from the concrete jungle to the urban jungle: the UK junglist massive
Due to its location, thriving economy, colonizer role, world power, and head of the Commonwealth, Great Britain has been an immigration destination throughout the centuries. However, significant ‘black’ areas didn’t begin to develop until the early 1900s where immigrants from the West Indies and Africa moved to port cities like Liverpool and Cardiff and metropolitan cities like London (where over half of all black Britons live), Manchester, and Birmingham. “The experience of Caribbean migrants traveling to Britain provides further examples of complex cultural exchanges and how a self-consciously synthetic culture can support some equally novel political identities” (Gilroy 82). Almost as soon as they arrived, blacks were subjected to racism and almost 100 years later the question if the UK can be multi-cultural is still asked. “The issue of the identity and non-identity of black cultures has [always] acquired a special historical and political significance” (Gilroy 81).
In order to identify the rise and influence of jungle music on the British side of the black Atlantic, we need to look at the black British social environment, the reasons for its unforeseen and unexpected universal popularity, and how jungle music reflected the intentions of listeners and creators. At first glance, jungle reflected the Jamaican sound systems of the 1970s, but after a closer look, the music was truly a hybrid genre made up of past, present, and future Caribbean, British, and American elements; a genre that could be molded into whatever form the selectah (DJ) wanted.
Examining the place of music in the black Atlantic world means surveying the self-understanding articulated by the musicians who have made it, the symbolic use to which their music is put by other black artists and writers, and the social relations which have produced and reproduced the unique expressive culture in which music comprises a central and even foundational element. // Paul Gilroy
everything old is new again (the link below is good background music)…
setting the tone
“With growing immigration during the fifties and sixties, African and West Indian cultural life burgeoned in many British cities . . . black and white youth cultures were intersecting more fully” (Osgerby 119–123). Yet, the influence of black culture on the styles of white youngsters became more readily discernable, relations between them remained contradictory. Similar to the Baby Boomers in the United States during the two decades that followed World War II, most of the arriving immigrants were young adults, teens, children, or babies. The growth of these minority communities made a huge impact on England’s national culture and politics, especially for the youth culture that grew up during this time. Most of the racism and discrimination towards/within immigrant communities often arise from the perception(s) of black youth. Historically, British youth have faced higher unemployment rates compared with older demographics, and black males have higher unemployment rates than black females, not to mention prejudices in the education system as well.
As a response to hostilities, the black immigrant community began creating sub-cultural groups to show a sense of solidarity between the numerous ethnicities and cultures within the black British demographic. The annual West Indian Notting Hill Carnival is the best example of this. Originally organized for the Trinidadian and Tobagonian populations, over time the Carnival has become both a positive and negative symbol for race relations: cultural unity within and against the black community. Riots between non-black youth/adults and Carnival participants have pervaded the Carnival since its inception almost 50 years ago, and keeps the immigration debate on the government’s agenda.
feeling the beat
Black-white racial defensiveness continues in present time, and was most recently experienced this past summer during the London riots. Although there has always been tension between West Indians and the police since the Broadwater Farm riot in the mid 1980s, the fatal shooting of a black, Caribbean youth (alleged drug dealer and gang member) named Mark Duggan by Metropolitan Police Service officers triggered the race relation ‘discussion’ once more between blacks/whites, authority/civilians. For 4 days and nights, protesters in London and beyond rioted, looted, and committed arson, leading to 5 deaths and 186 police injuries. As a result, there was an increased police presence and strict curfew for the 2011 Notting Hill Carnival, in fear of continued destruction from the Caribbean minority.
Riots were not the only area where the authorities tried tackling racial discrimination: numerous Race Relations Acts have been passed by Parliament to try and erase (or at least decrease) levels of prejudice. This is somewhat interesting, and perhaps seen as a way to collect votes, as the majority of the government and ruling party were members of the Conservative Party and opposed high levels of immigration (who were the ones being discriminated against). British racism has generated turbulent economic, ideological, and political forces that have seemed to act upon the people they oppressed by concentrating their cultural identities into a single powerful configuration: “whether these people were of African, Caribbean, or Asian descent, their commonality was often defined by its referenced to the central, irreducible sign of their common racial subordination- the colour black” (Gilroy 86).
http://urbanimage.photoshelter.com/gallery/Jamaica-Sound-Systems/G0000_hzhMg0YyoI/C0000dwspv1zZ65s jamaica sound systems
But there were positive aspects that arose and evolved during the 1960s and 1970s, it wasn’t all doom and gloom: one is the creation of black British music. The Caribbean sound systems began to appear in British cities due to the mass immigration of Jamaicans, and were extremely influential of later music genres and helped shape identity in the following decades. Sound systems were essentially mobile dance parties. Imagine the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade with music playing from large speakers on floats or the Rio de Janiero Carnival, where DJs and MCs would play ska, reggae, and other types of Jamaican music. In The Black Atlantic, Paul Gilroy writes that black communities have often been constructed through music, which is especially important in breaking the inertia that arises in the unhappy polar opposition between a squeamish, nationalist essentialism and a skeptical, saturnalian pluralism that makes the impure world of politics literally unthinkable. “The preeminence of music within the diverse black communities of the Atlantic diaspora is itself an important element in their essential connectedness.” Black music helped create a fluid, black identity that wasn’t based on a certain ideology and could change depending on the societal or political changes.
rudies and rastas
Jamaican sound system culture also brought the rude boy and Rastafarian movements with it, which offered black youngsters an alternative set of values, aspirations, and hierarchies that were a negative influence. “A combination of bigoted discrimination and frustrated ambitions encouraged the growth of oppositional sub-cultures among many second-generation West Indian youths,” these sub-cultures supplied a rationale for resistance to, rather than assimilation within, dominant white society (Osgerby 126).
The rude boy or rudie originated from the ‘concrete jungle’ shantytown in Kingston, and embodied a bombastic persona and street smarts slyness: he didn’t put his faith in society, but made his own destiny based on gambling, stealing, pimping, and drug dealing. This mentality transitioned well into British society, as many black youths faced high unemployment, prejudices from a dominant other, and wanting to make a name for themselves in the ‘urban jungle.’ Rastafarians or rastas, on the other hand, didn’t concentrate on making money or even material goods, for the most part. Rastas believe in a loosely-guided 10 point ‘moral code,’ and that blacks are superior to non-blacks and will rule the world in the near future. (Cannabis usage is permitted and western society (Babylon) must be rejected.)
These polarized ideologies were a response to cultural racism and exclusion, and allowed British youth to identify with a cultural identity from a familiar place (the third space, Jamaica). But these opposite beliefs influenced each other and created reggae music from popular Jamaican ska and rocksteady tunes: rudies played songs at slower speeds to dance more intimately with females and Rastarfarians helped spread their message of African repatriation. The radical, socio-economic, and religious emotions reflected in reggae were universal and the music quickly spread to the US and UK from the Jamaican diaspora in each country and began infiltrating each country’s music sub-cultures. Reggae became extremely popular also within Jamaican, Caribbean, and black communities, but also within the working-class skinhead sub-culture in the UK. Each culture and sub-culture was able to use reggae to reflect their principles and, looking back, it is extremely doubtful that the mainstream/contemporary UK dance scene would have become what it is without reggae.
Reggae’s hybrid origins in rhythm and blues were effectively concealed, it ceased, in Britain, to signify an exclusively ethnic, Jamaican style and derived a different kind of cultural legitimacy both from new global status and from its expression of what might be termed a pan-Caribbean culture. // Paul Gilroy
dub
The dub subgenre sprang from the Jamaican sound system and reggae music productions of the late 1960s and eventually became its own musical genre. Jamaican recording studio engineers Osbourne “King Tubby” Ruddock, Lee “Scratch” Perry, Errol “Errol T.” Thompson, and others, created dub (assisted by the latest computer and technology innovations) through deconstructing reggae songs and placing these new sounds over a repetitive beat. In the decades that followed, dub became “one of the stylistic cornerstones of popular dance music in the digital age, and its fluid reinterpretation of song form laid an important foundation for the amorphous remix culture that is so central to contemporary pop music” (Veal 2). By the mid-80s, black British musicians began blending American hip-hop and house with dub, and created new musical genres within punk, pop, and hip-hop, as well as their own musical hybrids like jungle (and the infinite number of incarnations), trip-hop, grime, 2-step garage, and dubstep, which has found increasing popularity in the US over the last few years.
jungle
Jungle, and its other incarnation drum’n’bass, was “the first sub genre that was developed completely by the black population in the UK” (McCall 136). Similar to Jamaican dub, it was composed electronically on a computer by a DJ, used samples from other songs or sources, and had an MC rap/sing the verse/chorus over a speedy reggae track at 150–170 beats per minute (compared to the 120 bpm of most contemporary pop songs). The MCs were free to say what they felt in American English or Jamaican Patois or interjections to rally the crowd. “Language [was] used as a particularly effective means of resisting assimilation and preventing infiltration by members of the dominant group” (Hebdige 114). This freedom of lyrical creativity trickled down into garage, as well, as a sort of ode to remaining underground and rude boy attitude. Jungle, breakbeat, or drum’n’bass is a form of dance music distinguished by its crossing of cultural boundaries and its poaching of blending musical forms and cultural signifiers, redrawing young people’s maps of national identity in the way it fused a deeply felt sense of local identification (rooted specifically in London) “with a transcendence of both national and cultural boundaries” (Osgerby 202). Jungle, the embodiment and transmission of the different genres, cultures, and people, emerged as a distinctive black genre of music.
Jungle could be seen as elaborating (albeit temporarily) a range of identity positions that were relatively more inclusive and less rigidly determined by the divisions of race, class, and gender than many identity options found elsewhere in the field of youth culture. “Here, a parallel can be drawn between the new identities offered in jungle and what some theorists have seen as a more general growth of cultural hybridity in contemporary societies” (Osgerby 202). Jungle originated in predominantly black areas of London, and most closely reflected the sound system era of the early 60s with its Jamaican music styles and rude boy attitude/clothing and was a creative musical outlet for black youths.
acid house trickles in
As jungle was climbing up the music charts, another manifestation of electronic music was being developed and honed by non-blacks. In the summer of 1987, a gang of British DJs, including Paul Oakenfold and Danny Rampling, traveled to Ibiza for a week and discovered the power of wide-open dance music played to a crowd buzzing on ecstasy; Alfredo Fiorito blasted house music originating from the gay sub-culture in Detroit and Chicago, and international pop through Amnesia’s speakers, which were completely different genres than the British DJs played in their own clubs. When they returned to London, they began playing house and techno instead of American rap, and the British rave culture was born.
“The speed with which the dance and rave scenes came to dominate youth culture in the late 80s and 90s was remarkable” (Osgerby 201). If jungle was for the black, working-class youths, then acid house was for white, working-class youths. This isn’t to say that only whites listened to house and blacks jungle, there were expectations later on, but in the beginning it was mostly separate. “Some jungle scenes in England became the antithesis of rave’s initial ideals because of their suggested associations with violence and bad drugs such as crack cocaine, creating yet another division within the scene” (McCall 136). Even though acid house and raves saw their share of drug use, integrating MDMA into the overall dance experience, they became multi-million dollar businesses as concert promoters and record companies saw the potential of advertising to white consumers. During this time, more outdoor festivals were organized and Ibiza became the dance capital of Europe. Euro dance was the poppy and upbeat side of UK electronic music and was extremely popular during the early 1990s, when the government on both sides of the Atlantic were trying to clamp down on rave parties and drug usage.
on the rise
“The musics of the black Atlantic world were the primary expressions of cultural distinctiveness which [blacks] seized upon and adapted to its new circumstances” (Gilroy 82). The junglists were transforming the genre into any hybrid they wanted and in a few years, and a musical spectrum as plentiful as the colors of the rainbow emerged from the underground clubs in England (predominately London, Bristol, and Essex). But the British musical group synonymous with electronica is The Prodigy- one of the most successful and creative British acts. Unlike Roni Size and Reprazent, who were exclusively black from Bristol, Prodigy included black and white members, who are still together and active 20 years later with 25 million records sold worldwide.
They managed to mix punk, dub, and hip-hop elements with a drum’n’bass beat and make it both commercial and underground. Their music and lyrics were aggressive; they didn’t want to conform with society so they made their own identity. “Perhaps this explains the secrets of its universality that jungle and its offspring have experienced over the past decade: the marketability has made it easier to reach a larger market, to bring the subculture to popular culture, and to shift from ‘black’ to everyone” (Guins and Cruz 288). Prodigy performed at the large festivals for tens of thousands of people in the UK and around the world, receiving numerous awards, and found a loyal fanbase, transforming DJs and MCs into the new rock stars.
“Under the impact of processes of social, economic, and cultural globalization identities have become less fixed and more fluid, with the emergence of new forms of cultural identification” (Osgbery 203). British youth sub-cultures at this point branched away from and connected to each other, there were no beginnings/endings in most instances- black jungle music became electronic music. The introduction of MTV in 1981 furthered globalization of youth cultures, not only American, but also all the syndications of national MTV stations around the world. It broke social constructs, cultural boundaries, and economic levels; anyone with a television could witness worldwide integration in the making. Pop became indefinable, allowing for anyone to create and identify with a sub-culture.
The MTV generation became what Homi Bhabha referred to as ‘translation,’ a condition in which a complex of cultural cross-currents and cross-fertilizations produce a wealth of hybrid identities that simultaneously blend together a diversity of cultural traditions. Additionally, jungle could also be an personification of translation: “a peculiarly British musical genre, jungle was also a bearer of strong links with specifically black cultural traditions, a cultural hybrid generated as lack youngsters negotiated and translated their way through the different cultural contexts created by post-colonial migration” (Osgerby 203).
garage and dubstep
Garage was another genre that sprang from jungle. It brought with it a wider variety of ethnicities making music, similarly with grime and dubstep. In the early 2000s, garage splintered into dubstep (appealing to those who wanted more elements of drum’n’bass) and grime (appealing to those who wanted to use more hip-hop elements). Dubstep went back to the darker days of jungle and introduced the wobble sound that has differentiated from other genres. Dubstep has appeared in the American media quite frequently over the past few years, most recently in SPIN magazine from October 2011 where the issue was dedicated to the rise of electronic music and featured (American dubstep prince) Skrillex.
“Though they have often seemed separate and autonomous, black and white youth cultures have always been deeply connected, engaged in processes of aesthetic dialogue and exchange which have played out, at a symbolic level, the wider patterns of relation between the two communities” (Osgerby 117). Like dubstep, grime also found popularity in the UK and beyond; Dizzee Rascal and Tinie Tempah are two of the most well known artists, and are also originators of the genre. “Hip-hop culture is best understood as the latest export from black America to have found favour in black Britain” and grime could arguably be called British hip-hop, as is strikingly similar to the American hip-hop of the 2000s, which has relied more heavily on the computer and not so much the sequencer” (Gilroy 87).
The relationship between dubstep and hip-hop with American blacks/whites on each side of the Atlantic, is similar to what Paul Gilroy talks about in his book The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. “Gilroy’s writing on the ways in which cultural materials flow back and forth between the regions of the Black Atlantic underscores the complexity that is produced within markets as the international media industries respond to shifts in the character of demand produced by migration” (Gandy 71). What started as a white/black/both American genre, warped to fit the needs of white/black/both, and then retreated back across the ocean in its new form, ready to be reused once again. The formula is such: American rock’n’roll, rhythm and blues, and jazz influenced Jamaican artists to pick up the guitar and drums, creating the reggae which found its way to England where it was remixed into dub, sped up in jungle, computerized into garage, slowed down into dubstep, Americanized into grime, and emailed/youtubed/downloaded back to America where the process will start over again.
reverberating sounds
The electronic music genres that originated in England owe much of their early success to the underground stations that played them, as popular music hadn’t recovered from the Euro dance and Euro pop years yet. Since 1991, Kool FM was the ruling pirate station in London and was at the forefront of what’s hot. Hardcore jungle was first played here, as well as garage, dubstep, and grime. Rinse FM was another pirate radio station, noteworthy for Dizzee Rascal and Skream exposure, and has since become a legitimate radio station in 2010. BBC Radio 1 (and the digital version BBC Radio 1xtra) caught onto the electronic music trends early on, almost in part to Pete Tong who has become the de facto voice of electronic music from around the world.
What began as a music subculture for the Jamaican, West African, and West Indian communities in South London, is now featured in a cereal commercial with dancing teddy bears (Weetabix Chocolate Spoonsize, which features the 9 year-old UK street dance phenomenon Arizona Snow) and portrayed in television shows and movies. But just because they reach the non-black other more easily than before, these later genres are by no means easy listening or watered down compared with jungle. “The jungle music scene was racially divided, it being a scene and musical style that is more explicitly associated with reggae and rap music cultures- cultures which are generally associated with their Caribbean and urban African-American roots” (Wilson 116). Grime music collective So Solid Crew continued making songs about racial prejudices they faced and still have been commercially successful over the past decade. Oxide and Neutrino made the crossover to garage, and were featured in the parody film Ali G: Indahouse.
Hebdige explained that subcultures “share a common feature apart from the fact that they are all predominantly working class” and used the concept of bricolage “to explain how subcultural styles are constructed” (Hebdige 359). Bricolage refers to the means by which the non-literate, non-technical mind of so-called ‘primitive’ man responds to the world around him. The subcultural bricoleur, the titular character in Ali G in this case, acts as the ‘author’ of a surrealist collage, and typically ‘juxtaposes two apparently incompatible realities [white suburban youth wanting to be black] on an apparently unsuitable scale…and…it is there that the explosive junction occurs’ (Hebdige 359).
The bricolage process involves a ‘science of the concrete’ (as opposed to our ‘civilized’ science of the ‘abstract’) which far from lacking logic, in fact carefully and precisely orders, classifies, and arranges into structures the minutiae of the physical world in all their profusion by means of a ‘logic’ which is not our own. “The structures, ‘improvised’ or made up (these are rough translations of the process of bricoler) as ad hoc responses to an environment, then serve to establish homologies and analogies between the ordering of nature and that of society, and so satisfactorily ‘explain’ the world and make it able to be live in” (Hebdige 359). After laughing at Ali G’s mishaps and seeing the world through his undeniable ‘male-centric perspective’ during the shows and movie, the viewer recognizes these structures through an over-dramatized portrayal of black youth culture.
in the mix
“A symbiotic relationship between youth subcultures and the commercial market is not a quality unique to some new ‘postmodern condition,’ but has been a defining characteristic of young people’s cultural expressions since at least 1945” (Osgerby 185). Osgerby describes the close connections between youth (sub-)cultures around the world and international media ‘working’ together during this postmodern period of increased saturation of advertising. Even though youths from different cultural backgrounds are subjected to similar marketing techniques by international conglomerates, Osgerby thinks it is improbable that class/racial tensions will be erased from the minds of British youth culture this century.
“While Britain remains a society characterized by structural inequalities in the distribution of life chances and material resources these inequalities will continue to be central to our understanding of young people’s social and economic experiences” (Osgerby 186). Gilroy states that black British refuse the binary black or British because the ‘or’ allows the choice of either being black or being British, but if the ‘or’ were replaced with an ‘and’ then there wouldn’t be a choice of either culture. “You can be black and British…because even those two terms, joined now by the coupler ‘and’ instead of opposed to one another, do not exhaust all of our identities. Only some of our identities are sometimes caught in that particular struggle” (Guins and Cruz 291).
all together now
Although jungle, dubstep, grime, and garage were once considered shocking subcultures, such as punk, they have transitioned into mainstream culture because of their own blending of culture(s), that does not see race, class, or gender, and is open for creative interpretation by all. These electronic musical hybrids saw immense popularity in the early 1990s and see no signs of slowing down; what once began as a black male-dominated culture, males and females of non-black backgrounds have made an impact and name for themselves. Popular culture “is an arena that is profoundly mythic…it is where we discover and play with the identifications of ourselves, where we are imagined, where we are represented, not only to the audiences out there who do not get the message, but to ourselves for the first time” (Guins and Cruz 293).
Osgerby alludes that the fluid and fragmented sub-culture hybrids allow evolutions and alterations for different cultural loyalties. Instead of making a firm set of stylistic commitments, most youngsters have instead cruised across a range of affiliations, constantly forming and reforming their identities according to a social context (204). He concludes by saying that these partially formed, postmodern cultures at the end of the 20th century were already present within the youth sub-cultures of the 1950s and 1960s. This permits youths free range to keep adjusting themselves to reflect the changes of the scene, new dimensions, and societal issues: reggae, dub, jungle, garage, grime, dubstep, and beyond.
Jean Baudrillard and Frederic Jameson viewed these trends negatively, explaining that these new postmodern sub-cultures were depthless due to media saturation. But Stuart Hall (himself a black British from Jamaica) and Angela McRobbie point out that some sort of control has always existed to lull opposing voices and new identities have opened more spaces for these opposing voices to awaken. In a context where traditional assumptions have been steadily destabilized, a new range of fragmented identities have come into view, promising greater prominence and empowerment to groups once confined to the periphery of cultural systems. “Perhaps it is in youth subcultures such as jungle with its unstable fusion of fragmented and contradictory reference points, that this ‘decentering’ of identity has been most readily apparent” (Osgerby 204).
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