funky house sceptics, let me draw your attention to this

can I just make a simple request for more pics of cooly g?

http://photos-e.ak.fbcdn.net/hphotos-ak-snc1/hs152.snc1/5649_243500675152_518030152_8400212_1004313_n.jpg

I dunno if you're eye-rolling at me lex, but it kinda pisses me off that it's so much easier to publish an article saying "hey this unambitious populist dance scene is already dead but don't worry! there's an intelligent version of same that you can enjoy while retaining cred" than it is to publish an article actually talking about that scene.

I respect Fact and XLR8R and etc. (not least for being the kinds of magazines likely at least to be interested in a scene like funky) but the sad truth is that their entire approach basically demands the former kind of article - if "funkstep" didn't exist they would have had to invent it.

Hell, it sounds like something I'd come up with.

I was kind of begging for more music like Cooly G and Roska last summer on my blog.

Etymology wise funkstep is just shit, if you're going to halve UK Funky and Dubstep at least take the interesting parts. Call it DubFunk or SocaTech, or just fucking House. Its not like this is reinventing the wheel.

Cooly's entire recording career to date is just one long musical crush on DJ Gregory.

On a slightly more positive note, BOK BOK's Ripe Banana is v vry fun.

More Bloghouse people need to get into Funky if this is the quality of the result.

Thing is I think what producers like Roska and Cooly G and Scratcha DVA are doing is interesting (though apart from the name i don't see how you can distinguish them from, say, Madd.One Ill Blu, Swift Jay, Lil' Silva, Scotty D etc, all of whom they resemble as much as they resemble each other), but surely moreso in the sense of how it contributes to funky as a whole, rather than as some hermetically sealed niche for dubstep fans.

Moreover as you suggest josiah if you like these three producers then basically you have to buy into funky's crush on US house. So the only reasons I can think of to actively privilege "funkstep" as a scene over uk funky is a fear of R&B vocals and skanks - i.e. a fear of music that sounds "black".

Again, none of which is meant (by me) to suggest that this music isn't often really great and there shouldn't be more of it.

Of course probably most skank tracks would pass for "funkstep" if you removed the vocals:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m3-LOiEMSyo&feature=player_embedded#t=159

that song is so good

Yeah! I love how totally indifferent to the notion of dignity this music is, it's not even like "let's go out of our way to be silly", more like "what would be the most fun thing to chant on the dancefloor".

It mystifies me that basically people want to have a separate scene with basically the same music but no vocals!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WpzzGXBW4GA

In all honesty, this is what I'd like "Funkstep" to sound like.

Only at a house tempo obviously.

I'm probably going to be obsessing over Mala's 2005-2008 period for most of the next 10 years, so never mind me. Its not like I dislike vocals, I just want my Deep House to have some serious bass to it.

There's also a funky track that uses that Alicia Keys sample - Mista P, "Funky Interlude".

surely moreso in the sense of how it contributes to funky as a whole, rather than as some hermetically sealed niche for dubstep fans

well this is it - if you actually go to the nights there's no sense that it's becoming a hermetically sealed niche. the last time i saw cooly g play, she was preceded by gabriel heatwave playing lady chann, aidonia, crazy cousinz, ms dynamite - you could easily look at funky from that angle and get a completely different perspective, and lament that it's not housey enough. i haven't been to a funky night in the past half year where "in the morning" wasn't played at some point. one thing that ties the new generation of dubstep producers like ikonika, joy orbison and hudson mohawke together is their obvious love of r&b, from joy orbison's trademark cut-up soul vox to ikonika regularly dropping the-dream into her sets.

this sort of talk from roska and geeneus - and let's not forget the kind of angle geeneus has pushed over the past 12 months! - comes across less as a battle for the heart & soul of funky as a bunch of separate producers trying to work out their own individual role in a scene which is so varied that inevitably there's a bunch of stuff they don't like covered under its umbrella. anyway, in that interview isn't kyla arguing that "proper" uk funky has, with the various novelty skanks, become too masculine and too grimy? wasn't that what you were fearing a few months ago? tbh as fun for 10 seconds as the skanks are, they have gotten rather boring and lazy, and i could do without hearing most of them again.

i mean, first you were scared of funky becoming grimy, now you're scared of funky becoming dubsteppy...these influences are inevitable given that funky's appealed to grime and dubstep fans since it came into existence in its current form. but it's not as if the whole scene has lurched towards those sounds. it's still v much in a state of flux at the moment.

also fyi -

@COOLYG jus to let ppl no i dnt call my music anything its jus wat i make i did not call it FUNKSTEP THAT IS @SCRATCHADVA AND @MRROSKA
about 10 hours ago from web

tbh i think it's worked the other way round: the simultaneous lurching of lairy ladstep like caspa and rusko into the semi-mainstream and the emergence of uk funky has created a space where lush post-dubstep artists from guido to ikonika can thrive; this bleeds towards techno with hessle audio, subeena, ben ufo et al; and it co-exists in the same scene as crazy cousinz, marcus nasty, the heatwave, perempay, circle et al. joker and crazy cousinz are co-headlining some diesel music event next week!

It does seem like all of these varying viewpoints and backgrounds the artists and deejays are coming from have the potential for a huge amount of creative fertility. I've been so happy watching the Hessle Audio guys slow down and get increasingly into old Garage and dubby Deep House. And the whole combination of Grime background mixed kind of gritty Electrohouse Scratcha plays around with has sooo much potential. My issue with Bassline was that it was just so fast, the 4x4 doesn't work as well at 145 IMO.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vCGo7Ve8qdQ

Wish someone industrious would make a Funky refix of this tune for example.

that mala alicia tune is nice but sounds like dubstep gone quiet storm.

which is >>>>> dubstep imho

purely from a u.s. 'listening to ppl talk' perspective ive actually heard music nerds over here talk about funky for the first time in the past couple months ... the kinds of ppl who were allll about dubstep for the past two years, i mean. i think that the 'problem' for funky, & again this is a totally u.s. viewpoint here but still, in that i think funky just became really, really un-ignorably big in the past 6-12 months, in a way it hadnt been before, and so all these dudes who could just ignore it now have to make space for themselves @ the table ... where is the intelligent dance music in funky, i implore you!!

Lex I'm not complaining about the kind of music Cooly G or Scratcha play when they DJ - this is my whole point, articles like this one totally misrepresent what these artists are doing anyway!

My last blog post was about Pearson Sound and Scratcha's Hyperdub release = I'm not actually anti the music itself whatsoever. Every time I raise these issues I'm accused of border policing, which is not my point at all, my point is that articles like this are the instances of border policing, trying to carve out a narrative that can conveniently ignore or dismiss whatever it is they, as funky house sceptics, don't like.

Anyone who complains in their opening gambit that funky isn't experimental, forward thinking music, shouldn't be writing funky house primers in my opinion.

Perhaps it wouldn't bother me if I couldn't personally name ten people IRL who are now "really excited" about how funky is "moving beyond" divas and MCs into "experimental Hyperdub territory".

The music they're talking about is great! But the way they talk about it really isn't. I'm surprised that you can be so bitter about people only liking R&B for the sonics and producer fetishism back in circa 2001, and yet not see the exact same dynamic at work in critical treatments of uk funky now.

i don't think i really care what press angles get taken on funky tbh. that it gets press at all is a good thing at the moment. it's not as egregiously factually incorrect as most mainstream journalism on "urban" music can be. and really, it is very hard to put more stock into the "critical treatments" this receives from a US-based magazine - presumably none of the staff actually have first-hand experience of the scene - when there's no evidence of any anti-diva/pro-experimental line when i talk to producers, djs, other journalists - far from it! for most, there's no dividing line between hyperdub experimentalism and r&b divas, it's all stuff they can play around with. honestly i think you're paying disproportionate attention to the writing about the scene as opposed to the music of the scene.

also, all the supposedly funkstep guys promote all the other strands of funky too - scratcha plays migraine skank, even the 'progressive' dubstep guys play various vocal tunes far as i know. theyre not actually attacking the other strands, thats just a few message board people and journalists. but its hard to come to any firm conclusion when even grunky-pushers like marcus nasty hate the mc/skank tunes.

that article would have been better really if it just said it was focusing on the techier side of funky and left it at that, rather than outright dismiss the other stuff thats out there too (though to be fair from reading the text under the youtube videos at the end the writer seemed to think they were fun at least)...

Yeah at the risk of repeating myself again and again I know that none of the actual djs and producers push this line.

Except... you know... Scratcha's September "House and Funkstep" mix, where he does half a mix of typical funky and half a mix of funkstep, is a really good example of how this kind of delineational approach could ultimately work against the music - the tracks he plays in both sections are uniformly great, but I think both sections are weaker for not being mixed in together. The second half ends up feeling much drier than it needs to (Cooly G avoids this through liberal application of moist ibadan and euro house anthems).

It strikes me as one of the scene's key strengths that Ill Blu can make tunes like "Dragon Pop" and "Pull It" and "Time To Get Nasty", or that S.Chu can make tunes like "Hard Dough Bread" and "You Got Me" and his remix of "I'm Leavin".

Speaking of which: Turns out S.Chu's "You Got Me" is the R&B-ish one I've been trying to ID for ages, "If you want it then you gotta take it boy you gotta ask for it don't you wanna own it honey..." The follow-up "Peepshow" is also gorgeous, while his remix of "I'm Leavin" is punishing.

http://www.myspace.com/schuuk

That Mala track is excellent. I wish he would release more stuff.

"first they came for the divas, and i did nothing ..."

All that said people should check out the Scratcha DVA House & Funkstep mix, both to make up their own minds and because there's heaps of tracks here nicely ID'd by the tracklisting:

*HOUSE
1 Viktor Duplaix – Lust 4 Life
2 Fingaprint – Rising Sun
3 Donaeo – Love To Happen
4 Gracious K – Migraine Skank
5 Seany B ft Alahna Faye – Want Me Back
6 DJ Naughty – Quicktime (Roska Remix)
7 Roska ft Jamie George – Wonderful Day
8 Sticky – Jeremiah Riddim
9 Geeneus ft Katy B – As I (Scratcha Dubplate Special)
10 DVA ft Alahna – I'm Leaving (MA1 Remix)
11 Fuzzi Logik – The Way You Move

*FUNKSTEP
12 Donaeo - Be Mine
13 DVA – Congo
14 Yonurican – Boriken Soul
15 Roska – The Shephard
16 S.Chu – Hard Dough Bread
17 Ill Blu – Dragon Pop
18 DVA – The End
19 DVA – Natty
20 Deep Down
21 D Malice – Unnecessary
22 Cooly G – Akai
23 Speech Debelle – Spinnin (DVA Funkstep Remix)
24 Soul Dynamics – Make A Choice (Audiowhores Remix)
25 Raven (Remix)
26 DVA – Jelly Roll
27 MJ Cole – United Groove (L-Vis1990 Remix)
28 So Solid – 21 Seconds (DVA & Roska Funkstep Remix)

On the "funkstep" section ("Unnecessary" is funkstep now?) I think the only bad track is "The End" (a halfhearted rip-off of the Felix Da Housecat/M.I.A. track Scratcha likes), while tunes like "Hard Dough Bread" and "Deep Down" are excellent.

http://www.sendspace.com/file/b27n2w

nice little primer with marcus nasty here -
http://www.dummymag.com/features/2009/09/25/marcus-nasty-i-can-t-explain-why-but-i-love-it-/

lol@barbie music.

fyi

@geeneus i would just like to state that when i said funkstep that i was actually joking and it was a cuss to people that think they are making funky
about 1 hour ago from web

If I may respond to the bit above, re: the XLR8R article... since I edited the piece, here's sort of how it ended up as Funkstep(?). Basically, we worked on this piece for a number of months, originally with the hopes that we were gonna nail down once and for all this thing we know as UK Funky. As time went on, and as the writer spoke to more and more producers and DJs, the word on the street from pretty much ALL of them was that Funky was dead -- their words, not ours. So, we changed the tune and let the players in the scene tell the tale, and they told us that at this point what everyone knew as funky was no longer what funky really was... the girls had left the club, the nasty skanks and hoods had taken over and made the genre even more laughable, and its main players were on to something entirely different... bringing it all back to the lab, as it were, and twisting in more 'intelligent', darker, dubstep-ier bits. 'hell, we're calling it funkstep and dubbage now' is essentially what they were all saying. So who are we to do anything but report the news?

And yes, we note that Geeneus was just taking the piss... hence the question mark in the title.

theyre not the only ones saying funky is dead.

Who's pushing funkstep as a distinct sound though, apart from Scratcha DVA and Roska, who already work together?

The idea that "the main players were onto something entirely different... bringing it all back to the lab, as it were, and twisting in more 'intelligent', darker, dubstep-ier bits" is just absolutely, categorically wrong, because it turns 2-3 producers out of a hundred or more into "the main players" based on... what exactly? They both have shows on Rinse? So does Marcus Nasty.

Plus even putting 'intelligent' in scare-quotes doesn't change the fact that the article tacitly endorses this assumption that somehow "funkstep" records are more experimental etc. even though they mostly basically take their cues from Lil' Silva, i.e. the most popular producer for rappers to jump on. 90% of the difference between funkstep and "nasty skanks" is the absence of vocals.

And the dubbage guys have been sour on funky for, like, a year and a half - for them it's not a case of funky being "dead", they just wish it had never deviated from "proper" house in the first place.

WELL we shall see what marcus nasty, crazy cousinz and lil silva bring us @ beyond tonight then. unless i flake from exhaustion early (nb: likely)

almost went beyond. but too knackered. went to blackmarket today to pick up some funky records. but they had nothing new. only cooly g eps on cd for SEVEN quid!

OK SO that was all kinds of incredible, musically. idk what went on w/the sets - scratcha seemed to play for ages (and his set was seriously BIG), then lil silva played...like, two tracks, then marcus nasty came on?

ANYWAY: i guess the main guiding aesthetic would've been the fantastic 4 ep, i think all those tracks were rinsed at some point. but it kept veering off down all these unexpected tangents - a vague dubstep grumble here; a ton of karizma and hard house banton there; and yes, a ton of diva/r&b vocal tunes, loads of which i didn't recognise (one with a repeated "only once i've seen you" hook, another with a "can't say no, can't say no" hook). scratcha played this one AMAZING tune w/a soprano sample and big chunky bassline. and there appears to be a rather slinky track out there which interpolates white town's "your woman" as the hook (sung by a female vocalist) and has wiley on verses. loads better than the overrated og. also some sort of female-vocalled version of "love lockdown" - not the greenmoney refix - ALSO loads better than the og.

what was kinda disappointing: as per that xlr8r piece, kyla was right. too many man too many man. it was fine for a while but goddddd why are there suddenly so many dudes flailing around and almost fucking moshing??? get away from funky dancefloors! i know it's beyond so a slightly more dude-centric crowd but none of the beyonds or even funky-centric fwds i've been to were as "too many man" as that. no wonder, if funky's getting associated w/dudes treating it like a grime rave, that its producers want to get away from that.

still, wrt the various appellations being tossed around from month to month - i think, as i tweeted the other day, these ephemeral genre names are the product of genres currently in real flux due to astonishingly high levels of creativity from so many directions. a lot of really individual, distinct producers and djs working within the same scene and taking influences from such a variety of sources. it's a really exciting time to be paying attention to the whole of this spectrum.

OHHHH yeah another highlight - scratcha dropping that BIG PHAT KICK DROP MAKES THE GIRLIES GET SOME vocal from the felix/diddy mixtape!!!

bless you, youtube

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bXuNnCmURwc

and OHHHH yeah the geeneus/ms dynamite tune was also dropped, bigger than ever

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9-g-QimJKlc

and i've just stumbled across this new stush track which sounds ridiculously heavy

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CXVFpNNr9Io

I really enjoyed Scratcha's set but yeah he was on for ages!

After Marcus finished last night the whole thing degenerated into everyone standing around watching Jammer and the other grime people that were there mosh around - rubbish

The female vocals version of "Love Lockdown" is by DJ Naughty, and yeah it's amazing.

agh why are there no mp3s of this anywhere :(

Believe me I know!! But also it's very difficult to search for :-(

i forgot: bits of scratcha's set veered unexpectedly into an almost fidget-house direction. this is the sort of thing i mean when i say it's all completely in flux.

all the anthems got dropped too - "in the morning", "gabryelle refix", "pull it"...

Lex I'd be interested to hear your opinion of his pure funkstep set (linked above) compared to the set you're describing (which sounds much more my thing obv)

Also did you hear the actual Fantastic 4 dj set on Rinse a while back - Ill Blu / Roska / Scratcha / D-Malice all taking turns playing 2 tracks each?

That was great. So many amazing unreleased Ill Blu dubs in particular.