I Could Never Never Be Lonely. A Breakbeat Container*
The pleasure of listening to a Tim Reaper set when driving down highway 1 in the rain.
It takes me to remembering a time in 1997 of coming alive, of being around people, an idea of no future.
I want to tell an undertold story.
There was something about feeling like a waste product. A positive waste product. A self-loving waste product. A self-loving soup of waste product.
A sort of blending of the past and future in sonic form. An antiracist soup that formed underneath the monarchy.
What can I tell you about this? Allentown on a couch in a place to nowhere, Mortal Kombat on the screen, I’ve got nothing really going on, I’ve got a quiet boyfriend with “art” tattooed on one bicep and “crime” tattooed on the other. All of his friends are not white and I feel wild and free with them and they respect me. I met some of them at the grocery store I worked at. I have lost all my high school friends recently as everyone went to senior week to drink and I wasn’t allowed to go, and I was not really excited about that anyway. Most of my friends went to other schools. It was that time when people were going off to college anyway, it was not worth trying to save friendships. I was reluctant to go to college though I loved reading and study. I just felt like I didn’t have any other place to go. I wanted to move to the city but I didn’t have any money, so it was the only way I could do it. My home life had become so chaotic and I kept getting kicked out of my stepmom’s house with my very unstable father who I did not want to live with. I am some whitegirl who is actually Eastern European growing up near people who were still becoming white and still living in neighborhoods where everyone was Slovak or everyone was Austrian or Russian in the rust belt of so-called Pennsylvania. I didn’t relate to others who had grown up being encouraged to succeed or participate in activities they loved. You worked, and you obeyed. I am going through the motions to go to college but I don’t care.
And I hear this sound. And I immediately love it. It sounds like utter chaos but it sounds like a wall that will protect me. It is soothing in its impenetrability. It is fast and has multiple rhythms, endless collisions.
I am finding all these other people at once who care about it. It is a sound that originates from Jamaicans living in London. I don’t even understand how music traveled back then. Pirate radio, yes, was a huge part of it, but how outside the scope of that?
When I hear the music of Tim Reaper right now in the present I am struck by the archival wisdom of it. I mean, music can be good, or derivative, but when I heard this music I could feel that this very young person had studied the music I loved so dearly in my coming of age 26 years ago. I say this as a person who dearly loves the underground, as an antiracist dreamer, as a hater of the values of empire, especially in a hometown as racist and segregated and judgmental as the one I grew up in. My friend Andrew Kenower passed along Tim Reaper’s music and I was floored about how carefully this music respects the previous genre and makes something gorgeous and new at once.
“‘Jungle’ stems from the term ‘junglist‘, which refers to people from Arnett Gardens, an area of Kingston Jamaica. It is often noted that Rebel MC popularised the term in the UK by sampling the phrase ‘alla the junglists‘ from a tape of a sound-system party in Kingston.”
https://psy-minds.com/jungle-music-history/
“America got hip hop, Jamaica got Ragga, we (London) got jungle” - a DJ in the film All Black-Jungle Fever (1994)
There was a split between those that would dance to Black music and those that wouldn’t. And who was let into the club or not. It sounds strangely similar between London and well, Allentown.
I also was shocked to find out other white people didn’t grow up constantly thinking about race. I thought about it constantly, it was all anyone talked about once you were out of a home or church or other insular sphere. I remember from a very young age noticing that there was a lot wrong with how segregated everyone was. I remember having Black neighbors I played with and people thought that was weird. I remember crossing the busy street near my grandma’s house and seeing all kinds of people there but all the other kids in my school would then tell me I would get killed there. It was insane. Everyone I moved toward in my life was hoping for a better place than this, and we were listening to Wu-Tang and the first rave tapes were filtering through, and we were moving into the type of mixed up, mashup archive of our own creation. We were the kids that worked at the grocery store and there had to be something better than here.
“Jungle was a form of cultural expression for London’s lower class urban youth.
The post-Thatcherite United Kingdom of the early 1990s had left many young urbanites disenfranchised and disillusioned with a seemingly crumbling societal structure.
Jungle reflected these feelings; it was a notably more dark, less euphoric style of music than many of the other styles popular at raves.” https://psy-minds.com/jungle-music-history/
I am simultaneously embarrassed to keep citing Psy-minds, and impressed with the ability of this website to summarize what I have read many places.
Jungle is quite a contested term, I have heard some DJs express utter disgust at it being used, when people had to deal with the British media calling them jungle bunnies and the different kinds of racist terms used, and promoters canceling parties if they decided to play jungle, because of the “mixed” context it created, but the people who started it used that term and were fully aware of how they are inverting the meaning when they continue to do that.
I’ve always wanted it to stay in this nowhere of the rave mashed with the recognizably Black music, a mix of the familiar and the new. Mary J. Blige was one of the most commonly sampled in the time period I am thinking of.
“People who were born with nothing can find something to relate to.” -Kenny Ken in the film A London Someting Dis.
Kenny Ken describes how he came out of prison and fell into this scene and had a place to be. In other interviews he describes the relationships he made in this scene kept him from returning to prison, as someone from a different place was willing to vouch for him.
Other than the traditions and love of my grandparents, and the friendship that I found everywhere playing outside the row houses, there wasn’t much to love in life.
I still struggle to use words to describe what jungle sounds like. I am impressed when I read these new articles that have a name for every sound. I have never been a person who understands things that way. There is nothing like driving through city streets and listening to drum n bass, it is second only to dancing in a proper place. But the constant stops and starts and turns and skidding…
Psyminds says: “The style is characterized by fast tempos (150 to 200 bpm), breakbeats, dub reggae basslines, heavily syncopated percussive loops, samples, and synthesized effects…Producers began meticulously building breakbeats from scratch with extreme precision, sequencing together individual single shot samples. The percussion took on an eerie chromatic quality through digital effects like time-stretching/compression, pitch shifting, ghosting, and psychedelia style reverse…The resultant polyrhythms of jungle’s “rhythmic psychedelia” triggered a physical as well as mental disorientation in the listener/dancer.”
“Reggae baselines.. low frequencies.. and exaggerated bass” –words used to describe jungle by the DJ Fabio in the film All Black-Jungle Fever (1994).
Back when I listened to this music there was no commentary, no subtext, no internet to write on, no ones opinion to hear, you just had to hold a tape and be brave to go somewhere new, and trust your friends you were with, and hope for a minute that there would be a properly dark room and amazing people and the right drugs (or maybe no drugs tonight too, depending who you were with.) I mean, I guess people were on aol at this time, in chatrooms, something I never did, but I really enjoyed knowing how to make the sounds or sing the songs with others, and not know the names of the tracks or the people. Because it was a living archive that prioritized the knowing together, not the author.
There was something in the multiplicity this music contains.
“That’s another reason why I’m involved in the jungle movement, because it’s brought a lot of people together. I mean, like certain men, a few years ago, they wouldn’t dream of talking to a white person and the same the other way around. But now…we were all under one roof raving, laughing and joking together.” Kenny Ken in the film A London Something Dis
I realize how I knew nothing about the real history, because I didn’t know where to look, other than talking to people. But somehow it communicates itself to me and it spoke to me because of our common desires, common drives.
And yet archive is a natural component of drum n bass somehow, notice how I slip back and forth between using the word jungle or drum n bass, in the early years I was going out, ’97 was many years after what happened in London but we were listening to this golden era when it was impossible to define, impossible to split hairs and say what the good and bad parts were (is it “intelligent” jungle? they said later on—and “drum n bass” starts getting said as the undeniably Black voices come out of it as the necessary part, but then there were always those who took offense to the word jungle), such a blast of yearning and possibility swirled into nihilism and a relinquishing of future. These are the ones who fall inside of this role easily, and so it feels very good.
Now, in recent years, 2023, there is a Black Junglists Alliance, keeping the roots of jungle clear. There is an awesome new artist who goes by the name Nia Archives, who said her grandmother listened to this music. I listen to one of her tracks and remember how stretched ghostly sounds emote in no other way. She combines the catalog of jungle sounds with pop vocals about longing and dealing with emotions. There is a wonderful pull of this music coming up out of the muck again and filling it with people who will commit to one another in a cluster, almost without knowing why. Does it happen again?
I have literally been listening to this music for almost 30 years, and in this gorgeous time loop I can learn more about it now, I can see images of loads of the kind of dancefloor that never existed before, and this was a music that was actually co-created, a totally consensual blending of cultures.
When I try to imagine myself dancing to this, I only feel the sounds and feel darkness. I don’t have memories or narration to the types of experiences or connections I experience like I do to other dance music experiences. Is this sort of like the loss of all the culture and connection to ancestors that lower class people in the city are dealing with across the board? I’m editorializing, but this does come up in All-Black: Jungle Fever. When you don’t have the connection to that other root, you must make it in the now, by whatever comes through. I could write a whole other euphoric description of house music and why it is important but it is much more rendered in interactions. Here, in jungle, it is much more dissolved, it is more like an exorcism or a dispelling of a ghosts to be reckoned with. And there are not words, there’s a nod.
*title refers to the track “Lonely” by D’Cruze (1994)
This track samples the intro to the song of Regina Belle's "Good Lovin'" which for some reason is sampled in MANY MANY (hundreds of?) jungle songs of this time period, like a wild refrain to show that the composer of the track was in some kind of cluster?? "It's the way that you hold me, and the way that you kiss me tenderly... I could never never be lonely, if you give me just what I need" i.e. I remember one song repeating just "what i need/what i need/what I need", and so many others use "it's the wayyyeeee..." For a long time I misrepresented this sample as being Mary J. Blige because she was so so prevalent.
Thanks to Brian Ang for publishing the text originally, and the recording here:
