Electric Shock

by Peter Doggett

  By 2000, brands such as Enyce and Rocawear had established themselves as major players on the fashion scene. More significant than the predominance of urban streetwear across the racial divide, and on the global stage, was the emergence of individual rappers as entrepreneurs – those two imprints having been launched by Puff Daddy and Jay-Z respectively. Whereas their rock ’n’ roll counterparts had invested their riches in drugs, fast women, divorce lawyers, sports cars and, only then, real estate, the superstars of hip hop quickly established themselves as capitalists without restraint. In 2014, The Guardian estimated that Puff Daddy – who now prefers to be known as P. Diddy – had amassed a $700 million fortune, only a small proportion of which could be credited to his musical exploits.

  Nobody exemplifies the new business dynamic in hip hop more vividly than Dr Dre. Once a Nigga With Attitude, then the pioneer of gangsta rap and bass-heavy production techniques, Andre Young is now a billionaire, thanks to the purchase by Apple of the Beats electronics corporation he formed with producer and label boss Jimmy Iovine. Dre’s aim was simply to expand his urban fashion lines; Iovine suggested that there might be more money in designer headphones. Where once it was fashionable only to sport the discreet white earplugs of Apple’s iPhone, Beats turned headphones into the kind of status symbol that sneakers had been twenty years before – the larger and more noticeable the better (and never mind the sound quality, which in Beats’ case has often been criticised).

  With its icons now among the highest-earning businessmen on the planet, it is no wonder that hip-hop culture became increasingly obsessed with wealth and its conspicuous consumption. Raps that would once have chronicled ghetto shoot-outs descended into vehicles for product placement; likewise their videos, which could not have been any more arrogant and (in every sense of the word) exclusive had they been produced by potentates and princes. Inherent to this sense of ownership – of a milieu in which a man was judged by his purchases and belongings, not his actions or words – was the belief that women, young, near-naked and bootylicious (to borrow a song title from Destiny’s Child), were simply one more category of object, to be abused or disposed of with the same impunity as a horse’s head in a mafia movie.

  In the twenty-first century, it was easy – indeed, almost inevitable, if your body held a progressive bone – to decry the innate sexism of mainstream, macho, bling-obsessed hip hop, and to mourn the gradual triumph of that attitude in the wider urban spectrum. Nothing illustrated this trend more brazenly than the 2013 success of ‘Blurred Lines’, a collaboration between Robin Thicke and the ubiquitous (in 2013) Pharrell. The song, which featured a particularly inflammatory guest rap from T.I., was widely interpreted as encouraging or condoning the act of rape – the supposedly blurred lines being those that divided consent from sexual abuse. The fact that the song was released in the aftermath of the revelations of systematic, lifelong abuse of children and adolescents by the disc jockey Jimmy Savile merely heightened the controversy. The furore spread to include the gratuitous display of naked female bodies in urban and hip-hop videos; and their influence on the brazen sexualisation of women in modern society, with pernicious effects on precisely those age groups targeted by Savile and other offenders in the entertainment industry. All of these strands and concerns coincided in August 2013, when the 20-year-old former child star Miley Cyrus ‘twerked’ provocatively in front of a worldwide TV audience at the Video Music Awards, while Robin Thicke (inevitably) ‘popped up like some kind14 of sex-pest Zelig’, in Dorian Lynskey’s words.

  Here was food for a thousand sociological theses.fn2 Aged 18, pop starlet Christina Aguilera had declared ‘It’s important to me15 to be a positive role model. Parading around in a bra and a pair of hot pants will not inspire confidence in other girls. That would just make me one more person pushing them to feel like they have to be something they’re not.’ Aged 21, and promoting her album Stripped, Aguilera offered herself to early-evening television viewers on the BBC’s Top of the Pops as the exact antithesis of her earlier promise. Was the choice to sexualise her image entirely hers, did it come from her handlers, or was it an almost inescapable option in a society which demands that its young women offer themselves as fantasy objects of male desire?

  For all the erotic deification of a talented urban singer such as Usher, however, many fans still responded with an almost stunning innocence, as if social attitudes had not changed since the era of Patti Page and Doris Day. One 15-year-old Usher fan told a journalist: ‘People always ask me16 if he’s a virgin. I don’t know. They ask me if he’s bisexual. I don’t know. I don’t care.’ His virginity was obviously an ideal for this girl, raised in a religious society, but she was prepared to love him even if he had sinned. How would she react if they ever met? ‘I would treat him like a regular person. I would take him shopping. I would buy him a friendship bracelet.’ No blurred lines there: merely the same infatuation which young women have indulged for male pop stars since the heyday of Rudy Vallee and Bing Crosby. This was either a refreshing antidote to the sexual obsessions of modern popular music; or a sad reflection of girls’ willingness to build their dreams around impossible, fictional ideals; or perhaps both. One conclusion is inescapable: without teenage sexuality, there would be no teenage pop; without teenage pop, no arena in which to explore teenage sexuality. Pop has always been the antithesis of sexual repression; and often the embodiment of sexual exploitation.

  Rock has to absorb17 other rhythmic forms, because the underlying rhythms of music change with fashion, and people like to move differently now than they moved thirty years ago.

  Mick Jagger, 1995

  In America now, Skrillex18 is the biggest thing since Nirvana. You’re witnessing a whole new cultural revolution.

  Dance-music promoter Drew Best, 2012

  Huge chunks [of the Top 40]19 cleave to roughly the same musical template … There will be a 4/4 house beat. There will be a euphoric, hands-in-the-air breakdown similar to those found on early 1990s rave tracks. There will be Auto-Tuned vocals. There will be a moment where the vocal goes ‘woah-oh-woah’ (or similar) in the stadium-rousing style of Coldplay … Representatives of genres that used to be identifiably different from each other – pop, hip hop, R&B – currently make singles that sound largely indistinguishable.

  Alexis Petridis, The Guardian, 2012

  In a world of instant global communication, where there is no underground beyond the so-called ‘dark net’, the only way to maintain elitism, the preoccupation of the adolescent and post-adolescent cult, is to label oneself. Labels explain who you are, and more importantly who you are not.

  Nothing exposes an outsider (or an adult straying into youth culture) more quickly than the inability to master the language. The British grime artist Wiley satirised this fact with his 2004 single ‘Wot U Call It’, dedicated to everyone (which was everyone outside the grime scene) who could not define or describe his music. No sooner had scholars managed to deduce the precise chemical reaction which created grime from a blend of black cultures and rhythms, than its protagonists renamed their music. One step ahead of the masses, they retained their mystique. Assimilated into the mainstream, they were socially dead (albeit better rewarded financially).

  So it is tempting to suggest that, for anyone who is not a participant in these subcultures, or whose livelihood does not depend on being able to throw their names around with an air of confidence, it is irrelevant to attempt to chronicle the ever-mutating dance beats which have filled floors and sparked turf rivalries over the past twenty years. Their names – garage, dubstep, trap, tribal, gabba, plus the long-suffering and much-abused techno, electro, house and rave – convey the universe to their adherents; nothing to the outside world. Taken en masse, however, all of these rhythmic innovations, let loose in the digital universe for orgiastic miscegenation, have combined to immerse the modern world in the frenzy of dance. The ceaseless, ecstatic repetition of electronic, digital, computer-derived rhythms now dominates every party, whethe
r it’s in a Hoxton or SoHo warehouse or at a works’ Christmas outing; filled with teenage hipsters or their embarrassingly overstimulated grandparents. There was a scene early in Paolo Sorrentino’s ravishing film La Grande Bellezza (2013) which demonstrated this perfectly: to an insistently modern dance soundtrack, wealthy inhabitants of Rome’s decadent, aristocratic milieu throw themselves into a frenzied exhibition of sensuality and physicality, careless of their age and social stature. Nobody holds back, asking for the DJ to console them with Motown or the Rolling Stones, the lambada or ‘Agadoo’: to a woman and man, they exist solely in the moment, and this is the moment of dance. And has been, for as many years as anyone under the age of 30 can remember.

  Lost in this compression of modern culture are musical explosions so vibrant that each, individually, might have lent their name to an era: trip hop, lazy and spacious, and yet hinged around the frenetic traditions of electronica and breakbeats; ragga, its Caribbean-electro blend neatly combining the themes of the age, sexuality and technology; jungle, where electro meets rap amidst wired, clattering rhythms; grime, located in the precise quadrant of London where punk, reggae, rap and jungle coincided. Isolated against a static backdrop – like ragtime in 1900, or swing in 1935 – jungle or grime would have signalled a revolution in sound and manners. Lost in the melee of constant movement, they were both startlingly new and almost impossible to see – like the one dancer in a room of vibrating bodies who is obeying a slightly different rhythm. No sooner were they identified and described than they were gone, translated into a different subgenre or possibly even a different species. Five years later, they might return, crossed with techno or house or rave (whatever those nouns meant that week) into a style which would briefly earn its place in the ever-expanding lexicon of dance.

  There was one line of movement which remained constant. That was the drift – inexorable and apparently inescapable – from black culture to multiracial mainstream. The early years of the twenty-first century were an urban era, when the defiantly black traditions of R&B and hip hop dominated and shaped the language and landscape of popular music. Their innovations were apparent in teen pop by former princesses of the Disney empire, just as they were amidst the constant rotation of rap-with-soul, soul-with-rap guest appearances. This music was built on the startling rhythmic variations and sonic distractions invented by two remarkable African-American production teams: Timbaland, with various collaborators; and the Neptunes (alias NERD, or Pharrell Williams and Chad Hugo). At the time when hip hop had become nothing more radical than pop, its rage and provocation reduced to the banality of Jay-Z’s ‘Jigga My Nigga’, Timbaland emerged with a sonic technique so spare that it sounded alien, in the most exotic interpretation of that word. When he produced the 2000 hit ‘Try Again’ for teen soul star Aaliyah, her song was merely a distraction against synth bass riffs which invaded the ears, and constantly unnerving spurts and detonations of sound. On Jay-Z’s contemporaneous ‘Big Pimpin’’, Timbaland painted sonic colours as if he’d migrated to Egypt; on Missy Elliott’s thrillingly bizarre ‘Get Ur Freak On’, it was West Africa, with a tinny synth riff that resembled a one-string banjo, and layers of vocals which were both tribal and futuristic. And this single reached the Top 10 of the pop charts in Britain and America: had the mainstream ever been so experimental, so unpredictable? Neptunes were producing equally surreal effects with their manipulation of bass and percussion, their recording studio simply the venue for the most life-affirming joke in the history of creation. When OutKast and Kanye West joined in the fun, it was as if the psychedelia of 1966–7 was being reborn, minus its veneer of intellectual respectability.

  That was too glorious an era to last, as yesterday’s innovations became today’s clichés, and the prime movers became distracted by their individual ambitions. As that final (to date) golden age of adventure in mainstream popular music faded away, it was time for a new generation of entrepreneurs and musicologists to translate exploration into mass entertainment. Remixer extraordinaire Armand Van Helden once described Daft Punk as the Led Zeppelin of dance, popularising and formalising a seam of underground music. In their low-budget science-fiction space helmets, anonymous and unrecognisable, this French duo streamlined the sonic madness of the urban era into hypnotic computerised beats: house meets hip hop meets advanced robotics, perhaps. Layered over these deceptively simple rhythms were the sounds of technology: voices, guitars, horns, keyboards, all compressed into the wire-thin expressions of machinery seizing control of human emotions. Forty years of synthesised tomfoolery, sixty years of modern pop, were all rewired for electronic sound, to the point where they were both other-worldly and joyously familiar.

  Like Daft Punk, the commercial giants of this decade – the second of this unpredictably uniform century – can command mammoth crowds with their anonymity. These have been the years of Skrillex and Calvin Harris, David Guetta and Avicii, deadmau5 and Zedd: the masters of EDM (or electronic dance music). Their talent has been, like the instruments which define their music, to synthesise generations of dance-floor innovation into seamless, ceaseless waves of manufactured exhilaration. The reward for these men (every one of them white) has been wealth of the kind which was once reserved for performers who performed, singers who sang, or musicians who played instruments. With their success, pre-recorded sound has effectively replaced live music, just as it has when pop performers mime their vocals so they can concentrate on their dance steps.

  But the EDM revolution also turns us full circle, back to the irresistible effect of the syncopated rhythms of ragtime, and the epic journey that followed over the next 120 years. ‘Dance music now is pop music20’, said disco producer Giorgio Moroder in 2012. Perhaps, at heart, it always has been. The world that has been soundtracked and shaped by popular music is a world of ecstasy, of rhythm, of movement – a world that ultimately is never more than two steps from the dance floor.

  * * *

  fn1 Rockstar also invented a game called Wild Metal Country, which had nothing to do with either heavy metal or country music.

  fn2 And here is a question for those students to debate: was the media preoccupation with sexual imagery in urban and hip-hop songs a reflection of the exploitative nature of those genres? Or was it influenced by the age-old white fear of black male sexuality?

  Picture Credits

  The images at the openings of Chapters 1–16 and 20–22 are reproduced by permission of Getty Images, the pictures for Chapters 17–18 are courtesy of the Library of Congress, and the picture that opens Chapter 19 is reproduced by kind permission of Bob Gruen (www.bobgruen.com).

  Every effort has been made to trace and contact all copyright holders. If there are any inadvertent omissions or errors, the publishers will be pleased to correct these at the earliest opportunity.

  Acknowledgements

  This project might have died at birth had it not been for the enthusiastic initial response of my editors at The Bodley Head, Will Sulkin and Jörg Hensgen. Will took well-earned retirement soon after signing his name to a contract, but Jörg valiantly saw the book through to the end. His input as a creative sounding-board, agony uncle and (not least) editor was immensely valuable and much appreciated. Many thanks also to Will’s replacement at The Bodley Head, Stuart Williams, and to David Milner, Anthony Hippisley, Matt Broughton, Emmie Francis, Maria Garbutt-Lucero, Ceri Maxwell and Will Smith.

  My agent for this book, Rupert Heath, helped me to fine-tune the initial proposal and the subsequent contract: thanks once again to him. As ever, Andrew Sclanders generously opened up his counter-culture archive for my perusal. His regular sales catalogues (www.beatbooks.com) have depleted my bank balance over the past 15 years but enriched my bookshelves. Many thanks also for their encouragement, support and suggestions to Colin Harper, Clinton Heylin, Johnny Rogan, Stuart Batsford, Andy Miller, Tony Nourmand, Carey Wallace, Sarah Hodgson, Alex Gawley, Max Vickers, Lily Stewart, Lou Ann Bardash, Tom Ovans, Miryam Audiffred and our neighbours, Keith and Beryl Bro
oks, whose reminiscences of seeing the Ted Heath band in full 1950s swing helped to kick-start this book.

  Much of the research for this project was undertaken at the British Library, my home for many long days during 2012 and 2013. Thanks to the very helpful staff there, and at the University of London Library, and to the beleaguered survivors of the public library services in Ealing and Southampton. Audio research was simplified by the limitless archives of Spotify and YouTube, which enabled me (for example) to access almost every hit song and record released since 1890. This is a sign of the times: music that would once have cost me many thousands of pounds to acquire is now available for the meagre cost of a broadband connection and a streaming subscription.

  The book was written at home, mostly in silence, as the days when I could concentrate while listening to music are sadly long gone. Only a few albums passed the test of placidly inspiring creativity rather than distracting it, notably In a Silent Way and the Jack Johnson Sessions (Miles Davis), My Goal’s Beyond (John McLaughlin) and The Individualism of Gil Evans – none of which was ever intended to serve as Muzak. The text was edited over long cups of coffee at Harris & Hoole in Ealing, and The Tea Party at Lee-on-the-Solent, where the staff patiently tolerated my table-blocking antics.

  Our lovely daughters, Catrin and Becca, were spared most of the agony of watching this book take shape, by cleverly deciding to leave home and pursue their own exciting and very different lives. We love them more than they probably realise, and miss them while admiring their courage and independence. Freddie was a constant companion, and an inspirational one at that, as long as I obeyed her demands to be fed and let outside, so she could pursue her relentless surveillance of The Cat Next Door.