The articles I've complained about have been XLR8R/Urb/Guardian not FACT I don't thinkThis may be splitting hairs Tim but I posted the Scratcha URB mini-mix (personally I think it's excellent) & interview upthread.
You may well have come across it elsewhere, but regardless the preamble name-checks Roska, Cooly G & Geeneus, whilst in the short piece itself Scratcha - in addition to being completely self-effacing about his position within Funky - also mentions Fingaprint & Supa D.
Now, URB is a US publication. My point being that to send for this appears, well, miserly, considering that to many of their readers this would presumably have been the first they would've seen of some of these names. You surely can't expect a piece on (for eg.) Devine Collective, who most people here haven't even caught onto yet!
Could be a case of taking a look out of the forest to see the trees?
Don't want to bore people by going over the same ground over and over again, but since my position on this appears to be difficult to understand...
I actually posted the same link on ILX's UK funky thread, noting that I thought Scratcha came across excellently - as he does on his Rinse Breakfast show, a really great guy who tries to promote a lot of different parts of the scene.
And of course his own stuff deserves attention - I thought "Hard House" was one of the best funky tracks of last year (shame it's not on the mini-mix).
What bugged me was the writer feeling it was necessary to say this:
"Overall, it’s been tough to gauge a concrete grasp of what’s artistically and creatively fruitful in the genre of UK Funky. However, certain DJs and producers are giving the genre a backbone along with the pop cheese. Producers like Roska (or Mentor Roska, as he’s affectionally referred to), Cooly G, and Geeneus have all been pivotal in the shake-up of UK Funky, providing intrigue, depth, and necessary weight to a genre dominated by percussion and diva vocals."
Quite oddly, the writer half-admits that (s)he is finding it difficult to follow funky, but then blithely commits to the argument that these four producers must be the people offering "backbone", "intrigue", "depth" and "necessary weight" to balance out what (s)he describes as "pop cheese".
Why would a writer who is probably rather aware of the superficiality of their familiarity with a scene still feel compelled to big up the artists they like at the expense of the genre at large?
The short answer is probably that XLR8R said so.
The longer answer is: Because this is how rock criticism and dance criticism is structured for the most part. We love our iconoclasts. We like the idea that the artists we check for are bold, brave, questing individuals who rebel against and transcend the (insert phrase to describe the irredeemable unadventurousness and lightweightness of their host scene - hey, "pop cheese" will do!) of their parent genre.
And we proceed to apply these structures of judgment even when we half-know we really have no idea what we're talking about.
Well, "we" do this.
This is something I'm fairly aware of in writing, and for all my kvetching here, for all the times I've been told I'm miserly or curmudgeonly, I think I'm pretty careful to write about given artists in a way that talks positively about their relationship to their genre, both in terms of points-of-similarity and points-of-difference.
Really any producer who is worth their salt and who amasses a decent number of ace tracks will not be able to be reduced to being merely an expression of genre - not legitimately anyway. So of course there's a role in criticism highlighting this, saying "look what Scratcha or Roska or Mad.One or Scotty D or Royal P or whoever does which is novel and distinct and exciting."
But I wish this was done in the context of a spirit of listening that thought "isn't this great that funky has so many talented and unique producers like this" rather than "what a relief that this iconoclastic producer is here to save us from having to listen to other funky..."
