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It's a London thing: How rare groove, acid house and jungle remapped the city (Music and Society)

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Garcia started going to clubs like Club UK in Wandsworth and Garage City at Satellite Club — which would eventually become The Colosseum, home to legendary UK garage night Twice As Nice. “There was no such thing as UK garage then,” he continues. “Garage was US garage... It was really vocal, gospel almost, and very, very soulful. The stuff I was gravitating towards in the shop was a bit more dubby, and it would be the B-side of big gospel records that would have a little chopped-up vocal. But you’d speed them up, because they naturally sounded better [that way].”

Simultaneously, it’s happening in Manchester. It’s got different components. It’s much more related to a switch amongst white youth taste from indie to dance music, which was happening at the Haçienda, was happening under the influence of ecstasy. Very, very significant, but those books have been written. Dave Haslam writes about that, and many others. So you’ve got figures like James Brown within rare groove, who’s absolutely pivotal. He’s a key songwriter. He’s a key producer. He’s a key band leader. He’s a key rhythmic genius who instils these ideas into his band who then go off… They go and work in lots of other genres. One generation of his band leaves because they’re pissed off not getting well paid, so he brings in Bootsy and Catfish and reinvents the J.B.’s. So there’s a story there. Stevie Wonder. A whole series of great artists. Dubber And academia is a great place to respectively indulge the enthusiasms of your youth. To what extent is that why we do this?Caspar It’s been so fascinating talking to you. Thanks for your questions, Andrew. I know that you and I share a lot, and being asked those pointed questions, the ones you’ve asked me, are really at the heart of the dilemmas which come with all of this. Academia, over-celebration, nostalgia for something you didn’t like in the past, all of that. So I really appreciate your questioning. Your kind but sharp questions.

Caspar I know. It’s funny that. I was trained as an academic, doing a PhD. And in doing a PhD, I did that typical thing where I arrived at the university and I thought “Okay. I’ve got to read everything.”. And I tried to read everything. And it was the high point of post-structuralism. It was Foucault. It was Baudrillard. There was postmodernism. It was Fredric Jameson. It was Spivak, and it was Homi Bhabha. And it was some very exciting theoretical work, some of which is incredibly difficult and some of which is very poorly written. And I then churned out a PhD which was - surprise, surprise - poorly written, incoherent in places, and was actually a lot worse of a piece of work that I might have produced outside the academy. It didn’t really fit either way. I had very nice examiners. I scraped through with changes and whatnot. Caspar Well, that’s a great question, and I’m sure you’ve got as interesting an answer to this as I have, Andrew. But I think there’s a slight difference here. And I, as a lover or a consumer of, an enjoyer of, trip-hop and dubstep and broken beat, none of those genres… Those genres have been produced by a cadre of producers, really. A group of experimental producers who’ve got together, and it’s really great that they’ve done that, and they’ve worked on new musical ideas and developed a scene. And that scene did have an audience of a kind, but it wasn’t that tightly connected to an audience. It didn’t have a social being. It had a being which was in the studios, in those circuits of expertise, and therefore it wasn’t protected from the way in which fashions just move on. So early raves… If you had someone come on the mic in early rave, they’d pretty much just be saying “Get on one. Let’s get radio rental.”. That sort of thing. In ’92/’93 with the emergence of hardcore, which is a… Acid house splits into multiple sub-genres. That period is usually called hardcore, or ‘ardcore, without the H. That’s what Simon Reynolds calls it. “’Ardcore. You know the score.”. Dubber And I guess the other part of this would be that it’s quite hard to portray this kind of music-making on something like Top of the Pops.There, he built an empire, setting up his label Kronik Music to release his own recordings, as well as music by Shy Cookie, Timeless, Genius Cru and more. His studio saw artists including Oxide & Neutrino pass through, while So Solid Crew recorded much of their debut album there. Garcia also took over a pirate radio station called Flight FM, and ran his It’s A London Thing club night. “Every day, we were just bashing it out, man,” he smiles. “We were going hard, and making a lot of money. It was beyond all your dreams. At 19. It was a pretty wild place. At that time not everyone was operating as business-like as they are now.” So when it came to acid house, a completely different set of questions emerged. The first thing is, this was not music that sounded anything like music of the past. There was no band. There wasn’t that setup of drum, bass, keys, guitar, vocalist that you would expect. You couldn’t hear any of that. It was clearly music made with machines. Possibly music made by machines. There was awareness at some level that the music was made by someone, but that someone wasn’t a musician, primarily. They were a quote-unquote producer. It was someone who had put the stuff together themselves. We became aware of this because we knew about hip-hop, and we knew that within hip-hop, the actual sound tech was made by someone playing around with digital technologies. With drum machines, samplers, and bits of other people’s music. But that wasn’t what was going on here because in hip-hop, you can recognise the reference points of the previous music, but here you couldn’t because the sounds were… Actually, what were foregrounded was the sound of the machine itself. Caspar Oh, yeah. I do. I really do. And I think that’s one of the reasons why I’ve hung onto my job. We’ve gone through various painful restructurings and things like that. The simple fact is, the courses I teach - and it’s not just down to me being a brilliant teacher - are popular among students. They want that kind of information. They want that kind of advice. They want to see people who have worked outside the academy, and I think the academy could do a much better job of being more flexible and allowing people who aren’t lifetime academics into the institution. This would also mean those people who are lifetime academics being prepared to step out of that space and do other things. And there’s not as much fluidity there as I think there should be or could be because I’m very keen to break that clear distinction between what is often called the ivory tower and the real world. What academics call the real world as if they’re not part of it. So, yeah, I think it’s of huge value to the institution. So within the jungle scene, you’ve got the re-emergence, because of reggae sound systems, of this British vocalist, this vocal style, who was there to orchestrate the dance. To interact between the producer who’s made the music, the DJ who’s playing it, the dancing crowd, in this call and response type of activity. And those figures, like MC Det and Skibadee and Shabba and the Ragga Twins, most of whom got their initial music training in sound system culture, emerged strongly in the jungle scene. Dubber Well, not only that, but it’s peer reviewed. So the people who have to review it, which also contributes to their CV, in inverted commas, is also unpaid labour.

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