That's why imo the emphasis should be on it being a nuum rather than the nuum. Can we get a rhizome into this?
that's why concepts like gilroy's black atlantic, erik davis' black electronic, eshun's black atlantic futurism, goodman's hyperdub, kevin martin's macro-dub infection, etc. are better starting points imo. they're be both specific and amorphous. you can see multiple continua running through each, and crossing over into others, infecting, becoming-, etc. without overly prioritizing one place, perspective or stream.
true if you talk about it as
a continuum amongst many then it does its job well but how often is it actually uttered that way (by anyone)? it's almost always deployed like this hagiographic singular thing: The Nuum. and fidelity to ideals of The Nuum implicitly determines a music's worth.
as i've said before,
it's very useful shorthand for a particular period which has largely receded. but sorry to say it's not rigorous. if you lay out everything that's gone on in UK music since the windrush, or hip-hop, or house arrived - or just since rave - and you start drawing lines between the bits you get something very tangled. and that's before you start adding in everything that's coming from elsewhere. yeah ardkore begat jungle, and jungle begat 2step, etc. but obviously that's not all that was going on by a mile. the term usefully points to futurist and fwd drives but its scope is still too narrow.
The Nuum necessarily has to write out what it considers peripheral to maintain its consistency - i.e. the 'non-hardcore' moments as SR describes them. for one thing that means writing out even the other scenes that ardkore gave way to directly. and how do you account for 'non-hardcore' elements popping up a couple of years later and driving some new Nuumological development?
plus, 'feminine pressure'* is a huge complicating factor because it represents a whole other continuum of musical development and crowds moving between scenes. and not coincidentally the impetus is often one scene's shift towards a more 'hardcore' stance, which usually entails a 'no gyal tune' undercurrent. somewhere, recently, i read someone saying that what's wrong with funky is that you'll never hear about police locking off its raves. that's about the crux of it - critics and punters with this nagging feeling that their tastes aren't legit unless they can make a claim for the music being dangerous or resistant.
long story short - it's useful shorthand for a period that has largely past. the term has problems and while it can be used in the multiple it rarely is, making it highly subjective and strictly genalogical. it depends on the idealization of 'hardcore' at the expense of other considerations, most notably what 'hardcore' means for those it marginalizes.
saying this is not to take a swipe at his oeuvre or say 'whataboutme.' as much as anything i think you've got a group people here who've been profoundly influenced by his work, now building on it, critically engaging it and calling him on what appear to be inconsistencies.
and just an aside, there are also several different issues getting tangled up in the posts above...
1 - the enduring usefulness of the idea of the hardcore continuum re: contemporary music
2 - whether fidelity to the nuum in itself is grounds for determining the worth of a music
3 - 1 & 2 aside, SR's cheap shots at uk house/funky. i don't think anyone cares if he likes it, just that he get to know his subject better before slighting it, as with dubstep before.
...
* which seems to refer to quite rigidly hetero sites, so even feminine pressure isn't singular.
