Ruby Mulraine, Radio 1Xtra executive producer
CHAPTER NINE
Who Needs a Record Company?
London bass in the digital age
ON FRIDAY JUNE 25, 2010, just as the build-up to the England vs Germany World Cup quarter final was gripping the entire nation, Dizzee Rascal exploded onto Glastonbury’s main stage. Wearing an England football shirt with DIZZEE 10 on the back, and proclaiming a frankly superfluous ‘I’m Dizzee Rascal from London city’, he was instantly one of the weekend’s biggest hits. Not there for any kind of novelty or camp value, or even as one of that year’s multi-culti quota fillers, he was there in his own right. As much a part of the audience’s musical landscape as anyone else on a bill that included Snoop Dogg, Slash and Gorillaz. It was Dizzee’s third consecutive Glastonbury, each met by an escalating reaction, and this time he was eclipsed only by Stevie Wonder and the solidly Glasto-friendly Muse.
That he could rock this particular house was hardly surprising. Here was a man who had grown up on east London sound systems, MC-ing raves in which there was literally nothing separating those on the mic from those who had paid good money to get in – nimble, crowd-pleasing skills were a basic survival tool. This set was significant as an unequivocal, live-televised marker of quite how much a mainstream rock crowd had accepted a sound that, a decade previously, was all but unknown outside certain parts of London. And that the scene itself was happy to be there made the point that everybody had more in common than they did keeping them apart – indeed Dizzee’s England shirt was never the ‘PR masterstroke’ that a couple of stupidly cynical reviewers claimed it to be.
Of equal consequence was that this had come about with minimal encouragement from the industry. By remaining true to itself, grime and its immediate family of jungle, UK garage, dubstep and so on had taken up where Soul II Soul left off, and plugged in to how many youngsters really thought about their lives and their music. As a result, it had built an impressive fanbase, which the establishment actually seemed at pains to deny. Dizzee’s first Glastonbury – 2008 on the Park stage – came in the year that a spectacularly boneheaded rant from Noel Gallagher served to encapsulate the industry viewpoint that popular music meant white men with guitars, and little else. Reacting to the announcement that Jay-Z would be closing the event, the former Oasis guitarist fumed: ‘Sorry, but Jay-Z? Fucking no chance. I’m not having hip hop at Glastonbury, it’s wrong.’ Thankfully no one who mattered took any notice.
Dizzee Rascal didn’t scale the heights of Glastonbury’s Pyramid Stage unaided, however. By that time he had become the poster boy for a subterranean London black music movement that had been simmering on pirate radio, in raves, on sound systems and in specialist record shops for the best part of twenty years. It had been progressing creatively, expanding commercially, and learning from its own past to become, by the middle of the noughties, everything the previous chapters in this story would have wanted to be. It all began with a deliberately forbidding style that had enough of a sense of irony to call itself ‘jungle’.
‘WHAT HAPPENS WITH PRETTY MUCH any sound that comes along and black people feel it, if it’s not black they’re going to put black on it. That’s kind of what we do. If it’s rock, and a black man gets into rock, and we put some black on that, then Jimi Hendrix comes along and starts putting looseness and groove into it. I think that’s what happened – house music came along and it was Chicago and stuff like that, which was all cool but we wanted to put some black into it. And some London.’
Dizzee Rascal at Glastonbury, 2010, where he stole the show so comprehensively it amounted to grand larceny.
Marc Williams is explaining how jungle came about, when London sound systems appropriated hardcore from the rave scene to spice it up with breakbeats and dancehall reggae. We’re sitting in a corner of Mosaica, a very swish restaurant on the ground floor of the Chocolate Factory, an arts-centric complex of studios and offices in the shadow of the Alexandra Palace, in Wood Green. Marc is a part owner of the upmarket eating place; he bought it because he has studios upstairs and it was going to close down, which would have left Marc and the artists he works with with nowhere to eat. Marc is the manager of Labrinth – Mosaica’s other owner – and they’re one of the most successful partnerships in modern British music. More of that later, though. Right now he’s back in the late 1980s, on his Archway-based sound system, Lifeline, mixing hip hop and reggae as the capital’s musical perspective shifted once more:
‘Jungle came about because there were so many of us out there who loved reggae, loved hip hop and were on the edges of the rave scene and liked a lot of it. But moving forward into what became jungle and drum’n’bass, it was a sound-system thing, because in that situation what separates you from the next man is your beats and how you lay them down – you’ve got to know when to shift.
‘The good soundmen are always trying something new. You’ve got your sure shots, but you can’t get anywhere if you just lean on records they’ve heard a million times. You are always in that position where you’re treading new ground and you don’t know if it’s going to break underneath you. That’s the only way to stay fresh. It’s like “You ain’t heard this one”, but even as you’re playing it you know it’s a risk, they might not like it and then you’ve got to know when to move: “Yo yo, make a move, man, pull that tune off quick! Talk to the people … keep them running … get the next tune on!” Then it’s calm, like “Don’t worry, I got you! OK so I caught you out on that, now let’s go …”
‘That’s the sort of thing that led to experimentation, even with a small sound like Lifeline. We all looked up to Soul II Soul, we were from the same area in north London and they were like the main boys in the block, they inspired everybody to move forward. I remember playing in Elthorne Park [in Hornsey Rise] with Soul II Soul – I won’t say battling them, just at the same gig! – I was about sixteen and I blended “Computer Love” with a reggae tune [warming to the memory, Marc sings the chorus of the Zapp hit and mimes manipulating a turntable to bring in a dubwise bassline – it sounds deeply funky.] They had never heard anything like that before. Then I put on “Holding Back The Years” by Simply Red and mixed that with a reggae tune as well – everyone went absolutely nuts over it. So we had that feel back then, and once we knew how it could work we were blending reggae and hip hop all the time:
‘It was with that same mindset, later, when we were doing a remix of something that somebody played me a break beat and I put it on a house track – chkachkachaka – and from there it was easy to add a dubwise bassline on it because that was my thing. I think I was one of the first people to take a breakbeat and do that, and from there you could feel there was a load of us – the Rebel MC and guys like that – who clearly loved their reggae but also loved hip hop and dance music. … It was all of us thinking “How do we put our black influence on that?”’
THESE MID-1980s DEVELOPMENTS were happening at street level, away from a record business that had never quite grasped reggae and had yet to come to proper terms with hip hop. All through the 1980s and well into the 1990s, despite the story told in chapter eight, the mainstream remained largely untroubled by the evolution of British black music. With the record companies and music media actively resisting black appointments to positions of real responsibility, the same clichés as twenty years earlier remained the default setting. That’s not to say there weren’t underground developments elsewhere; for some time a new breed of club promoter had taken over the warehouse party scene, making the most of sound-system technology to blow it up into massive outdoor events. Originally straight outta Manchester, it was becoming so widespread as to be the default setting for what seemed like an entire generation of British pop kids. As a side effect, it even instigated a massive cultural change from drink to drugs – the vast majority of raves didn’t have liquor licences – to the extent that the UK drinks industry went into something of a panic, and developed alcopops in a bid to lure kids back on to the bottle.
Stoked by tabloid outrage, the authorities grew so concerned about acid house, and these usually illegal events that were attracting five-figure audiences, that there were questions in the House. It all led, eventually, to the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994, which specifically targeted outdoor raves and went so far as to criminalise ‘two or more persons making preparations’ for such an event.
Naturally this scene produced its own music. Faced with serious sales figures and acres of style-press coverage, the industry claimed hip hop/house hybrids of its own, courtesy of warehouse party deejays and producers like the Beatmasters, Coldcut and Bomb the Bass. For about twenty minutes, the term ‘hip house’ was bandied about as if it was a bona fide genre. Add to that the techno-centric tidal wave from Northern Europe crested by Black Box, Snap! and Technotronic, and pretty soon there was a new addition to rock’s rich tapestry – the genre now officially known as ‘dance music’.
A great deal of the tunes were pretty good. With music subdivided into so many splinter genres, it was impossible for there not to be something for everybody, and the scene was so huge it allowed a significant cross-section of deejays to cut their teeth – Fabio & Grooverider were good examples. However, coming on the heels of the warehouse parties, it had a different complexion. Literally. Unlike the parochial social engineering of Jazzie and Norman, the rave scene was so widespread that in effect it created its own mainstream. Despite its apparent outlaw status, it functioned much like the regular industry, never really bothering to think beyond the largest obvious consumer group. Not that there’s anything inherently wrong with that – it simply meant that as this movement boomed across the UK, it was no more a black scene than, say, punk or Two Tone.
Under such circumstances, it’s easy to understand what Marc meant when he spoke about putting some black and some London into the proceedings. And for many youngsters, this would have applied to more than just the music.
AS THE 1980s ROLLED INTO THE 1990s, the notion of black Britishness became more delicately balanced. A large proportion of those coming of age had parents who were born here, and multi-national backgrounds that could include two or three Caribbean islands and more than one continent. Add to that African/Caribbean-Caucasian mixed race as London’s fastest growing ethnic group, and for many youngsters ‘back home’ was what they saw out of the window; anything else was just an interesting holiday. The capital’s constantly evolving street slang provides the best illustration: Jamaican patois remained its foundation, but it included at least as many hip-hop reference points and a grab bag of longstanding Londonisms – you could visit three different time zones within the space of a sentence. That this vernacular was in use by kids of all races further muddied the cultural waters.
That kind of linguistic mash-up, of course, was nothing new to the capital’s sound-system underground. Since the start of the 1980s, as dancehall had taken over London’s reggae, deejaying styles had shifted up the gears. The first Kingston sound system to tour the UK was particularly influential. Jamaican champions Ray Symbolic came over at the beginning of the decade, and the ultra-fast chatting style of their top deejay, Ranking Joe, left a deep impression. Especially with Saxon Sound, a Lewisham-based operation that was one of the capital’s biggest, and probably the most innovative and visionary – alongside its singers Maxi Priest and Peter Hunnigale, the deejays included Smiley Culture, Asher Senator, Tippa Irie and Papa Levi. They immediately put the new style on their home turf with crisp, semi-cockney patter atop spring-loaded dancehall riddims, incorporating their local environment into the lyrics – Papa Levi is (in) famous for rhyming ‘Sugar Minott’ with ‘Kenny Everett’ in a righteous toast about Jah Rastafari. Smiley Culture hit the pop charts twice in 1984, with “Cockney Translation” and “Police Officer”, and was closely followed by Tippa Irie’s “Hello Darlin’” – the tunes have since been accredited with kick-starting the Jamaican/London jargon crossover. Particularly the former, which, as the name implies, was a kind of ital Berlitz, translating such terms as ‘Old Bill’ into ‘dutty Babylon’ and delivered in appropriately bilingual fashion.
Crucially, this Londonised a Caribbean tradition of story telling and use of language that had previously been the preserve of reggae. While that was to prove pivotal in the evolution of jungle, more immediately it was an important step for young black London in general.
General Levy, who made the switch from ragga to jungle in the early 1990s, enlarges:
‘In the early ‘80s, there were a lot of Jamaican sound system cassettes coming over here [the forerunners of today’s mixtapes, recorded off sound-system control towers] … Stereograph, Jammy’s, Kilamanjaro … with deejays Charlie Chaplin, Johnny Ringo, Brigadier Jerry and Josey Wales. This was when the MCs was beginning to become predominant in a lot of reggae music, and it brought a lot of togetherness to black music because it brought back the street slang. With the singers there was like a conscious vibe there all the time, but with the MCs there always was a conscious vibe but it brought more communication thing on the street slang. Like all the latest talk, all the latest shoes to wear – Clarks bootee [toasts] I have a pair of Clarks bootee / I have a beaver hat … All the latest styles, so people across the world were kept locked in on this or that.
‘The sound systems over here, like [Lloydie] Coxsone, Saxon and Java, were breaking it down to us, kind of like an English interpretation of Jamaican culture, or they could chat about what was going on around us in a way we could basically relate to. It was rebellious, too, because reggae music is rebellious, and when we were in school we used it that way. We’d get into school with our headphones on, it’s brought the [sound] clash with you, and these schoolteachers telling us “Don’t do this, don’t do that” and we’re looking at them, with their boring selves, like they don’t even know what’s going on. I’d bring words into school that I got off the tapes, sometimes words that I didn’t even know what they meant, and when things got really messed up I’d use these words like I was swearing, but I wasn’t swearing! They’d have me in the headmaster’s room and my mum had to come up the school and they’d ask her what these words mean!
Dizzee takes five in the studio.
‘It’s important kids have that sort of language, because we were all living at home with our parents and when you’re young you feel like your parents they’re on your case for every little thing, getting in your head and trying to understand every little thing which is going on. So kids like to have a secret language that only their crew will know – if you’re on the same level then you will understand the language. Not just for their parents either, sometimes you need to keep something for yourselves that the rest of the world, that’s been giving you stress, can’t understand. Music, the reggae music we listened to, was that way of communicating.’
This dancehall-style MC-ing, with the sort of London twang pioneered by Saxon, became the defining factor of jungle as a stylistic development. It was perhaps inevitable that the new black British style came from the reggae world. Jamaican music had always turned over genres faster than any other form, as sound-system operators were perpetually seeking to gain an edge. Now a significant change was required as, post-Soul II Soul and Saxon, crowds expected more open-mindedness, and for their music to speak clearly to them as Londoners. No route to broader appeal could ignore the house music boom, yet this had to be balanced with core audiences who didn’t want to lose touch with their basic blackness or their own undergrounds. That meant sticking with an underlying reggae vibe, because although hip hop was making a deep impact, there was no chance of it becoming as self-defining as its Jamaican counterpart. Which is another language-related issue. Hip hop was then so firmly established as American, it was virtually impossible to rap in English with any other accent. There was always something deeply suspect about London rappers who did so. Jamaican patois, however, was part of life here, and so many kids grew up with their parents or grandparents speaking it that it seldom sounded fake. Reggae in the capital was d
ue for a musical shift too, as since the end of the 1980s dancehall had been losing traction over here. Since “Sleng Teng” in 1985, the style had become darker and, with a few notable exceptions, less welcoming to women. Many blamed this on a combination of the sudden American interest in the music and the shift from strictly ganja to significantly cocaine and crack. Whatever it was, the playful sexiness and bawdy humour of the slackness era was being replaced with tales of violence and mayhem from artists who would rather be fighters than lovers. It wasn’t reflecting life in London a great deal either – and that had now become even more important, as this audience was so culturally mixed and well aware of the likes of Smiley Culture. Ever the pragmatists, soundmen started to search for something that would address these issues.
The hardcore end of house music, which in terms of tempo was not too far removed from ragga, made reasonable musical sense to a lot of the disenchanted dancehall crowd and the generation coming up under them. Although it wasn’t unusual to find black kids at hardcore raves, however, this had more to do with increased multi-culti socialising than their being genuinely engaged with the scene. That said, enterprising souls soon began to retool the hardcore sound, and take it from a rave to a dancehall environment. Not a great leap, really; forward-thinking deejays like Marc Williams were already messing about with hip-hop loops, and were not afraid to use funk and rap samples. Creating new soundscapes to define London’s youthful street culture, they were open to influences from all quarters, apparently colourblind, as inventive and innovative as they were unconventional, and not remotely beholden to the establishment. It might be wishful thinking, but the very name ‘jungle’ seemed to reflect a wry left-field humour. Ask half a dozen people how the name came about, though, and you’ll get six different answers – and they’ll all be true.
Sounds Like London Page 31