funky house sceptics, let me draw your attention to this

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.

table is the table, that description of mine you just quoted was with respect to "funky house" of the last ten years, not uk funky.

Perhaps if you tell me what you've listened to I can understand where you're coming from a bit better.

t's impossible to point definitively to one particular quality that renders a tune "UK funky" on a sonic level

i'm sure this right but in my head the dominant rhythmic signifier of funky (O--XO-X-) is pretty much as clear as that of 2 step (O-X--O-X) tho there probably are more variations within the former (sorry any excuse to write 4 beat drum patterns using O, X and -)

How am i supposed to read those drum patterns steve?

O = bassdrum
- = unused beat
X = snare

i fear i have written both wrong tho, that would be REALLY embarrassing

oh-- then forget i quoted you. i've listened to a bunch of the Crazy Cousinz mixes, some donaeo, a lot of Kyla's stuff....

I guess that it just comes back to one of my original points, which is that a lot of this UK funky stuff is quite good, but it isn't anything new-- the same sonic pallettes and rhythm structures have been used for years and years...I mean, an example-- the excellent Black Coffee track above is similar structurally to a great number of MAW productions. that isn't knocking it, but i feel like the 'THIS IS REVOLUTIONARY' pronouncements that some are bandying about are just people looking to claim something as revolutionary. it's dance music, it's for people to dance and fuck to-- that's pretty elemental, and it all just depends on what one wants to dance and fuck to. i'd readily dance to some of this uk funky, but i'd definitely rather dance to a live set from an Ibadan producer like Tiger Stripes or almost ANY Strictly producer-- just a preference.

now i take my leave-- tho this thread has been illuminating. thanks, tim, for not being a jerk, and i'm sorry if i was one at times. my american attitude, no doubt.

It's just that the tracks you're talking about are almost certainly weighted down at the house-sounding end of the scene.

By way of comparison, Mos' Wanted's tracks on his myspace page - check "Different Lekstrix" and "Frozen" in particular - share zero in common with ibadan/strictly. The same applies for Lil Silva. And they're just two examples among many.

As someone who also loves Ibadan and Strictly Rhythm I can say this confidently!

Not that I'm saying UK funky has to be distanced from US house to be good or interesting, but you're notion of what the scene is comprised of seems way off base to me.

argh your notion your notion your notion

Okay-- will listen later today, on the bus! thx.

'Different Lekstrix' reminds me of Ellen Allien or some other boppin' German techno (think this comparison has come up before with some other stuff?)

In other news, the Ill Blu remix is Shystie's "Pull It" is fab.

Also oi does anyone know that track Mak 10 plays with what sound like the bass riffs from Donaeo's "Bounce" and a cut-up male vocal going (what sounds like) "Getongetongetit!"??

Yeah, that stuff is rather different, though from the (disappointingly short!) Lil Silva clips, I think I like this stuff-- grime and soca beats with dirty Detroit tech synths. I think I'm gonna go surfing for some of his stuff.

Yeah, now I can understand a bit more of the talk, Tim. I still don't think it is revolutionary, but the Lil Silva and Mos Wanted stuff is clearly completely unconnected to MAW and Ibadan...so thanks.

i'm sure this right but in my head the dominant rhythmic signifier of funky (O--XO-X-) is pretty much as clear as that of 2 step (O-X--O-X) tho there probably are more variations within the former (sorry any excuse to write 4 beat drum patterns using O, X and -)

The thing is that the rhythms in funky are much more flexible than that. I'd even say that very few funky tunes follow that simple soca/reggaeton pattern. "Do You Mind" for one, but most of the tunes that have followed have used more complex drumbeats with any variety of syncopated snare patterns over a 4/4, or maybe not. I don't think it can be claimed that there is one dominant rhythmic pattern. When I get home I'll post a few different funky drumbeats to illustrate.

from looking at some of the analysis in this post, you lot can never talk shit about people posting on dissensus again.

haha otm

Mak 10 & Shantie ruling my life atm

My post was pretty standard naval gazing on my part, and I'm 80% sure r|t|c is joking with all that schizoanalysis talk.

I wanted to mention that I totally disagree with the idea that the artist is the authority on their own work. k-punk's idea of "agents of the nuum" sounds dicky but I think it's basically correct to say that artists are rarely the best people to explain the quality and the functioning of their own work - being a good musician doesn't automatically make you a good critic, even a good self-critic.

After a couple of years of being a music critic I decided I no longer wanted to do artist interviews because 4 out of 5 artists will have really dispiriting or at the very least boring takes on their own music. I got sick of pretending I wasn't annoyed by it, and feeling like the quality of my articles was being dragged down by dubious "insights" provided by the subject matter.

A really good example was interviewing Frankie Knuckles: he dismissed all his pre-90s output as soulless machine crap...

Lex the fact that you skipped some of the conference in order to speak to Tori Amos (whose explanations usually detract from the enjoyment of whatever song she's talking about) should make this obvious!

DJs are often better interviewees in this regard because they spend a lot of time thinking about other people's records and how they fit into a context - in some senses a DJ set is a lot like a thinkpiece. This supports (or is supported by) chuck eddy's contention that music critics aren't frustrated wannabe musicians so much as frustrated wannabe DJs.

Certainly with dance music, the intentions of the author or the context of production will rarely have any direct bearing on how the music is experienced in its primary states of reception (be it on the dancefloor or in the car or wherever). It's nice to read about the backstory for "Love Dub" but that has no bearing on whether it works as a track, or how it works as a track.

hah tim, the schizo was a joke insofar as i don't really hold the bestest grasp of the term, yeah (does anyone?) - but my intentions were entirely genuine (as indeed throughout) in the sense that from what little i've read i do actually think it could be a useful text within the sphere of this particular parlour game ("within reason", heh); this was in reply to reynolds, after all. and whilst i was obviously having myself a little stylistic promenade there (cronenberg quote 4 the tru junglist intro clearly!), quite why you schoolmarmishly dismiss that one paragraph - and not uh, the one with the esemplastic modelised processuality or anything - as "performance" probably sez more about you & yours than it does about me, no?

not to mention you then going on to begin to address the funky "state of mind" anyway.

also table is the table, i hope tim reasoning with you on a track by track basis doesn't just make you transfer over your lust of the "revolutionary" over to a different strand of funky that you happen to be less familiar with - i'm not saying some tracks aren't original and excellent and all, but the key thing here is how old, new, borrowed and blue are all uncannily commingling now under one cognitive flag so to speak.

A really good example was interviewing Frankie Knuckles: he dismissed all his pre-90s output as soulless machine crap...

daaaamn

yeah wtf

r|t|c I don't want to schoolmarmishly dismiss your schizoanalysis, but you did start that bit with "simplistically speaking"!

"i hope tim reasoning with you on a track by track basis doesn't just make you transfer over your lust of the "revolutionary" over to a different strand of funky that you happen to be less familiar with - i'm not saying some tracks aren't original and excellent and all, but the key thing here is how old, new, borrowed and blue are all uncannily commingling now under one cognitive flag so to speak."

Yes, this is v. important. I actually feel a bit hypocritical saying "go check out Lil Silva!" because I don't like that attitude when it's expressed as e.g. "most UK funky is uninteresting vocal house crap but go check out Lil' Silva!" But when you're trying to convert outsiders you have to start somewhere.

what is the track(s) used on migraine skank? or who produced it if its not lifted from something else? i dont like the beat switch personally.

that el-b song on footlooses show is great btw.

Most of the backing track on "Migraine Skank" is DJ Gregory's "Don't Panic" (possibly a remix or dub of same, I can't remember precisely), pitched up slightly I think - the switch in the middle is to Hard House Banton's "Sirens".

i dunno why i never recognise sirens. i even have the 12".

It's kinda generic in the best possible way.

I just downloaded a Scotty D and Smoothie T set from January, hopefully containing lots of Scotty D dubs. I'm excited.

Will report back with a link if any good.

I want to hear more stuff like Fuzzy Logik's "Work the love" where the traditional house elements come through really strongly but underpinned by funky's more sinuous rhythms and lurching grime bass. In general more like MA1's april 18th set on Rinse, but more UK (that mix is full of US stuff). The overall vibe is much more laidback than a typical Nasty set but with much richer sonics.

Any recommendations?