really enjoyed some of this, but it must be very serious business indeed when some of the main participants start deploying PDFs.
The London dubstep scene, for example, is accessible and welcoming to participants from a wide range of social backgrounds in a way that the “underground” jungle scene never was, but it is also characterised by a certain self-consciousness which is inevitably somewhat embarrassing to those who can remember what the jungle scene felt like “back in the day”. Dubstep is an internationally-successful genre whose devotees desperately want to belong to a “scene” and to listen to avant-garde music with its roots in reggae, jungle and grime. Jungle, on the other hand, was essentially a local music - a seemingly spontaneous bricolage of reggae, hip-hop, dancehall, house and techno which nonetheless sounded entirely new and entirely unique - made for local dance crowds. It took most intellectuals, critics, audiences and producers from outside of that milieu several years to stop dismissing it as meaningless proletarian noise and to realise its musical importance, despite the efforts of early advocates such as Reynolds himself.
i definitely felt some (slightly) embarrassed recognition on reading this! as awkward 16 year olds living in an inward-looking northern town, me and my friends’ only real connection to developments in jungle came through the voracious consumption of Dreamscape / Pleasuredome tape packs and occasional confused/skint forays into our local underground record shop. now i’m an older, better off, terminally nostalgic 30 year old dad living in london, i jumped on dubstep as soon as i heard it (2004?). i love, love the music, but i’ll admit openly that in terms of personal meaning to me, it also represents a longed-for “second chance” to be involved (still very peripherally in my case) in a junglesque music scene.
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one thing that dubstep has, which i loved about jungle, is a pretty fast pace of innovation. i remember it seemed that jungle pushed itself forward so quickly from one season to the next - there would be a vogue for Arsonist style bass sounds, then it all went sort of techno, etc - and i think dubstep’s "edges" (which aren’t even edges in my opinion) have an even faster pace and a wider range of mutations and inbound influences. i feel a lot of excitement from this, and the fact that i know it can’t last makes it even more exciting as i self-consciously savour the moment…
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this snippet from a Ramadanman interview gave me vertigo when i encountered it:
When did you first get into UK bass music?
I guess it was probably jungle. I never really got into it that much, but I bought an LTJ Bukem CD when I about 12. I guess that was about 2000