Like Brutalist architecture demonstrated the beauty that could be forged from the grey functionality of concrete, Jungle did the same with the structural backbone of popular music, the drums. Jungle liberates the drums from the purely functional role they are assigned in rock, and freed from this percussive labour they assume a whole new existence where their true potential is spectacularly unleashed. Snares, kicks and cymbals resonate with tunefulness, explode into spasmic chaos, or just rrroll into an infinite turbo-peacefulness. The drums become the melody, harmony, the rhythm and the atmosphere, their former aesthetic austerity supplanted by emotional charge and hightened sense-stimulation. This radical approach to the use of percussion throws everything up in the air, the unexpected permeates every second.
Jungle and Brutalism are instantly polarising to the newcomer and the dilettante. Unlike techno or house, where the subject succumbs and ‘gets lost’ in the music, letting its inner rhythm descend to the tribal repetition of its ancestors, jungle requires an active engagement, a wilful acceleration of the body’s rhythm, beyond the ‘natural’. To enter the Junglistic state requires both a commitment and a risk; once you adjust to jungle’s accelerated state, you may not experience anything the same way again. Jungle and brutalism demand and require belief; belief that culture and community can be better, that they will be better, provided a collective commitment to progress is made and honoured.
However, in jungle, the stark contours of the drums are always tempered by the bass. Even the most alien and weird basslines will enwrap the subject in an arousing tickle of low frequency soundwaves, a libidinal compromise to the Junglist biology.
Like brutalism, jungle was inherently at odds with the cultural and economic imperatives which were rapidly consolidating their influence. Their modernist drives towards collective progress and innovation were in direct opposition to the regressive culture of individualised consumerism..
As the Junglistic ideals receded into fond memory for some, and were written of as a historic fad by others, the de-radicalisation of DnB progressed with characteristically pointless speed. Rhythmic innovation was rooted out and replaced by hasty monotony, nuance supplanted with one-dimensional expressions of set-defined emotions. The overwhelming desire to ‘please the dancefloor’ with simple drum patterns, blunt basslines and flawless production technique, highlighted a collective amnesia, the memory erasure of a period (only a few years before) where pleasing the dancefloor did not involve a drive towards ever lower common denominators.
As the vacuity of the DnB project became ever clearer to its followers (taking up to 10 years for some), many began to dissent. A sense of boredom prevailed (some tried to reinvigorate the sound by re-introducing rhythmic experimentation, but did so in the most po-faced and joyless way imaginable, repelling most prospective followers). The hollowness of what underground dance music had come to be was laid bare for all to see. The perfect time for change…
And then dubstep emerged.
Dubstep is about bass, drums relegated to formality, their purpose no longer evident other than as a stabiliser anchoring the flows of low frequency soundwaves in a metronomic channel. For former DnBers dubstep projects an endless sequence of reassuring signifiers, it feels different, but familiar. It lures with its opulent infinite sub-bassic pleasure, and comforts with well-worn Drum and Bass tropes; growling techstep basslines and bleeps, head-nodding dubwise grooves and the obligatory sampled rasta-vox; the symbolic order of DnB re-arranged into novel familiarity. The insurrectionary edge of DnB-bordome is now dulled, the army of discontented junglist soldiers mollified, their revolutionary burning doused by vats of thick immobilising bass. Bass is now reactionary; it feeds the underground libido just enough to suppress the mind-body-souls’ desire, its need, for more, and for better. By tweaking the formula just barely enough to feel kind-of-new, dubstep has pacified the latent sonic-proletariat.
