After Timbaland’s rhythmatic influence kicked in, the next stage of interface between UK rave culture and US urban music took the form of a massive spate of bootleg ‘garage’ versions of R & B hits, like the Architechs’s helium-vocalled revamp of Brandy & Monica’s ‘The Boy Is Mine’, a tune that ruled London through most of 1999. Using timestretching to speed up the vocals so that they fit 2step’s brisker tempo, Architechs made the duetting divas sound like ghosts of themselves, wavery and mirage-like. They also added crowd noises ‘to make it feel like a contest between Brandy & Monica’, Architechs’s City told me. ‘We wanted it to sound like a real soundclash with the crowd dividing its support between the two girls.’ Having failed to interest Brandy’s UK record company EastWest in the idea of releasing the remix officially, Architechs put it out as a white-label bootleg. Played incessantly on the pirates, ‘B & M Remix’ eventually sold 20,000 copies – a staggering feat, given that regular record stores won’t stock bootlegs and the record was only available via London specialist stores. This craze for illegal remixes even transformed Whitney Houston into a London underground star – there were around ten different garage bootlegs of ‘It Ain’t Right, But It’s Okay’. Producer Zed Bias released a number of illicit remixes at the height of the bootleg mania, and says that he has it ‘on good authority’ from major label people that, far from being annoyed by the illegal bootlegs, ‘they want us to do unofficial remixes’ – partly because street buzz is a form of promotion and partly ‘on the off chance that a slamming bootleg comes out which they can pick up cheap. See, if they didn’t want us to do the bootlegs, they wouldn’t put the a cappellas on the 12-inches.’
Another R & B influence on 2step is the obsession with ‘vocal science’. Coined by dance pundit Anindya ‘Bat’ Bhattacharyya, vocal science refers to the techniques of processing vocal samples that 2step producers deploy to such intoxicating results. Going back to the harmony group SWV in the early nineties, R & B producers have long used technology to make the voice sound unnaturally bright, sweet and ‘perfect’ – mostly recently with the pitch-correcting device known as Autotuner, which can be misused to make a voice momentarily glisten with an angelic perfection that is eerily posthuman. 2step producers similarly use effects such as phasing to create a kind of cyborg-melisma, making the voice scintillate, twinkle or tremble. Updating the diva-sampling techniques of jungle, 2step producers micro-edit vocals into staccato riffs, treating ‘human soul’ as plasmatic material to vivisect and rhythmatize. In a weird way, it’s the more subtle deployments of these techniques that are most disconcerting (like the ecstatic shiver-stutter woven electronically into the word ‘re-e-e-mix’ on Artful Dodger’s remix of Craig David’s already ultra-warbly vocal on ‘Fill Me In’). It’s unnerving because the line between the human and the artificial isn’t so clearly defined and because the biomechanical bliss it incarnates is so seductive.
Although R & B remixes continue to stream out (reworking a current R & B chart hit = fast-money-music for 2step trackmasters on the rise and on the make), by 2000 the scene plunged into Phase Two of its merger of R & B with house: generating its own good songs and fine vocalists. After three years developing outside the limelight, UK garage shimmered like a galaxy of talent, from the pop garage of Artful Dodger and Shanks & Bigfoot, to the ‘musical’ option of Wookie and MJ Cole (guaranteed to please acid-jazz fans, Mercury Prize judges and owners of coffee tables worldwide), to the more experimental auteur-producers like Zed Bias, Dem 2, Groove Chronicles and Steve Gurley. Then there’s the entire subgenre of reggae-influenced garage outfits like Master Stepz and M-Dubs, who often work in tandem with charismatic MCs like Creed, PSG, Sparks & Kie and Richie Dan.
MCs are a crucial part of UK garage. Most started out in the jungle scene, but some come from a UK dancehall or home-grown hip-hop background. ‘Rappers and ragga MCs had a hard time in this country,’ says Ras Kwame of M-Dubs. ‘But now thanks to 2step, ’nuff man get a chance to come through and express themselves ’pon the mic.’ Building on the UK reggae sound-system tradition of ‘fast chatting’ and jungle MCs rapid-fire flow, garage MCs have developed a distinctively English style of sinuous and sibilant speed-rapping, riddled with stuttering effects and switching seamlessly between Jamaican patios and Cockney patter. Garage MCs also retain some of their original role as ‘host of the party’. It’s the MC who mediates between the dance floor and the DJ in the ‘rewind’ ritual, when the crowd shouts ‘Bo!’ if they love a record that’s just been dropped into the mix, whereupon the MC instructs the DJ to immediately stop the tune, manually ‘wheel’ the disc back to the start and ‘come again’. This audience participation ritual is so crucial in 2step that Craig David and Artful Dodger harnessed it for their breakthrough hit ‘Rewind (When the Crowd Say “Bo! Selector!”)’. When drum and bass gradually fell into the orbit of techno, the MC – both as sample-source taken from dancehall or rap records and as a live partner to the DJ in the club – began to disappear from the music. But the jungle MC reappeared in UK garage, effectively Jamaican-izing house music – a striking mutation, given the homophobia of dancehall reggae and the gay disco roots of house. Indeed, the rude-boy factor of the ragga patois voice in speed garage anthems like Gant’s ‘Sound Bwoy Burial’ probably acted to ‘inoculate’ against the ‘effeminate’ sensuality of house (in the tune the MC talks about ‘ruffhouse’, as if christening the new genre the track is birthing in front of our ears and sharply distinguishing it from regular house music). In 2step, the gruff, chest-puffed-out boom of garage MCs like Creed provides the yang to the high-pitched divas’ yin.
It’s not just dancehall, though: seventies dub and roots reggae also have a vital presence in UK garage. New Horizons, for instance, picked up on the latent Jamaican element in New York house (with its B-side dub remixes) and developed a strange and wondrous micro-genre of reggaematic house – from their 1997 classic ‘Find The Path’, with its churchy organ vamps, Gregory-Isaacs-on-helium falsetto, and skanking dips and afterbeats woven into the four-to-the-floor pump, to 1999’s ‘Scrap Iron Dubs EP’, with its bassbin-busting low-end frequencies and lewd ‘slam down ya body gal’ chants. Even stranger mix-and-blend came with R & B bootlegs like Large Joints ‘Dubplate’ and the anonymous illegal version of KP and Envyi’s ‘Swing My Way’. Both bootlegs set the divas’ gaseously processed vocal adrift in a dubby echo chamber, over a groove built from a flickering reggae keyboard lick and a chugging house beat. Abducting unsuspecting R & B goddesses into a Jamaican soundworld, these tracks offer typical only-in-London recontextualizations of non-UK sources.
All these Jamaican inputs show that 2step garage’s amalgam of ‘Black Atlantic’ sounds (house, dancehall, electro, R & B, jungle, roots’n’ dub) is at once the latest chapter in the hardcore/jungle/drum and bass continuum and that tradition’s self-deconstruction: the point where the music reaches out to genres beyond the borders of the rave and pirate radio narrative, such as R & B and dancehall (which is the other Other Electronic Music). 2step is paradoxical proof of two opposed syndromes. More than ever, music in the digital era is post-geographical, drifting across the ‘Black Atlantic’ and the world, intersecting with the desire of communities and populations remote from the music’s original context. At the same time, and perhaps as a semiconscious form of resistance against globalization and digital deracination, there’s a stubborn persistence of the local, the tribal. You can see this in hip hop, with its intense regionalism, its city-based sounds and ’hood mythologies. And you can see it in UK garage, which – like jungle before it – is full of references to place, from the early speed-garage anthem ‘It’s A London Thing’ by Scott Garcia and MC Styles to Middlerow’s 2000 tune ‘Millennium Twist’ with its Dickens-inspired lyrics and chorus ‘L.O.N.D.O.N. London/That’s where we’re coming from’. 2step’s musical sources are actually ‘coming from’ everywhere but London, but the final composite is indelibly stamped with a fierce sense of geographical identity.
Like jungle before it
, UK garage represents itself as more than just music: it’s A Way of Life, the urban folkways of a vibe-tribe. Friday, after work, it’s down to record stores like Uptown or Rhythm Division, to check out the latest tunes on white label. Later, getting dressed up before heading out to Liberty or the Gass Club, garageheads tune into pirate stations like Freek or Mack to hear even more upfront tunes on dubplate. Saturday, clothes shopping at Proibito or Zee & Co., and then maybe one of the big monthly raves like Exposure. Sunday, chilling out, in the sun if you’re lucky, and then onto Twice As Nice. Completing this sense of UK garage as a world unto itself, the scene even has its own summer resort, Ayia Napa in Cyprus, to rival the traditional clubbers destination of Ibiza.
Underneath the flash, monied surface, UK garage has a less glamorous but utterly crucial side which is its solid economic infrastructure. This is what enabled the scene to thrive as a self-sufficient entity for three years before the mainstream got interested: a network of small independent labels, rave promoters and club managers, DJ and MC agencies, and pirate radio stations. It’s almost impossible to overstate the importance of pirate radio. Locked On, the garage scene’s leading indie label, is named after the slang term for being tuned into a station’s signal, while its uniform 12-inch-single sleeves depict a transistor radio’s FM frequency dial. Zed Bias, who compiled the mix-CD Sound of the Pirates for Locked On, explains: ‘Pirate radio is really the kids’ link to the scene – ‘cos if you’re a teenager, you can’t get into clubs yet. A lot of pirates are actually run by kids, so that’s where you’ll hear the future of the music. The pirates break new tunes.’ MJ Cole’s debut album Sincere includes ‘MJ FM’, an immaculate pastiche of a pirate radio show that’s intended as tribute not parody. ‘I should really dedicate the album to the pirates,’ says Cole. ‘Without them I wouldn’t even have started making garage. The weird thing is how this music is still so underground, even after it’s gone Top Ten. And that’s down to the pirates. They’re still pumping it out.’
In the late nineties, London plunged into a new golden age of radio piracy not seen since the first explosive wave of jungle in the 1992 – 4 period. DJ Luck, owner of Lush FM, estimates ‘there’re over a hundred stations in London, and around sixty per cent play garage. At the moment the FM band is so rammed, there’s no space left.’ Most are local and sporadic in their broadcast, but Lush belongs to the premier league of roughly twenty pirates with the financial and organizational muscle to withstand the raids mounted by the authorities.
The HQ of Flex FM, another leading pirate, is a third-storey room in a dilapidated house in the dowdy semi-suburbs of South London. The walls are covered in graffiti – ‘ALL DA RAGGAMUFFIN BOOM-LICK SELECTOR’, ‘DJ Felix D, Harry Barefoot, Lady Cheryl, Pixie, MC Warma’. Joint-rolling detritus is strewn over the mantelpiece. Empty lager cans and Bacardi Breezer bottles choke the Victorian fireplace. It looks like the kind of soiled and sordid squat where you’d find nodded-out junkies, but this Sunday afternoon the house is a hive of energy. Flex FM is a power station generating currents of cultural electricity that transfixes an audience scattered across London.
The trio responsible for the excitement – station owner DJ Dee Kline plus MCs Sharkie P and Hyperactive – make a perfect picture of UK garage’s multiculturalism. Dee Kline is lanky, white and scruffy; Hyperactive is Asian and neat in his white Nike baseball cap and Dolce & Gabbana T-shirt; Sharkie is Jamaican and buff in pink fishnet vest. The two MCs take turns chatting ’pon the mic while the other holds the mobile phone and relays big shouts texted in by the kids out there in listener land. ‘Bigging up the Man like Richard . . . Hold it down, the Lady Emma . . . Anthony in Balham, wass’ happenin’ bro?’
Hyperactive does a rap about his grooming rituals: ‘Colgate attack/ My plaque.’ Then Sharkie P consults his dog-eared exercise book full of rhymes and goes into a toast using the melody of Suzanne Vega’s ‘Tom’s Diner’. Scratching deftly on top of his own remix of Ol’ Dirty Bastard’s ‘Got Ya Money’, Dee Kline cuts to a bass-heavy garage remake of Soft Cell’s synthpop hit ‘Tainted Love’ from 1981 (a time before most of Flex FM’s teenage audience were born). UK garage’s not scared of cheese. Like Puff Daddy, producers take ‘hits from the eighties’ and reinvent them. There’s a garage anthem based on the melody from UB40’s cod-reggae hit ‘One In Ten’, DJ Luck & MC Neat remade Stevie Wonder’s ‘Masterblaster’, and artists as unlikely as Tracy Chapman, Carly Simon and Sade have had songs covered or sampled.
This cheeky hip hop collage approach is what Dee Kline is all about. Based around samples of a TV comedian imitating a Rasta, Dee Kline’s ganja anthem ‘I Don’t Smoke’ was a pirate anthem and then reached Number Eleven in the pop charts after being licensed by major label EastWest. The canny Warners subsidiary also picked up the sample-laced ‘Bound 4 Da Reload’ by Oxide & Neutrino, which did even better: straight in at Number One. Hanging out at EastWest, this eighteen-year-old duo look like archetypal garage kids: Caesar haircuts, flash mobiles, gold bracelets, spaceship Nikes. Together with their clique So Solid Crew, a thirty-strong MC/producer/vocalist collective, Oxide & Neutrino also run a pirate station, Delight FM. It was while deejaying on a pirate show that Oxide got the idea for ‘Reload’, his very first track. Someone phoned in a request and when his voice went on the air, you could hear Casualty, the TV show about a hospital emergency room, on in the background. When DJ Oxide faded up the track on his deck, Casualty’s theme fitted perfectly over the beat.
Tunes like ‘Reload’ and ‘I Don’t Smoke’ are polarizing the UK garage scene, creating an instant generation gap. The old-guard axis of garage DJs like Tuff Jam and The Dreem Teem regard these sample-based tracks as ‘novelty tunes’ devoid of the sexy swing that the scene was originally founded on. ‘There’s a committee being set up by all the UK garage dons, just like the top jungle DJs and producers did back in’94 when the music was crossing over,’ says Zed Bias. These scene elders are blocking the new music – a futile and pre-doomed attempt to arrest the very mutational process that spawned UK garage in the first place. ‘They’re trying to control things, but they haven’t kept their finger on the pulse. All they’ve done is shut themselves up in this exclusive little room.’ Meanwhile, the younger audience who grew up on jungle and pirate radio love the new, rough-hewn style of garage – what Dee Kline calls ‘future rave’.
Neutrino attributes the snide comments made by established DJs about ‘Bound 4 Da Reload’ to sheer jealousy at its astounding success. But it’s probably as much because the track sounds less like garage and more like a new-millennium renovation of electro topped with nagging and nasal rapping from Neutrino. All it really has in common with the garage played at swanky clubs like Twice As Nice is the 130 b.p.m. tempo. ‘Reload’ doesn’t actually sound like a cheesy novelty song at all. It’s bleak and ominous, from the doom-booming sub-bass palpitations to the morgue-chilly echo swathing the track and the ice-stab pizzicato violins. The latter are ‘Strings of Death’, maybe, given the samples of gunshots and an agonized voice pleading ‘Will everybody please stop getting shot!?!’ – a black humorous allusion to the rising blood-tide on London’s streets. Taken from the UK gangsta movie Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, the sample in ‘Reload’ plugs into the grim realities of a Britain where crime is soaring, despite or maybe because of the boom-time prosperity. Wealth remains unevenly distributed through society, and kids are under enormous peer pressure to own status commodities like mobile phones, expensive clothes and jewellery.
Propped against the counter of Uptown Records in D’Arblay Street just a few minutes’ stroll from Oxford Street, a black girl complains bitterly: ‘S’like I was sayin’, garage is all commercial now. Nobody’s keepin’ it real.’ The real-ness is coming. Just like drum and bass when it reacted against LTJ Bukem-style coffee table jungle, the next wave of garage producers are stripping the music down to bass and beats. You’re even starting to hear the kind of caustic industrial noises that originally drove the girls dem out o
f the techsteppin’ main arena and into the garage side room in the first place. It smacks of cutting your nose off to spite your face, but it’s an inevitable cycle. UK garage’s sublime equilibrium between yin and yang, treble and bass, light and dark, has been maintained for an improbably long time. 2000 is UK garage’s fourth fabulous summer in a row – an eternity in the high-turnover world of British dance culture. Now the scene looks set to plunge into wintry darkside mode, as if girding itself for the next recession.
At the club Liberty, you can hear this taking effect. ‘Here come da basslick,’ shouts the MC, and when the B-lines drop, the girls shimmy downwards to a crouch, ragga-style. Thing is, there actually aren’t many ladies on the dance floor, probably because the music’s nothing but sandworm-wriggly low-end frequencies. ‘As soon as the treble and the big vocals disappear, suddenly it’s all blokes,’ says garage scenester and vocal scientist Bat. ‘Usually, it’s like this all-girl moshpit up in front of the DJ booth.’
Liberty’s atmosphere is a strange mix of swanky and skanky – it’s the kind of place you stumble on champagne bottles left treacherously underfoot. An alarmingly skinny blonde, Uma Thurman on a hunger strike, grinds her jaws (a telltale sign of cocaine abuse) as she ‘bogles’ with her black boyfriend, grinding her scrawny butt against his crotch. Everywhere eyes are cold, faces barred like shop windows in a run-down area. Garage fans still call themselves ravers, but Ecstasy’s loved-up vibe is an ancient memory. It’s not that people don’t do E, it’s just not a special thing anymore. People take it along with whatever else is around – drink, spliff, cocaine. In the chill-out room, Luke, a pasty nineteen-year-old, chews furiously on a lollypop and confides that he’s dropped ‘three Mitsubishis’. Most people would be a melting blob of love on just one, but Luke’s totally impassive. Garage’s behavioural codes enforce restraint and deem abandon unseemly.
Energy Flash: A Journey Through Rave Music and Dance Culture Page 59