Domu is one of those bad-ass deejays in the style that we love here at ISM. I can remember when he played in Pittsburgh back in early ‘04 he was dropping James Brown, classic disco, Amp Dog Knights’ “I’m Doing Fine”, broken beats, and jazz records all over the place in a fresh style. Then the next day he came into the shop I work at and bought a bunch of great shit, including the then fresh-from-the-distributor Omar-S 002, one copy for him and one for Dego from 4 Hero. Domu’s entry into dance music came through his drum and bass releases on the classic Reinforced label as Sonar Circle and Static Imprints. The 4 Hero connection led to him releasing on the then new 2000 Black label, which is of course possibly the most famous of the broken beat labels. He has since expanded into soul, house, disco edits, melodic techno, hiphop, and basically every style of music we cover here. So obviously, this is our kind of guy.
That makes it all the more important to pay attention to what he has to say about the effect of “scenes” in this blog post (you should be checking out his blog anyway!). The broken beat scene was originally based around the concept of free form deejaying in a soulful style (does this sound familiar?!?!), especially at the Co-Op night mentioned in the post. It eventually dried up and died off completely, and the world of music was left that much poorer as a result. He has a few ideas about what caused the death of broken beat that are pretty interesting, and could only come from someone who was so intimately involved with that scene.
Regardless of why broken beat died, he does point out that soul and experimentalism are being injected into music from all sorts of places in 2009. And he goes on to champion DIGGING for this new music that both breaks and creates rules, which is of course what we exist to promote. An open minded approach can fit into many different scenes, and more importantly it can connect them. I watched my boy Selecta drop Omar-S, Osborne, Recloose, and Louie Vega records for some breakdancers the other night and they ate it up. Good music can transcend so many barriers.
That said, I believe that you can still predict which scenes are going to give you the best results. Sure, broken beat died off, but the “Beatdown” style of house music from Detroit has been around since before broken beat, and it continues to be ESSENTIAL music to this day without ever compromising the openminded eclecticism that defined it in the first place. To me, it seems that the “scenes” that create the problem are ones driven more by the cultural legacy of rave music. The guys over at mnml ssgs made a post recently about their changing ideas about consumption of dance music. When I read that piece, it was obvious to me that they were having a problem with the exact same aspects of dance music that led me to despise raving despite liking some of the music they played at raves.
The great part is that the culture of house and techno music does sit outside of that sphere of influence, even if there are many parts that mingle with rave to this day. Once you step outside of the conventions of rave music, these problems become less and less apparent. How can we continue to separate the good dance music from the spectre of raving and what that brings along with it? The mnml ssgs guys talk about putting on events where the music doesn’t go all night, which is already done amongst soulful dance fans in NYC who have had legendary Sunday morning parties to go to for many years. The Chosen Few picnic in Chicago is another great event that puts house music out there for people to see in the daylight, so that more people can understand that dance music isn’t just drugged up idiots dancing in the dark to music that all sounds the same. Don’t get me wrong, I love a great night in a club with a fantastic deejay playing, but this music isn’t just a hedonistic soundtrack to drug binges.
The more we can build a network of people who love good music ALL THE TIME and IN ANY PLACE, the stronger the music coming from it will be and the less succeptible it will be to the negative aspects of the scenes that Domu discussed in his post.
two points:
“To me, it seems that the “scenes” that create the problem are ones driven more by the cultural legacy of rave music.”
I’m sorry but this is just nonsense. I mean 4 Hero, dons of broken beat, were also arguably the greatest of all the junglists & go back all the way to hardcore. you can’t get more “legacy of rave music” than that. more generally I think it’s silly to set up a false dichotomy between “rave” & “soulful/ecletic” whatever. not that it’s anything new, Derrick May being horrified at hardcore & so on.
also re: scenes. yeah, there’s a lot of crap that comes along with them but I think there’s a strong case to be made for genre music as often more vital than the more experimental stuff pushing around the edges. or at least that both are necessary & complement each other.
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pipecock reply on May 5th, 2009 3:59 pm:
i think if you ask 4 Hero about their roots, they will tell you that they were into the black music that influenced hardcore and then jungle and they just continued on with that. no matter what, even broken beat was still heavily by what was left of rave’s influence and i think that helped lead to it dying. it seems to me that the turnover rate in the “rave” scene due to people getting way into drugs and then ditching it altogether when they “get old” or whatever is one of the main culprits. it doesn’t leave a long enough history intact for music to develop in. that isnt the case in non-rave music where you usually have a better mix of older and younger people both making and appreciating music together.
also i dont think Domu is against “genre” music as a whole. what he is getting at is that it becomes a problem when the genre feeds back on itself over and over with no new direction. this is another place i think house and techno music have a good track record; they maintain their history and accept new sounds at the same time.
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padraig reply on May 5th, 2009 5:40 pm:
re: 4 Hero – that’s exactly my point. there is no arbitrary rave/non-rave distinction. they were into hip hop & Detroit techno but also daft rave music (for that matter a lot of classic Detroit techno is also daft rave music). surely their ability to draw on & fuse elements from both together was/is their greatest strength?
it seems you’re first positing two sides, “rave” & “soulful” (both of which have a bunch of assumed values to them), then attributing everything bad to rave & everything good to soulful. if that’s not what you’re saying please correct me. if it is that’s a ridiculous claim to make.
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pipecock reply on May 6th, 2009 12:25 pm:
rave was not 100% bad, but very close to it. more importantly, it was the values held within the rave culture that draws the line. 4 Hero were interested in making timeless soul music. for a (very short) while, that involved making rave music. then they moved on. they could only make their current music by leaving rave culture behind 100%.
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padraig reply on May 6th, 2009 3:07 pm:
“rave was not 100% bad, but very close to it.”
so, essentially, you’re saying it is.
I don’t know 4 Hero, have never talked to them, so I’m not going to get into a debate over their intentions. tbc tho – are you taking this from an actual source (like an interview or a book or 4 Hero themselves) or are you just superimposing your own version/agenda? if it’s something I can read by all means please point me to it.
second – when, specifically, did they “move” on from rave music? thus allowing themselves, in your view, to get on with “timeless soul music”. that is, again, what would you classify as “rave music”?
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pipecock reply on May 6th, 2009 6:36 pm:
i remember reading some interview with Marc Mac around the time their last LP dropped where he was talking about how they identified as soul/jazz/funk musicians for the entire time they were making records. i would have to dig through my old magazines to find it.
but i think you can hear clear divergence in their music from what was typical rave music by the mid-90s at the latest. Jacob’s Optical Stairway, and then by 4 Pages youre looking at music that has more to do with techno and jazz fusion respectively than it does with rave music.
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padraig reply on May 5th, 2009 5:47 pm:
sorry but also have to take issue with rave doesn’t “develop”. rave/ardkore-jungle-UKG & 2 Step-grime & dubstep. there are innumerable strands running all thru those musics that link them together. even broken beat. also I don’t know nearly as much about it but I’d reckon the same is true of the stompy hoover/trance German side of things, all the way thru to mnml. Oliver Lieb, for example.
perhaps it’d help if you clarified what you mean by “rave”, which after all is a term used to mean many different things.
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pipecock reply on May 6th, 2009 12:29 pm:
it doesn’t “develop”, rave relies on trends and moves on quickly when the “next big thing” comes around.
i mean, even looking within drum and bass, you cant play a track from 15 years ago in a set with new stuff and have it make sense to the general public who consume it. house and techno are exactly the opposite, you can play records from 35 years ago and it still makes sense with new stuff.
it wasn’t until like the last year or two that anyone in dubstep would consider playing records from only 10 years ago by cats like El-B in their sets.
it was these problems with rave culture based music that made me give up on listening to that music almost altogether (aside from the great shit from the past that i still have). i can’t stand the idea of music only being good and useful for a short period of time. that is pretty much one of the DEFINING ideas of rave music, unfortunately.
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padraig reply on May 6th, 2009 3:14 pm:
alright. so then it’s a preference – you prefer music which doesn’t undergo radical shifts, which stays more or less the same for extended periods of time. that’s fine, obv preferences aren’t things that can be wrong or right.
what I disagree with is making the value judgement that your preference is the right & better one. what you call “trends” other people might call exciting developments (or whatever). where you favor consistency other people might (& do) prefer radical shifts, a continual bubbling up on new ideas.
again I think it would help if you specified what you mean by “rave”. if you mean hedonistic drug-taking then yeah, agreed, that sucks when it’s a culture rather than a very occasional event, & it’s to the detriment of music. but it seems like you’re also including the entire lineage of rave music, which is kind of a baby/bath water thing.
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pipecock reply on May 6th, 2009 6:43 pm:
the problem with the “exciting developments” is that they are never true developments. they happen and fall out of favor very quickly. and that is exactly the kind of thing that happened with broken beat, 2-step, and jungle. in Domu’s original post he alludes to this, and it was this cycle that helped kill off broken beat.
even if you just look at what the cats who did broken beats are doing now, most of it has less to do with rave and more to do with hiphop, house, soul, or other genres. it seems like it was the last straw for many of those guys.
at this point i don’t think it even matters to get rid of all of rave’s influence in dance music. it lives on mostly in the clubby techno and dubstep realms right now, which are of course still the dominant forms of dance music covered by the press because their constantly shifting trends give writers lots of ammo to get all longwinded about. if you’re concerned with timeless music, i don’t think those are the places you go to hear music. that’s my point.
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Karl reply on May 6th, 2009 6:54 pm:
“the problem with the “exciting developments” is that they are never true developments. they happen and fall out of favor very quickly. and that is exactly the kind of thing that happened with broken beat, 2-step, and jungle.”
these “exciting developments” also gave birth to these genres. Off course they are “true developments”… This fast paced change and innovation may end up in trends and flavours of the month, but it also gives birth to new music, new genres and experimentation.
Also the fact that the music moves, changes and mutates quickly doesn’t mean that the good older stuff isn’t timeless in itself.
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pipecock reply on May 6th, 2009 7:39 pm:
to be honest, i think the last true “new” genre of any sort was hardcore/jungle. the other branches off of it have been more or less combinations of that style with other genres (speed garage adding jungle’s bass to house music, etc).
and i agree that the music is timeless in itself, but the problem is that the culture around it makes it so that older music may as well not exist aside from using it as sample fodder. the worst part is that people within those genres who DO look back and play older things get labeled as “retro” and never can achieve real popularity within the scenes. this same attitude is what made the mnml guys turn their noses up at the “retro” deep house until it suddenly became a trend to like music like that again. that kind of attitude irritates me, and it is one of the core values of rave culture.
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padraig reply on May 6th, 2009 10:37 pm:
generally – I don’t really disagree with you about the negatives of rave culture (mindless hedonism, press feedback loop, Next Big Thing syndrome, etc.) tho I do think it’s more of a mixed bag than you’re making it out.
as far as DJ-ing & that element of it – it does suck that music has that quick expiration date & that DJs/producers are forced to keep pump out BS just to keep up. I remember seeing an interview w/I think Dillinja (tho I might be wrong – some big name junglist who’d carried over to D) complaining about exactly that – that he had to spend so much time/effort churning out dancefloor crap that he didn’t have any time to actually make, yunno, good music.
what I disagree with is your notion that everything good comes from soul/funk culture & that everything bad comes from rave culture. again, I think that’s a false dichotomy. anyway, it seems like we’re just arguing about the semantics of “rave” at this point & I’m happy to agree to disagree anyway.
also I don’t know if it needs to be said but I wouldn’t even be wasting time on this if i didn’t think ISM was quality & that your opinion on dance music is worth reading.
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pipecock reply on May 6th, 2009 10:54 pm:
i don’t think i wrote rave off entirely, but i did say “I believe that you can still predict which scenes are going to give you the best results” and that’s really what my addition to Domu’s thoughts were about. the idea is to have a thriving, eclectic, and musically fertile group of people making, playing, and listening to music. one of the best ways to do that is to avoid rave culture since it kills those ideals if given enough time (and if anything, it seems like the time from good to bad music from a new genre in rave music is getting shorter, and shorter, and shorter… a problem caused by the hyper-quick communication of sound through the web?).
the problem is that many people lump all dance music together and consider it “rave” music, but culturally there is lots of good stuff (IMO the vast majority of it, especially at this point) that really has nothing to do with rave culture.
obviously rave music has put out great tunes. my problem with it lies in the fact that none of those continue to be active due to the culture that surrounds raving.
always feel free to disagree and aruge anything on here! that’s why it’s called discussion, not monologues by the ISM crew
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oh, also tbc – I what you’re saying in general, especially the bit about “good music can transcend barriers”. I just don’t see why you need to drag the rave strawman into it.
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Maybe it’s because I’m nowhere that was a ‘hotbed of rave’ that I look on that scene more kindly, because a lot of people I still vibe with I met in the early 90s around midwest raves. At the time it was neither particularly commercial, nor unusually drugged up. Or no moreso than any night at a rock club round these parts.
I have to continually plead with people I know that DJ to mix it up. I always figured it was what you were supposed to do — why _not_ drop something 30 years old in a set of new music, if it keeps things interesting and makes an interesting comparison both ways?
I honestly think that there’s something about ’scenes’ in big cities that can take away from the experience. First of all because there’s the inevitable faddishness involved. Second, because the drugs and inevitable criminality around them. I don’t judge people taking drugs, per se, but it’s pretty clear that a lot of potentially cool places — Limelight in NYC for instance — start out cool and turn into places for dealers to make big cash off people only there to get fucked up.
The best scenes imho are always the least ‘hip’ — not to put too fine a point on it, but if there’s a lot of black folks in the room who have paid for babysitters in order to go out and dance, you know it’s going to be real right.
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I would say that most of the music that you guys like and feature on here is (or has its roots) in hedonistic “rave” music, disco in ny? house in chicago?
all dance music in general has a very hedonistic side to it that shouldn’t be dismissed but neither should drug fueled pleasure seeking become the main point
I think you need to define your understanding of rave better too. Not sure that a guy with a background like Domu would agree. Im willing to bet that a lot of the broken beat people and the reinforced crew look favourably upon their early days and the hardcore music and raves of the early 90s.
Also I think that the sort of deep eclectic genre less approach that you advocate is a a scene in itself.
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pipecock reply on May 6th, 2009 12:35 pm:
house and disco have nothing to do with rave culture, they existed within their own offshoot of funk and soul culture for years before raves existed. rave may have bitten some of the hallmarks from that culture, but it didn’t take everything or it wouldnt have been different.
whether those guys want to look favorably on rave music or not, it doesn’t matter to me. i still listen to the music from rave culture that i like (Logical Progression Vol 1 is in my car CD player as we speak!), but all i have is disdain for the culture that killed off such a vibrant form of music and replaced it with “drum and bass”. that whole transformation is in fact the kind of thing that Domu talked about in that post (which has since been edited, irritatingly), so whether he realises it or not, he is not happy about it.
also not sure how eclecticism itself is a scene. my favorite producers and deejays generally tend to exist through a variety of “scenes” which arent related. is Waajeed part of the same scene as Shake? is Recloose part of the same scene as DJ Harvey? is Domu part of the same scene as Theo Parrish? i think of it as a style more than a scene, which makes much more sense. and that is what Domu wants, he wants to be able to do music in that style without having to worry about fitting into some “scene”.
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Karl reply on May 6th, 2009 4:21 pm:
Once again, I feel you need to clarify what you mean by rave.
My point was that house came out of a very hedonistic often drug fueled scene and the same goes for disco (sure there were other defining demographic/social/musical factors too). Whats the difference between the warehouse/music box and rage/blue note/fwd/”insert influential ravey club night”
“all i have is disdain for the culture that killed off such a vibrant form of music and replaced it with “drum and bass”
what about the really ravey hardcore stuff that came before? Early moving shadow, reinforced etc? Or the great dnb that came after? 2 Pages 4 Hero, Goldie, Roni Size, techstep, Optical, etc?
maybe your right about it being a question about style and not a scene. But what I mean is that a lot of these eclectic guys seem to play at the same circuit, the same clubs/festivals, go on the same radio shows, sign to similar labels etc (the guys you mentions being an example), and there’s a special crowd for these nights, a msg board crew etc.
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pipecock reply on May 6th, 2009 11:14 pm:
“Whats the difference between the warehouse/music box and rage/blue note/fwd/”insert influential ravey club night””
i mean, the differences are pretty huge, especially in terms of how music is consumed. i think i’ve touched on this difference enough in my other comments and in the original post, but to me that is a major factor and that difference is cultural.
“what about the really ravey hardcore stuff that came before? Early moving shadow, reinforced etc? Or the great dnb that came after? 2 Pages 4 Hero, Goldie, Roni Size, techstep, Optical, etc?”
Goldie, 4 Hero, Omni Trio, and many others are awesome producers who made great music. but ALL of them have strong connections to other music (usually house, techno, soul, jazz, funk, electro, etc) that makes them interesting to me still, unlike say Bad Company or whatever. it seems as though rave music begins eating itself as its primary influence, skipping all the other shit. that’s when it gets to be its worst. there are a few exceptions like Calibre or whatever who came out of nowhere, but they also never achieve huge popularity like the nonsensical rave shit.
as for the eclectic guys playing in the same circuit, sure that is gonna happen a bit. but i feel like they have a greater spread in the kinds of places they play and in the identification of the people in the crowd. i just made a post about Dam Funk who is another cat that should be thrown in with this movement. he is on a “hiphop” label, he makes synthy funk, he plays Larry Heard and Juan Atkins records, etc.
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padraig reply on May 7th, 2009 2:17 pm:
“Goldie, 4 Hero, Omni Trio, and many others are awesome producers who made great music.”
well thank f**k we can all agree on that
.
when talking about the connection of those guys to other music tho – really the key is hip hop, time & again. sooooo many of those dudes were b-boys first – Danny Breaks, DJ Crystl, Goldie, Remarc, Shut Up & Dance, DJ Hype, etc etc. – & the attitude/approach/vibe of jungle is much closer to hip hop IMO than house or techno, even if people were borrowing diverse sonic influences.
as far as “rave” as a culture I reckon it had a time & place & thereafter was a victim of its own success – businesspeople who didn’t really care about the music saw that there was $$$ to be made & so eventually you get this machine devoted to making $ that has little if anything to do w/the music. whereas in the States there was never any comparable breakthrough in popularity so things have been able to develop largely on their own terms.
it’s funny – I grew up w/punk rock before getting into electronic music & despite that being largely a youth culture it’s kind of similar to what you’re describing in that there’s often a greater mix of different ages – for example being from Pittsburgh you may be familiar w/Aus Rotten, who aren’t around anymore but all of them still play in other bands & are very much a part of the scene despite all being I guess in their mid-late 30s? again I would say as there’s no chance of making $ you wind up getting people who are really dedicated to the music/culture.
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pipecock reply on May 7th, 2009 2:37 pm:
sure, those guys in particular really had a basis in hiphop culture, and that is what initially attracted me to jungle. and despite being awesome and putting out so much great music, how many of those guys are still on the map? it’s a sad state of affairs. but they all got passed by by a culture that didn’t really appreciate what they were doing in a meaningful way.
also, punk is in my roots as well, that’s the other side of what attracted me to jungle in the mid-90s. it had the attitude of hiphop with the brute force of punk and a heavily DIY attitude. Aus Rotten are huge local heroes, they played the first punk show i went to and i used to be cool with them. their bassist Corey comes out to the local funk and soul night all the time. oddly, the drummer for Anti-Flag (also a pittsburgh underground sensation around 94, before they blew up and got retarded) was at my last monthly house gig. very odd. but yeah, punk is all about a community and a family. sure there are new young kids in it all the time, but the old guys are never forgotten.
that kind of approach to music that existed in both the hiphop and punk scene definitely influences me to this day. i HATED it when jungle changed and people just didn’t play the old shit anymore. for me, as someone who dug through the crates for old shit, that attitude just didn’t fly.
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padraig reply on May 7th, 2009 5:23 pm:
well I dunno if you’re interested but here’s a great, great interview with Shut Up & Dance where they speak to some of the things you’ve been talking about.
http://blogtotheoldskool.com/?p=974
they’re still around making music but yeah I’d have to say, exception to the rule. it’s funny, that rawness & DIY attitude was a big part of what attracted me to jungle too (I could say the same for the raw early Chicago house, same attitude in a lot of ways).
& not that matters but cos you’re a dude who clearly reps his city – I’ve been to Pittsburgh plenty of times & it has a great, great punk scene – one of the best, most mixed (age, gender, style) scenes I’ve ever witnessed. I’m a bit young to have seen Aus Rotten but I’ve seen Caustic Christ & Behind Enemy Lines (the two post Aus Rotten bands) plenty of times at house shows & Mr. Roboto & so on. PGH is great, one of my favorite towns.
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“but this music isn’t just a hedonistic soundtrack to drug binges.”
nail+head+hit
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The broken beat scene was a victim of it’s own exclusivity. Club nights that were difficult to attend, Co-Op for example. Records that seemingly never made it off dubplate, only in the hands of the chosen few. Too few influences feeding into it, a closed shop which eventually turned stale.
Yeah – and what the others say, no rave = no Reinforced = no broken beat.
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pipecock reply on May 6th, 2009 12:23 pm:
the dubplate exclusivity really only started getting out of hand near broken beat’s end, when tunes like “Future Rage” were played to death for seemingly years before finally coming out. that was drum and bass’ influence seeping in more and more, IMO.
i don’t agree that it was limited to the chosen few, either. plenty of broken beat music came from outside of London altogether! NYC, Detroit, Germany, Italy, all these places were making records that fit into that mould. Goya even distributed some straight up house and techno records.
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Stephen reply on May 7th, 2009 6:27 am:
2nd and last Sunday of the month in a small London club is pretty exclusive. Don’t get me wrong – I was a regular in the early Velvet Rooms days. Trace it back to Speed on Thursdays at the Mars Bar or Metalheadz at the Blue Note on Sundays. Fast forward (sorry) to FWD>>, it’s still a closely controlled scene.
Regards the dubs – I’ve got to disagree, it’s a necessary part of the culture. Trancend Me (big Co-Op anthem) has three years on Future Rage (in terms of release date) and was on dub easily as long. Aren’t dubs the new developments? They might be heading down dead ends (eg broken beat) but don’t they prevent everything turning into nostalgia (eg detroit techno)?
I dunno, I’m not sure if I’m arguing for or against here – just that these scenes will burn brightly for a short time, and move things on in the bigger picture of dance music. The scenes born from rave rarely have longevity, but the people in them do (eg Domu).
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You sure know how to get people’s backs up Pipey and I’m now compelled to post in a thread that I don’t even understand. IMO disco & house may not have anything to do with rave, but rave has a lot to do with disco & house. Assuming that we’re talking about rave being a scene and house being a style, I can’t help but see a connection: From the late 80s onwards Rave appropriated the House style. Like it or not, that is a connection. Christ, even the fact that we’re discussing it means there must be a connection.
I’m sure you know that in Britain and Ireland we have a style called Rave as well as a scene. A lot of folk I know, myself included, started out listening to ‘Rave’ (ie breakbeat hardcore) and discovered the good Chicago & Detroit shit through that, so this connection is paramount for someone like me. It doesn’t matter if that’s seen as incorrect by folk in the US. It’s a real tangible connection that I feel.
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pipecock reply on May 7th, 2009 1:16 pm:
i feel like the relationship between rave and house/techno is not a fair one. it is embraced when convenient, and then disregarded when it is no longer useful. i mean, pittsburgh got its exposure to house and techno primarily from raving. after disco, we had a pretty serious drop off before rave brought those musics here starting in the early 90s. so it IS useful in some way for gaining new recruits. but the inconsistency and the kinds of crowds at raves can be seriously bad news.
and yeah, i know about the idea of rave music (what Simon Reynolds has called the “hardcore continuum”, there’s been debate recently as to whether dubstep and funky house should count in there. i think its obvious that they should because of their lineage!). that music is most directly influenced by rave culture. other musics such as house, techno, electro, disco, etc all existed on their own outside of that. they may have played a big part at different times, but they are their own game especially culturally.
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That’s fine, but when you say house and disco have nothing to do with rave culture you only mean that cultural influence which is flowing into these genres as you see them. You’re only painting half the picture. Great art forms can transcend any kind of personal ownership and think this is true of great music as well. That said I don’t think you can state that the rave scene’s relationship with the disco lineage of house & techno as being fair or unfair. I do understand you’re preference for the original stuff, but the fallout from these amazing styles of music is inevitably going to end in places that are unexpected. I see it as a testament to the power of this music.
I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that it’s likely that when House kicked off in the 80s there were probably plenty of Disco heads that saw it as a bastardisation. And the same with Soul into disco before that.
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pipecock reply on May 7th, 2009 3:10 pm:
i mean, obviously i was down with the “bastardization” of hiphop that was jungle. and the bastardization of house that was 2-step. as you get further down the line, the original shit just isn’t there at all anymore and i just lose interest. like looking at average drum and bass today, does it have anything to do with hiphop or reggae? just about not at all. and this pattern of self consumption has been the case in every rave based form of music out of the UK. dubstep right now is where DnB was in about 98. the pattern repeats itself, and that is a cultural failure.
i have no problem with music mutating, but when the mutations happen so fast in a rush to be “the new thing”, that never yeilds good results. nothing can shed its past and continue to be interesting. messing with rave culture is like dancing with the devil, many many artists learned that lesson.
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platinumray reply on May 8th, 2009 5:34 am:
I totally agree. It’s just that over here we’re completely desensitised to things being crapified and all the goodness taken away for some kind of lowest common denominator shit, that I don’t really get bothered by it anymore. I focus on what I like.
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I was watching the ‘a London something dis’ doc from 93 the other day. Such a shame that energy was lost over time but people change and move on I guess. Here’s the documentary if you haven’t seen it already…
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5jd2Lr7C0nc&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tCXt62rfm18&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nSsBcdD0Wsg&feature=related
I’m not sure I agree with rave being a bad idea, it gives a freedom to music that isn’t always found in clubs – see the acid house and early jungle raves here, also plenty of warehouse raves around here before that such as those run by the Watson Brothers (http://www.djhistory.com/interviews/noel-watson) in the early 80s, who latched onto the Chicago house sound very early all the way back to when the term rave was coined for all night jazz parties. I guess what is bad is when people see these free spirited parties and try and replicate them for the wrong reasons (usually money I guess).
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because the post was deleted, here’s the google cache version: http://bit.ly/pabV2
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