Liner notes to a history of the Scorpio break
Following on from the history of the rewind, I wrote a similar piece for RBMA on the history of the Scorpio break. It was published last week as part of their Loop History series and while it’s a lot lighter than the rewind feature I wanted to do another liner notes for it as it’s a nice way to add some context to the research that went into it. And it’s also a good place for some of the content that didn’t make the cut for various reasons.
For the past couple of years I’ve been chewing over an idea in my head to look at the links between hip hop and jungle via the breakbeats that make up the rhythmic backbone of both genres.
The main drive for this is that I don’t think many people realise that a lot of early jungle simply sped up the foundational breaks of hip hop because many of the music’s early pioneers were hip hop kids. Bristol legend DJ Krust, who I interviewed for this feature, put it as simply as it gets: “I was trying to make hip hop but it came out like jungle.”
And here’s another great quote about the links between hip hop and jungle from Paradox, whose 2013 ode to Scorpio is one of the toughest edits:
People tell me I’m a b-boy writing in the wrong field of breakbeats. I love programming breakbeats… I just love programming them at 170bpm! I’ve always loved that original funk side to sampling. Go back to the 80s and I was part of a hip-hop band. I was rapping, I was 16 years old and D&B wasn’t even invented. Nor was jungle. Me and a mate started a band and he was always spinning back these mad breakbeats; the Amen Brother break, Tina Turner breaks, James Brown… All the breaks that were used by legendary hip-hop acts like Public Enemy and Tuff Crew. So that was me hooked.
Because of my fast rapping we recorded the breaks at 160bpm, which was too fast for everyone in hip-hop! So we sent them to a few labels; Moving Shadow, XL, Strictly and Suburban Base. They all came back with record deals. All our early Moving Shadow releases had so many breaks because we were b-boys who didn’t really know what we were doing. Rob Playford said to us, ‘your stuff is way too fast!’ The double-A was 180bpm. That was unheard of in 1991…
In an interesting echo of the work I’m doing for a book, I’d wager another factor for this is the lack of MCs in England at the time that could hold up to their US counterparts. This is a story I’ve heard with regards to producers attached to the first wave of instrumental hip hop that caught the trip hop tag. It’s not that people didn’t want MCs on their music, it’s just that there was a dearth of them. And to loop us nicely into the rewind history work, I’d say another factor is the Jamaican foundations of sound system music in the UK. This would naturally give rise to MCs within jungle that are closer to the Jamaican DJs, who entertained the crowd and conducted vibrations between selector and audience, than to the standard American hip hop MC.
So anyways, I’ve been trying to do something around that for a while. A few months ago I pitched the idea again to RBMA and the editor instead suggested we focus on one break and make it part of their Loop History series — which was started with Wayne Marshall’s excellent run down of the Dembow loop.
We settled on Scorpio as one of those breaks people wouldn’t necessarily know had become a part of jungle. Charlie Fracture was the first person I hit up, as we’d discussed the break before and he released Dawn Day Night’s Death of Scorpio in 2013, which reimagines the original in a footwork style.
Charlie was the first to mention Bristol as the city from which memorable tracks using Scorpio came from. This was seconded by Danny Breaks, who mentioned that during his days at Suburban Base records from Bristol had made an impression in how they used Scorpio. All of which led me to find Krust and get his input, which really makes the story complete.
In terms of the original track, I used a couple of links to get the necessary info: an NPR story from 2007 and the transcript of Dennis Coffey’s 2008 RBMA lecture — ironic, I know. The latter has some great quotes and insights from Coffey on how the track and album came to be, and how it flopped before becoming his best known work.
After that I used Who Sampled as a way to draft a skeleton of who had sampled the original. While far from exhaustive, Who Sampled tends to be fairly accurate and is how I was able to trace the in-between steps the break took from hip hop to jungle. Funnily enough, aside from two Reprazent tracks and Drop Bear, most Bristol tracks that sampled the break aren’t in there.
Using Who Sampled, recommendations and some digging I was able to pull together a playlist of the break within jungle/dnb from 1992 to 2013 and work from there.
In the feature I mention that I couldn’t find any major jungle/dnb release between 1996 and 2000 that used Scorpio and didn’t originate from Bristol. After checking in with a few people, Danny pointed out this track he wrote in 1995 — titled Bristol, appropriately — though it wasn’t released until last year when he unearthed an archive of old material for the 20 years of his Droppin Science label.
The full playlist is below — I’ll keep adding to it as people recommend tracks I may have missed.
As Krust put it, you can see that once the break makes it to Bristol it starts to be used in more elaborate ways than just a simple loop — even if that remains one of its most effective forms.
Below is a quote from the chat I had with Krust about how thought out Full Cycle’s ethos was back then:
Our whole ethos was very specific. Before we started making music, we’d sit down in Roni’s or my flat and talk about music. For hours. We’d watch Wild Style again and again to refresh ourselves, get all the wild style breaks out and really discuss making music. We talked a lot about what was missing in the scene. How we would experiment, how we would use breaks differently. We all agreed that we were going to do something specifically different for DJing purposes. We had a strict ethos. We pushed each other around the ideas of being creative in every aspect. We rarely used the same kicks and snares, we used staple breaks, but the whole emphasis of Full Cycle was fresh, it was about being a bboy. From a bboy point of view if you come into the dance and someone has the same laces as you, you need to go home and change your trainers or laces. We took great pride in dropping breaks on each other. Go to the second hand shop, hunt down breaks, come back and you’d be like ‘Roni listen to this.’ Once we did what we did with it everyone else could have it. We needed to be first, we needed to break something new, to be original. And that came from hip hop. Hip hop was about being fresh, being dope. Busting skills. Showing your moves. When we found Scorpio it was like whoa! It encompassed everything we were about. That was a no brainer. Drop it raw. In the beat. Lead people into it. It was very conceptualised, our approach, it wasn’t a mistake. We thought it out, very thoroughly.
And here’s a partial chronology of the break’s usage from 1992 to 2013 in text format, which is how I realised that the break had made a jump from Bristol to Cambridge in the early 2000s.
1992
Secret Squirrel — Mu Venom
The Prodigy — Ruff In The Jungle Bizness (Uplifting Vibes remix)
1994
Engineers Without Fear — Spiritual Aura
Roni Size & DJ Die — Music Box
1995
Ron Tom — Give Me Da Weed
Danny Breaks — Bristol (unreleased)
1996
Gang Related & Mask — Numbers
Mask — One People
1997
Reprazent — Heroes
Reprazent — Share The Fall
Reprazent — Watching Windows (Ed Rush & Optical version 2)
Scorpio — Trouble
Scorpio — Li Li
1999
DJ Die — Drop Bear
2001
Bad Company — Dogfight
DJ Ink — Kaos Theory
2002
Dkay & Epsilon — Where We Stand
Total Science — Dee Pee
2003
Dkay — Devotion
Lenny Fontana — Spread Love (NuTone Remix)
Cyantific — Good Weather
2004
Calyx & Teebee — Cyclone
Kelis — Trick Me (Artifical Intelligence Remix)
Commix — Herbie
NuTone — Millie’s Theme
2005
Breakage — 4 Me
Pieter K — It Could Have Been (Polar remix)
2006
Shapeshifter — The Ride
2007
TC — Strictly Drum & Bass
Makoto & Specialist — Pachinko
2008
Young Ax — Higher Ground
Young Ax — Into The Deep
Syncopix — Blue Fog
2009
Telmo A — Still
Hobzee — Sad Song
Eveson & Redeyes — State of Mind
2011
NuTone ft 4Hero — Invisible
2013
Danny Byrd — Sublow Junkie
Dawn Day Night — Death of Scorpio
Paradox — Scorpius
