Category: General

GUTTERBREAKZ: “3) HEAVEN 17/B.E.F. – invented The Human League. Reinvented Tina Turner and pioneered hi-tech Soul music. Made a record my mum liked (‘This Is Mine’) and a record my wife likes (‘Come Live With Me’), which is no mean feat.”

A really, truly, genuinely, GREAT band. People laugh at you for saying this but they did it all — but with so much deadpan Sheffield humour and irony that people thought they really were yuppies. Fucking fools the lot of them. Their version of Lets Stay Together with Tina Turner was wonderful ibn a way their critics will never understand. And their legendary “lost” (as in no-one rated it) third album, How Men Are, is an unrecognised work of genius. The closing track, the best kept secret, is a blinder of electronic emotion.

Heaven 17. Just too good for this world.

GUTTERBREAKZ: “Good to see that I’m not alone in being firmly ‘anti-London’. Still, I’m waiting for someone else to back-up my ‘Sheffield = Music Mecca’ claim.”

Me me me!!! I’ll back it up! Well I would, but just check out this page, cogent and entertaining stuff from someone who is, clearly, from the right side of the pennines.

Fuck, why has no-one pointed out this blog before? Blinding stuff. I’m proper made up, Just goes to show that it is worth clicking on Si Reynolds’ list of miscreants at random…

blissblog: “it’s only recently that the pirates have got so specific about this or that particular End. Garage isn’t just an East thing, there’s pirates all over, in the South, the West, the North… “

So when you lived in London, Simon, I presume it was North London?

😉

Cos, this statement is factually incorrect. The south London pirates have ALWAYS made a point of their geographical reach and differentiation. Not just my beloved Upfront FM either. Sure there’s a particular variation on this theme in the grime scene but it’s a well established meme.

And a related point which also impacts the whole London-centricity argument — when I was living in Brixton, it was obvious to me that the natural locus of garage, its omphalos, its holy hill, wasn’t Brixton, wasn’t Hackney, wasn’t Bow — it was, and for all I know still is, Croydon. I used to go on pilgrimages to Croydon record shops when I was doing business down there and the vibe was so strong. The number of garage raves in Croydon was unbelievable. You could see all the kids driving down there to go to the “proper” garage’n’r’n’b nights. You had DJ South Central, whose name was adapted from LA/Compton, but translated to, you guessed it, Croydon.

And before you dismiss this as just another Suburban Base story, I’d like to emphasise that from my point of view the lost area from Brixton through Streatham to Croydon was the heart and soul of the scene, and it was always very 2 Step oriented. This might be a different current from the Hackney / Bow one, and maybe there’s more of a north-south dividide in garage than we thought.

blissblog: “Amen–they wouldn’t let it die!”

Funnily enough I’m just finishing off a new ragga jungle track I’m doing with a Bounty Killer accappella, loads of layered breaks (like that producer Reynolds quoted on blissblog), and a dirty great big bass (like remarc was talking about). And of course, I’m sticking some Amens in there at key points, and the impact it has on focusing the rhythm is extraordinary. They seem to mesh with whatever they’re put with that’s in time. Now, two things spring to mind.

One, I’m using the standard 170bpm-ish break we all know and love. But, on a machine that’s currently dead and being resuscitated, I have an MP3 of the original Amen break, which is of course at funk tempo. So — who sped up the break to what we know? Have lots of people done their own versions (I’d be a bit surprised if that’s the case cos the Amens we hear are pretty uniform in their sound — I think the artefacts in the signal caused by the original sampling and timestretching process sound common in all the versions I’ve heard. But I could be completely wrong. Maybe sampling up and timestretching your very own copy of Amen, ideally from a copy of the original vinly, is a rite of passage in the drum’n’bass producer community. Or maybe what we’re hearing is the sonic signature of Akai and Emu samplers, two variations on a bit-mangling theme; talk about music of the machines. Then again, maybe the jungle Amen is a sample of a hiphop record that itself sampled the original vinyl… I’d really like to know what the deal is here.

Second, who’s getting royalties for this break? Has it become de-facto public domain or is someone making a mint out of D’n’B producers? Can you take out a subscription — 12 months of Amen-sampling for $99 a month?

And is the drummer getting any dough from all these people using his playing?

blissblog: “Funky Drummer was a culmination of this rhythm, and of the breakbeat. The song seems to be improvised on the spot to fill space on a record or use up studio time, little more than that beat, when James counts down the band to sit out that break, and drummer Clyde Stubblefield just keeps on doing his thang, only more so, little knowing that future generations of samplists were waiting in the wings of history. “

This is a bloke called Alan Murphy doing stuff on blissout. All comprehensible of course but I am left reflecting that the funky drummer break is IMO less interesting than the rest of the track, which hangs in space, endlessly cycling, an ourobouros of rhythm, perfect, meditative, a funk hymn to life itself. By no means is it a filler.

k-punk: “Talk about having your cum and swallowing it.”

Yes, it’s SUCH a dillemma, isn’t it?

tHAT wAS a nAUGHTY bIT oF cRAP: “HOWEVER, I’ve always thought the way music works backs up this ‘vision’, THE PAST AINT HISTORY! In this sense ‘Enlightenment’ (and thats where I come unstuck, who’s to say what is ‘Enlightened’?) always constitutes the future, and is from time to time stretched a little further “

I think he’s critiquing his own argument before he’s finished explaining it. Clearly I would argue viz someone like Merlin Stone that the 18th century enlightentment myth of progress (and indeed its lefty descendants with their faith in one-size fits all solutions — suckers!) is based on faulty premises. In other words, the (pre-platonic, socratic) past ain’t that backward. And I say that without, I hope, falling into noble savagery. Quite the reverse actually.

What I would also say is, I thijnk, identical to what Matt is trying to articulate: that the “progress” of music, of culture, is not linear, but elliptical, fractal even.

tHAT wAS a nAUGHTY bIT oF cRAP: “Obviously a band like the Velvet Underground (like it or not Paul Meme) are still, if not bursting with vital influence, then a little pungent. “

Hehehehe! I was wondering if this was going to come up. But let’s not get side tracked. My antipathy is partly curmudgeonly and entirely subjective. There are just very few Velvets records that I think are ANY cop at all — Heroin (good indie metal track) and… oh fuck knows. They don’t do much for me. And I’ve been listening to them since I was 12, played loads of their songs in a band a few years later. The whole reverence for them I find both mystifying and irritating in a way that I don’t for a band like, say the Stooges. And yes, you could probably critique the stooges as easily as the velvets. But the stooges did funhouse and Iggy did the Idiot, while the velvets did insipid sub folk and Lou Reed did, ummm, well quite a few good pop records actually, so lets leave it at that. I still reserve my right to snarl offensively about the velkvets being the most over-rated band in music history, I mean, if I gave it to Gen with boith barrels why not the rest of you?

I tend to think hipsters treat the velvets the same way the rest of the world treats the beatles. I don’t like the velvets much but I do like the beatles so go figure. Mind you, next time the sunday telegraph uses sunday morning in a TV ad I’ll sing along.

Of course the velvets are interesting objectively because of the milieu they sprang from but you’re all bored of that line of thinking so I’ll stop.

tHAT wAS a nAUGHTY bIT oF cRAP#106258083149864339: “The Silver Records.”

Jesus, the man’s on fire!

Incredible stuff, this is the music criticism equivalent of Jeff Mills — all flashing speed, lava, and power — combined with Slip It In-standard collector nerd punk invective. “So now the goons are coming to the party I thought it was time I did a bit of the old bollocks-on-the-table. Let all you kids snapping at my heels know what you’re up against. Which is an absolute disgrace because the records I’ve chosen to perform this nasty trick with are among the most important documents of the 20th century.” Hardcore. I’ve no idea what these records sound like and I probably never will but you’ve got to read this.

Funfair For The Common Man: “(but don’t get me started… “

Just talked to the wife about this, she reckons they were a great band too. Thing with the Poppies was, lots of girls liked them, cos they were funky and they were fun, and that must really piss off the high brow fan boys…