Gen Z junglizm

[blissblogger]

Freshness.

the Cold fresh air vybe

 

[subvert47]

currently listening to...

 

[shiels]

to do some reductive and problematic jungle gender studies you might hear a tension between masculine and feminine elements through the 90s stuff but in this recent example youre hearing an almost postgender yearning for the metaverse. thats what youre saying?

in terms of vocals this stuff is also strikingly less sexy than OG jungle, garage and dnb - its either infantile or alien / avatar sounding - to massively generalise

 

[dilbert1]

the fakesimiles are getting more and more convincing

it's difficult not to assess them purely on how much they can pass as old school, i'm not sure is that the point or not

A lot of this stuff instantly registers as “soundcloud jungle” because of the lo-fi-via-plugins sound quality but also the singular focus on “deep” “atmospheric” vibes with little of the mastery or vision of the stuff their aping.

This slate of anonymous releases on GBW (or a lot of other stuff on the label) on the other hand could fool just about anyone

 

[version]

 

[version]

the fakesimilies are getting more and more convincing

it's difficult not to assess them purely on how much they can pass as old school, i'm not sure is that the point or not

The other I day came across someone talking about an old book they'd bought called 'The Grammar of Ornament' (1856) and they mentioned the following:

In his introduction to 'Arabian Ornament' he makes a beautifully succinct Hegelian point that the Arabians first made 'crude and imperfect' imitation or use of patterns and styles they found in Byzantine churches and other conquered populations, but that this attempt at copy or return to a style was the necessary step to creating an entirely new body of art. The new only arises out of a return to the old, but this return always fails as such - it will always fail to recreate the lost age, but this failure will in turn become its own substantively new set of traditions.

Now I'm wondering whether this will eventually happen with the various genre revivals we hear at the moment, or whether we've become such great mimics that this process can no longer take place. For one, some of this revival stuff's anything but 'crude and imperfect'. If anything, it's too perfect. There doesn't seem much room for a 'substantively new set of traditions' to arise from it because it's so closely aligned with the old set.

 

[dilbert1]

Conceptualizing historical succession in one’s present moment is always abstract, and the distance we feel between us and the 90s aside, perhaps its not the “lost age” its often taken to be, especially here but also seemingly everywhere. The impetus now (versus the quote) is out of a self-infantilizing longing for the past born from consciousness of inertia and hopelessness. “Things were just doper back in the Byzantine days” vs “we’ll be using this along the great path of our destiny.” Still I don’t think jungle’s necessarily a dry well, but no one thinks in grand terms, even in the naive way producers in the 90s did. People just want to have a good time, easy options, safe pleasures, and anything obstinate or difficult in this regard is captured by the same vibe siloing, takes pride in being inaccessible, and is so concerned with its image. Standards are a lot lower, as long as you can get it to look like you’re doing something people are apparently impressed. So in a way the jungle fakesimiles are good because they stand on the strength of the music, but I’d like more risks to be taken, more weirdness and outsider approaches, less cutesy 90s winks and nods. We aren’t going to be able to shake that era totally, fooling ourselves if we think so, but new attitudes and relationships to it would be necessary.

 

[version]

I was thinking more broadly than just jungle, tbf. I've posted in here because it's more interesting and gets more discussion if you can pull these abstract ideas into something more tangible, like tunes, rather than another thought/philosophy thread. I'm also walking a fine line and trying not to fall into the classic k-punk/Dissensus 'No Future: Why's Nothing as Good as Jungle?' debate we've hashed and rehashed a million times.

I'll flesh it out into a new thread and see where it goes from there as I've something specific in mind.