JUNGLE EMERGES: A Flashback to 1993
director's cut of a piece written six years later, Spin, 1999

by Simon Reynolds

Years before Roni Size and LTJ Bukem became international hipster favorites, jungle was banished from the media limelight. To identify yourself as a "junglist" in 1993 meant you belonged to an outcast tribe, a scene feared by most London clubbers as a sinister underworld populated by speed-freaks and baby-gangstas. Born out of rave's Ecstasy-fuelled fervor, the music had mutated, under the influence of bad drugs and the desperation of the recession-wracked early Nineties, until it was too hard, too dark, and too black for most people to handle.

The emergence of jungle has everything to do with drugs. Its frantic breakbeat rhythms evolved because ravers buzzing on too many E pills and amphetamine wraps craved beats as hectic and hyper as their own overdriven metabolisms. The music's bad-trippy aura and disorientating FX simultaneously reflected and exacerbated the paranoia induced by long-term stimulant abuse. 1993 was the year of "darkside", a crucial transitional phase between hardcore rave's hands-in-the-air euphoria and jungle's guns-in-the-air menace.

"The production played tricks on your mind, " enthuses Two Fingers, author of the pulp novel Junglist, talking about twilight-zone jungle classics like Boogie Time Tribe's "Dark Stranger" and Origin Unknown's "Valley of the Shadows". "Darkside freaked out a lot of people, especially those still in the Ecstasy haze--because on E there's no distance between you and the music. Darkside was just evil, evil music--and that was good. Cos it got rid of the lightweights, to be honest".

One of the first all-jungle-DJs raves, Jungle Fever, went out of its way to scare off fans of happy rave and fluffy house, theming the venue with tombstones, coffins, and Gothic statuary. But the classic darkside moment in jungle mythology is an infamous inccident at a rave called Telepathy, where DJ Rap unwittingly played 4 Hero's "Mr. Kirk's Nightmare"---a song in which a father is informed about his son's fatal overdose--just seconds after a boy was knifed on the dancefloor.

Stabbings and muggings, friction and tension.... Many blamed the shift from rave's smiley-face glee to jungle's skrewface scowl on another drug: crack. After all, who else but rock-smoking fiends could possibly enjoy such insanely frenetic beats? Joe Wieczorek, owner of the hardcore rave club Labrynth, claims "the early dark jungle, you might as well call it crack music. There's nothing worse for a raver than being somewhere he doesn't feel safe, and if there's fifty rock-heads in the club, it's going to frighten the life out of you." But although there was a spate of anti-crack tunes like DJ Ron's "Crackman On the Line" in 1993, others reject the linking of jungle and crack as a crypto-racist slur based on the fact that the dancefloor was anywhere from 50 to 80 percent black.

If any substance has a claim to be the true junglist's drug, it's marijuana-- especially the hydroponically-grown ultra-strong weed known as skunk. An archetypal tableau in any jungle club is a group of boys stood in a huddle "building and burning." One youth clasps his hands together, fingers interlocked, and upturns the palms to form a flat surface for his friend to build a massive spliff on; in a crowded, jostling club, it's the only way to roll. Another friend leans close to block off the sight-lines of any security guard in the vicinity. "Burning"... well, that's self-explanatory. Marijuana is the reason jungle basslines started to run at reggae tempo, exactly half the speed of the accelerated breakbeats, thereby allowing dancers to skank rather than rave. And marijuana is why the nudge-nudge wink-wink references to E in tracks were gradually replaced by roots reggae samples exalting ganja, sensimilla and herb.

Jungle wouldn't exist without two black musics that also worship sub-bass and the chronic that intensifies the low-end boom: hip hop and reggae. The life arc of DJ Hype, founder of the labels Ganja and True Playaz, is typical. A white working class boy from the desolate East London borough of Hackney, Hype spent the Eighties playing on a reggae sound-system and competing in hip hop cut'n'mix contests. By 1990, he was spinning house on pirate station Fantasy FM and recording brutal Euro-techno anthems as The Scientist. Jungle is the only-in-London amalgam of all these different imported sounds, and crucially it was a collective invention. " I always say, we are the foundation, because there's no one record, no single DJ, no specific club, where jungle started," Hype declares.

If you wanted to pinpoint the emergence of jungle, though, one contender is the moment at the end of 1992 when tracks like Bodysnatch's "Just 4 U London" and Code 071's "London Sumting" hit the pirate radio airwaves. "That it's-a-London-thing stance, I always took as this-is-a-black-thing, y'know," says Two Fingers. "London has the biggest black population in Britain". It was black fashion that shaped jungle's style spectrum, which ranged from hip hop-influenced "ruffneck soldier" minimalism (puffy MA1 and MA2 flight-jackets, namebrand sneakers, baggy pants) to dancehall-reggae derived ghetto fabulous flashiness. At the ragga-dominated raves like Sunday Roast and Desert Storm, the 80 percent black British crowd "larged it" VIP style--the men flaunting Versace and Moschino, gold sovereign rings and bottles of champagne; the women flexin' their abdomens and winin' their waists in their skin-tight "batty rider" shorts, micro-skirts, bustiers, and thigh-high boots.

As well as changing the way people moved on the dancefloor, the ragga influence was decisive in another area that sealed jungle's break with house and techno: the crucial role of the MC. "Girls sticking their asses in the air and a MC really working the crowd, getting them to hold their lighters up and blow their horns to get the DJ to rewind the track." is how Lee Billingham, aka DJ Bo!ne, recalls his first encounter with jungle at the South London club Lazerdrome. "I loved the whole 'selector! wheel-and-come-again!' , rewind thing," says Two Fingers, another Lazerdrome regular. The democratic way in which the audience controlled the DJ via the MC, he argues, is part of jungle's renegade blackness--its participatory, call-and-response ethos. "As the jungle MCs like GQ, Det, 5-0 and Moose took on the Jamaican patois thing, they became more than crowd motivators, they were vocalizing what the massive was feeling, connecting you with the music more intensely, and adding a lyrical element to this largely instrumental music. There's an ephemeral, magical quality to the MC chants--especially on the pirate radio stations, they'd just go off on one, creating stuff on the fly."

It's the pirate radio stations that are the real heroes of jungle's story--they kept the vibe alive in the scene's early, pre-breakthrough phase. London has dozens of these illegal radio collectives, gangstas of the airwaves who broadcast from the top of towering apartment blocks and engage in a constant, quasi-military struggle to survive not just governmental suppression but the skullduggery of rival stations who'll gladly steal their pirate brethren's transmitters. Legend has it that one outfit, Rush FM, turned the derelict upper floors of an East London block into a fortress so impregnable that the DJ's had to rappel up the side of the building to reach the studio. They sealed the stairwell entrance with concrete, hollow metal tubes pumped with ammonia gas, and a wire connected to the electrical supply. When local government officials attempted to drill through the barricade, they hit the live wire and an electric spark ignited the gas, exploding the concrete and showering the workmen with shrapnel.

Yet for all its militancy and moodiness, jungle seethed with "a fierce, fierce joy", as convert Bjork put it. The speed of the music was crucial, as if you could somehow ride its future-rush, achieve escape velocity, and smash through to a brighter tomorrow.

"The breakbeats were so fast and chopped up, your body wanted to be pulled in twenty different directions at once," recalls DJ Bo!ne of his baptismal experience at Lazerdome. "Me and my mates just looked at each other, jaws dropped, and were, like, 'This is mental!!!!"."

Says Two Fingers: "Anyone can be a junglist, but for me, it's part of having a black spirit. Jungle is about getting sweaty and having a religious experience on the dancefloor. It can feel like the Holy Spirit is moving through you."

BONUS BEATS: A FLASHBACK TO 93!
A London Sometin' Dis
A Jungle Documentary filmed in 1993
Segment 1
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5jd2Lr7C0nc&feature=related
Segment 2
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tCXt62rfm18&feature=related
Segment 3
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nSsBcdD0Wsg&feature=related
and
another one, this from 1996
Lost In Music
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GRLfCYFntVg&feature=related

BRITPOP
Frieze, December 1995

By Simon Reynolds

'Britpop'--just in case you've been in a coma for the
last year--is the music papers' buzzterm for an alleged
rejuvenation of the charts, with the likes of Oasis, Blur,
Elastica, Pulp and Supergrass displacing American
grunge/faceless rave/super-annuated AOR in the higher reaches
of the Hit Parade. 'Britpop' has become a rallying cry, an
excuse for chests to swell with patriotic pride. It's even
made the tabloids and the News At Ten. Back in August a
cabbie told me he'd only ever bought four records in his
entire life, then--unprompted--brought up Blur and Oasis.
Even he'd heard about their big battle over whose single
would enter the charts at Number One.

So everybody--industry, media, 'the kids'--is frothing
with excitement about Britpop. Why? The music biz, which
was having trouble building long-selling careers off the back
of dance music and had lost ground to the post-rave indie
labels, is thrilled because the Britpopsters are guitar-based
bands who willingly constrain themselves within the 3-minute
pop single format and radio-friendly, trebley production.
The music press is buzzing 'cos Britpop's aesthetic base--
the mid-Sixties, filtered through its late '70s echo, New
Wave--had hitherto been strictly an indie style, and thus the
inkies' province. At the same time, the bands are overtly
anti-experimental and pre-psychedelic; they combine playsafe
1966-meets-1978 aesthetics with an almost doctrinal ethos of
ambition and stardom-at-all-costs. Because the bands it
discovers now hit the charts, the music press' prestige and morale
has been boosted; for the first time in years, people turn to the inkies as
tipsheets! Moreover, Britpopsters behave like stars, make
an effort to give good face and good copy, and this makes the
journos' job easier. And 'the kids'? Even the youngest
surely sense, on some subliminal level, that the sound of
Britpop harks back to the days when Britannia ruled the pop
waves, while the attitude evokes an era when being young was
a real cool time. The glory-lust of Oasis' "Champagne Supernova",
the insouciance of Supergrass' "Alright", seem mighty
appealing, even as they fly flagrantly in the face of the
socio-economic facts.

As it happens, I think Britain IS the place to be, pop-
wise; it's just that this state-of-affairs has NOTHING to do
with Britpop. Relatively unheralded by the media, another
generation of Britons are waiving the rules. There's the
post-rock experimentalism of Laika, Pram, Techno-Animal etc;
the trip hop of Tricky, Wagon Christ and the Mo'Wax label;
the 'artcore' jungle of 4 Hero, Dillinja, Droppin' Science,
the Moving Shadow label; the art-tekno weirdness of Aphex
Twin, Bedouin Ascent, et al. All these strands of UK
activity are either offshoots of, or deeply influenced by, club
music and sound-system culture; sonically, they're informed
by the rhythm-science and studio-magick of dub reggae, hip
hop and techno. And all speak eloquently if non-verbally of
the emergence of a new hyrid British identity, a mongrel,
mutational mix of black and white.

Britpop is an evasion of the multiracial, technology-
mediated nature of UK pop culture in the '90s. If it started
a few years ago as a revolt against American grunge (Suede's
fey fusion of glam Bowie and glum Morrissey), now it's
extended itself into the symbolic erasure of Black Britain,
as manifested in jungle and trip hop. For Britpopsters, the
Sixties figure as a 'lost golden age' in a way that's
alarmingly analogous to the mythic stature of the Empire vis-a-vis
football hooligans and the BNP. Even more than the insularity of
Britpop's quintessentially English canon (Kinks, Jam, Small
Faces, Buzzcocks, Beatles, Smiths, Madness), it's the sheer
WHITENESS of its sound that is staggering. Take Elastica,
whose singer Justine Frischmann confessed that she could only
think of one form of black music she liked: ska (the
jerkiest, most New Wavey form of black pop ever!). And take
Blur, whose homage to the U.K's music-hall pop tradition
manages to sever The Kinks from R&B, Madness from ska, and
Ian Dury from the Blockheads' fluency in funk and disco.

Damon Albarn's pseudo-yob accent testifies to a
nostalgia for a lost white ethnicity, one that's fast eroding
under the triple attrition of America, Europe and this
nation's indigenous non-white population. Like his hero
Martin Amis, Albarn fetishises London's vestigial remnants of
authentic white trash as "the last truly English people you
will ever know" (to borrow a lyric from Morrissey, another
feller with a dubious penchant for skinheads and villains).
Mozzer is right, this is a dying breed, already displaced by
a new generation of London youth who speak an alloy of
Cockney/Jamaican patois/B-boy slang, watch American sci-fi
movies, grapple with Japanese computer games, and listen to
sampler-based music like jungle.

It's these kids--the kind you'll find at drum & bass
hang-outs like Speed and AWOL--who are today's mods, not the
sorry-ass mod revivalists at Camden's Blow Up club. Mod
originally meant 'modernist', meant having utterly
contemporary tastes in music, clothes, everything. Today's
junglists, trip-hoppers and techno-heads share their '60s
ancestors obsession with records (the obscurest track, the
freshest import) as opposed to bands; the same orientation
towards Black America and Jamaica; the same anticipation for
the future. Camden is supposed to have brought back the idea
of Swinging London, but for five years now pirate radio has
been making a clandestine cartography of the metropolis,
bringing the scent of enchantment to forsaken places like
Peckham and Dalston, as MC's chant out the listeners' paged-
in "big shouts" and "'nuff respects".

Perhaps even more than race, it's covert class struggle
that underpins the Britpop phenom: the fetishising by mostly
middle class bands and fans of a British working class
culture that's already largely disappeared, is really a means
of evading the real nature of modern prole leisure, which
remains overwhelmingly shaped by rave. Blow Up's avowed
anti-Ecstasy stance symbolises this perfectly. Not only did E
usher in a new and still unfolding era of psychedelic music
based around the drugs/technology interface, but the drug
also permanently altered the mentality of vast tranches of
da youth, blasting away reserve, inhibition, emotional
constipation, everything in the English character that holds
us back. E and rave transformed the UK into one funky
nation, but you wouldn't be able to tell that from Britpop.
From Blur's rickety arrangements to the raunch-less
turgidity of Oasis, Britpop is rhythmically retarded, to say the least.
Partly, it's the result of cultural inbreeding, of a white pop tradition
that's long since distanced itself from the R&B roots that
made the Beatles and Stones dance bands; partly, it's a
deliberate avoidance of anything that smacks of lumpen rave.

Thanks to rave, the most vital sectors of '90's UK
subculture are all about mixing it up: socially, racially,
and musically (DJ cut'n'mix, remixology's deconstructive
assault on the song). Returning to the 3 minute pop tune
that the milkman can whistle, reinvoking a parochial England
with no black people, Britpop has turned its back defiantly
to the future. Here's hoping the future will respond in
kind, and remember Britpop only as an aberrant, anachronistic
fad--like trad jazz, the early '60s student craze that
resurrected the Dixieland sound of 30 years earlier. Perhaps
Oasis will one day seem as inexplicable as Humphrey
Lyttleton!

Where Blur's The Great Escape and Oasis' What's The
Story) Morning Glory bask in the setting sun of England's
bygone pop glory, Tricky's Maxinquaye and Goldie's
Timeless gaze into the future. Both Tricky and Goldie are
black British B-boys mindwarped by the drugs/technology
interface; both share a strikingly similar set of
miscegenated influences ranging from art-rock (David Sylvian,
Kate Busy) to ambient (Eno) to the black avant-garde (Public
Enemy, Miles Davis); both made the Top 5 of the Album Chart.
Reflecting what is really going on in Britain in 1995,
Maxinquaye and Timeless offer two versions of a modern
inner city blues. Dark, discomfiting, devoid of the callow
cheer of yer Blurs and yer Supergrasses, yet it's these
records (and, believe me, a horde of other trip hop, jungle
and post-rock releases) that are the real reasons to be
cheerful about British popular music in 1995.