Let's Not Push Things Forward

 

A celebrated remix of The Streets's "Turn the Page"

What its existence would seem to demonstrate, though, is inability to turn the page of this particular book of history. 

(What you'd want, really, is not even a new chapter, but a whole new volume).

But this is Overmono whose debut album Good Lies was hailed by the Guardian as “UK rave history... distilled to perfection” 

I'm trying to think who would've been the equivalent in rock  - when this stage of "history" getting  "distilled to perfection" would have got underway..

Oasis seems too obvious, and also belated... I feel like the process was well underway by the mid-Eighties.

You'd probably have to wind it back to earlier in the (re)Creation arc - to Primal Scream

All that said, listening to Good Lies for the first time, I'm enjoying it. There's cleverness, there's craft, it's made up out of or in reference to things I already reverence... but the echoes, allusions and twists are subtly done. In a certain sense, what's not to like?  

I was always a bit more vulnerable to the appeal of "record collection rock" than I would have liked. I couldn't quite ever be as stern about it as Mark Fisher. 

Still, it's an odd thing  - given that the foundational principle of the culture is F-FWD - to listen to this 

Apart from the overall sound quality -  clean and crisp in a 2023 upgraded sort of way - there is nothing about this track that would sound out of place in 2000. It sounds like Groove Chronicles.  

I mean, maybe the wibbly synth wouldn't have been there but it could have been, if GC had wanted it to be. 

Surging styles become settled styles.

Bit like how groups operating today can be described as - can describe themselves as - "postpunk". 

It's a stable, if not utterly static, form - akin to the blues, or folk. 

yet already flashbacking in 2009 to 2004?

This "Dubstep Heritage" series only got to two episodes!

jumpstyle versus slumpstyle

Kieran Press-Reynolds with a guest piece at Shawn Reynaldo's First Floor, while the main man takes a vacation. 

It's a report on "the holy hell of cursed jumpstyle" - a zoomer-oriented TikTok-propelled twist to the gabber continuum.  

"vyrval’s ballistic banger is the biggest tune in a growing wave of psychotic jumpstyle music that seems made to express existential fears: technology has gone too far, we’ve broken the world beyond repair, autocratic autobots will soon seize control...  In the comments of the clips that accompany these songs, people write what’s basically apocalyptic science-fiction, imagining grim future scenarios: “Me watching an AI generated video of me doing the most atrocious War crime ever.” The visual aesthetic mirrors the freakiness: unsettling cyber graphics are superimposed on neon landscapes, with distorted limbs and objects."

"At its most baleful, these songs obliterate any and all melody, leaving listeners with no chance for reprieve from their unrelenting assault. Dj Svevsx’s “jumpstyle (1)” has over 8 million plays and it’s just a 42-second spasm of feculent kicks." 

Looks bit like the Moving Shadow logo, that silhouette. 

Weathered legend returns to youth currency 

What K calls "peak slumpstyle" - the slowed + reverb remix 

Lithuian "nu-jumpstyle Jesus" Yabujin 

And his alter-ego

"What makes this internet-addled aesthetic so addictive is the way it taps into the younger generation’s collectively fried childhoods. It’s a shitposty Tower of Babble that crosses countries and languages."

Talking of shitpostmodernism, Kieran is quoted in this Kyle Chayka article in The New Yorker on corecore and "The Dada Era of Internet Memes"

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

The uglier aspects of this nu-jumpstyle scene reminded me a bit of this spoof  and spoof pt 2 I concocted back in 2007 (inspired by guesswho)

Old post on hardstyle, a related genre that has some militaristic undercurrents... well, overcurrents really

Jumpstyle in simpler, happier, more innocent days. 

RIP MC Duke

RIP MC Duke 

Another of those figures who moved through the UK rap scene and into hardcore rave and jungle. 

"Can't beat the system, go with the flow" - source of the famous sample as used by (fellow former Britrap cru) The Criminal Minds, on "Baptised By Dub"

 

"Educated Snares" - you gotta love that title!

Associated with Suburban Base / Boogie Times - recording, with a partner, under the name e.kude

Sample from Bill and Ben the Flowerpot Men there (or perhaps impersonation)

                                                 

   Gorgeous Chaka Khan sample in there.

But before Suburban Base, MC Duke put out a couple of aliased records with Shut Up and Dance ("fast rap' turned breakbeat h-core)

Discogs bio: 

Born Anthony Mark Hilaire / Kashif Adham

Died 21 April 2024, aged 58

MC Duke got his big break when the emcee who had won the DMC MC Battle got on stage at the DMC World Championships after party and announced that he would battle anybody in the house, MC Duke got up and beat him. Derek B saw what happened and as he had just signed to Music Of Life asked Duke to meet him at the label the next day. While waiting for Derek B, Duke met the owner Simon Harris, and rapped live as he didn't have a demo, needless to say the rest is history.

Later he joined the Shut Up And Dance label and released two 12 inches with DJ Leader 1 under the name I.C.3..

He then went on to produce for Boogie Times/Suburban Base label and set up the Harddisk and Bluntly Speaking Vinyl label

Discography

Messy playlist of MC Duke under various guises and in various eras

Interesting that despite being MC Duke, he graduated from rapping in the Britcore scene to producing in the Ardkore scene and running labels, as opposed to being a rave MC.  

Check out the nifty little sample from Specials "Gangsters" - another example of the 2-Tone / Nuum connection

"Common Sensi", teehee

This E.KUD.CM stuff is good ruffstuff - clattery and jittery - and some classic vocal licks (“spread out and skiatter", "sekkle" etc)

It has taken me a ridiculous amount of time (well, a full half hour) to notice that the name E.KUD.C.M.  is MC Duke backwards. 

Fits the hardcore as hip hop turned inside out idea -  hip hop but the MC is the occasional ancillary phrase bobbing about amid the beats, and the drums are doing all the real talking.

Dantronix

 

"dantronix in the house" - inspired aliasing! 

Listening to this when it came out really rammed home the hardcore / Brit B-boy connection for me. 

Mantronix as  gateway drug to Amentalism  - via "King of the Beats"

                            (I talk a bit about Mantronix and going to UK Fresh in '86 in this podcast C86 Books )

Skratchadelicism   distils the equation: hip hop + E = ardkore 

Flowers In My Garden - luvved-up hardcore as hip hop pastoralized

And of course, the sample, the sample is from Woodstock the movie  - John Sebastian (ex of the Lovin' Spoonful) announcing the birth of a baby at the festival  - "that kid's gonna be far out"  (at 19.40 in this clip)

Danny Break'z was how he monikered himself early on !

The apostrophe got lost 

Then it resurfaced with the new name Droppin' Science, presumably inspired by this track 

Style Warz - flying that flag high! 

"I was more into the music than the rapping" - Danny Breaks, in this 1995 interview for German TV, dropping science on his beat-science

                                                                   (via Blog to the Old Skool, via Droid)

Handy playlist I made of Dantronix trax -  appropriately it goes in a strange loop da loop, starting  with the first Droppin' Science material and goes forward through those peerless releases, until - after "The Bear" - it doubles back to the Sonz of the Loop Da Era, er, era -  but goes reverse-chronology, from "What The..." to "Far Out".   Some remixes by him in there, and remixes of his tunes by others. It's quite a body of work 

My interview with Danny Breaks from October 1995

Quite Viberty, what he went on to do