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K-Punk on 'bassline and the return of feminine pressure' for FACT Magazine.
"Dubstep and grime’s male moroseness corresponded not only to a deficiency of oestrogen, but also to a drying up of serotonin.
Though I'm seduced by K-Punk's observations about how grime and dubstep's sonic loss of momentum is like permanently plateauing on MDMA, and I've thoroughly enjoyed his and Simon Reynold's musings on the hardcore continuum in the past, at some point during grime's development I stopped finding that theory very useful or relevant.
I'm not normally one to be so dismissive, but isn't the hardcore continuum just a way for older guys to relate to these off-the-wall kids making totally new original stuff that, aesthetically at least, bears little resemblance to the genres that the 'Nuum designates as their supposed predecessors. Imagine taking about the hardcore continuum with Oddz & Eastwood. I don't know if it would hold a lot of water for them (or whether they would even care).
Likewise, bassline is surely an altogether more strange phenomenon, less to do with a pendulum swing from masculine to feminine or from dark to light, and more to do with being removed from London and connected to a speed garage scene that never really died off like it did down South.
I don't even find bassline particularly effeminate. Some of it is pretty murkey, shower, screwface stuff, surely. If anything the pendulum swing is happening in favoured musical structure, in momentum and energy - people are sick of doing the halfstep and they want to dance again, which is where the bang bang bang bang of the 4x4 kick comes in.
I found much more on point an useful Simon Reynold's observations about how bassline as it is now is kind of like how Dirty South rap is in the US:
"It's the Dirty North. Like with rap starting in New York, grime started in London. But it diffused itself into the provinces, then mutated. The results sound backward to the originators, just like crunk and other Dirty South regional sounds seemed retarded and crude to rap custodians.
But look at how crunk totally flipped everything in the US, and now every US rap and rnb tune sounds totally infused with its crazy ideas.
BTW I keep meaning to link to this great blog Smug Police. They keep putting up zipped up collections of bootlegged mp3s (low bitrate, calm down all you niche-hungry mp3DJs) focussed around a new bassline producer each time, as well as linking to mixes and other stuff. They linked to DJ Venom's Maximum Carnage which is nice. Safe for that G (Gs?) if you ever read this.
"Dubstep and grime’s male moroseness corresponded not only to a deficiency of oestrogen, but also to a drying up of serotonin.
Though I'm seduced by K-Punk's observations about how grime and dubstep's sonic loss of momentum is like permanently plateauing on MDMA, and I've thoroughly enjoyed his and Simon Reynold's musings on the hardcore continuum in the past, at some point during grime's development I stopped finding that theory very useful or relevant.
I'm not normally one to be so dismissive, but isn't the hardcore continuum just a way for older guys to relate to these off-the-wall kids making totally new original stuff that, aesthetically at least, bears little resemblance to the genres that the 'Nuum designates as their supposed predecessors. Imagine taking about the hardcore continuum with Oddz & Eastwood. I don't know if it would hold a lot of water for them (or whether they would even care).
Likewise, bassline is surely an altogether more strange phenomenon, less to do with a pendulum swing from masculine to feminine or from dark to light, and more to do with being removed from London and connected to a speed garage scene that never really died off like it did down South.
I don't even find bassline particularly effeminate. Some of it is pretty murkey, shower, screwface stuff, surely. If anything the pendulum swing is happening in favoured musical structure, in momentum and energy - people are sick of doing the halfstep and they want to dance again, which is where the bang bang bang bang of the 4x4 kick comes in.
I found much more on point an useful Simon Reynold's observations about how bassline as it is now is kind of like how Dirty South rap is in the US:
"It's the Dirty North. Like with rap starting in New York, grime started in London. But it diffused itself into the provinces, then mutated. The results sound backward to the originators, just like crunk and other Dirty South regional sounds seemed retarded and crude to rap custodians.
But look at how crunk totally flipped everything in the US, and now every US rap and rnb tune sounds totally infused with its crazy ideas.
BTW I keep meaning to link to this great blog Smug Police. They keep putting up zipped up collections of bootlegged mp3s (low bitrate, calm down all you niche-hungry mp3DJs) focussed around a new bassline producer each time, as well as linking to mixes and other stuff. They linked to DJ Venom's Maximum Carnage which is nice. Safe for that G (Gs?) if you ever read this.
Labels: bassline, fact magazine, k-punk, niche, simon reynolds
14 Comments:
Rubbish post but a decent dialogue starter.
All these so-called movements (just re-packaged "genres" actually) are meaningless without some historical context...yeah you "kids" can just float around thinking you're original without knowing who your musical ancestors are. Cool. Whatever. That's kind of the genesis mindset for something like bassline. Bassline is such an absolutely recycled "genre" , it's stupid really.
Grime can, however, lay some claims to sounding fresh at times, but bassline, no chance.
haha thanks
i dunno thats your opinion. i think it sounds pretty original. people who say it sounds just like speed garage obviously have their ears fixed on differently to me. Whether you like or dislike all these tunes with 5 basslines all over the place going mental, I can't really think of anything that's sounded like that before. Kind of innovative.
Also how is it not a scene (dunno about movement, i dont care for that word) in its own right? Its got its own infrastructure, its own tightly knit community of DJs and producers. Bassline is insular as fuck, if all the hyped fucked off tomorrow they'd carry on as if nothing happened
I kind of half agree with alex. I think the hardcore continuum is useful as a way part-explaining where all these crazy sounds came from all of a sudden, besides some people's insanely imaginative minds. However, I agree with alex when he says that it can't really be applied to bassline house, there's something a lot more complicated going on here. And I also agree that no speed garage ever really sounded like this.
the 'nuum as a thoery has been pushed beyond breaking point, it worked... to a point, that point has been passed, once you start stretching theory, or distorting reality to fit the theory, you've betrayed the theory and any value it may have had. End of the day theory is there to clean up the mess, to explain away after the fact.
"genre" has as much relation to the lived experiance of music as a map has to the terrain it describes, genres/maps are fixed, need constant updating and are always that far behind what is actually going on.
bassline certainlly contains elements of speed garage, but saying they sound the same is like saying "ice rink" sounds the same as a Rosie Gaines tune!
... and smug police are doing sik, sik work!!!
you "kids" can just float around thinking you're original without knowing who your musical ancestors are. Cool. Whatever. That's kind of the genesis mindset for something like bassline.
whichisprobablywhyit'ssomuchfun.
What gets me about the nuum theory is that the minute there's any sort of development in UK dance music (or at least the minute the internet picks up on it), there's a rush to figure out where it falls into this theory. and I can't help feeling that that's missing the point a little bit.
safe for linking to my blog, It's just one G at the moment running it (continuum)
I just like to listen to music.
I guess bassline is similar to speed garage but only in the way that grime is similar to late 80s/early 90s fast rap. Same principle, very different execution.
Anyway, these people take themselves too seriously. Fuck taking notes at a rave.
yeh I think there's a lot to be said for youthful ignorance, if scenes or artists become too keenly aware of what has passed, or have too great a respect for it then I dunno how productive it is really, especially (ironically) when you're talking about the 'hardcore spirit' or whatever (which surely to a great degree is about not having awareness of or reverence for what has passed). and then you've got to ask what the game is with all the continuum chat, as Alex says sometimes it feels like a way for (older) writers or critics to maintain a grip on what was/is vital and exciting in music, when (especially according to their own paradigm) they just can't. it may not necessarily be the conscious intention but I think its the effect
to say that bassline is just speed garage is dumb. in a formal / structural sense they are pretty close (ignoring the mad bassline design), but that completely ignores one of the main things that sets music apart, the vibe, in which they're absolutely worlds apart.
i think the 'nuum talk is harmless. the youngers don't care and people who are old enough to know the original hardcore are interested in where it's all going. as long as it's not over-analysed.
i was into rave as a young teen, got into djing d&b when i was old enough, then garage on the pirates, grime, dubstep and now the bassline stuff has caught my interest.
i naturally followed the music and developing genres without care for nuum talk. but if some people want to write about that then cool, it's interesting to a point.
the younger generation making the moves will do what they do. and if older folks who don't go clubbing so much want to write about it then fair enuff.
awww, i go away for six weeks and you decide to destroy the hardcore continuum without me??? i totally wish i'd been at the party ;)
a great and balanced post al.
as i've said more times than i care to mention in the past on these pages and on dissensus, you cannot project historical trends forwards, it's the first thing they teach you if you study history goddamnit. in fact here's something a certain mr lenin once wrote many years ago:
"We would be committing a great mistake if we attempted to force the complex, urgent, rapidly developing practical tasks of the revolution into the Procrustean bed of narrowly conceived 'theory'."
truedat vladimir
"Bassline is insular as fuck, if all the hype fucked off tomorrow they'd carry on as if nothing happened"...
Yep that's what I'm sayin' blood. It's insular in the sense that it's just repackaging ideas that have been caned to death in different facets of electronic music for a while now, (perhaps without knowing or caring). Nobody's screaming about how "innovative" certain European dance music labels are, they just put out consistently fresh sounding dance music. But because it's a sound that's taken over parts of the UK, and gained a foothold in Urban scenes, it's lauded as visionary. All aboard the Bassline bandwagon! "Bassline" just doesn't have the memorable tracks that other movements' can lay claim to. They're are a few decent tracks out there, but not nearly nough to justify the hype. The palate is just to monochrome.
A vast majority of people are too quick to put the originality stamp on something that's just another derivative. IMO.
I met some dude from Nottingham who had travelled down to London for a breakcore rave and was chatting to him about the music scene in his area. In his opinion all the bassline/donk music that was popular were he was from was just another form of scouse house type shit. it's easy to put bassline on a pedestal when it's associated with a lineage of "gritty" and "real" music in the manufactured hardcore continuum metanarrative of Simon Reynolds but it's not so easy to praise when it's put in the context of a music as embarrasing as scouse house innit.
Simon Reynolds deserves massive props for being a visionary and sticking up for hardcore, realising it's revolutionary nature and it's potential when every other writer and cultural pundit had dismissed it as jokes. His continuum is entirely valid as in hardcore begat D&B which Begat Garage etc. because the influence and historical arch is undeniable. But how much influence does hardcore have on the music of today who are its historical antecedents? Pretty much none at all, even to the elder statesmen of Dubstep/Grime/Funky/Bassline whatever even Drum & Bass/Jungle is little more than a childhood memory if anything at all.
Where it slips up in my mind is Simon Reynolds blinkered hatred of Techno music. First of all were we going to some vastly different raves back in the day or what but more than any other music techno influenced hardcore more than anything else. The reasons he dislikes it are all valid, the purist BS, the elitism and anti populism, the bourgois underground arty-ness of it etc. etc. But this is exactly what has given it it's longevity, other musics have had there moment and died out, techno abides, no fucking sell out brah. You can hate on Techno for the perceived "whiteness"of it's audience or whatever but the identity of it's creators and it's prime movers can't be denied, techno is more a music of black origin then hardcore, jungle or garage will ever be.
D+B is effectively written off by mr reynolds when it starts adopting techno sensibilities he trashes it as a dead end. D+B is still going and maintaining today WTF happened to the Garage stuff that was promoted as the next step in the continuum, that shit sold out and died out pretty damn fast. Could it be that it learnt that the underground leanings of techno was the the sustenance of artistic credibility and survival? The music that came out largely as an antithetic reaction to garage shows real promise but does anyone really think that bassline or funky which is a rehashing of the uk/speed garage scene has any real sustainable future, I mean come on now.
Simon Reynolds places far to much importance on the vagaries of the leanings of the black/urban working class of London whose fashionable bandwagon jumping can be just as fickle as the white middle class hipsters from the swankier parts of town. It was the white suburban working class youth from dull satellite towns in Essex/Berkshire/Kent/Surrey etc. who truly supported Hardcore, Jungle/D&B from back in the day till now even. World Dance & Dreamscapes predominately white suburban D&B audience dwarfed that of Roasts or whoever when they jumped ship to the Garage scene but who remained innit.
IMO Dubstep which was for such a long time a music looking for audience has a real potential for longevity as many of it's producers have a real anti-commercial streak running through them. Even who you'd think of as sterotypical dubstep guys like Skream are starting to branch out into new direcions despite the it's current popularity and genre straight jacketing. grime i dunno about it's future but as far as I'm concerned the direction that Trim, JME, Skepta, Wiley etc. in becoming more real and personal and dropping a lot of the merking/skeng type shit makes it a lot more relevant to me and it's a positive step. Whether this is a bad thing as far as killing off the scene that nurtured them so far only time will tell. as far as the funky type scene goes it's a dead end period, I'll be surprised if it doesn't just die ou before it get's even a sniff of the mainstream this time round.
thats very interesting but do you hate pop music? this troubles me
i need to do another post or 10 about the HOUSE CONTINUUM
I don't hate pop music as such brah, but what is "pop" shifts greatly through time and musical trends, the pop music of today differs greatly from what was considered "pop" in the past.
On the one hand from my post I am supportive of certain grime artists dropping the impenetrable slang of "merking chiefs" with a "skeng" type lyrics which would alienate a large part of their of potential audience. Whilst on the other hand I am supportive of Dubstep producers transcending the limitations of them of producers of a genre of music within narrow boundaries of expectation. In both of these aspects I feel I am being supportive of a drive towards more and sustainable popularity rather than supporting a drive towards a musical dead end/ghetto. Grime has the possibility for mainstream acceptance if it could reach it to more than it's core audience. Dubstep has risen to prominence through it's deviation of popular musical norms. My applause for the popularisation of one style whilst applauding the obscurism of another is not hypocritical as I believe it is IMO of benefit to both styles of music to develop in this fashion.
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