Funky/London/UK House

B

BareBones

wheezy
Benny B said:
Grant Gsmallz Smalling
HERE IS YR CHANCE TO PLAY THE GET DOWN GAME FROM YR OWN COMPUTER BY DOWNLOADING THE GET DOWN RIDDIM FROM THIS LINK !!!!!!!!!
http://www.sendspace.com/file/blclc4
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haha cool. i'm gonna look well stupid now but fuck it, how do you actually play the get down game? i've only caught it a few times and haven't worked it out. or is it just one of those games like mornington crescent? shoulda put this in the questions you're scared to ask thread really.
 
Tentative Andy

Tentative Andy

I'm in the Meal Deal
BareBones said:
haha cool. i'm gonna look well stupid now but fuck it, how do you actually play the get down game? i've only caught it a few times and haven't worked it out. or is it just one of those games like mornington crescent? shoulda put this in the questions you're scared to ask thread really.
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This is how I undestand it - you need two people, and you take it turns to think of someone's name (can be a real person, TV character etc) and then say 'x person, get down get down' over the beat. The first person to hesitate too long or not think of a new name loses.
Great to get that instrumental anyway. :)
 
B

BareBones

wheezy
Tentative Andy said:
This is how I undestand it - you need two people, and you take it turns to think of someone's name (can be a real person, TV character etc) and then say 'x person, get down get down' over the beat. The first person to hesitate too long or not think of a new name loses.
Great to get that instrumental anyway. :)
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cool that's kinda what i thought. it's the way that sometimes the names are linked in some way rather than being totally random, ie they'll say the names of a few different politicians in a row or something, that made me think there was some 'mallets mallet'-style word-association business going on which was escaping me.
 
F

FairiesWearBoots

Well-known member
gumdrops said:
funky is all about girls. and its not brentwood or wherever but theres raves in ilford which technically isnt in london/is suburban. despite all the producers and djs fretting about there being too many guys in the clubs i dont think its really like that. the reason its not gotten bigger i think might just be cos its still seen as too black/urban/underground. theres no big chart hits to get wider attention/make it seem like everyone can do it, which is what would usually kickstart a new load of club nights outside from the scenes main players. plus maybe the fact its harder to get the actual records means theres less chance of non-insider djs getting enough stuff to play, though thats already been discussed and well i might be wrong. though i suspect its easier to start a new post dubstep night and have a shitload of new tracks to play than it would be for funky. whether anyone would come to a night like that in deepest southend though i dont know.
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Yeah I totally get its a girls thing just wondering why the sound hasnt quite spread beyond east London,
as you said above, maybe a funky chart hit would boost it
or maybe its just timing
 
Benny Bunter

Benny Bunter

Well-known member
BareBones said:
haha cool. i'm gonna look well stupid now but fuck it, how do you actually play the get down game? i've only caught it a few times and haven't worked it out. or is it just one of those games like mornington crescent? shoulda put this in the questions you're scared to ask thread really.
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remember Mallet's Mallet? its like that only word association isnt necessary. I might clash my flatmates with it tonight!

edit: soory, you've already got it!
 
Benny Bunter

Benny Bunter

Well-known member
Ossie is an astonishingly good producer, nice to see him get some recognition. But Set the tone's already been given away, will it be a new version of it or summat?
 
T

Tim F

Well-known member
I think it's a historical error to conflate 2-step's popular success with the presence of bass.

First, remember there was a 2 year lag between the first 2-step tunes (stuff like Anthill Mob's "Set You Free", Dem 2's "Destiny", Amira's "My Desire", Dreem Teem's "The Theme") and chart crossover, during which period (I'm given to understand) it was pretty much strictly a London thing.

Second, at the point of 2-step's crossover we're talking a low-ebb in bassiness, the booming (or wah-wah, in the alternate) basslines of speed garage had by this point faded somewhat. Stuff like "Rewind", "Sweet Like Chocolate", "Bodygroove", "Crazy Love", "Flowers", "Do You Really Like It", "Moving Too Fast", "Girls Like This", "Why?" (i.e. the tunes that actually crossed over) all had very minimal bass presence, and are for the most part pretty trebly.

(And as much as I love heavy bass tunes in 2-step, there's something equally nice about that fragile helium bittersweet bliss you get on a lot of the really trebly tunes - not a hit, but Artful Dodger's remix of Valerie M's "Tingles 2000" is an ace example of this)

Then the return to bass (esp. led by The Wideboys) actually started 2-step's drop away from popular crossover. But the scene had had a chance to establish itself outside of London by virtue of that window of crossover success.

I would say that as a general rule the primary crossover audience for bass stuck with drum & bass during that period and then switched to dubstep subsequently.

I think funky's lack of crossover success is pretty easy to explain actually, esp. by comparing it to 2-step at its most populist: by virtue of its distinct beat matrix and speed, 2-step was instantly identifiable even at its most smoothed out and songful and unthreatening ("Sweet Like Chocolate" probably being at the extreme point), so it gets the double benefit of being both interesting and comforting.

Whereas funky, when it smoothes itself out, is left with tunes that are practically indistinguishable from vocal house (e.g. Perempay & Dee's "Time To Let Go"), but if it stays jarring then it's... jarring. Esp. in a context where the rest of the pop landscape is disinterested in syncopation. 2-step had the benefit of coinciding with R&B at its most wired and jittery, so its rhythmic strategy made a certain amount of sense even in a pop context. Audiences are less forgiving of syncopation now though; I suspect this held back "In The Morning" somewhat.
 
G

gumdrops

Well-known member
the only real chance of funky crossing over at this point is if katy b is held up as some sort of magnetic man type figurehead for funky, but i dont think shes going to be (her albums prob gonna be a bit of everything). but if she was, she would be a good person to do that for all the obvious reasons. other than that, i think its just going to stay as a healthy underground thing for quite a while to come, with occasional bits of extra outside attention. tims theory about syncopation is interesting and prob makes most sense. chart pop and R&B hasnt been this rigid for god knows how long so funky doesnt really fit with that, whereas with 2 step, it had timbaland doing something similar. funky should just hang in there for a while til it gets someone like james blake lol.
 
Corpsey

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
I've noticed Americanisms creeping back into my online writing - 'ill' for example. Its not very surprising, though - when you spend a lot of time reading american writing/forum posts on hip-hop its bound to influence your own language. Hell yeah, its the mutability of muthafuckin language innit guv?
 
Corpsey

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
Didn't mean to derail the discussion re. funky crossing over, its an interesting subject. Especially when there are funky-ish tunes from outside funky like 'What U Talking About' that ARE crossing over, at least in terms of that student crowd who love Annie Mac and Toddla T etc.
 
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Tentative Andy

Tentative Andy

I'm in the Meal Deal
This prob won't add much of importance to anything, but in relation to what people were saying about funky not gaining an audience outside of east London/bits of Essex, can I just say that there is somewhere that's kind of an exception to this and that's the Midlands. As I've said before, loads of the funky producers who have risen to prominence from around 2009-ish are from that part of the country - Emvee, Sony, Andy Jay & S-Tee, Screama, Shay & Sinista, Naughty Raver, Illmana, Fully Kurrupted. The same goes for singers like Farah and Miss Fire, and on Twitter and on radio shows I'm often hearing about club nights in Birmingham with people like Marc Ryder djing. Recently loads of the big djs from Deja Vu and elsewhere were playing at this 'Supa Jam meets Road Block' event in Leceister which had a capacity of something like 3,000.
Of course, the scene there is still largely about clubbing rather than record buying/the charts, and I think at a lot nights funky will get played along bassline and other things (just like most of the producers I mentioned still also make bassline and bits of grime and so forth). In a way it's prob not surprising either as the west Midlands was one of the big strongholds for jungle when it was still very underground and otherwise a London based thing (heard some great old jungle tapes from places like Quest and the Edge).
 
Benny Bunter

Benny Bunter

Well-known member
Good point Andy, those Midlands based producers have made some of the best funky tunes out there, and they're getting played by Marcus Nasty so there's no higher compliment really. Bassline has been a big influence on some of the best LDN producers like Funkystepz and DJ Naughty to name but two. Easy to forget that its not completely a london thing. The parallels with Jungle are undeniable: the midlands is another heartland for this sound.
 
O

Ory

warp drive
emvee's "windrush" out next week on vinyl! not sure who that other guy is tho, sounds like bland post-dubstep.

SPEAKS004 – Emvee / Graphics – Future Runnings EP – 12″ Vinyl

a1 Emvee – Windrush
a2 Emvee – Strength
b1 Graphics – Blue Top
b2 Graphics – Brian Said to Me
 
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