary left-wing figurehead and nor is it supposed to. Corbyn isn’t some perfect embodiment of a proletarian death drive suddenly inserted into our parliamentary democracy, but he is nonetheless a vector allowing long-derided subcultural currents to rise higher within the national unconscious than they have been able to since he first entered the House of Commons.
Because, despite rave’s apparent retreatism, hardcore has never died. It has had its peaks and troughs but it has been largely consistent as a path travelled by so many over the course of dance music culture’s development, fragmenting off into new subcultures that nonetheless retain a shared sensibility of collective action and jouissance. Sinking below the production line of commodified genres has led to its continuation becoming less easy to reify and capture but, chances are, if anything has recently been described as “deconstructed club” it can be fastened onto an almost 40-year lineage of musical experimentation and collective politics. In this sense, deconstructed club is the music press’s attempt to categorise a party that kept on going, stubbornly, on rave’s own terminal beach, amongst the washed-up detritus of past political and musical failures, mudlarking for new sonic futures found amongst contorted old objects.
This new generation has seen and heard the musics of rave, perhaps appropriated and repackaged after the fact, and wonders how we ended up where we did. Compared to now, the alternatives of the rave era seemed numerous if still impotently subcultural. Corbyn, surreally, represents their future prospects within parliament but to say he is representative of these sentiments overall is a patronising misstep.
This is to say that this hauntological beach rave has not been so woefully nihilistic that it needs someone like Corbyn to galvinise it into action. Its persistence has successively held rave’s offspring back from the brink of death and it has given buoyancy to their collective politics at the same time. It is up to Corbyn to encourage their proliferation, not for these scenes to embody Corbyn-supplied political strategies. It is, after all, the parliamentary instantiation of the politics of neoliberalism that are to blame for its near-death in the first place. It is up to Corbyn to dismantle those damaging infrastructures so that these precarious embers might blossom into a new way of life.

Everything about this is wrong, wrong and wrong. Hardcore did die. when the micro-capitalism became macrocapitalist. UK garage, grime, all these genres are in a sonic continuum with hardcore, but in no way a subcultural continuum. The centre did not hold. Hardcore was an accident, a glorified mistake, and that's what made it so fucking good. You are ignoring all the Belgian, German and Dutch gear which went into hardcore, the poor mastering quality of a lot of that music, its near dj unfriendliness. There was no premeditation. When things got premeditated, that's when it died. Even garage started off with a much more premeditated idea of what it wanted to be. You'd be hard pressed to find a UKG tune with a screaming 303 or even a chinsy italodance piano. Hoover and morse code stabs were rare. It was simply something to be avoided.


Grime's alignment with Corbyn's politics (opens in a new tab) is the perfect example of how this might be done. Whilst their cross-cultural love-in might have been a tandem surprise to many, it emerged out of this kind of sociopolitical undercurrent, emboldened by a generation that is unwilling to extend the nihilism of past generations any further.

This shows you have absolutely no fucking immersion in the grime scene. Literally everyone saw that campaign as a joke, including those who participated in it. Just look at Lethal B's disappointment with the LP on twitter. It was good publicity and not much else. You're so removed from everything you write about you come across as overbloated, pretentious and passing moral judgments to cling to a theoretician who was even out of date when he was writing. The same cannot be said for Kit.

and I love your adendum!

Update #1: This post might already be redundant with the Labour Party doing too little too late. Apparently, Grime4Corbyn will not be making a return for the 2019 general election campaign. (opens in a new tab):
“The general consensus [amongst grime artists] is that they were used,” said one grime manager, who asked not to be named. “They didn’t follow up. They weren’t expecting a general election so soon, and it’s a bit late to go to the grime community now after ignoring us.”

No shit sherlock! Why are you so white and provincial that you still hold out hope in a moribund, racist and imperialist institution? I doubt you'd feel the same way if someone repeatedly rammed into your skull what that filth did in 1920s Iraq. Socialism my runny fucking arse!

 

other_life

bioconfused
i just never expected to see him post here, not right now anyway. like it threw me for a loop.
you and i both know support for Labour of any sort to any degree is Washed and Untenable though i'll let you have the floor on that question
 

thirdform

pass the sick bucket
It's pure grift. theoretical eclecticism at the expense of rigor. Which would be fine as some kind of goldsmiths shag-a-thon if they weren't making moronic political conclusions which are not based in reality.

This is the good shit you want.


As ever, the British socialists lack a certain cosmopolitan worldliness, an inability to think outside of their parochial bbc approved culture, which in any case is always inescapably shaped by the bourgeois social relation, even when it makes attempts at ostensible working class ethnography. They don't not call it bourgeois society for a reason!
 

thirdform

pass the sick bucket
xenogoth is decently good at writing about literature film and music and no one i'd trust on politics in any kind of practical sense

Maybe, but I despise left wing culturalism. It always poses the problem backwards. As if the culture they have to fight comes from the right, rather than culture as such.

In this regard, it's hard to pose any theoretical advancement after the situationists. Class War, to their credit, tried to pose this problem practically, but like many anarchist orgs they got trapped in valourising the Victorian bourgeois caricature of nationalistic (and for that result) nonexistent, working class life. When we say the workers have no fatherland, we are not saying that nationalism is a fantasm or that is mmere false consciousness, we're saying something more fundamental than that. That proletarianisation itself is a condition which arises out of migration.

I'm sure @john eden can talk about the 80s stuff more.

But this is my problem with still using the hardcore continuum as a framework in anything. It allows one to view music in postcolonial terms, only if it can bve absorbed into a nebulous british identity. As I was saying to @luka the thing is not that hardcore had to be truly multicultural (it couldn't be by chucking some tablas or sitars on it anyway) the thing is to look at the development of music (all contemporary music) through an international lense. What I think is interesting in @sadmanbarty 's idea is that now more than ever it's easier to talk about globalised trap and drill. But that is not to say that prior to that the progression of music was solely delimited to national borders.
 
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other_life

bioconfused
fuck it i got my buum thread derailed let's link let's do d'rash
for anyone else trying to stay on topic/about to Bang Down My Door about it i got paid last night and have the tab to order the book open i'm gonna do it right now. should get it first week of september. i'm still excited to read it/think the notion it's forwarding is important in a meta sense, mvuent gave me a good pitch.

"Rather than culture as such" -
this is agreeable to me but i catch myself saying "we need to return to a pre-civilisational high culture, taking what we have learned from civilisation while in the same destroying it", trying to wedge an opposition between:
'culture' [all intentional and intelligent human activity]
and
'civilisation' [more or less synonymous with 'city', with 'centralisation' and other bugbears of the anti-authoritarian left - capture and imprisonment of large populations for the purpose of resource extraction, monumental architecture, military discipline &c].
but you say that culture itself is the enemy - how do you figure this? are you defining it differently than i am or am i understanding you just as you mean?

"It's hard to pose any theoretical advancement after the Situationists" -
have you seen debord's "in girum imus"? it felt like having my own sorry conditions of life read back to me on a bill of arrest (to be melodramatic about it).

"When we say the workers have no fatherland, we are not saying that nationalism is a fantasm or that is mmere false consciousness, we're saying something more fundamental than that. That proletarianisation itself is a condition which arises out of migration." -
i think about this a lot especially in relation to the fact that today's westerners were not originally from the west, nor were yesterday's westerners (and on). this is what's retarded about patriot front and similar groups here positing a 'pan-european' american identity.
the indo-european in america, displaced by two degrees (and on) from outer europe and further from inner europe, is on a flat plane, at equity, with the african in america, displaced also by two degrees (and on) from outer africa and further from inner africa, and on a flat plane both of them still with the man indigenous to the americas, which are vast, and in which were and are many nations.
i don't think people see or understand the displacement of people going on around us all the time nor do we understand what it means that it will only continue to intensify.
 

Benny Bunter

Well-known member
Just done the chapter on trap in the 2010s and it was stellar, even better than the Vybz Kartel one.

Best new music writer since Tim Finney.
 

Benny Bunter

Well-known member
I'm gonna hold back on the quotes I like cos its like the whole thing is made of quotables, not a word wasted. Very fun to read.
 

Benny Bunter

Well-known member
That Huncho Jack album is definitely an overlooked classic, every song is great and it's more psychedelic and exotic than Culture.
 

DannyL

Wild Horses
Six or seven times is actually impressive. Well done Corps! Very few others on here could manage that amount of self abuse.
 

Benny Bunter

Well-known member
Just finished the book - he absolutely smashed it. Top marks. I'll probably read it again straight away.

Who else here has read it?
 
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