Kent-
quoted 17 lines Not to speak for a bunch of people I've never met and probably never
> Not to speak for a bunch of people I've never met and probably never
> will meet, but ...
>
> I can't imagine that its any different than any young urban minority
> who have by their efforts have achieved some success. The way you
> show your success is by it's material fruits, so you dress up nice,
> tip big, and buy the best beverages. When you're just one generation
> away from poverty, material success is always a cause for celebration.
>
> It just happens that in the UK, underground garage has sprung up
> and reflects that celebration. In fact the producers arise from the
> same situation -- they're the first generation who could afford to
> own professional recording equipment, and work things out for
> themselves.
>
> Where I'm from I've been at parties for a group known as the Black
> Graduate Professionals, and they're all about dressing sharp and
listening
quoted 3 lines to R&B-influenced hip hop. It's about Juvenile and D"Angelo instead
> to R&B-influenced hip hop. It's about Juvenile and D"Angelo instead
> of 2-step, but it's the same thing: People in a certain position in life
> looking for music that speaks to their condition.
One of the reasons that I find this explanation hard to accept derives from
the way that I see 2-step: not so much as a distinct genre of music, like
techno or IDM, but as the latest 'host' of what I call the 'rave virus', a
moment in a longer-lasting subcultural event. The people who are going to
2-step events are exactly the same people (often *literally* the same
people) who, ten years ago, were standing in muddy fields with whistles
round their necks and dummies in their mouths shouting 'mental, mental'.
Or, five years ago, were wearing crisp combats and box-fresh Nikes, nodding
along to hardstep jungle at nights like AWOL. Why is it, then, that now in
particular they have decided upon this one particular way of expressing
themselves, which previously had been of no use to them? In my view it has
more to do with the internal dynamics of the rave scene - particularly the
need that the 2-step crowd has to distance itself as much as possible from
the pleasure-free astringencies of 'scientific' drum & bass - than the
deliberate flaunting of newly-won wealth. After all, although many of these
people may well be substantially better off than they were when breakbeat
hardcore was in the ascendant, simply by virtue of being that much older,
my impression is that this is still not a scene dominated by graduates,
professionals or other people whom we might expect to be high-earners. It's
a working class scene, as it always has been. In a sense, then, what
they're doing is acting out a fantasy of wealthiness and success -
roleplaying, if you like - rather than expressing the actuality of success.
I wonder whether there's actually a measure of ironic self-knowledge in
this, a sense in which it's not simply a parody of wealth and
sophistication, but that it's a caricatire of what newly wealthy members of
subaltern groups are *meant* to do? Like Chris Eubank, the black boxer who
lives in a country house, wears Union Jack cufflinks and has a
chauffeur-driven Rolls Royce. He clearly recognises the element of
ridiculousness to his behaviour, hence the current advert for Nescafe in
which he drinks a cup of coffee with his little finger extended, 'Asterix
in Britain'-style. Similarly, in the case of 2-step, there's a sense of
deliberate grotesquerie, of gleeful crassness to the frantic consumption of
champagne, the readiness with which brand names are flaunted (as in the
trend for wearing Moschino shirts with the label hanging out). This would
fit in well with the theory of 'oppositional hyper-capitalism' - that this
is a bitter, spiteful satire on both the rich and successful, and the
assumptions of the upper and middle classes that the working classes, given
access to money, will behave in a particular way.
quoted 16 lines It's to do with 'swing', for want of a better word. 2-step
> >It's to do with 'swing', for want of a better word. 2-step
> > producers use all of the resolution their sequencers provide in order
> > to
> > shift their beats around by small amounts relative to one another.
> > This
> > results in rhythm tracks which are extraordinarily nuanced, and which
> > have
> > a kind of organic quality absent from most electronic dance music. It
> >
> > always reminds me of the rustling of leaves...that sort of quiet, but
> >
> > infinitely detailed rubbing and shaking and shivering which sounds
> > unmistakably 'natural' to us.
>
> Don't you just mean that they are messing around with the quantise
> functions in Cubase a bit more than other electronic musics have?
Possibly! :-) But, in my own productions, I've found that actually shifting
the beats around 'by hand' gives more control.
Gareth
--
Gareth Metford (Nonlinear / Qubit Records)
Email: gmetford@qubit.demon.co.uk
Nonlinear website:
http://www.qubit.demon.co.uk/nonlinear