Pirate Utopias
The rave and the pirate radio show (the ‘rave on the air’) are exemplary real-world manifestations of two influential theoretical models, Hakim Bey’s ‘temporary autonomous zone’ (TAZ), and Deleuze and Guattari’s ‘desiring machine’. A decentred, non-hierarchical assemblage of people and technology, the desiring machine is characterized by flow-without-goal, expression-without-meaning. Powered by E-lectricity, the rave sound-system or pirate radio is a noise factory; the feedback-loop of the phone-in sessions makes me think of Hakim Bey’s vision of the TAZ as a temporary ‘power surge’ against normality, as opposed to a doomed attempt at permanent revolution. A power surge is what it feels like – like being plugged into the National Grid. A great MC’s effect has a literally electrifying effect on the listener; the audience is galvanized, shocked out of the living death of normality. ‘Come alive, London!’
’Ardkore is where rave’s anti-politics of rapture (techno as euphoria-generator without pretext or context) meets hip hop’s cut ’n’ mix. The combination of the DJ’s inexhaustible, interminable meta-music flow and the MC’s variations on a small set of themes, has the effect of abolishing narrative in favour of a thousand plateaux of crescendo, an endless successions of NOWs. Over and over, again and again, the DJ and the MC reaffirm ‘we’re here, we’re now, this is the place to be, you and I are we’.
This radical immediacy fits Hakim Bey’s anarcho-mystical creed of ‘immediatism’, so named to spell out its antagonism to all forms of mediated, spectacular, passivity-inducing leisure and culture. The rave is a machine for generating a series of heightened here-and-now’s, a concatenated flow of sonic singularities and ultra-vivid tableaux. If the illegal rave comes closest to Bey’s conception of the TAZ (which must always be a physical, tangible location), the pirate radio station works both as a ‘virtual’ TAZ-surrogate, and as an informational web that provides logistical support for the creation of future, geographically ‘real’ TAZs. Both these functions help to stoke the fires of anticipation and keep alive the dream that the TAZ will soon be reconstructed. While pirates continue to provide ads and news about raves and clubs, this ancillary role of radio was most pronounced during 1991 – 2, when DJs like the Rough Crew provided ravers with phone-line numbers and travel directions concerning Spiral Tribe’s free parties.
But perhaps what’s most subversive about the pirates resides not in its advertising of illegal raves, or even in its own crimes of trespass on the airwaves, but in the way they transgress the principles of exhange-value, commodity-fetishism and personality-cult that govern the music industry. The pirates fill the air with an endless, anonymous flow (DJs and MCs almost never identify tracks or artists) of free music (you can tape all the new tunes, long before their official release). In The Revolution of Everyday Life, the Situationist Raoul Vaneigem argued that a new, utopian reality ‘can only be based on the principle of the gift’. With their sacrificial expenditure of energy into the ether, their amateur pay-to-play ethos, the radio pirates have more than a whiff of the utopian about them. You can taste the freedom.
TEN
ROOTS’N FUTURE
JUNGLE TAKES OVER
LONDON
Notting Hill Carnival, August 1993. Black sheep of the post-rave diaspora, jungle has been banished to a small public park called Horniman’s Pleasance on the outskirts of the carnival zone. Adverts on pirate radio rave breathlessly about the park’s 25,000 capacity, but the event doesn’t quite live up to the hype. In fact, it’s a dismal turn-out: around twenty-five people have shown up. A few try to dance, in a desultory fashion; most stand around looking confused. After half-an-hour, my posse’s patience runs out, and we head back to the centre of the carnival, where the pumping house’n’garage systems have packed the side-streets off Portobello Road. A believer, I can’t reconcile the awesome vitality of the music seething out of the pirate airwaves, with this seeming proof that jungle just ain’t runnin’.
Notting Hill Carnival, August 1994. What a difference a year makes. This time, it seems like every other sound-system is blasting jungle, deafening and distorted through overdriven speakers. UK Apachi, man of the moment with his Top Forty cracking ‘Original Nuttah’ seems to be doing PAs at most of them; we see him perform at least three times. And wherever there’s a jungle system, the streets are choked with a crush of mostly young black bodies. Trying to make your way into the crowd to get closer to the speakers is impossible; it’s a battle even to stand your ground, let alone dance. And every so often, people start to scatter in a ripple effect – maybe because it looked like a fight was about to start, like someone had pulled a gun or a blade. Within seconds, people a few rows ahead have turned on their heels and are sprinting full-tilt straight at you, eyes wide with terror, and you’re running too, to avoid a collision and whatever appalling incident has sparked the panic. Then almost instantly the fear dissipates, calm is restored, the MC offers some platitudes about peace and unity, and the sound-system detonates again. 1994, and jungle is running ’tings in London town right ’bout now.
‘We like the speed of it, the barrage of stimuli. People often think of psychedelic experience in terms of slow-and-dreamy music, but rushed, garbled music like jungle is closer . . . It’s part of the whole speeding-up process of Western society. And you can’t have an escalated culture without more extremes of everything, positive and negative.’
– Kevin Shields, My Bloody Valentine
Out of the fluxed-up chaos of ’ardkore evolved an entirely new sound, a new subculture: jungle. Between 1992 and 1994, jungle shed the chrysalis of hardcore, and with it, every last vestige of the rave ethos. The only element of hardcore rave to survive was the sheer velocity of the music; it was as though Ecstasy culture had permanently hyped up the metabolism of a generation.
The speed aspect is crucial. Scene insiders offer platitudes like ‘jungle is a feeling’. But if you need a definition, then the music’s core is the accelerated, chopped-up breakbeat rhythms that create that feeling – what Bjork crystallized as ‘fierce, fierce, fierce joy . . . sort of “I’m just too happy, I want to explode.” ’ Happy isn’t quite the word: jungle’s militant euphoria is fuelled by the desperation of the early nineties. Composed literally out of fracture (‘breaks’), jungle paints a sound-picture of social disintegration and instability. But the anxiety in the music is mastered and transformed into a kind of nonchalance; the disruptive breakbeats are looped into a rolling flow. In this way, jungle contains a non-verbal response to troubled times, a kind of warrior-stance. The resistance is in the rhythms. Jungle is the metabolic pulse of a body reprogrammed and rewired to cope with an era of unimaginably intense information overload. As such, its rhythmic innovations will pervade popular music well into the twenty-first century, as insidiously and insinuatingly as rock ’n’ roll, funk and disco have done in the past.
Renegade Snares and Brutal Bass
‘Percussion music is revolution.’
– John Cage, 1939
A breakbeat is the percussion-only section of a funk or disco track, the peak moment at which dancers cut loose and do their most impressive steps. In the mid-seventies Bronx, DJ Kool Herc invented the hip-hop technique of looping these breaks into a continuous, hypnotic groove, by using two turntables and two copies of the same record. By the mid-eighties, rap producers were using sampling and sequencing technology to loop beats with greater precision.
Prized for their gritty, live feel, breakbeats come from James Brown and his band the JB’s, from the Meters, Kool and The Gang and the Jimmy Castor Bunch, from fusion artists like Bob James and Herbie Hancock, and from a legion of obscure funk and disco artists of the seventies. As hip-hop culture burgeoned in the early eighties, the choicest breakbeats – like ‘Apache’ by the Incredible Bongo Band – were collated on ‘Breaks and Beats’ compilations. The most famous break in all of jungle is ‘Amen’, a hard driving snare-and-cymbal sequence from ‘Amen, My Brother’ by the soul group The Winstons. Chopp
ed up, processed through effects, resequenced, ‘Amen’ has been used in thousands of tracks, and is still being reworked. How would the drummer in the Winstons respond, if you told him that a stray moment of casual funkiness, thrown down in a studio in 1969, had gone on to underpin an entire genre of music? Close behind ‘Amen’, there’s the classic break from Lyn Collins’s ‘Think’, in which James Brown yells ‘you’re bad, sister’ to Collins. Sped-up so that JB sounds like a funky elf with a chronic case of hiccups, ‘Think’ became a feverish, percussive tic almost as ubiquitous in jungle as ‘Amen’.
In the early nineties, many house and techno producers had started to use breakbeats in tracks, either to add extra polyrhythmic ‘feel’ or simply because it was easier to loop and speed up a segment of ‘real’ drums than to program a drum machine. As breakbeat house and hardcore grew popular, this short-cut was transformed into a positive aesthetic by younger producers, many of whom had been original British B-boys. Living up to the root meaning of that term (the B refers to ‘breaks’), producers like Gavin King of Urban Shakedown, DJ Hype, and Danny Breaks of Sonz of A Loop Da Loop Era layered multiple breakbeats to form an exhilarating bedlam of clashing and meshing polyrhythms.
This hyper-syncopated hardcore drew more Black British kids into rave culture, catalysing the feedback loop of black influence that resulted in jungle. But the breakbeat mess-thetic alienated as many as it seduced. While jungle, like most pop music, is in 4/4 time, it lacks the stomping, metronomic four-to-the-floor kick-drum that runs through techno, house and disco. Eurodisco pioneer Giorgio Moroder had deliberately simplified funk rhythms to make it easier for white dancers; the ‘jungalistic hardcore’ that emerged in 1992 reversed this process, and for many ravers, it was simply too funky to dance to. That year, Josh Lawford of Ravescene magazine prophesized that the breakbeat was ‘the death-knell of rave’, and in a sense, he was correct. But it was more than just the disappearance of the four-to-the-floor kick that alienated ravers. Jungle’s dense percussive web destabilizes the beat, traditionally the steady pulse of pop music. Breakbeats make the music feel treacherous. The in-built safety factor in most machine-made dance music, the predictability that allows the listener to trance out, was replaced by a palpable danger. Jungle makes you step in a different way, wary and en garde. It was this edginess that drove many ravers out of the hardcore scene and back to house.
Through 1993, these rhythmic innovations matured into a veritable breakbeat science. Sampled and fed into the computer, beats were chopped up, resequenced and processed with ever-increasing degrees of complexity. Effects like ‘time-stretching/compression’, pitchshifting, ‘ghosting’ and psychedelia-style reverse gave the percussion an eerie, chromatic quality that blurred the line between rhythm, melody and timbre. Separate drum ‘hits’ within a single breakbeat could be subjected to different degrees of echo and reverb, so that each percussive accent seems to occur in a different acoustic space. Eventually, producers started building their own breakbeats from scratch, using ‘single shot’ samples – isolated snare hits, hi-hat flutters, et cetera. The term ‘breakbeat science’ fits because the process of building up jungle rhythm tracks is incredibly time-consuming and tricky, involving a near-surgical precision. Like gene-splicing or designing a guided missile, the creative process isn’t exactly fun; but the hope is that the end results will be spectacular, or devastating.
Breakbeat science transformed jungle into a rhythmic psychedelia. Unlike psychedelic rock of the sixties, which was ‘head’ music, jungle’s disorientation is as much physical as mental. Triggering different muscular reflexes, jungle’s multi-tiered polyrhythms are body-baffling and discombobulating, unless you fixate on and follow one strand of the groove. Lagging behind technology, the human body simply can’t do full justice to the complex of rhythms. The ideal jungle dancer would be a cross between a virtuoso drummer (someone able to keep separate time with different limbs), a body-popping breakdancer, and a contortionist. Jungle demands extravagant, impossible, posthuman responses – it makes me wanna sprout extra limbs, rotate my upper torso in an 360 degree arc round my waist, morph into a springheeled panther, bounce off the ceiling, go all Tex Avery.
Alongside its kinaesthetic/psychedelic effects, jungle’s radicalism resides in the way it upturns Western music’s hierarchy of melody/ harmony over rhythm/timbre. In jungle, the rhythm is the melody; the drum patterns are as hooky as the vocal samples or keyboard refrains. In Omni Trio’s classic ‘Renegade Snares’, the snare tattoo is the mnemonic, even more than the three-note, one-finger piano motif. The original versions of ‘Renegade’ focus on a bustling, ants-in-your-pants snare-and-rimshot figure, like a cross between James Brown’s ‘Funky Drummer’ and an Uzi fusillade. The subsequent remix and re-remix by Omni’s allies Foul Play make the snares snake and flash across the stereofield like a streak of funky lightning. On all four versions, Omni and Foul Play make the drums sing inside your flesh.
This rhythm-as-melody aesthetic recalls West African music. It also parallels the preoccupations of avant-classical composers like John Cage and Steve Reich, who drew inspiration from the treasure-trove of chiming timbres generated by Indonesian gamelan percussion orchestras. Jungle fulfils the prophesy in Cage’s ‘Goal: New Music, New Dance’ of a future form of electronic music made by and for dancers. ‘What we can’t do ourselves will be done by machines and electrical instruments which we will invent,’ wrote Cage, seemingly predicting the sampler and sequencer.
Alongside breakbeat science, the other half of jungle’s musical core is its radically mutational approach to bass. Until mid-1992, the bassline in hardcore generally followed the 140 b.p.m.; on tracks like Xenophobia’s ‘Rush In The House’, the effect was as jittery as a shrew on the verge of a coronary, or, more to the point, a raver’s heartbeat after necking three E’s. Gradually, a slower bassline sound came in: at first, a seismic, sine-wave ooze of low-end frequencies; later a dub reggae bassline that ran at about 70 b.p.m. beneath the hectic breaks. The half-speed bassline transformed jungle into two-lane music, tempo-wise. Just as if you were driving on the motorway, you could enter in the slow lane, and groove to the skanking B-line, then shift to the fast lane when you felt like flailing to the drums.
As the beats grew ever more complicated, the bass took on a sophisticated melodic and textural role that broke with the metronomic, pulsating basslines in techno. Making a parallel with forties bebop, David Toop described this role: ‘bass is returned to its function as a physically felt harmonic/rhythmic component rather than a stun-gun which punches home the chord changes’. Physically felt is the key phrase: jungle’s sub-bass frequencies operate almost below the threshold of hearing, impacting the viscera like shockwaves from a bomb. ‘Rumblizm’ is how DJ Nicky Blackmarket designated jungle’s low-end seismology. New effects and new kinds of riffs emerged every month: stabbing B-lines that updated the ‘sonic boom’ effect that rap producers had got from detuning the Roland 808 drum-machine; reversed B-lines emitting a sinister, radioactive glow, a sound dubbed ‘dread bass’ after the Dead Dred track which made it famous; shuddering tremolo effects like a spastic colon; metallic pings and sproings like syncopated robot farts. Just as they had meshed together multiple strands of percussion, producers eventually deployed two or more basslines simultaneously. In jungle, bass – hitherto dance music’s reliable pulse – became a plasma-like substance forever morphing and mutating. Like the jittery breakbeats, this new dangerbass put you on edge – it felt like trying to dance over a minefield.
B-Boy Meets Rude Boy
How did this martial music emerge out of rave culture, with its loved-up, peacedelic spirit? Where did all the junglists come from, anyway? Some were original British B-boys who’d gotten swept up in the hardcore rave scene; others came from the reggae sound-system subculture of the eighties, whose music policy ran the spectrum of imported ‘street sounds’ from dub and dancehall to electro and rap.
Take the trajectory followed by Danny Breaks, the white wh
izzkid from Essex behind Sonz of A Loop Da Loop Era and later Droppin’ Science. As a schoolboy, Danny was into electro, breakdancing and ‘cutting up breaks on the turntables’. By the late eighties, Danny had decided that UK rap wasn’t ‘really runnin’. Even when the UK crews were rapping about everyday English life, ‘it didn’t come ’cross, ’cos so much of the flavour of rap is the American voice.’ Rap also never developed the political role (what Chuck D called ‘black folks’ CNN’) that it did in America, because, Danny argued, ‘black and white are more integrated in Britain, at least amongst the young. There’s outposts of racism like skinheads, but most of the youth don’t care about your colour.’ Because of this, British youth were always more interested in hip hop’s sampladelic sorcery and breakbeat-manipulation, rather than the verbal, protest side of rap.
Energy Flash: A Journey Through Rave Music and Dance Culture Page 33