grime and the hardcore continuum

2-Step did break around the time that Britpop was also at its apex, and that genre and attendant excesses are always contributed to "the Blair effect", so why not indeed?

i don't want to overstate the amount of people involved in crime but,it is a big thing. and if you or even some of your friends are involved in that, whether its nicking cars and selling them on to car yards or individuals, going on shopping sprees with stolen credit cards, jacking, selling drugs whatever, that means pretty much that you'll have friends go to jail, get grassed up, have the police fabricate evidence, get stabbed, or shot if you're unlucky. it means constant paranoia, police and rivals, if you're weak youll get robbed, you might see people you know get addicted to things, you'll find tht with a criminal record you can't get a job no matter the state of the economy, it's a trap in other words, a trap that even if you escape will defintely claim some of your mates if you move in those circles.
'it's just one big cycle here'
everybody involved in making grime has involvement in that world, everybody, even if just by association.

crime doesnt go away anyway, when theres more money sloshing around, theres more to rip. look at hardcore, happy music right, but how much crime was there involved at that time? loads

i think the difference is, when theres a downturn, perhaps it strikes a wider chord, and when music succeeds, it does so by breaking out of its immediate demographic

perhaps but the difference was that the vast majority of the music's creators themselves were NOT involved in serious crime.

um, i don't want to accuse the artists of being involved in serious crime, if they were they wouldn't be wasting their time making music, they'd be making serious money. (and a lot of them cease their illegal activites once the legal money starts coming in.) it;s small scale, but it still ruins lives.

is this really the case? i mean, they have mobiles, the internet, technology is generally cheaper or somehow more ascertainable - i'm alluding that generally people are better off, it seems so but of course there is still poverty and people live in it and it's quite likely that there will be SOME in that scene who fit that description but the generalisation seems too stong - it doesn't seem any more 'hard-up' or desperate than hip hop or jungle did here when they were young underground movements.

yup, always fashionable to be a crim, no argument there. but i promise you, i grew up in stratford and it weren't scary. there wasn't crackheads pestering you for money, there wasn't as many muggings, and there was certainly nowhere near as many arms, and that crew/gang culture wasn't nearly so serious. if you get involved with that (and i'm not obviously) you can get stabbed up for being in the wrong territory. i know some of you will think i'm making it up, but thats what i'm trying to tell you, it's much realer than you think, when we were coming up it wasn't like that. and thats what i'm saying isn't it, i'm not saying people are poorer now, i'm saying they're scareder.

does everyone think like that or am i just childish? or am i just the only one stupid enough to admit to something like that?

should put somehting garage related here too now
if ruff sqwads music was a woman, i'd seek her hand in marriage.

of course i was 16/17 then, i think most of us are like that at that age, and a good many are like that in a class-war sense, as you are. Nick is like that, and he's from a very similar background to me after all. but - the crucial, total difference between him and me - he liked Oasis in the mid-90s.

more important than crime and low funds is the mC though. this is the real reason why grime can into existence. it was the music the MCs willed into existence. they were sick of being the sideshow. the younger ones were sick of dibby dibby and flava for the raver, they wanted to write they wanted to spit properly and to do that they needed some music to act as a backdrop. thats the real reason grime came into existence. it sounds like it does for a whole host of other resons, but the need to talk was why it exists at all.

i don't hate anybody, not even marcello.

What kind of content/ visual quality?

i miss dibby dibby and flava for the raver!

seriously i wish there was a bit more of that old Mc-as-compere, enhancement-to-the-music, foil-to-the-DJ role

it's great they're all into writing out their verses and reciting small books's worth of stuff but i miss all the off the cuff daft stuff

on that old 1999 2step tape i mentioned upstream, it's easter monday and the mc gives out a shout to the Cadbury's Creme Egg massive. that kind of thing doesn't seem to go on so much

sometimes i think the more the uk mcs try to imitate and assimilate to american standards of mcing they'll lose what they had before, the english quirkiness and parochial charm. while not gaining an iota in terms of a chance of breaking into america

(just saw 'fix up look sharp' on MTV 2 the other day and it didn't work at all, he doesn't command the video space like any old US emcee would, the music sounds scrawny, the voice sounded like he's from Mars -- out of context, it doesn't compute)

Haha!

very. everything's hyper evolving. people talk about producers being old school with in 6 months. kids are in crews acting the badman at 12.

>ecstasy has been wiped from the cultural dna.

yes! this is EXACTLY why i started this thread. surely the lack of e breaks the hardcore continuum?

>i wish there was a bit more of that old Mc-as-compere, enhancement-to-the-music

may i suggest the sublime Crazy D, as foil to the mighty DJ Hatcha, and his amazing abilty to twist and recontextualise odd phrazes from madonna, reggae anthems, adverts etc. he's always shouting to all "first aiders and escapaders."

]email me if you want some CDrs Simon. Hatcha & Crazy D are genius...[

i got a copy of that nasty set now by the way, no thanks to you lot!

i agree 2step has never had anything to do with e, but its swing and warmth was still part of the house axis, that warm "up" vibe. (and even jungle and later d&b still had that, before the drop). but now grime is all "down": bassy, controlled, contained, angry...

and also don't get me wrong, i can see the evolutionary thread very clearly sequentially from hardcore to grime. i just think either end of the thread (ie hardcore and grime) share next to none of the same sonic elements.

94 yeah there woz pills around (some of them in my tum) but E had ceased to be the paradigmatic vibe-setter. there weren't any tunes hymning E by 94 but there were lots of tunes about herbalist and ganja lover

i wouldn't actually say a drug element was integral to the Nuum, at least not any specific drug. the only thing maybe that's consistent all the way through every kind of pirate music is weed. but that's not unique to that scene

i think what really defines the h-core Nuum is the transposition of a Jamaican way of doing things onto UK club culture -- the dubplates, the riddims, the bass presha, the MC... pirates i think of as equivalent to the big sounds in JA, instead of a lawn they have a broadcast area. Same cut throat rivalry, same repping their local manor, same ties with shady folk

H-core Continuum = the mishmashed up only-in-Britain/mostly-in-London meeting of house music and Jamaica.

ok so if you say drugs is not a core element of the "Nuum" then we'll ignore that, but the influence of house music is now almost completely erased from the Nuum's latest thread...

why is it the hardcore continuum and not the reggae continuum or the disco continuum or something else? what motivates critical attention on this lineage over others? is it something about establishing a narrative throughline for specifically british-based electronic/dance musics? and is it supposed to be prescriptive in some way (which would make sense of bizarre things like jazz influences in jungle being talked about as somehow extraneous or intrusive)?