Like other ’ardkore junglists with roots in the electro/bodypopping/ graffiti era – DJ Hype, Aphrodite, DJ Crystl, 4 Hero, Goldie, DJ SS – Danny’s desire to ‘do instrumental stuff with breaks and weird sounds’ drew him gradually into the rave scene. When acid house hit in 1988, this first generation of British B-boys were swept up in rave fervour; acieed’s phuturism eclipsed an American hip-hop sound already retreating to trad funk ’n’ soul grooviness. This rave-revelation coincided, for many, with their final alienation from American rap, which had taken a turn towards the grimly serious – from the ‘niggativity’ of gangsta rappers like NWA and the Geto Boys, to the righteous ‘edutainment’ of KRS 1 and X-Clan.
Infiltrating the hardcore rave scene, these lapsed B-boys came up with their own hyperkinetic mutant of hip hop. Suppressing the storytelling and rhymin’ skills side of rap, they reactivated a neglected legacy: the frigid futurism of electro, the cut ’n’ mix collages and jarring edits of Davy DMX, Steinski and Mantronix. Sampladelia taken to the dizzy limit, ’ardkore was basically hip hop on E, rather than a debased form of techno (as its critics supposed). But consider the fact that MDMA is not exactly a B-boy drug (can you imagine a loved-up Chuck D?) and you’ll have some idea of how strange a hip-hop mutant ’ardkore was. On tracks like Hyper-On Experience’s ‘Thunder Grip’, like DJ Trax’s ‘Infinite Hype’ and ‘We Rock The Most’, breakbeats swerve and skid like the automobiles in Penelope Pitstop; melody-shrapnel whizzes hither and thither; every cranny of the mix is infested with hiccupping vocal-shards and rap chants sped up to sound like pixies. The vibe is sheer Hanna-Barbera, but beneath the smiley-faced ‘hyper-ness’, the breaks and basslines are ruff B-boy bizness.
’Ardkore producers like Hype and 2 Bad Mice even revived scratching, an old skool technique which had virtually disappeared from US hip hop as it evolved from its DJ-and-MC-oriented street-party origins into a studio-based art geared around the producer and rapper-as-poet. Danny Breaks christened this ’ardkore sub-genre ‘scratchadelic’; a classic example is 2 Bad Mice’s remix of Blame’s ‘Music Takes You’, where a squelchy scratch-riff slots right next to the Morse Code keyboard-stab, piano-vamps and staccato blasts of hypergasmic diva (which sound like Minnie Mouse in the throes of coitus).
Although it started as a breakbeat-fuelled offshoot of techno,’ardkore jungle had devolved by late 1992 into a speedfreak cousin of old skool hip hop. ’Ardkore was the messy birth-pangs of Britain’s very own equivalent to (as opposed to imitation of) US hip hop: jungle. That said, you could equally make the case that jungle is a raved-up, digitized offshoot of Jamaican reggae. Musically, jungle’s spatialized production, bassquake pressure and battery of extreme sonic effects, make it a sort of postmodern dub on steroids. As a subculture, jungle is riddled with Jamaican ideas – like ‘dubplates’ (exclusive tracks given to DJs far in advance of release), ‘rewinds’ (when the crowd exhorts the DJ to ‘wheel and come again’, or spin a track back to the start at high velocity, producing a violent screech by rubbing the stylus the wrong way). By the end of 1992, junglist MCs were adding patois buzzphrases from dancehall reggae – ‘big it up!’, ‘brock out!’, ‘booyacka!’ – to their repertoire of ravey rallying cries and B-boy boasts, and exhorting the crowd to raise their lighters in the air (the ragga fan’s traditional salute to the DJ). And by early 1994, the most popular jungle tracks were those based around vocal licks sampled from raggamuffin stars like Buju Banton, Cutty Ranks, Ninjaman and Spragga Benz, whose rasping, grainy voices and self-aggrandizing insolence fitted perfectly with the rough-cut rhythms.
Even the name ‘jungle’ comes from Jamaica (as does its more baldly descriptive synonym, ‘drum and bass’). According to MC Navigator from London’s ruling pirate station Kool FM, ‘jungle’ comes from ‘junglist’, and was first heard in 1991 as a sample used by Rebel MC, who pioneered British hip-house in the early nineties, then formed the proto-jungle label X Project. ‘Rebel got this chant – “’alla the junglists’ ” – from a yard-tape,’ Navigator told me, referring to the sound-system mix-tapes imported from Jamaica (Yard is the slang term for Kingston, and the root of ‘yardie’, a hustler or hoodlum). ‘There’s a place in Kingston called Tivoli Gardens, and the people call it the Jungle. When you hear on a yard-tape the MC sending a big-up to “alla the junglists,” they’re calling out to a posse from Tivoli. When Rebel sampled that, the people cottoned on, and soon they started to call the music “jungle”.’
Africa Talks to You, the Concrete Jungle
‘When I first heard jungle, it seemed full of possiblities in a way I hadn’t encountered since hip hop. Hip hop’s main influence on My Bloody Valentine was that it re-educated us about rhythm; now jungle’s re-educating everyone again. I’ve been inspired by the way the rhythms shift and inverse on themselves, the way there’ll be ten different beats at once, or effects like the beat’s exploding. Someone wrote that black American music, being born of oppression, is downbeat, even when it’s meant to be lifting your spirit, but that African music is always stepping off the ground. I think that’s what jungle rhythms do . . .’
– Kevin Shields, My Bloody Valentine, 1995
Actually, there’s no real conflict between the jungle-as-twenty-first-century-hip-hop and jungle-as-cyber-dub theses. Jungle completes the circle in that it reconnects hip hop with one of its multiple sources: Jamaica. Like a high proportion of Bronx denizens, DJ Kool Herc was a Jamaican immigrant; as well as inventing breakbeat-science, Herc imported reggae’s tradition of mega-bass sound-systems. Reconnecting the Bronx to Kingston, jungle is the latest and greatest of the ‘post-slave’, post-colonial hybrids hatched within what Paul Gilroy has dubbed ‘the Black Atlantic’. Jungle is where all the different musics of the African-American/Afro-Caribbean diaspora (the scattering caused by slavery and forced migration) reconverge. In jungle, all the most African elements (polyrhythmic percussion, sub-aural bass frequencies, repetition) from funk, dub reggae, electro, rap, acieed and ragga, are welded together into the ultimate tribal trance-dance.
Beyond the idea of the entranced dancer being possessed by the spirits, ‘voodoo’ has another resonance with jungle, in so far as Haitian voudun is a hybrid culture, a mix ’n’ blend of black and white. Like Cuban santeria, voudun is a syncretic religion combining elements of West African animism and Catholicism. Even more striking is the centrality of drums in voudun ceremonies and rites. Just as African drums were used as signals for slaves to escape or rebel in the Deep South, similarly voudun fuelled the revolt of the Haitian slaves, leading to the founding of the first black republic in the Western Hemisphere.
Of course, this isn’t the reason London youth ‘cottoned on’, as Navigator put it, to the word ‘jungle’. First and foremost, the term just seems to fit the music like a glove. When you’re on the dancefloor, it feels like you’re inside a jungle of seething polyrhythms, a sensation at once thrilling and scary. Then there’s the ‘urban jungle’ metaphor, which runs through black pop history in a thread that connects The Wailers’ ‘Concrete Jungle’ (1972) and Sly and the Family Stone’s ‘Africa Talks To You (The Asphalt Jungle)’ (from 1971’s There’s A Riot Goin’ On) to the prototypical documentary-realist rap, Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five’s ‘The Message’, whose chorus runs ‘it’s like a jungle sometimes / It makes me wonder / How I keep from going under.’
There’s also the extensive, highly charged history in pop music of ‘jungle rhythms’, as object of both fear and desire. ‘Jungle’ reinvokes the anxieties of the white, elder generation confronted by the ‘primitiv-istic’ repetition and percussive stridency of fifties rock ’n’ roll. Some of the more paranoid anti-rock evangelists hallucinated a Soviet Communist conspiracy to ‘negrify’ the youth, with Elvis the Pelvis as a Pied Piper leading the kids into the ‘dark continent’ of animalistic sexuality. Jungle returns to rock ’n’ roll’s original sin – the priorization of beat over melody – and drastically exacerbates it by stripping it down to just drum and bass.
Underlying the fear of ‘the jungle beat’, of course, was the fear of degradation through miscegenation, the loss of racial identity. In the nineties, such fears were no longer the preserve of white supremacists. The title of Spike Lee’s anti-mixed marriage movie Jungle Fever comes from Nation of Islam supremo Louis Farrakhan, who uses it as a derogatory term for interracial relationships. In Britain, ‘jungle fever’ has sometimes been shouted as abuse by black youth at mixed-race couples.
The question of jungle’s musical ‘colour’ bedevils outside commentators and scene insiders alike. Jungle is often hailed as the first significant and truly indigenous Black British music. This notion obscures the fact that alongside hip hop and reggae, the third crucial constituent of jungle is whiter-than-white: the brutal bombast of the Euro-hardcore sound spawned in Belgium and Brooklyn. But even if you concede jungle’s musical ‘blackness’ as self-evident, this only makes it all the more striking that from Day One more than 50 per cent of the leading DJs and producers have been white. Some of the ‘blackest’ sounding, most hip-hop-and-ragga-influenced tracks come from pasty-faced producers like Andy C, Aphrodite, Dead Dred, and DJ Hype. An example of the havoc this can wreak even with scene insiders’ preconceptions is the story of Goldie’s first exposure to Doc Scott’s music. ‘I thought “this guy has got to be a nigger.” When I found out it was a white guy with blue eyes it freaked me out.’ Yet on other occasions, Goldie – himself half-English and half-Jamaican – has described Scott, his ally and mentor, as a true ‘nigga’.
For the most part, junglists de-emphasize the word ‘black’ and stress ‘British’; there’s a weird patriotism, in part a pride-full response to years of having to look to Black America or Jamaica for beats, but also evidence that these second or third generation immigrants feel that the UK is their home. Even Nation of Islam influenced militants like Kemet Crew stress that jungle has always been a black-and-white scene, while Kool FM’s credo is ‘No matter your class, colour or creed, you’re welcome in the house of jungle.’ Far from being racist, as Shut Up and Dance once alleged, the term ‘jungle’ actually codifies the multiracial nature of the scene, as contrasted with the mostly white audience for trance techno and ambient. Jungle is a kick in the eye for both white-power organizations like the BNP and for black segregationists, because it shows that trans-racial alliances are possible. Not just because it makes ‘blackness’ seem cool to white kids, but because there’s a genuine unity of experience shared by Britain’s black and white underclass.
So when white producer DJ Hype samples a black orator who preaches ‘we must unite on the basis of what we have in common’, the common experience – inhabiting the same run-down tower-blocks and council estates, being harassed by the police, living for marijuana, breakbeats and b-b-b-bass – may be grim and impoverished, but it’s ‘real’. Even when they live in nowheresville suburbs like Hitchin and Romford rather than inner-city ghettos, junglists belong to a jilted generation who are bored and frustrated, and have little to live for but burning up dead time in a weekend’s worth of ‘jungle fever’. The true meaning of ‘junglist’ is defined not by race, but by class, in so far as all working-class urban youth are ‘niggas’ in the eyes of authority. Junglist youth constitute a kind of internal colony within the United Kingdom: a ghetto of labour surplus to the economy’s requirements, of potential criminals under surveillance and guilty-until-proven-innocent as far as the Law is concerned.
Gangsta Rave
‘A “nuttah” could be Bruce Lee beating five guys at once, or someone who fights for a just cause like Mandela or Malcolm X, or it could be a bad-boy who robs banks. It’s just a word for someone who’s a fighter.’
– UK Apachi talking about the song ‘Original Nuttah’
In many ways, jungle is outlaw music: the scene’s three staples are pirate radio, drugs, and uncleared samples. From late 1992 onwards, the nascent jungle scene rapidly developed an overtly criminal-minded attitude. Tuning into the newer pirate stations like Don FM, you’d hear MCs sending out ‘big shout”s to ‘all the wrong ’uns’, ‘liberty-takers’ and ‘rude boys’. Listen closely to the MCs’ cryptic patter, and you might easily assume that illicit transactions were being conducted in code.
The nefarious vibe filtered into the music too, in the form of samples of sirens and bloodcurdling gunshots, and soundbites from blacksploitation thrillers and gangsta movies. Shy FX’s ‘Original Nuttah’ and ‘Gangsta Kid’ both hijacked Ray Liotta monologues from Goodfellas: ‘as far back as I can remember I always wanted to be a gangsta’; ‘Organized Crime’ by Naz Aka Naz sampled the sombre theme from The Godfather. Gun-talk pervaded the music, with band names like Tek 9 and AK47, song titles like ‘Hitman’, ‘Sound Murderer’ and ‘28 Gun Bad Boy’, and ragga-derived soundbites like the boast about carrying an ‘oversize clip and carbine’ in Conquering Lion’s ‘Code Red’. Most chilling of the lot had to be Family Of Intelligence’s ‘Champion of Champions’: mid-track, the rhythm halts, and a gruff Yardie voice promises, in a grisly sing-song, to ‘murder ’im, kill ’im . . . full ’im up of copper, full ’im up of lead / ’cos me bad boy vicious’.
Jungle’s ghettocentric vibe reflected the state of the nation. The recession had hit Britain hard, inner-city youth were facing unemployment and a welfare system that had been systematically dismantled by the Conservative government during its fifteen years of one-party tyranny. ‘American’ problems like guns and crack were taking root. Desperate music for desperate times, jungle’s two preoccupations were oblivion and crime. Inner-city kids wanted to get out of ‘it’ (dead-end post-Thatcherite reality) either by taking drugs or selling them. All this made the emergence of ‘gangsta rave’ – seemingly a contradiction in terms – a logical upshot of systemic failure.
As the music changed, so did the mood of the scene. In 1992, the received image of the ’ardkore raver was a sweaty, shirtless white teenager, grinning and gurning, reeking of Vicks and asking for a sip of your Evian. By 1994, the stereotypical junglist was a headnodding, stylishly dressed black twentysomething with hooded-eyes, holding a spliff in one hand and a bottle of champagne in the other. Out went all the trappings of rave – the woolly hats and baggy T-shirts, the white gloves and fluorescent light-sticks. Despite the sauna-like humidity of clubs and raves like Telepathy, Innersense and Sunday Roast, junglists came encased in black flight-jackets (MA1, MA2, Puffa, etc.) For a while there was fashion amongst the more chic black junglists to carry handkerchiefs, in order to dab away every last drop of perspiration and preserve the aura of aloof coolness. Sweat symbolizes rowdy communion, everyone mucking in together, shedding inhibitions and self-consciousness. The new taboo on sweat signalled that the scene’s emotional temperature had dropped. By 1993, eye contact was disappearing from the London hardcore scene; bonhomie gave way to a surly vigilance. Smiling (in black hip-hop culture, often considered a signifier of servility, a desire to please whitey) was replaced by the skrewface, a pinched sneer expressing disgust and derision.
What happened here? As hardcore evolved into jungle, it shed rave’s emotional demonstrativeness and gestural abandon, which had originated in gay disco and entered white working-class body-consciousness via Ecstasy. In its place, a ‘black’ ethos of self-control and mask-like inscrutability was embraced by white and black alike. Paralleling and/ or catalysing this shift were changing patterns of drug use. ’Ardkore’s nudge-nudge references to ‘rushing’, its sniggery E-based innuendos, were replaced by roots reggae soundbites about sensimilla, ganja and herb. There’s a sense in which the disappearance of the Ecstasy vibe allowed young black Britons to enter the rave scene en masse and begin the transformation of hardcore into jungle. Ecstasy’s effects of defenceless candour are probably too risky a cultural leap for the young black male, who can’t afford to jeopardize the psychic armour necessitated by the very different black experience of urban life.
As marijuana displaced the E, dancing lost its mania, became less ravey and out-of-control. The h
alf-speed bassline gave dancers the option of grooving to the dub-sway bass rather than flailing to 160 b.p.m. breaks. At a rave in 1991 – 2, you’d see lots of open-body gestures; at climactic moments or cosmic interludes in the music, arms were held aloft, outstretched to the heavens in a universal gesture of mystic surrender. Jungle replaced this openness and vulnerability with more controlled movements, closer to shadow-boxing or martial arts. As the dancehall-reggae influence kicked in, ragga clothing and bodymoves infiltrated the scene. You saw girls in skin-tight hot pants, bustiers and micro-skirts, dropping to a panther-style half-crouch and flexing their abdomens with the kind of risqué, confrontational sexuality patented by ragga-star Patra. The effect – imagine a Zulu go-go girl – was sexy but menacing, seducing the male gaze only to stab it in the eye with every pelvic thrust.
Under Siege
Jungle’s ‘creole’ culture could only have evolved in London. Paul Gilroy describes the city as ‘an important junction point or crossroads on the webbed pathways of black Atlantic [political and cultural traffic]’. The assertion of African sonic priorities (polyrhythm, bass-frequencies) caused breakbeat-based hardcore to contract from a nationwide, chart-topping pop music into a regional underground, centred on London and its surrounding counties. This contraction was celebrated by such late 1992 tracks as Code 071’s ‘London Sumtin’ Dis’ and Bodysnatch’s ‘Just 4 U London’. Apart from the odd outpost in multiracial areas like the Midlands and Bristol, the rest of the country shunned jungle. From the rave-will-never-die movement called ‘happy hardcore’ to the club-based house mainstream, the four-to-the-floor kick drum ruled supreme everywhere but the capital.
Energy Flash: A Journey Through Rave Music and Dance Culture Page 34
