Gabba Flamenco Crossover
High Sierra Skullfuck
Just read Blackdown's piece on funky and really enjoyed it. The way it came across to me was that there's a very definite sense that London's post-UKG elite are pulling away from Dubstep, and not thinking of it as 'their' music any more. Comments about the current dubstep scene in the piece were almost totally ambivalent-verging-on-negative, and it's really interesting that Soulja didn't seem interested in contesting this given how much she and Ammunition have riding on dubstep (by contrast they were careful to keep the door to the grime community open).
I also went to a squat party in west London over the weekend and heard dubstep rinsed on the main system, something that's now a regular event at squat raves. This has been building for more than a year now, but in the last few months dubstep has properly crossed over into the free rave scene.
It seems to me that this has come from two different angles. The rig owners, having often spent tens of thousands on their soundsystems, are unsuprisingly eager to play music that shows off thier pride and joy in the most devastating light. Certainly I've never heard dubstep sound as physical and overwhelming as it did on saturday, played on maybe the best free party rig in the country - a rig that would destroy all bar a tiny handful of London's club soundsystems.
But from the punters point of view, it seems that people have suddenly woken up to the amazing syncronicity between dubstep and ketamine, which I guess was totally unintentional on the part of dubstep's originaters. But K and dubstep were born for one another, just like extacy and acid house... and watching dubstep's sudden boom in squat raves has really reminded me of the lightbulb that went on over people's heads in 88-92 when they first took Es to house music.
It's really interesting to me that the sense of 'back to 2000' that Blackdown identifies in the piece locks into another late 90s timeline - from 94, when artcore jungle was a tiny scene, percieved by the mainstream dance audience as a throwback to a golden age of a few years before; through to 95 when D&B broke into the mainstream, and D&B producers revelled in a sense of 'we told you so'; into 96 and 97 as the doubts about the path D&B was taking were voiced with increasing volume within the London pirate scene, until 98 which was really the year that the London pirates completely abandoned D&B.
It seems that you could map that exact timeline onto dubstep 2003-2007. And the reason it's began to alienate the London massive is the same; the music has 'lost the soul' - like D&B before it, dubstep become a science of atom-splitting beats and bass manipulation that only works on the scale of the crowd.
And how fitting that this new London music is called funky - because 'the funk' is what dubstep had to squeeze out before it could be accepted by squat ravers. All the funky stuff of life - sex, lavisciousness, curve and swing, 'physical' in the human, sensual use of the word - are the traits that ketamine supresses. The sensations that dubstep now amplifies are 'physical' in the other meaning of the word - robotic, astral, post-human, the universe of bubbling plasma and lunatic physics that ketamine opens the door to.
So what we're seeing in 2007 is dubstep moving over the ketamine threshold - out of the London 'nuum of champagne, charlie and glamour/playa/laydeez culture, and into the provincial 'nuum of techstep, gabba, breaks and acid tekno. As a sometime champion of the provincial 'nuum and a long-time defender of free party culture, it's a little amusing to see London 'nuum heads retreating behind a wall of what is basically MoS-style funky house (love the paragraphs of sematic splitting in Blackdown's article) - are we seeing a little inverse-inverse-snobbery here?
Meanwhile I'm itching to see what the squatland bass technicians can mutate this music into. Dub-core, anyone? Maybe half-gabba?
I also went to a squat party in west London over the weekend and heard dubstep rinsed on the main system, something that's now a regular event at squat raves. This has been building for more than a year now, but in the last few months dubstep has properly crossed over into the free rave scene.
It seems to me that this has come from two different angles. The rig owners, having often spent tens of thousands on their soundsystems, are unsuprisingly eager to play music that shows off thier pride and joy in the most devastating light. Certainly I've never heard dubstep sound as physical and overwhelming as it did on saturday, played on maybe the best free party rig in the country - a rig that would destroy all bar a tiny handful of London's club soundsystems.
But from the punters point of view, it seems that people have suddenly woken up to the amazing syncronicity between dubstep and ketamine, which I guess was totally unintentional on the part of dubstep's originaters. But K and dubstep were born for one another, just like extacy and acid house... and watching dubstep's sudden boom in squat raves has really reminded me of the lightbulb that went on over people's heads in 88-92 when they first took Es to house music.
It's really interesting to me that the sense of 'back to 2000' that Blackdown identifies in the piece locks into another late 90s timeline - from 94, when artcore jungle was a tiny scene, percieved by the mainstream dance audience as a throwback to a golden age of a few years before; through to 95 when D&B broke into the mainstream, and D&B producers revelled in a sense of 'we told you so'; into 96 and 97 as the doubts about the path D&B was taking were voiced with increasing volume within the London pirate scene, until 98 which was really the year that the London pirates completely abandoned D&B.
It seems that you could map that exact timeline onto dubstep 2003-2007. And the reason it's began to alienate the London massive is the same; the music has 'lost the soul' - like D&B before it, dubstep become a science of atom-splitting beats and bass manipulation that only works on the scale of the crowd.
And how fitting that this new London music is called funky - because 'the funk' is what dubstep had to squeeze out before it could be accepted by squat ravers. All the funky stuff of life - sex, lavisciousness, curve and swing, 'physical' in the human, sensual use of the word - are the traits that ketamine supresses. The sensations that dubstep now amplifies are 'physical' in the other meaning of the word - robotic, astral, post-human, the universe of bubbling plasma and lunatic physics that ketamine opens the door to.
So what we're seeing in 2007 is dubstep moving over the ketamine threshold - out of the London 'nuum of champagne, charlie and glamour/playa/laydeez culture, and into the provincial 'nuum of techstep, gabba, breaks and acid tekno. As a sometime champion of the provincial 'nuum and a long-time defender of free party culture, it's a little amusing to see London 'nuum heads retreating behind a wall of what is basically MoS-style funky house (love the paragraphs of sematic splitting in Blackdown's article) - are we seeing a little inverse-inverse-snobbery here?
Meanwhile I'm itching to see what the squatland bass technicians can mutate this music into. Dub-core, anyone? Maybe half-gabba?
