What’s that? You want to know about the history of UK Bounce. Well pull up a chair and I'll tell you all about it. You have to go a long way back to the actual point zero of Brit-Bounce. It was those Shut up and Dance fellows who started it all off as we know it. We can ignore that Streetsounds UK Electro compilation because, well, its not got that distinctive UK flava, its still very Kings Road B.Boy. We're going to ignore Derek B (though he had a few hits which were rated in the US including "Rock the Beat") and Normski (don't laugh, besides shacking up with Janet Street-Porter, strangely apt name, he also raps on that Reese track). No, PJ and Smiley (SUAD) are the godfathers. A track like “Rap's my Occupation” sounds 10 years ahead of its time. They also produced a whole raft of stuff with a similar aesthetic for people like Ade, Nicolette and The Ragga Twins. Its Ardkore with vocals, early enough for rapping and songs not to be swamped by drug-noise.
And lets also not forget the Tribal Bass stable, Rebel MC’s label. Rebel MC is playing for SchoolDisco.com nowadays (nothing wrong with that, good gig I imagine). Anyway the Rebel was the (reluctant) pop face and a few MC gangs, like the Demon Boyz and Blapps Possee lurked in the background. The Blapps Possee's “Don't Hold Back” is pure UK Bounce, in fact I even heard it played at the start of some chaps set last week.
Finally I guess you could lump in Genaside II, they also had a yearning to be a rap crew. Heck they ended up hanging out with the RZA, although the evidence musically is less strong (kind of rests on “Narra Mine”).
To be honest I think we all thought these acts were a bit quaint. Memories of hip-house were still fresh (there's a genre ripe for rediscovery) and while we could just about stomach Fast Eddie (now delivering Pizzas in Chicago, nothing wrong with that, nice work if you can get it, handy moniker etc) a whole gang of UK Fast Eddies was perhaps not such an enticing solution. I guess the point was that these were all guys and girls who couldn't cut a tree as straight UK Rappers. They probably would have soldiered on like London Possee in terminal obscurity surviving on mentions in Public Enemy's global round-up liner notes. There just wasn't the market for it; everyone would always buy the American variety, so just like The Ragga Twins (“Reggae owes me Money”) they sold out into Rave. Except that that didn't really work out either (despite producing some wicked tunes).
And then it goes quiet (or gets too noisy?) for nearly ten years. You have rapping in the UK but you hear it in the Dancehall and on the Pirates but nowhere else. Of course that’s the axis from which it emerged (vis a vis the Jamaican model of music), so its not gone but its withdrawn like a Virginia creeper from a tower block. Ardkore produces some truly lunatic rapping, but in the spirit of that music its regressed to Hugo Ball-style babbling ("having a vindaloo in the loo doing a poo poo" etc) There are only a handful of rap tracks amongst the millions of Ardkore records, and if anything Ardkore is skewered towards Ragga chat, its a sonic bias, largely to do with Ragga's terror-inducing alienation effect. What are these scary fellows jabbering about, crikey?
Come 1994 and Jungle and we start to see the emergence of celebrity MCs like Det, Navigator and 5-0 However these guys still weren't actually saying anything, merely pushing the party along, bigging up the DJ and giving shouts out to all the sexy ladeez. Det and Navigator made it onto a few comps, but nowhere near a 12". The comparable trope here is US rap before "Rappers Delight", where it exists but nobody's thought anyone would want to buy a whole record of it.
Then, my chickadee, Jungle turned into Techno in 1997 with the atrocious Tech-step and completely lost its humour, sex appeal and popularity. The story goes that the bad-bwoy swagger the basslines and the charm migrated to garage, while in truth it took a very long time to infiltrate. We patiently sifted out the more rootical tracks and gradually as the elements of street music seeped back into the disco and so did the rapping.
Lazy (and ill-informed) commentators credit Oxide and Neutrino with defining the UK Garage Rap revolution, sure “Up Middle Finger” is a classic, but “Casualty” was more innovative for its stentorian electro bassline than for anything else. For me O&N will always be The Prodigy of UK Garage (nothing wrong with that, a few more miles on the clock and they'll be hanging out with Oasis and bagging stray All Saints), as for their connection to So Solid, oh yeah well whatever.
In my humble opinion UK Bounce was flowering in a whole host of beds. Notably on labels like Red Rose records ("A little bit of Luck", "Troublesome") who I fancied as the new Suburban Base and Kronik records ( “G.A.R.A.G.E.” and now the home of Genius Cru) In the hands of Zed Bias (“Seven Wonders”, “Neighborhood”) and with artists like Teebone (“Get Down”, “Fly Bi”). However Teebone does sound distinctly (ahem) old skool, a voice in tradition of the Jungle MCs phat, rolling, confident and masculine- not in the least scrawny like your proverbial Dizzy Rascal. Also, with the exception of “Troublesome” (worth hunting down) the other tracks were really 2 bar loops of raps, not your full flow.
Of course the real light to the touchpaper was So Solid Crew’s "Oh No"- caned to death on the pirates. After that everyone else took a little while to catch up. I'm of the opinion that 2001 was the poorest ever year for the Ardkore continuum, and up to this point I'll admit being totally unimpressed by the idea of UK Garage Rap (Reynolds was trying to pitch it to me as long ago as “Fly Bi” - I mean c'mon: " the F the L, the F the L the Y, the F the L the Y the B the I" ) Perhaps in this deathly year Ardkore finally petered out, and now we're living in the UK Bounce era. Some of my colleagues have playfully alluded to So Solid being the new Sex Pistols and UK Bounce as being the new punk. It’s more accurate (and less rock-centric) to compare it to “Sleng Teng” and the birth of Ragga, or “The Message” and the birth of Hip-Hop, or “Mentazm” and the birth of Rave. To my mind the significance of the movement lies in the fact that we've never had UK rappers before on record and now well, we have a deluge.
Last year we had stacks of MC tracks by the likes of East Connection, Dem Lott, Roll Deep (and its constituents), Heartless Crew, MC Dynamite, Dynamite MC (!), Stush, MC Dappa and Hyperactive, Pay as you go Cartel, Genius Cru, More Fire Crew, So Solid Crew, Musical Mob, Tubby T etc etc etc. Musically the pointers are more Dirty South (Ludacris, Mannie Fresh) and Swizz Beatz than Timbaland (who will always be an R&B producer, his stuff is too disco-ified for these artists to aspire to), hence UK Bounce. And also Ragga but finally for its rhythm tracks more than the vocal delivery (Dave Kelly, Lenky, Patrick Roberts, Lloyd James etc)
Did I say Bounce not Hip-Hop, well yes I did. New Orleans bounce (my fave example of which being DJ Jimi's "Where they at?") is dance music, not for the old head-nodding crew. It's interesting to note how close UK/JA/USA have become. I can't think of a time when they've been so synched up. Now with tracks like Roll Deep's “Regular” slowing right down to the same tempo as Ragga and Platinum Rap, who knows the yanks might become as casual as we are with geographical specificity and start playing UK Bounce over there, not that I really care (lord knows they're playing ragga! The Neptunes certainly can't get enough of it)
My hopes for 2003, more of the same please only different. Lets keep that tempo dropping too. I hope that answers your questions. Now if you don't mind I've got to fit these new wide rims on my bimmer.
Posted by Woebot at January 15, 2003 12:52 PM