Grievous Angel

Pounding System: “I Believe”

Great stuff. Dubversion is clearly a man who needs one of my Belief Is The Enemy T-shirts. And big up Dubversion for liking the Come Together jungle remix I did.

However:
“(PS these are some things that i decided i didn’t like this week:
Bitches Brew. Vashti Bunyan. Piles. the NME (again). Nectar Cards.”

Bitches Brew is worth sticking with but go for On the Corner first if you haven’t already. And In a Silent Way for something else completely — like, simplicity. Vashti Bunyan? You’re a brave man not liking her in this neighbourhood, geezer! Piles — I reckon I could do a heavyweight piece in this subject, though no doubt someone will tell me it’s a bad idea.

Speaking of In a silent way, I presume there’s loads of d’n’b records that sample this, but I haven’t heard any. If anyone can confirm this one way or the other I’d be grateful, cos I’d love to do it and it would be fairly easy!

I’m now running this blog on a new server: it’s here: https://blog.grievousangel.net

Please tell ten friends The Breast Cancer site is having trouble getting enough people to click on it daily to meet their quota of >donating at least one free mammogram a day to an underprivileged woman .

It takes less than a minute to go to their site and click on “donating a mammogram” for free (pink window in the middle). This doesn’t cost you a thing. Their corporate sponsors/advertisers use the number of daily visits to donate mammogram in exchange for advertising.

Here’s the web site! Pass it along to people you know.

www.thebreastcancersite.com

>AGAIN, PLEASE TELL 10 FRIENDS TO TELL 10 TODAY

WOEBOT: “If Grime came to be understood as UK Hip-Hop it’d be a disaster. Why? Because, put simply, Brit-Hop has never managed to get over being a inferior version of American Hip-Hop (Grime on the other hand seems mercifully oblivious of America).”

Excellent, excellent piece on this topic from Matt. Excellent because he’s not just commenting on articles in the mainstream press, he’s actually engaging with the authors. Excellent because he develops his point through detailed examination of specific, key records. Excellent because of an almost anthropological reportage on Mr Bongo. His argument is in essence that Grime shouldn’t be tarred with the UK Hip-Hop / UK-Rap brush because those genres do, basically, suck.

And quite right too.

However I feel that Grime can fruitfully be seen as being, at last, a decent British response to US Rap. As he was kind enough to point out, my view is that Grime and US hip hop are structurally similar — emphasis on the vocal rather than the backing, Black urban culture as the source, all that stuff. And, while Matt undoubtedly knows more than I do about Grime, it seems to me that Grime people do have US rap reference points. This is scarcely new. Plus uk garage crews went r&b as soon as they got popular — So Solid, obviously. Champagne garage and US R&B have always gone together.

The music doesn’t sound like US Rap though. It’ll get closer though. As I think I mentioned here before, Cameo is dropping grime tracks with girly choruses already — I preferred this to a lot of the more banging stuff FWIW.

* Cha Cha Slide looked great on the telly too.

* Oh, and great to see the Gothic Futurist article coming out, it’s fantastic. Essential post punk too.

WOEBOT: “A surprise and a delight, here.” Getting bigged up on Woebot is like getting an Oscar. Certainly more valuable than getting a bloggy or whatever BS award is being invented.

“Here’s one for fans of my discomfort.” Shit, that must be irritating. I guess a demanding fan can be pretty critical. For a fan of woebot is what I am — it’s the best blog out there, certainly the best music blog, even if he doesn’t like Jurassic 5 (what is he LIKE?). He’s one of a select group of blogs I try to check every day while feverishly checking UK-Dance. The rest of my blogroll:

1. Uncarved, for the crispest writing: Woebot can be fast and loose — and is all the better for it. More importantly, Uncarved does two things: he writes about more than just music, and he goes off and digs stuff out that you simply will not read about ANYWHERE ELSE. Because “Real Life” still has a thousand times as many stories as you will find on the Internet.

2. K-Punk. I don’t always agree with him — he’s far too much of a hipster-intellectual for my views to always chime with his — but he’s essential reading.

3. Reynolds for the same reasons as anyone else — i.e. his obsession with 80s scratch’n’sniff cards, the endless JPEG self-portraits of his red-white-and-blue mohican, and of course the engagingly-written recipes for rollmop herring.

Other than these three I just surf around the link side bars like everyone else.

“Nice to see so much going up big feller.” Yeah well there’d be a lot more if I wasn’;t spening every spare hour trying and failing to get this FAAAAAAARRRRRRRKING blog system working. Otherwise you’d have a series of articles about leylines in Dore (Sheffield suburb on the edge of the Peaks). Seriously.

Yeah.

PS – the gutters here have just filled with hail, but there’s blazing sunshine. Must be symbolic.

shards, fragments and totems:: “So I’m looking at the moveable type faq, and I’m thinking, this looks like a nightmare. “

And of course, my host doesn’t do movable type.

But it does appear to like word press — so why won’t it damned work?

Bloody computers.

movabletype.org : Requirements

So, I’ve got this spiffy new webspace to host my trax and mixes and stuff. And of course to host the blog, with photos etc. So I d/led WordPress, cos it’s the updated version of Eden’s blog software. And can I get it to work?

Can I fuck.

So I’m looking at the moveable type faq, and I’m thinking, this looks like a nightmare.

Surely there’s a simple to install system that’ll let you do modest blogging, with pix, on your own webspace, that’s free, or at least cheap? I don’t fancy spending more on blogging services than I do on my hosting…

Keith: gwan nice’tup wit ma bredren…: “nothing is better than Nasty Crew’s live sets. If you haven’t yet, do yourself a favour and listen to that one I linked to down below, it’s better than Boy in da Corner, which is album of the year”

I went back to this page — which I’ve blogged before — just to remind myself how good roll deep were. And none of the mixes work anymore — I guess the server is maxed out. Which implies the live tapes will come back, but then again they may not.

FWIW, I thought the MCing was pretty good, but not mind-blowing. However the Dizzy Vs Asher D clash was fabulous — I think because it was all acapella spittin’, undisturbed by plinky-plonk grime backing. Fortunately, I wiretapped that one. I have a techno-ragga instrumental to get out the way first, then I’ll be using that in a track…

WOEBOT: “like this recent contibution to an old post by Rolo who used to be in The Woodentops.”

I just want to point out that the Woodentops were according to my memory both a fantastic band and an important one, absolutely crucial in describing the cross-over from rock to dance.

Absolutely KILLER live — I would very much like the 12″ of Well Well Well.

Amazon.co.uk: Music: Coughing Up Fire: “Occult roots of grime”

Just got this as a present off John Eden and it’s an absolutely magnificent record of eighties Brit dancehall reggae done live. Saxon were arguably the greatest British sound system ofthe 80s and on this CD you can hear why. It’s all about the DJs so the backing tracks scarcely get a look in. You get fragments of famous rhythms (Armagideon etc), mainly with the bass cut and constantly spun back, so don’t buy this to hear the tunes themselves. You also get massive amounts of crowd noise :-). But if you want to hear the apotheosis of the Brit chatting art, this is it. The biggest name on here is Tippa Irie, who gets a HUGE response, but all the MCs are on top form. If you want to know where grime (the most recent, and most MC-heavy, variant of garage) and the rest of UK rave MC culture came from, this is what you need to hear — and it’s a lot better than most yard tapes you’ll buy in Brixton market. Absolutely killer, and this is where jungle and breakbeat artists get a lot of their vocal samples from, so it’s spotter heaven…