tufluv///: “Tuff Jam (actually just Tuff and some other bloke) arent doing anything new here its exactly what they were doing seven years ago, yet its wicked stuff and somehow all the more timely.”
Quite right. All this gutter-obsessed hipster carping about how previous strains of garage are irrelevant compared to the click-whoop tedium of SO MUCH gutter garage is just more knee jerk conservatism. The dullard lust for novelty is just jaded self-destructiveness. Planned obsolescence. And these people say they like reggae! Even a cursory examination of reggae shows that the desire for linear progress is wrong-headed at best and politically suspect at worst, inevitably driving music into cultural dead ends. The continuing popularity of 2 step and 4 beat — yes not a lot of it is made, but it’s still listened to a lot — is not something to be ethnically cleansed. It’s simply a part of the ongoing, evolving musical ecosystem, the DRIFT, that centres on hardcore but brings in elements of everything else.
The same is true of mid-nineties techno, which for ages has been beyond the pale of hipsterdom despite being, frequently, fucking ace music which was written out ofthe script because it wasn’t hardcore. Well, now’s the time to admit that most hardcore was shit while lots of funky techno was great. As predicted the hipsters are getting into it now as part of their ongoing market speculation but the attitude still sucks.