funky house sceptics, let me draw your attention to this

whenever i post anything, deej, you say that i'm retarded or annoying.

in other news, fuck you.

would like to hear someone reading john updike over funky house tracks

so is 'mirror dance' a big track in funky ?? its a huge 'just-house' song over here

still!

sounds like an obvious inspiration for 'inflation' to me

yr fave & mine sharky p killing it RIGHT NOW LIVE dudes

http://www.icecoldfm.co.uk/

ctrl + f "mirror dance" btw deej

Delirious ft Sweetness – Truthful
Puppert Master – Inflation Remix
Oveous Maximus – Mirror Dance (Yoruba)
Dewa Entertainment – Too Sweet

^ also check this outstanding extended riff about an hour and half into footloose this week.

haha, sharky currently turning portentous old 'samurai' (ma1 mix of jazztronik via marco del horno) into a bubbling s/t to the usual randy night out

HAHAHAHA and after all that filth he's now doing b2b with his infant kid he's had in the studio the whole time!!!!!!! love this guy

aww now the station's cut out :(

the shoutouts ARE - like deej in fact - quite annoying. tho tbh that whole mix (like cooly herself, good as she is) is a bit overrated (most fact mixes seem a bit lazily put together imho - like that roska one a while back).

heard a new donaeo track on kiss tonight. his most commersh song so far, nowhere near as good as the last few. goes a bit nuts with the orchestral stabs too.

I like Sharkey P too. It's difficult for me to hate on MCs who focus their chat on important topics like picking up girls on the dancefloor.

The 22 min track is Mista P's "Funky Interlude".

― Tim F, Tuesday, May 12, 2009 4:15 AM Bookmark

right, asked what the sample was iirc

gosh, however will deej cope with the combined beeves of titchy and idiot is the idiot.

I like Sharkey P too. It's difficult for me to hate on MCs who focus their chat on important topics like picking up girls on the dancefloor.

― Tim F, Wednesday, 13 May 2009 00:13 (52 minutes ago)

http://www.zshare.net/audio/599337044ba3bcaf/

in that case download (what i nabbed of) it like the animals do on tellyyyyyy. i was gonna llow it actually what with the dubs being old but in light of recent... travails perhaps a point needs to be reiterated. also if anyone should have the misapprehension that shark's a lairy joker and little else then i'd ask them to point out when their fave mc ever nailed anything so well as him breathlessly winding down his capers with "dj... play my..song... please!" at 23mins.

...beeves?

OH beefs but like...chaucerian or something?

yeah, thought i'd give it a go innit

Looking forward to the Sharkey P!

Is it wrong of me that I even joy his "I'll holla/I don't mind if she spit or swalla!" rhyme? Not for the content, he just sound so fantastically worked-up yet gregarious.

i just like the brazenness of rhyming "swalla" mostly.

so now, i'm as fond of shantie as anyone, but i've never really gotten that upthread thing of just a good bloke having a good time, showing much love, making you laugh. shantie does of course represent all those regular everyman qualities but to me works in an different sort of way to sharkey, who really is the ne plus ultra of all of the above listening to this. shantie's everymanness seems almost... profound? during his sets i even tend to find myself zoning out a little; he's weirdly unobtrusive - with that odd muffled quack of a voice - and thoughtful, and observant (stuff like suddenly deciding to getting round to doing some bars for the olympics, or that strange moment of seriousness justifying (to whom??) some stop the war lyrics with "well, it is a bit much innit"), and basically kinda just wanders in and out of the mix absentmindedly sometimes. yet he still intensifies the dance, not in spite of but because of all that somehow. in a greater sense i rather like to think of him as this kind of gentle shepherd of funky, safely prodding along marcus' and mac's furious herds of confused housey livestock, and your thoughts that go with it all the meanwhile.

mmmm. what else have i to catch up on?

i think i am in agreement with the thoughts here & elsewhere of reynolds' gimp regarding cooly g. (cept about the middle bit of her mix, i hated that.)
generally it seems to me a bit like in terminator 3 when arnie went all SQUEEEE and pussied out of his job just cos skynet thought they'd send a lady terminator over this time - did i remember that right? oh.

oh also me then being crestfallen at the cooly-ish stutter techsoul whatever section immediately following (indeed including, in that context) the 'love lockdown' cover early doors on the last marcus set.

i was trying to work out if i liked, or rather had any use for, this a while ago; think this would get play now or is bilal still too human?

http://www.soulbounce.com/soul/2009/01/rogiers_hollywood_story_gets_remixed_for_the_house_heads.php

question: is this new on the scene or actually have people been caning it for ages? - finding it really placeless just now. fabulous either way though.

Yes, I think this is right - if nothing else Shantie's conscious rhymes (e.g. "it's bare war on the streets nowadays/but I got two sons and I want shit to change/gun, coffin, wreath, wreath/every day more mums in grief/do we need more love on the road? in the rave? in the streets?") contradict that notion of him as an uncomplicated everyman. It's the interplay between that side of him and the "skanks in the bank"/"jump up and down on the spot!"/"all the skankers in the bank move to the front" stuff that makes him enjoyable.

The shepherd image is a good one: I think perhaps what inspires the "everyman" comparisons is that Shantie treats all the different styles fairly equally. Whereas the grimier MCs tend to wax and wane in enthusiasm/aggression levels based on what's playing.

One other thing I like about Shantie (and Rankin' too, but Shantie does it better) is that he's a good critic as well. Like when Mak 10 drops his Hard House Banton/D Double E blend and Shantie shouts "Lucky!!" repeatedly, as if to say "treasure this moment because you may never experience it again!"

(though Mak does tend to spoil this by rewinding the tune multiple times, I'm guessing so that no-one steals it from him. The intro on that one takes a bit long to build so the constant rewinds do hamper the vibe somewhat; that said when D.E.E. raps "I'm gonna put my hand through the letterbox" as the new counter-beat comes in... well, it's like the most exciting four seconds I've heard this year)

Ha, speaking of being reynolds gimp, his recent and dense discussion of the hardcore continuum being "centripetal" is actually very worthwhile and interesting, and accords with my own feelings substantially.

BTW whatever you posted asking "is this new" won't load for me. What is it?

melissa bradshaw's recent takedowns of reynolds are infinitely more interesting and worthwhile than that endless centrifugal vs centripetal post, and her theory of soca aerobics is definitely smarter

the last video is something called 'turn me on' by black coffee - name doesn't ring a bell but the tune does

it's probably more like a centipede but i'll read it anyway.

song is black coffee ft bucie - turn me on (original mix) bah xp. yes it is like you've always known it isnt it! and actually from south africa to boot. (whoooooaa we're all having a conversation let's write a book review about it.)(just... don't even get me started on "dancehall funky".)

haven't decided what i make of bradshaw yet. "lucky!"

"melissa bradshaw's recent takedowns of reynolds are infinitely more interesting and worthwhile than that endless centrifugal vs centripetal post, and her theory of soca aerobics is definitely smarter"

link at all?

http://melissabradshaw.net/

i see what she did there with the blog name.

Lex, based on that post Melissa appears to be conflating K-Punk and Simon's explanations of the hardcore continuum idea. They're actually very different. This is not her fault though, both writers have muddied the waters by not acknowledging their differences. All of the papers or associated rants I've read with respect to that continuum conference seem aimed at K-Punk's version of the idea rather than Simon's.

Simon's position is basically that he's talking about a set of cultural practices. K-Punk's is that he's talking about a politically charged philosophy for understanding and determining the quality of music. Simon's very happy to say "funky is 100% in the continuum, I just don't like it." K-Punk wants to tie the concept to (his personal sense of) the music's worth and/or(sonically) revolutionary potential.

To this extent it's really K-Punk who is prodding people to retaliate with "your problem is you just don't get the music, you're an old grinch." His response to this is, "it's not the music that's important, it's the idea that gives it meaning and resonance which is important." Which Simon wouldn't say, for him the idea is interesting only insofar as it traces what is actually happening in the music.

Melissa criticises Simon for saying (I paraphrase) "we all know what happened to Goldie when
he disconnected from the continuum", suggesting that he instead failed due to complacency and fame. But the two explanations aren't mutually exclusive. I'd suggest that Simon means, "If we agree that jungle was mostly great when it at least functioned as jungle qua jungle (regardless of whatever other stylistic qualities it might have possessed), it's to be expected that when an artist who positions him or herself as transcending that functional aspect, the quality of their music is likely to suffer."

I'd make similar comments of Roska's "classier" recent material: by seeking to minimise those qualities of the music we immediately associate with funky in favour of allusions to detroit techno and broken beat, those productions actually abandon a lot of what makes Roska an interesting producer in the first place.

Lol let me be annoyed by who I want & u can be annoyed by me rtc

actually I think r|t|c was (obliquely) supporting you deej.

cookie 4 tim, yeah i meant that more as just dem two forming the lamest tag team ever rather than any judging of your partic intolerances. (far be it from me, etc.)

the reynolds nuum piece is fine i guess, but it's just him in his garden shed
with the old trainset unless he's to go deeper than "funky is 100% in the continuum, I just don't like it" with it. this is the whole bloody thing.

eh i read that post on a phone so i couldnt really read between the lines

Yeah, the fact that simon doesn't get funky is a massive black mark, I just think it doesn't necessarily disprove (his version of) the theory.

One problem with k-punk's "the theory is the point" stance is that the time when the theory is actually most interesting is also the time when one is least likely to focus on it as a theory.

The Feminine Pressure thinkpiece remains the most eloquent expression of the entire notion to date, and there Simon barely acknowledges it as a theory in and of itself, the whole purpose was to use these ideas to grapple with the greatness of 2-step garage. Because the ideas were contextually and sonically engaged with particular music, it just wouldn't have made sense to separate them out and fashion them into some sort of standalone transcontextual manifesto.

The analogy that comes into my mind is that of a DNA sequence in the context of a living organism and a DNA sequence that is successfully isolated in a laboratory. We don't need to convert the former into the latter in order to understand its importance. But when an animal dies, the latter may be all that we have left.

A more correct twist on the Melissa Bradshaw position would be to note that the theory ossifies the moment it's put in terms of being a "pure" theory. The problem is not that the music is more important than the ideas we have about it (if only because it's impossible to say where the former stops and the latter begins), but that an idea developed in isolation from the music it purportedly explains becomes a flawed idea immediately, losing the subtlety and mutability it might otherwise have, and secretly importing faded memories of past experiences of past music to fill in its necessary gaps.

All of my many arguments with k-punk come back to this central point: while he's right to say that a theory of music has meaning and validity in its own right, for me it is inescapably something that needs to be motivated or provoked by the experience of the music to have any real purchase or truth value.

Where this becomes interesting for funky is that i think funky poses a challenge to a lot of these ideas to become (because smarter, more nuanced) versions of themselves. The original idea of the HC seems to have been inspired in large part by the challenge of explaining the odd combinations of transformation and fidelity (with respect to prior genres such as jungle) which 2-step presented. Over the years this explanation has become very "neat"; funky, which doesn't have something like the 2-step beat to organise itself around conceptually, is a lot more difficult to explain, which means that any explanatory theory has to be a lot smarter to be convincing.

sometimes i hear DONAE-O DONAAAAEEE-OOOOO in my sleep

also, i for one am ecstatic to be able to put this on a year end list

http://www.tower.com/this-is-uk-funky-house-vol-1-various-artists-cd/wapi/113463229

a question that popped into my head as i unsuccessfully attempted to wreck the dance floor w/ some funky at a party last weekend: if you don't want to dance to funky house, are you dead inside y/n?

i definitely don't want to turn the funky thread into a cuntinuum argument but i was at the UEL conference melissa mentioned and it was pretty great - kode9 and kodwo eshun's paper was excellent for all the reasons she mentioned, and dan hancox and joe muggs were brilliant in comprehensively debunking the entire cuntinuum idea. in particular i enjoyed joe bringing some i-was-there expertise to point out that the HC idea is an exclusionary and inaccurate representation of the 90s, not just something which is past its sell-by date as i think we all agree. i'd link to dan and joe's papers but i don't think they're online anywhere yet. (the nadir of the debate was kpunk spluttering about how artists don't have anything to say about music, and in fact only exist as "agents of the nuum" [ay ya ya] rather than individuals in their own right. everyone laughed at him, gratifyingly.) (i missed his own paper though as i was interviewing tori amos, whose own brand of academic babble was definitely preferable.)

back to funky! yeah at any given time i tend to have DONAEO, DONAEEEOOOO or CRAY-ZEE COUSINZ! CRAY-ZEE COUSINZ! or even "mwah mwah mwah" in my head.

a question that popped into my head as i unsuccessfully attempted to wreck the dance floor w/ some funky at a party last weekend: if you don't want to dance to funky house, are you dead inside y/n?

yyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy there is no question. i don't get people who don't get funky.

and i wish all of you could come to funky nights w/me and the crew btw. as well as night slugs tomorrow, i'm hoping to reach air @ ghost on sat...

http://profile.ak.facebook.com/object3/1133/109/n162460310261_8460.jpg

I wish I'd read this thread before attempting to listen to the Cooly G mix because I actually turned off after about 10mins as it was reminding me way too much of the, erm, nu-skool breaks continuum. I'll give it another go.

cooly g interview btw

What's the story behind Narst and Love Dub?

I made Love Dub on Sunday afternoon when I was chilling with my mate. I had my computer ready to go and I said “Oi bruv, I’m gonna make a banger right now, I can feel it…” He was like “Yeah man, I’m gonna kick back and watch”. So Love Dub came out like that, then I uploaded it that night. It’s about a boy I think I used to love and we broke up and and I missed him a lot.

"Everyone was welcome, and immediately granted the status of auteur of their own style of soca-aerobics"

excellent line.

cool and amusing piece all in all, tho despite the 'fuck all this intellectual over analysing!', it does seem like just another person adding their own 2 (admittedly wittier, less self important) pence to the harcore um, theorum. im sure SR will respond on his blog at some point with his rebuttal, and then MB will respond with hers, and so on and so on. i did like the point about the fact there even IS a continuum being blatantly obvious though - i like SR's writing but often the fact hes such a good writer means everyone forgets that sometimes he just states the bleeding obvious, like a lot of what he wrote in that guardian piece about samples/massive attack.

Yeah, the fact that simon doesn't get funky is a massive black mark, I just think it doesn't necessarily disprove (his version of) the theory { .... }

Where this becomes interesting for funky is that i think funky poses a challenge to a lot of these ideas to become (because smarter, more nuanced) versions of themselves.funky, which doesn't have something like the 2-step beat to organise itself around conceptually, is a lot more difficult to explain

Seth Brundle: The computer is giving us its interpretation... of a steak. It's, uh translating it for us; it's rethinking it, rather than *reproducing* it, and something is getting lost in the translation.

Ronnie: Me... I'm lost.

Seth Brundle: The flesh. It should make the computer, uh crazy. Like those old ladies pinching babies. But it doesn't; not yet because I haven't taught the computer to be made crazy by the...

{smiles at Ronnie}

Seth Brundle: flesh. The poetry of the steak. So, I'm gonna start teaching it now.

basically, from my point of view any solely structural modelisation of funky will remain - whilst quite possibly being, superficially speaking, pretty watertight - inadequate in terms of really explaining the animus of the scene. cos the funky esemplasm is reynolds' theoretical binary of flesh & bone fused into one, surely, wherein the warp & weft of the cognitive desires pertaining to "flava" are the equally dominant processual partners to the underpinning rhythmic matrix, which acts as more of an amniotic suspension than a skeletal frame as such.

upthread, matt dc is correct on two points: continually emphasising the idea of funky as a zone of infinite fluxional context, and recognizing what i once termed wrt to bassline the scene's "strong and indiscriminate nostalgic undertow" (by that i mean, well, take your pick - 'funky pulse', the 'show me love' refix, the 'ripgroove' tease throughout lil silva's 'different', 'in the morning', footloose the other week playing black russian's 'soul gypsy' - a boot of soul ii soul over 'gypsy woman' - and you not even noticing how insane it all is. though i'd also argue that this isn't something only localised to funky but is socioculturally endemic in the fabric of everything nowadays, globally; what popular notion of the future even exists any longer besides most guys' style icon apparently being marty mcfly?) as the chief source of antagonism to diehard k-punkian political continuuists; mcluhan's old "looking forward through the rearview mirror" chestnut, supposedly so riven with self-deception as to stall the engine entirely, or better yet what you get when something is both centrifugal and centripetal - stasis? (call it all hauntology and it's a-ok though, obviously.)

i dunno, the way i see it, simplistically speaking in order for nuum theory to survive it needs to develop something of a psychoanalytic approach towards acknowledging the subjectivity of the funky scenius. even maybe schizoanalytic, in the words of felix guattari, whose chaosmosis i ventured to put forth earlier, and which i believe tries to advance what he calls an ethico-aesthetic paradigm rather than a merely scientific one. tbh i ain't really read it yet boss, but i'm reckoning it'll do nicely once other people get stuck into it for me. it also won't stop me from saying that the reynolds' energy flash needs to become a transversal flash - heyo!

back to funky! yeah at any given time i tend to have DONAEO, DONAEEEOOOO or CRAY-ZEE COUSINZ! CRAY-ZEE COUSINZ! or even "mwah mwah mwah" in my head.

― lex pretend, Wednesday, 13 May 2009 09:19 (4 hours ago)

the worst one for this i find is "RIDDIM BOX-OX-OX-OX", murmuring evilly thru my daydreams.

haha eek, i originally typoed "murdmuring" there btw.

also i think i must have spent too much time with sharkey p, cos that cooly g quote is reading like some bad nuum erotica to me right now.

even you admit that the shouts and repping stay with you...i just want the music to stay with me, fuck the repping. nothing wrong with personal opinion on that point, thus no reason to call me an idiot.

also: To my mind it basically means populist big-room house that is neither too electroid nor too subtle, as said by tim f....thus, tho i've read this entire thread, i wonder how someone could possibly argue that this music is potentially sonically revolutionary? that seems a bit fucking much to me-- some of it is quite good, yes, but it is by no means revolutionary.

r|t|c, I hope the third paragraph performance doesn't mean you don't really believe in the first two paragraphs, because I agree with them 100% (not talking about the stuff in italics. Is that a Cronenberg reference or something).

In fact this idea:

"wherein the warp & weft of the cognitive desires pertaining to "flava" are the equally dominant processual partners to the underpinning rhythmic matrix, which acts as more of an amniotic suspension than a skeletal frame as such."

... is pretty much exactly what I was thinking but less neatly.

That's my point re the 2-step beat: despite UK Garage being less easily absorbed within a straight k-punk futureshock narrative than jungle (because, like, how do you theoretically explain the visceral intuitive certainty that the Sunship Remix of "Flowers" is perfection embodied?), nonetheless the beat becomes a get-out-of-jail-free card for inflexible theorists, letting them pay lipservice to a futurism they may not fully believe in anyway - they can acknowledge the bones so that they can overlook those aspects of the flesh that trouble them.

I think you're right that funky is where the flesh/bones distinction starts to break down - even the beat structures could be entered into the "flava" column, that "strong and indiscriminate nostalgic undertow" extends to the very rhythm patterns of tracks as diverse as "Seasons" ("I Luv U"), "In The Morning" (Bugz in the Attic), "Frontline" (Davinche) etc. Whereas 2-step's engagement with flava was hierarchically ordered by the beat, in funky it's more like all the elements come into constellation with one another, such that it's impossible to point definitively to one particular quality that renders a tune "UK funky" on a sonic level; the "funky" as such is in the covalent interrelationship. This is most obvious with the complicated history of tunes like DJ Gregory's "Don't Panic" and Suges' "We Belong To The Night" - both already anthems before they got varying vocal treatments, but somehow becoming more funky afterwards. I don't think this ever really happened with 2-step; the need for beat simpatico was always the overriding concern.

One thing I've been thinking about a lot, and it ties in with "if you don't want to dance to funky house, are you dead inside y/n?", is the question "what ears does funky demand of its listener/dancer ?" In other words, what is the manner of listening (or thinking about listening) appropriate to funky?

It's not something I can describe in full (not yet at any rate, and probably not ever entirely) but I think a part of it is a state of mind in which enjoyment of inadvertent eclecticism (not eclecticism proper - ooh let's follow x with y - but the eclecticism of a single "genre" which seems to entail and even require a constant diversity of strategies) becomes more than incidental or additional and assumes a position of, if not necessarily centrality, then something close to it. I feel like sequencing in mixes is even more important in funky than it was in UK garage, the way tracks collide into one another with totally opposing flavours and structures and yet, however briefly, become entangled and implicated within one another in a manner that works. In that sense the function of the house beat and the house tempo is as a kind of open space in which those kinds of collisions and transformations can occur, perhaps with more easily achieved success than was always possible in UK Garage (where it could be very difficult to find two grooves that sounded good with one another for more than a couple of bars. Probably the other influencing factor is that a lot of these tracks are very much like grime in their construction, occasionally verging on 1-bar loops, so the jumps from track to track assume more importance).

Ugh too tired to force further thoughts out but I want to come back to this.