Horrified to notice via Philip Sherburne’s Blog that Rolling Stone are calling the music "Grimy". Fucking Yanks eh! That's two worse than Grime. (muses to himself) When an arch-neologist like Sherburne falters you've got to wonder...
As I was saying to one correspondent, with the term Garage I wasn't suggesting as Angus did (and he won't thank me for invoking him) that we should hallow a connection between the Paradise Garage and "the now sound of the london pirates", but rather draw an historical line from the point whereupon the UK started to fess with US Garage (Todds, MAW et al). That's the sensible point zero of Garage. To disagree with K-Punk I always thought the move to the term 2step was so infintessimal as to be laughable, meaningless even, woo hoo it’s a bit skippier; like the move between Mac OS 10.2.7 and 10.2.8 (That's W2K SP2 to W2K SP3 Windoze users). Another factoid to mess up your head: when Skepta was recently asked which musician he'd most like to work with he said....Todd Edwards. Yeah I was surprised too.
My fave new term for describing the term came from the Grevious Angel himself, who chipped in with the eminently sensible "Rap." OK I'll admit to some degree I'm having a laugh, not playing the game whereby a name is called and we all rally round it. In my defense there is precious little support within the scene for Grime, and (here disagreeing with K-Punk again) great monikers of the past, be they detourned insults, always did come from within. Jungle came from within. Junglist. I guess the real issue at stake is that magazines and the cross-over crew don't just need a name, a handle, they need a NEW name. It's packaging and advertising isn't it, a NEW product is needed to stock on the shelves. It's typical of recalcitrant Garage that it can't seem to give a toss about it's own brand identity. That's as it should be.
Posted by Woebot at February 4, 2004 11:54 AMBTW Paul's comment. The Rap angle needs to in there. And fo shore a new name is needed. To go back to the historical precedent Old Skool (King Tim III and the Sugarhill Gang), you couldn't go on calling it Disco when the Rapping hit the records.
Posted by: Matt at February 4, 2004 12:16 PMfuck it, leave 'em to their own devices. anyone who thinks the lack of a na,me is going to spell the death of the music is crazy anyway. the only people it hurts is us. it's embaressing not knowing what to call it. the genie's out the bottle, this stuff is here to stay. it's no flash in the pan.
it's much better than sublow - which was what black ops are really keen to call it - they even had little flyers in their records with it written on.
if you take the word grime like the term queer is used then it starts to show some jouissance i think
Having been told repeatedly some months ago that it's "not rap," and by people who seem to have the cultural capital to make such an assertion, I am appropriately humbled and thus am heaping shame on you and Grevious Angel for even thinking of doing such a thing, jest or no. Don't you know that it's not rap? It's more dancehall than rap! It's a whole new sound! UK Rap is a specific thing and it's not that!
Even though it sounds a lot like rap.
Ah crap, there goes my cred.
Posted by: Eppy at February 4, 2004 10:36 PMhey. wait a minute
grime is grime. the clause stands. when someone says grime to me i know what they mean. i.e Sticky, Mr. Fidget
and all those concerned.
no fuss
sure. we can rename but the listening stands, and it's grimey.
Not sure if Jungle emanated entirely from within the scene itself; I'm sure I recall claims by some that it was a rather racist term applied by certain detractors.
The word Grime itself was used by older DJs and other UKG statesmen to describe the trashy quality of the music being made by young hoodlums.
Luke's right anyway - really it's an adjective: grimy garage.
shut up and dance railed against the term jungle as a racist term quite publically and there was a campaign within the scene to seperate the badboy junglist movement (as troublemakers) from the rest of em .
but i think the term jungle comes from clash tapes from JA where they describe the ghettos of jamaica as junngle and the people who live in them as junglists - you hear samples of the phrase all over early jungle
gotta remember as well alot of the early jungle scene was pretty pro-black and conscious - congo natty - mark x from kemet - with time stretched malcom x samples talking directly to a black audience.
4th Century B.C. - When sneaking past his Cyclopean guard, and asked to identify himself in the dark, Ulysses outwits his captor by responding that he is, in fact, "No Man." In doing so, he has denied his humanity, nationalized himself, and effectively changed history forever.
jungle came from within the scene totally. shut up and dance may or may not have agreed with the term, but that doesnt change it, or, at the very very least, it was adopted positively extremely early. Those Jungle Tekno albums that came out, they were early 92 at the very earliest, prob 91. Listen to the mcs all over easygroove fantazia tapes, grooverider, slipmatt, whoever. its all about *sounds of the jungle techno*, and this is well before hardcores demise, talking music takes you, some justice...
Posted by: gareth at February 6, 2004 08:43 AMThe racist bit of the jungle tag came from the BNP calling hardcore -- with its MIXED black AND white audience -- "jungle bunny" music. The aim was to a) insult the blacks and b) embarass the whites into leaving a mixed race scene.
It was then partially "reclaimed" as hardcore turned into jungle as a badge of honour by blacks, and to a degree whites, in the scene.
Simultaneously, the "junglist" samples come from a few JA dancehall records that talked about a particular bit of Kingston -- I seem to remember it's Waterhouse but I could easily be wrong -- being "the jungle", because it was so dangerous, and that to be from that area meant you were a junglist and hence well 'ard.
What a delightful semiotic mash up.
Posted by: paul "Hook! Hook! Where's Hook"!" meme at February 6, 2004 09:29 AMyeah waterhouse - i on;ly realised after i wrote the ghettoes of Jamaica it was a bit inaccurate - however you do hear it all over the clash tapes they sampled .
with the shut up and dance thing it's the same "elder statesmen" business as what's happened in garage a bit i think - although shut up and dance did record a few jungle tracks under the name "blackman"
Okay. Upton Sinclair wrote _The Jungle_ in 1906. At or around that time, he also sent a cassette of music to accompany the book to Benjamin Franklin, who was then the ambassador to France.
This tape was labeled "Jungle" and consisted of very fast, percussive and repetitive music that Sinclair had composed to try to convey the experience of working in an automated meatpacking plant (remember, this is in Chicago, which later became the home of the Hard Core Meat Beat scene).
In Britain, Rudyard Kipling had penned _The Jungle Book_ in 1894 and was experimenting with the fusion of "fife and drum" or bagpipe military music with Tabla rhythms imported from the Indian colony.
Kipling's close friend, Field Marshall the Viscount Montgomery of Alamein, known also as Rude Bwoy Monty, was intrigued by the new sounds that Kipling was creating and made a dubplate to play at social events at the officers club.
The new music quickly spread to all corners of the then-vast British Empire, thus creating what we know today as "jungle." So, you see, it's really not as new as you thought....