jungle Vibe(s)

GANGSTA RAVE: LONDON'S JUNGLE SCENE 

director's cut, Vibe magazine, early 1994

 by Simon Reynolds

   

Five years on, British rave culture is fragmented. In the late

'80's, when acid house and techno first inspired a mass movement, the

talk was of "love and unity".  But as the music evolved and

diversified, rave culture--like rap in America--split into hostile

factions, each of which regards itself the Way Forward for rave.

In a striking parallel with hip hop's schism between arty

bohemians and gangsta rap, middle class ravers have fastened on

'intelligent techno' (which ranges from trance's frigid frenzy to

ambient techno's chill-out serenity), while working class kids have

rallied to the banner of 'hardcore'.  Hardcore (or ardkore, as it's

sometimes mis-spelled to intensify its delinquent aura) is the

subculture; jungle is the soundtrack.  A mutant mongrel of techno and

hip hop, jungle is based around insanely accelerated break-beats (150

b.p.m and rising), overlaid with oscillating synth-riffs and a mind-

storm of mad samples: soul and reggae vocals sped up into a 78 r.p.m

helium-shrill babble, ghostly swathes of sonic ectoplasm, firework

explosions--you name it, jungle will (ab)use it.  Deep beneath this

frenetic barrage, seismic bass rumbles, sometimes sampled from dub

reggae, but increasingly just bowel-quaking, sub-bass ooze.

 As with rap, 'hardcore' means underground, anti-compromise, no

sell-out. It also means hard living.  Ardkore takes the druggy

hedonism of rave culture to new levels of debauchery.  Like all

ravers, ardkore kids love Ecstasy (or E), but they also often

mix'n'match it with speed and LSD. Marijuana is also popular, because

it mutes the nerve-jangling speediness of too much E, boosts the bass

and enhances jungle's roiling mesh of polyrhythms.  Jungle's enemies

blame the music's manic tempo on an alleged degeneration in the

quality of Ecstasy, which is believed to be adulterated with

amphetamine or substituted altogether by speed/acid cocktails.  In

fact, the real problem may be that longterm E use causes the drug's

lovey-dovey effects to wear off, leaving only the amphetamine

effects. As ravers endeavour to recover that fading, feels-like-the-

first-time bliss, they're tempted to take more and more pills.  The

result: a generation of speed-freaks.  Which explains why the average

ardkore rave is such a staccato experience, all jittery, juddering

beats and epileptic strobes, and why ardkore dancers twitch and jerk,

grind their teeth and "gurn" (pull faces).

As the junglist scene has solidified, it's taken on a

criminal-minded identity: you could call it gangsta rave. This simply

reflects the desperate reality its fans face. The recession has hit

Britain hard, inner city youth face unemployment and a welfare system

that's being systematically dismantled by a Conservative government

now in its 15th year of blundering misrule.  "American" problems like

guns and crack are taking root. Many kids can only afford to

participate in rave culture by becoming dealers.  Jungle tracks

reflect this with "bad boy" samples and choruses that declare "I

gotta be strong to survive". On pirate radio stations (illegal

broadcasters that the government struggles in vain to crush), MC's

send out "big shout"s to "all the wrong 'uns and liberty-takers". One

track, "Organised Crime" by Naz Aka Naz, sampled dialogue and

soundtrack motifs from "The Godfather", while, continuing the Mafia

theme, London's ruffest-and-tuffest pirate is called Don FM.

Jungle's gangsta vibe is influenced by Jamaican ragga (a.k.a

dancehall), a word which comes from 'raggamuffin' (a hoodlum or

street-wise rascal). Jungle tracks often sample ragga's insolent,

uproarious chants. White youth have adopted the 'rude boy' postures

and rasping patois slang of their Black British peers.  Jungle is the

soundtrack of Britain's burgeoning underclass, black and white kids

who live in the same inner-city tower-blocks and estates (i.e.

projects), and share the same hatred of the police and love of The

Chronic.  The jungle scene is relatively multi-racial in comparison

with the almost totally Caucasian make-up of other post-rave

subcultures. Far more Black British kids are involved as music-makers

and DJ's than in the decidedly Aryan techno scene, probably because

jungle's break-beat syncopation is funkier and grittier than trance's

programmed rhythms and purely electronic textures. Some say that

jungle has eaten UK's hip hop scene whole.  And so junglist slang

mixes terms from rap and rave (see side-bar).  Like early rap, jungle

is DJ-dominated rather than based around artists.  Junglist DJ's have

revived scratching and other turntable-manipulating techniques

largely abandoned by rap, and are taking the art of cross-fader

cut'n'mix to new heights. Over this jarring, jolting mayhem, MC's

holler self-celebratory chants, party-on exhortations, and druggy

gibberish: "buzzin' hard! oh-my-gosh, what-a-rush, what-a-rush!

Believe me, ardkore's firing!!".

     *         *         *         *         *         *

In its early days, when the music was simply known

as hardcore or breakbeat house, jungle was actually mainstream pop

music. From '91 to mid-'92, bands like The Prodigy, Altern-8, and SL2

had Top Five hits with their ardkore anthems. But when The Prodigy's

"Charly" inspired a rash of copyists to put kids' TV samples over

lame breakbeats (Smart E's "Sesame's Treet" being the most infamous),

pundits proclaimed the death of rave. Public taste shifted back to

softer, song-oriented house, and hardcore went back to the

underground. Strongest in London and its surrounding counties (Essex,

Hertfordshire, Kent), the jungle scene has something of a siege

mentality/persecution complex: it's a ghetto within rave culture,

scorned by hipsters and tastemakers. Some 'progressive' techno clubs

advertise "no breakbeats", on the grounds that jungle draws a bad

crowd. In response, jungle has bunkered down into a defiantly self-

sufficient community, based around indie labels, specialist dance

shops, pirate radio and small clubs. But despite the media black-out,

at the massive commercial raves it's always the junglist sound-system

that draws the biggest and most boisterous crowd.

Although a number of labels specialise in 'ardkore, jungle's

lifeblood resides in the endless torrent of 'white label' releases,

which are self-produced dirt-cheap (nobody bothers with sample

clearance) and sold direct to shops.  The DJs' premium on obscurity

and exclusivity feeds the frenzied turnover, which ensures short

shelf-life for everything but the most innovative or anthemic tunes.

It also means that most fans can only acquire the music through DJ

mix-tapes or by bootlegging it direct off pirate radio. The pirates--

there are a dozen or more operating in London alone, with names like

Chillin', Rush, Eruption, Impact--are crucial, sustaining the

subculture's sense of itself as massive yet subterranean, a shared,

secret underworld. The MCs' cryptic slang and slogans like "you know

the key" create a conspiratorial air. Kids page in messages:

sometimes coded, suggestive of clandestine, nefarious deals, but

mostly just salutations--"big shouts" and "'nuff respects", sent out

to other "massives" (any gathering of youths bigger than two),

huddled 'round the radio, rolling spliffs and getting "red-eye".

For all its futuristic sound, jungle is firmly in the British

working class 'weekender' tradition, sharing a love of pill-popping

and uptempo beats with earlier speed-freak, insomniac dance cults

like the Mods and Northern Soul.  'Ardkore also has an uncouthness

reminiscent of Oi!, a lumpen-and-proud-of-it offshoot of punk. Oi!

fans defined themselves against the arty bohemians who they believed

had hijacked punk from "the real kids"; similarly, ardkore youth

sneer at trendies and "lightweights" with their "fluffy" tunes.

Sometimes you'll hear the raucous chant "Oi, Oi!" (which roughly

translates as "yo!") rise up on junglist dancefloors.  But what

distinguishes jungle from its ancestors is the sheer desperation that

fuels its hedonism.  Facing the same "No Future" that goaded the

punks into revolt, junglist youth live for now - for a present that's

ever more attenuated and circumscribed as the recession bites harder.

As a fan who's nonetheless not really part of the subculture (in

class and age terms, I'm slumming it), the jungle scene fills me with

ambivalence. The music's ruffneck avant-gardism is exhilirating: ears

glued to the pirates, I know I'm living in the future.  At a junglist

den like Club Labrynth in North East London, the euphoric vibe can be

amazing.  On a summer night, Labrynth's garden --where over-heated

ravers retreat to chill out and skin up--can seem like a sacred

grove.  But increasingly, there's a squalor seeping around the edges

of the scene.  You'll see teenage girls throwing up because they've

taken too many pills on an empty stomach.  In the Labrynth's

fluorescent catacombs, faces start to look haggard as dawn

approaches. One of the nice things about rave culture is that you

fraternise with people you might never normally meet; class and race

lines are transgressed, drinks shared.  But when conversation

revolves around drugs--whether you've procured decent gear or been

ripped off, which brands of E (often named, in a sinister, infantile

touch, after brands of candy like Refreshers or Love-Hearts) are the

best--you start to wonder if this is a lost generation.  Despite its

affinities with early rap, jungle has a long way to go before it

blossoms into a counterculture like hip hop has. At the moment,

ardkore is an anti-culture, shortsighted and apolitical, looking no

further than the weekend's pills'n'thrills'n'bellyaches.

Ardkore is haunted by a dawning awareness that the subculture is

going nowhere fast (faster and faster as the b.p m. soar according to

an inexorable, drug-fuelled logic).  Last year, a track called "King

Of The Jungle" sampled a song from Disney's "Jungle Book",

inadvertantly capturing the impasse that faces the hardcore hedonist:

"I'm the King of the swingers/the jungle VIP/I've reached the top,

and had to stop/And that's what bothering me".  Burn-out looms.  In

'93, the jungle sound shifted decisively from "happy hardcore"

(rapturous, babytalk vocals and tingly piano riffs) towards "dark"

tunes. The dark style consists of stark drum-and-bass minimalism

overlaid with spooky horror-movie noises and soundbites that hint at

a deep ambivalence about fast-living: "boy, that stuff can give you a

brain damage', "we're not gonna die... we gotta get out of here", and

most unnerving of all, a girl--possibly sampled from a documentary on

mental illness or near-death experiences--murmuring "I felt that I

was in a long dark tunnel".

"Dark side" tunes probably have everything to do with a long-

term effect of E usage - paranoia. If 1988 was a replay of 1967's

Summer of Love, rave culture has finally reached 1969, the year

psychedelia turned apocalyptic: bad drugs, bummer vibes, Altamont,

Manson, et al.  But in another sense, "dark" is simply a development

of jungle's gangsta vibe: aligning yourself with "the dark side" is a

way of proclaiming yourself one baaad muthafucker.  It's like heavy

metal kids signing up for Satan's army, or gangsta rap's current

flirtation with psychosis (Cypress Hill's "Insane In The Brain",

Onyx's Mad Face Invasion).

One of the trailblazers of dark jungle is Metalheads, the

alter-ego of Goldie, a young Black Briton who describes himself as "a

B-Boy". A graffiti artist in New York at the height of breakdancing

mania, Goldie still paints canvases and murals, and has a sideline in

making gold teeth (hence his name).  Goldie was drawn to jungle

because of its breakbeat links to rap ("it was the only music around

that really provoked my instincts"), and doesn't even regard jungle

to be part of commercialised rave culture anymore.  Metalheads'

tracks like "Terminator" and "Sinister", with their eerily treated

beats and ghostly synth-tones, have been hugely influential, but

Goldie is disparaging of his imitators.  "'Dark' came from the

feeling of breakdown in society," he recalls. "It was winter, clubs

were closing, the country was in decline. As an artist, I had to

reflect it. But now all these kids have turned it into a joke, they

think 'dark' is about devil worship".  And so Goldie is trying to

push the genre forward, developing sample-modulation techniques like

'timestretching' and releasing tracks like "Angel", which layers

jazzy female vocals and lush ambient textures over rollin' beats.

Citing influences like Brian Eno and Miles Davis, he talks of opening

up a "New Dimension" for hardcore.

And he's not alone. Metalheads are part of a progressive

vanguard in jungle: artists like Foul Play, Omni Trio, 2 Bad Mice, DJ

Hype, labels like Moving Shadow, Suburban Base and Reinforced (the

home of Manix, Tek 9 and another Goldie alter-ego, Rufige Cru).

After dark-core, there's a new strain of jungle coming through that

exudes the same heady poignancy as "Angel".  With their strange

bittersweet alloy of bliss and sorrow, these tracks suggest that the

jungle scene is haunted by uncertainty. Take Omni Trio's "Stronger":

far from being another tougher-than-the-rest survivalist anthem, its

chorus mourns "I know I'm not strong enough".  Another track's

chorus, "drowning in love", is a perfect evocation of E'd up rapture,

except that the soul-diva sounds harrowed, like she's overwhelmed,

out-of-control, lost.

Goldie crystallises the new jungle vibe when describing his

music's soundclash of langorous, Eno-esqe atmosphere and dangerous

beats: "I wish I could live in the ambient dream, but I have to face

reality". For ardkore youth, life is a jungle, and oblivion is

costly: not just financially (E costs about $25 a tablet, and most

hardcore ravers need two or three to reach nirvana) but physically,

and above all, spiritually.

JUNGLIST SLANG

"Buzzing", "rushing" - under the effect of E.

"Oooh-gosh!", "oh-my-gosh!" - a fey gasp emitted at peak moments of

bliss or excitement.

"Kickin'", "slammin'", "shovelling", "firing", "blasting", "flexing"-

a good tune, good DJ or good time.

"Boombastic", "rumblin'" - bass-heavy.

"Sorted" - blissed-out or fixed-up with drugs; a state in which you

want for nothing.

"Pukka" -Indian slang term that means both 'tough' and 'sorted';

generally used to mean 'good', as in 'pukka tune', 'pukka E's'.

"Love it to the bone", "love it like cooked food" -an expression of

extreme musical appreciation.

"Comin' on strong", "comin' at ya" -the pills are taking effect, or

the DJ's got a good groove going.

"Nutter" -someone who likes to party hard.

"(getting) red-eye" -Chronically stoned.

"Sledged" (as in sledgehammer)--out-of-it, wrecked, sometimes in a

good way, sometimes after taking a contaminated E tablet.

"Work it up", "get busy", "hold it down", "belief!", "wind your

waist", "big up"-- MC exhortations to get up, get into it and get

involved.

"Madding up da place", "lively bizness", "RUFF!", "dropping it

neatly" -- MC boasts that the DJ is on a roll.

"Running t'ings" -MC boast that his pirate station is the boss.

DISCOGRAPHY

Various Artists compilations:

"The Joint"  (Moving Shadow/Suburban Base)

"Callin' For Reinforcements' (Reinforced)

"Hardcore Leaders II" (Kickin')

"Citybeat" (XL/American)

"The Dark Side: Hardcore Drum and Bass Style" (React)

"Enforcers 4" (Reinforced 12 inch EP sampler)

"Subplates Vol 1" and "Vol 2" (Suburban Base 12 inch EP samplers)

SPARE QUOTE

"Hardcore has a hard time 'cos it's cultural, it's not manufactured.

The media ignore it 'cos they can't control it.  So they dismiss

jungle as just a fun thing, something for 15 year old kids to get off

their nut to" - Goldie, Metalheads.