Mod
Magazine Chocolate
Weasel
Shop
|
Jungle It unified techno with hip-hop and dancehall influences. A music that thrived through a network of small independent labels, specialty record shops, and illegal pirate radio, until thousands of ravers were showing up at clubs and parties in London to hear it. DJs and producers created rooms filled with sounds of intense reggae, ragga and hip hop basslines propelled by brutal, stop/start breakbeat drum patterns copped from R&B, jazz and funk tracks decades old. Nearly a decade ago, hardcore techno’s treacherous, jagged breakbeats began to strafe the body’s on dancefloors. Dancing was like striding into a stream of machine gun snares and bass bombs sending shockwaves through one’s chest cavity. Hardcore techno (the definition has changed a great deal to now reference 200+ BPM Gabber styles) record labels filled specialty shops with 12”s of danger beats, incongruously swathed with soothing, silken tenderness strings, harps, and jazz fusion. Back in ‘89 breakbeat (or hip house) was the same BPM as techno; records by LFO and early Warp releases were played alongside Shut Up And Dance. After the MDMA-driven explosion of techno in British nightclubs spinning American House music in 1988 (on labels like Derrick May’s Transmat recently chronicled by Sweater magazine), dance music started to splinter into sub-genres like 'progressive house' and 'intelligent techno' each with its own specialist following and social profile. Rave music was largely scorned by the clubland elite, with its fast, unsophisticated sound and its audience stereotyped as a teenaged, druggy and unfashionable underclass. It was from this perceived subculture that hardcore emerged. Charged with frantic energy, it added influences from hip hop and reggae to the house music blueprint. It was an exciting new hybrid, which, unlike House itself was a genuinely British invention - - jungle was born. Traces of jungle go as far back as ‘89 when reggae samples first made their way onto techno records, and DJs started experimenting with sped-up beats. Jungle in the present tense started taking off between ‘91-’93, having evolved out of the 140+ BPM leanings of Britain's hardcore scene and DJs' tendencies to spice things up with new basslines. Producers started to make tracks using breakbeats from rap records, sped up to the 150 BPM techno pace. The evolving sound caught on like wildfire, giving birth to a druggy, underground subculture deemed ‘hardcore.’ At the same time, producers were pioneering ragga-techno with tracks like `Spliffhead,' which hurled reggae dancehall chants into the mix. Hardcore's rolling breakbeats and rumbling bass lines drew more and more new kids in, who in turn imported influences from dub reggae and soul. By ‘93, hardcore had evolved into jungle: who the press stamped as the ‘rude-boy’ street sound of London. LTJ Bukem’s oceanic hardcore tracks “Atlantis” and “Music” marked the turning point for hardcore. Jungle's fusion of ragga and techno was a natural progression from the ‘urban’ styles that came before and the end of the cartoon phase of Rave culture. In late ‘92, the dominant hardcore sound was still 'Happy', i.e. a mixture of sped up helium-fed voices, oscillator riffs, and the requisite 150 BPM stutter-beats. The seed's of hardcore's manifestation into jungle were already audible. Metalheads’ 'Terminator' invented the 'dark' sound, with it's eerily processed beats and samples. Through the first half of '93, two overlapping sub-genres - ‘dark’ and drum ‘n’ bass - increased hardcore's isolation. Drum ‘n’ bass transformed hardcore into relaxing ambient music; rhythm itself became a fluid to immerse yourself, while the body responded to the half-speed, heart-murmur bassline. Whereas, alienated by the moody, loveless atmosphere which the dark sound generated, many 'happy hardcore' fans defected to clubs which programmed progressive House and Garage where the old 'hands in the air' style euphoria and togetherness of the early rave scene survived (albeit in a muted form). But the dark sound opened up a vital space for experimentation. With it's premium on weirdness and disorienting effects, darkcore was the underestimated return of early 80's British avant funk. Like hip hop, jungle was (as stated by the press) to have blossomed out of the ghettoes and low-income districts as an outlet for the underclass. It survived and flourished initially without the support of any mainstream media, building its reputation by word of mouth, through underground happenings and the help of pirate radio. From car stereos and the open windows of local record shops that once stocked only reggae and soul, it had an unmistakably distinct sound: a hybrid of drum and bass; the sounds of ragga, strings, rare groove and the occasional abstract jazz break. The sound of jungle. By no means a new musical form but an offshoot of the hardcore scene that at the time represented the mainstay for rave culture: a scene universally shunned and patronized by both the mainstream and dance elite alike. Back in the
day, jungle was a scorching combination of firing beats, synth, bass and
ragga samples. But already brewing was an unmistakable difference between
manufactured and genuine jungle; the difference between ragga and jungle.
Early on jungle was mistakenly identified by its dependence on ragga samples;
the samples that gave jungle an identity. Part of the early style was
brewed with the ragga element, yet it was marked as false to the form
just to put a break underneath a reggae sample and sell it as jungle. Musically, hardcore was a London-and-surrounding-counties based offshoot of techno defined by sped-up, looped breakbeats as opposed to the linear, programmed rhythms of trance & house. Always more multiracial than other post-Rave scenes, hardcore got 'blacker' as hip hop, ragga, dub and soul began to filter into the music and by ‘93 having evolved into the hardcore/Jungle (the words at the time being interchangeable) scene that was universally shrugged off as non-essential. Soon the press, record industry and legal radio stations woke up to jungle; which at the tim, the focus was only on ragga-Jungle, the confluence of accelerated breakbeats and MC chatter. Hardcore began to shift towards a slightly self-conscious 'maturity'. And ironically some of jungle's experimental vanguard resorted to the same rhetoric once used by evangelists for progressive house and intelligent techno - to dismiss hardcore as 'juvenile' and 'anti-musical'. Often the 'maturity' and 'intelligence' resided less in the music itself than the context that surrounded it, i.e. reverent, sedentary contemplation as opposed to sweaty, boisterous physicality. Jungle soon was on the verge of a similar generationally-based schism, as older hardcore artists got frustrated by the limits of the 12" and started to make music that worked better at home than on the dancefloor: problematically establishing an 'armchair hardcore'- easy listening music with breakbeats. Early on a handful of sub-genres had come out of the jungle camp helping blur its definition, but straight-up jungle music depended the inclusion of a reggae bassline at 90 BPM and drums going at 180. More ambient hardcore/jungle gave the music room to breathe and became easier to dance to. Like the half-speed reggae bassline, the soul step made sub-genres of jungle smooth-grooving, wind-your-waist music; sexy even. Change from manic to mellow accompany a shift in patterns of drug use within the jungle milieu: less and less club-goers were taking E, instead favoring ‘skunk”. A smoking vibe, the languor of marijuana replaced the speed-freak spasms. A rumbling bassline builds slowly, before the heady machine-gun fire of sped-up breakbeats showers the crowd en masse, sending arms flailing wildly, lighters in the air and whistles shrieking all over the place. Then the bass hits and everyone really goes berserk. When the song ends, there's a brief pause before the MC gauges the crowd's reaction. Naturally, they are requesting, actually demanding, "Rewind! Rewind! Rewind!" With chants of "wheel up", a phrase similar to the reggae catchword, "rewind," which instructs the DJ to replay a track from the beginning. And because the first wave of jungle was born out of the reggae and gangster element in the UK, there's none of the frivolity that came along with the original 1988 Summer of Love raves. People take this music and lifestyle quite seriously. The jungle experience does not rely on the DJ alone as with Techno. In clubs, DJ' sets are punctuated by the shouts and exhortations of emcees who, like those in ragga clubs, toast to the records and lavish praise when DJ do well. A good emcee maintains the flow without interrupting with a DJ’s set; a set of test pressings of records they might have made that afternoon. It's also the emcee whose contribution is most responsible for the comparisons between jungle and hip-hop. A huge proportion of the music that was hot in the clubs cannot be purchased: a notion that breaks with all record biz logic. This is due to jungle’s dependence on the dubplate. Artists give influential DJ's a pre-release version of a track on acetate of which they press only a few at a mastering lab rather than a pressing plant. The DJs have borrowed the dubplate idea from Jamaican sound systems of the 70s who pressed up their own tracks in order to outdo their rivals. Now, top DJ's desperate for exclusives to spin, hook up their own or others’ dubplate tracks for each gig. Jungle musicians not only sample rhythm tracks from old soul and funk songs; they also chop the drum patterns into pieces and rearrange them, often several times throughout the course of a song. This results in a cacophony of rough, complex, ever-changing rhythms that have become jungle's signature sound. Lyrics, if any, are usually culled from old reggae and soul records and film soundtracks, or supplied by a live reggae MC. Drumbeats, words and sounds are compressed, stretched or treated with echo and spacey effects, much like in Jamaican instrumental dub music, to create a sound its purveyors best describe as "mad." Jungle can be stop motion bass that lurches and shudders until it's caught in a labyrinthine maze-mesh of ballet-like ballistic beats starts as dive-bomb and jetstrafe before becoming brisk lateral warps and quarks that flare above your head and make your ears squint as your body struggles to process them. Or the usual breakbeat equation where healthy slabs of breakbeat enclose a thin slice of melody. Vocals sparkle and surge, underpinned by measured bursts of breakbeat. And the breakbeat itself is being manipulated, chopped up to create a far more improvisational and organic, less rigid sound. shooting dub echoes and crashing, inverted beats into raw, cut-up oblivion. The ruff beats and stabbing subsonic bass embody a ghettocentric survivalist toughness. But because attention has focused on the likes of M-Beat and General Levy, hardcore's progressive vanguard has been neglected - those producing a sound known variously as 'Ambient', 'intelligent' or 'deep' hardcore. It's music of such undeniable beauty and innovation that even Trance heads and Detroit-nostalgics are starting to turn onto it, while other artists are incorporating Junglist elements into their sound and it's even crossed over to the indie rock brigades with the likes of Third Eye Foundation and Trans Am. Thus, an astonishing soundclash of tenderness and terrorism - demonstrating that hardcore could become more conventionally 'musical' without losing it's edge. |