20 Years of the Mercury Prize - Winners Poll

... aren't you a Squarepusher fan

I mean, perhaps I'm off the mark about this, but when forced to make a distinction between jungle and d'n'b, I've always thought of jungle as "breakbeat dancehall" and d'n'b as "breakbeat jazz".

d/l - this will take a while and a long article to explain fully and currently I don't really have time for either but I'll get back to it. for now, trust me.

xxpost sure, but i don't call squarepusher "jazz". just because a few artists sample jazz tracks or use jazz instruments don't make the whole scene "jazz" any more that rave was the new reggae because of "out of space". such quotes are straw clutching attempts at making d'n'b more palatable to people who wouldn't normally listen to dance music.

He was kind of a jazz musician, wasn't he?

I mean, perhaps I'm off the mark about this, but when forced to make a distinction between jungle and d'n'b, I've always thought of jungle as "breakbeat dancehall" and d'n'b as "breakbeat jazz".

― Tal Berkowitz - Vaccine advocate (DJP), Thursday, 8 September 2011 15:25 (2 minutes ago) Bookmark

that's an interesting way of putting it. i agree with the former, but i have trouble parsing the latter.

That was his background

dog latin, have you listened to the way Jenkinson plays bass, or more to the point have you listened to very many jazz bassists play solos?

Also, do you actually understand what "____ is the new jazz" actually means? I mean, beyond there being strong jazz elements in the music being cut up, a lot of what people were reacting to was a live band doing these fast cut-up, sample-heavy pieces with a good amount of improvisation in it. Technically, it wasn't that far removed from the process behind hard bop.

lol @ this list

voted Screamadelica I am a Bird Now

― I can feel it in my spiritual hat (Shakey Mo Collier), Wednesday, 7 September 2011 23:29 (Yesterday) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

dan, yeah i'm very familiar with squarepusher, but he's his own thing really an arguably doesn't fit the jazz or the drum'n'bass hole.

yeah, i understand the jazz tag being applied to reprazent, fine, yes it's jazzy - no arguments behind that, they're a live band with a strong jazz vibe. still object (or at least objected at the time) to people desperately trying to intellectualise or sanitise drum'n'bass, which is really just an offshoot of rave music, by calling it "the new jazz" which, frankly, it isn't and never was.

There was a whole dnb subgenre called jazzstep, and many of those guys themselves were talking about the connection between their music and jazz. So it's not like the "jazz" label was something outsiders wanted to stamp to the music.

squarepusher is pretty firmly rooted in jazz imo, harmonically esp, also oop north you can see him play with the sheffield/leeds free jazz scene playing bass exactly like he does w/ squarepusher

also don't remember v much improvisation, or fast cut up stuff w roni/reprazent?

technically, it's a million miles from hard bop! jeez

And there were also people like Cleveland Watkiss who actually were jazz musicians before coming to dnb.

(x-post)

and it's not like a lot of guys who self-identified as jazz musicians weren't involved in the scene, this notion that hardcore junglists decided to apply a thin veneer of stand-up bass to their existing stuff c. 1996 doesn't describe how it went down at all, from where i was listening

like the head for a roni size track would read

GO
STOP
BASS BREAK
GO AGAIN
Look stonedeyed at each other
Roni Nods, Dribbles
Song Ends

compositional process as well as perfomance tho. i mean anything being "the new anything" is always tinged with the ridic but trying to keep genres in their nice separate tupperware boxes is faintly ridic too

Keeping CDs in a nice separate tupperware box is also ridic...

still object (or at least objected at the time) to people desperately trying to intellectualise or sanitise drum'n'bass, which is really just an offshoot of rave music, by calling it "the new jazz" which, frankly, it isn't and never was.

The more "complex" forms of jazz were also offshoots of a once-popular, populist form of dance music, so perhaps the comparison is not that far-fetched?

not far fetched just pointless

dnb is closer to hiphop than anything else imo

Thriller is still a great album even if you don't approve of Micheal Jackson's caviar smuggling ring.

Is this a euphemism for und3rag3 s3x or have I missed some important Jacko news?

it's a reference to the previous few posts.

I don't like "intellectualise" and "sanitise" being used as interchangeables, nor the subliminal racism in operation when either is applied to black music (subtext: "they're dumb illiterate blacks ergo their music is not worth explaining or analysing"). Anyway DJP sums up things nicely in his post above (apropos hard bop).

Also d&b wasn't "just an offshoot of rave music," its roots go back (at least in part) to the dubplates of the seventies and the reggae sound systems of the mid-seventies onward.

xp Depends entirely on the producer. To Spring Heel Jack or Squarepusher d&b was another way of making jazz. To DJ Hype or Aphrodite it was high-speed hip hop. To others it was a different take on dancehall or Detroit techno or ambient. Even at the time nobody could agree on what it was or should be - some, like Goldie, were just better at shaping and presenting a narrative.

If any of them could have predicted Pendulum they would have quit their squabbling and bonded together against a common foe.

I don't like "intellectualise" and "sanitise" being used as interchangeables, nor the subliminal racism in operation when either is applied to black music

Hold your horses, this is getting way way too semantic and I object to this line of discourse very strongly, Marcello. Disregarding the fact that jazz is also black music, race has fuck all to do with this. The argument is the same as anyone who ever bemoaned punk rock being watered down or castrated or commercialised in the early '80s* - it goes no deeper than this. There've been some excellent points made here by all counts and I appreciate I probably just don't "get" what Roni Size and pals were doing in their sophisticating of drum'n'bass (especially when, as a teenager, I was more interested in visceral, high-impact dance music)- but my misgivings were largely aesthetic and based on personal preferences.

*also not trying to make an argument against whatever happened to punk in the '80s - let's not go down that root or i'll be apologising for things i haven't actually said all day

Don't worry, Marcello loves accusing people of subliminal racism. It's one of his things.

going through the Spotify playlist now, initial thoughts:

Primal Scream - I don't hate this as much as I used to, but I still don't like it
Portishead - duh amazing
Pulp - this is terrible until "Common People", at which point it becomes great for a few songs in a row before falling off again
Roni Size - This is such a mood album; when I'm up for it, it's fantastic, but when I'm not it's a painful slog. Today was a painful slog day.
Gomez - made it through two songs before realizing life is too precious for this
Talvin Singh - I assume this eventually gets to some sort of point? Because right now it's just aimless, vaguely pleasant noodling.

Nothing wrong with aimless, vaguely pleasant noodling.

not intrinsically, no

it's not very compelling to listen to, tho

I think also the aforementioned missing first track may be putting up an artificial barrier, as my first exposure to the album is 11+ minutes of "I had a thought, I'm going to play around with it for 64 measures with minimal variation! Okay time for strings."

Dummy.

the talvin singh album sounded best when i happened upon it while it was playing in someone else's house/car. did you know he played tablas on some remixes of Kiss Them For Me?

For me it was a toss-up between the Elbow album and Suede's debut. I chose Suede's debut. Some really awful albums in there though, in my opinion.

how is this anything but portishead?

Ms Dynamite is pleasant but boring

http://sickmouthy.com/2011/09/08/the-best-mercury-music-prize-winner-ever/

I suspect I shouldn't be enjoying this Franz Ferdinand album as much as I am, but fuck it, this is great

dog latin the issue here is that as is commonly the case you're parroting received wisdom which is totally off the mark in respect of what was actually happening. You don't have to understand "the scene" to have an opinion on the music but if you're going to base your criticisms around such issues then really you should try. Otherwise the "I don't actually follow the music and this is just my vague perception" caveat should be enough to make you stop typing further.

Like, yes, the beats on New Forms were largely less complex than Size/Reprazent had done before, but they were still mostly more complex than the majority of d&b beats by 1997, this was something happening scene-wide and if anything Size/Reprazent were fighting a rear-guard action on tunes like "Share The Fall". Go back 2 years previous and Size and Die in particular were doing some of the most layered, dense, trippy beats in jungle (see tunes like "11.55"). But those jazz samples had always been there from the beginning, and were really barely different to what Dillinja was doing in 1994 - 1996. The idea that they tailored their sound to cultivate crossover success is just wrong, the only adjustments they made to their sound were to stay consistent with where dancefloors were going. The crossover elements begin and end with the guest vocalists.

For a long time I thought it a shame that they released their big double cd epic in 1997 and not 1995, because the latter would have been a very different album. But the specific appeal of New Forms is its stripped back repetition, the way that tunes like "Change My Life" and "Hot Stuff" and "Down" and "Ballet Dance" interweave just a few carefully chosen elements to create this hypnotic space where even the mildest adjustment has massive effects - like the way the drums switch up about a third of the way through "Change My Life" and then the bass switches up at the two thirds mark. As a musical dynamic the effect is closer to Neu! than it is to most jazz. Or, closer to home, deep house. A tune like "Down" has that sparkly, spangly quality I associate with the best deep house like Dubtribe Soundsystem's "Do It Now".

And anyway the more you listen to the drums the more you realise they're actually full of surprises, all these micro-variations and hesitations and riffs on the central groove that are totally involving the way that interesting house percussion is involving.

Eventully d&b smoothed out even these and became mostly a changeless same, but it's horrendously simplistic to dismiss every point on a musical trajectory on the basis of its endpoint. If anything its the brevity of this particularly point - a moment when d&b was exploring the inherent possibilities in repetition but had not yet installed absolute repetition as orthodoxy - that makes it worth treasuring.

I voted for Antony. It's not necessarily my favourite on the list but I never really followed the Mercury's pre 97 and while I consider Screamadlica, Dummy and Different Class to be some of the most seminal British albums of the 90's I often forget they won the award in the first place. I vividly remember the 'Who the fuck?' shit storm that accompanied Antony's win fondly as well. I remember casual listening friends to be outraged at it. It really weirded some folks out.

I'm still sore about Wild Beasts missing out in 2010 and not even making the shortlist this year though.

I also think that the Polaris has been much stronger than the Mercury's in terms of winners and candidates over the last few years.

Cosign on that last sentence.

wow I don't know if I can put up with an entire Antony album

I'm not even 2 minutes in and all I keep thinking is "won't someone save that poor baby goat oh wait that's his singing voice"

okay apparently my breaking point is "One day I will grow up to be a beautiful woman"

ha I am pretty sure I hated Arctic Monkeys last time I heard them and now, post Antony, they sound like the greatest band on Earth

Kinda what I was getting at. In that Antony was a great winner mostly because of how much it fucked people off.

It's hard to see the intensely annoying aspects of a band as a positive when you are among the ppl getting annoyed.

As usual Tim, you have most eloquently summed up why I should be enjoying this more than I do, and I appreciate that. I dug out New Forms again only a couple of months ago, having not really listened to it since it first came out. The only thing that I object to in your post is the "received wisdom" thing, because frankly I can't help not being moved by something if it doesn't move me - this is not a parroting of opinion as I've held it since I first heard the album; so as far as I know this opinion is nothing but my own. But hey, I love hearing other's points of view when summarised the way you did.

No problems with crossover appeal - that's a good thing in my book. My secondary issue lies in the ostensible justification of drum'n'bass by trying to compare it to another completely different style of music (jazz) so as to make it more palatable to non-dance listeners when really it should be appreciated on its own merits (i.e. as dance music).

What can I say? At the end of the day it's simply not my bag. People appreciate music based on different values and these don't correlate so well with mine. As a landmark record that went on to influence perhaps the subtler and more experimental side of music: that I agree. And maybe at the time I was still wrapped up in my frantic jungle/aardkore schism, and certainly not tuned in enough to other developments in d'n'b to fully understand that.

On reassessing, it's still a pretty flat-sounding record to my ears (don't want to use the word "wallpaper" because it's certainly more than that), and while I've grown to love the more nuanced styles of dance (minimal house for example) over the last several years, the tunes just skim and scoot around in the background - my mind forgets they're there, which is neither pleasant nor unpleasant - it just is.

I'd like to start a thread about listening to music in a different environment from which it's intended. A big part of Reprazent (and drum'n'bass and dance and rock to an extent) is that it should be heard loud - preferably live in Roni Size's case. Not having access to decent clubs for most of my life, I grew up hearing dance on some pretty shitty home stereo systems. These days I mostly listen to it on headphones: moderately better but I often feel I have to hypnotise myself in order to imagine what it would sound like on a decent bass unit. For one, you can't feel bass vibrations in your body when limiting yourself to earphones.

I'm not even 2 minutes in and all I keep thinking is "won't someone save that poor baby goat oh wait that's his singing voice"

― Tal Berkowitz - Vaccine advocate (DJP), Thursday, 8 September 2011 21:35 (14 minutes ago) Bookmark

If Antony and Joanna Newsom did an album together I think your head might explode ;-)

Not a very big fan at all, but I'm always kind of impressed at how powerful Arctic Monkeys can sound compared to a lot of mid-00's indie. Speaking of soundsystems, if you'd ever attended an indie night circa that year, it blew the competition out the window.

yeah actually the thing that is striking me about this is that there is an unambiguous, driving rhythm section here; the crispness of the drums in particular is really viscerally satisfying and definitely making me more amenable to this than I would normally expect (see above Gomez reaction for contrast)

xxxxpost you're allowed not to like the album, but all the stuff about sanitising jungle and coffee tables is received wisdom.

my secondary issue lies in the ostensible justification of drum'n'bass by trying to compare it to another completely different style of music (jazz) so as to make it more palatable to non-dance listeners when really it should be appreciated on its own merits (i.e. as dance music).

There is a long history of dance music that uses jazz (and soul and funk and reggae and hip hop and etc.) samples though, and the point of this by and large is not to make the music more palatable to non-dance listeners, but to generate friction between the sample source and the groove.

Some idiot critics and listeners might seize on that in the wrong way (as per your quote) but it's pretty clear that this is not what Roni Size was doing. I'd say the first Goldie album (which I like too) is a much more appropriate target of that criticism.

We wouldn't complain about, say, Moodymann in these terms - mainly because he's never crossed over as much. But this is why working backwards from outcome (winning the mercury music prize) to intention is so fraught.