Posted on October 6th, 2008

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SHIRT CRIME

Posted on September 29th, 2008

We are in the midst of an epidemic of gangs of roving men in grey suits who will ransack your granny’s pension fund and make your bank go bust for the sake of their Kensington mansions, big business lunches and executive suite airflights.

They have grown up in a culture where inadequate father figures aspire to driving 4/4s into the city as a proof of their masculine worth. They complain about the congestion charge because they would rather we all died of air poisoning than they had to pay a little more out of the money they have stolen from your granny and your bank.

Stay away from these feral, white ‘happy dappers’! If you see a shirt, go immediately to a busy place and do not look them in the eye. If you see groups of shirts congregating in public places, looking suspicious, call the police.

Stay safe.

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EPISODE 5: CIRCLE

Posted on September 15th, 2008

London has a lot rave of scenes attached to genres. To each genre there is attached a genre of people. So for instance dubstep comes attached with dreaded boys and grime with sportswear. (There are also genres of people outside the rave scenes, like suits, crackheads, and slags). When the DJs attached to these scenes get succesful they start travelling all over the world and see more different genres of people.

But this isn’t the only kind of migration of genres. The genres themselves are going all over the place! With grime trespassing on funky house, and dubstep splitting into generic wobble, tech-y tech stuff, and even various other new generations of bass music that wont quite fit any description, the genres won’t stay in their place. Everyone is arguing over what a genre should be. When people are saying things like, ‘that’s not dubstep’, or ‘it’s not a new genre’, or ‘no shirts allowed’, the question that you really have to ask is: what makes a genre a genre?

(BTW JP sent me this picture in an email this week inviting me to his end of fashion week MHI vs Chockablock rave. He described the party as when this:

Meets this:

I nearly had a frigging heartattack. I was like, dude, how can you put freaky half starving pre-pubescent fashion models in with a bunch of nice grime boys like that?

He laughed a lot.

Then I thought about it and realised these two genres of people have more in common with them than you might first think. It has to do with killing themselves and the people who control the media.)

It’s not just the genres that are migrating. On a search for people to go funky raving with, I recently demanded of Kutz that he take me funky raving. To which he replied that he’s trying to move into dubstep!? Meanwhile Kode 9 has been playing funky at DMZ! And in the confusion, everyone gets in a muddle about names. People seem to get funniest of all about names. If you consider interpellation, then I guess it’s because it seems like a way of being stuck in the world. But sometimes people run away with your name. Like, how do people that don’t even know me email me calling me ‘Mel’ when my name is Melissa? Everyone started calling me Mel at school when I was 15 and the Spice Girls were first coming up. (Think about it.)

Sometimes a good response to the entrapment of naming is just to say, ‘flabchud’. Or ‘wanky’. Keep the names moving. Hell even the name of this blog won’t sort itself out.

Last weekend I went to Circle’s Ayia Napa reunion party. It was at Purple E3. It was the best fun I’ve had in years. There were colours, banging music, old vibes, new champagne, men, horns, heels*, new vibes,  women, glo-sticks, loads and loads of colours, with not a garish nu-rave pattern in sight! It was like everything nu-rave wants to be except with the content put back in. And did I say VIBES?

Circle play HOUSE. House & funky, funky house … from past interviews, Supa D and Kismet would probably not be down with calling it funky, though they do play the better quality end of what everyone is calling ‘funky’, i.e. UK produced and from a funky house DNA strand.

Circle went to Napa this year  - for the first time as ‘Circle’ - and from the sounds of the jokes on their radio show it went down well. Apparently Marcus Nasty was bugging them for a Circle T-Shirt and MA1 went topless. I’ve been cooking my dinner/doing my homework on Monday nights in a good mood because of a) the banter on their show and b) the niceness coming off from their music.

(more…)

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SWEDEY-CAKE

Posted on September 12th, 2008

I actually sat on this piece for months - about 6 of them - because I was having a big anxiety about it, (as well as a sort of mini nervous breakdown due to work overload, people crises and a certain rave). In retrospect my doubt came from a resistance in some of the artists I spoke to about being described, or ‘categorised’, but also from an inherent difficulty in writing about it.

This resistance has probably become more so the case since Warp, already home to Flying Lotus, signed Rustie and Hudson Mohawke. One of the main characteristics of all of their music is it keeps on developing. I am getting a vague impression the artists involved would like to keep it that way (Hudson Mohawke’s myspace is telling people to get paid to review movies - but hey I don’t get paid shit!)

Fatima (more…)

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BAN SHAKESPEARE FROM SCHOOLS

Posted on September 10th, 2008

It’s got guns in it. Or is that knives?

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ONLY BLACK PEOPLE SHOULD LISTEN TO BLACK MUSIC!!

Posted on September 5th, 2008

Dan from Spasm just drew my attention to this.

I am thinking Dan and I should compile a list of the articles we’ve pitched about UK urban grassroots stuff that the editor of this section has rejected/ignored.

He probably didn’t want us to write them because all urban music is ‘black’, whereas guitar music is ‘white’ (nevermind its origins then), and only black people according to this should be listening to (let alone writing about) ‘black’ music. It’s like the whole history of popular music just turned back on itself! Amazing.

I am also particularly interested in this sentence: “The reality is that the UK has long been unable to nurture, develop or sustain homegrown black music.”

Btw the writer of this piece is based in the US.

Hang on I just want to look at that Generation Bass photo again… (more…)

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Episode 4: Aidy’s Girl Is A Computer

Posted on September 4th, 2008

London is full of people who have turned their back on the complexities and frustrations of human experience and spend their time with computers.

Take 35 year old called Roy, who spends his day fiddling figurative money on complex Excel formulas and returns home late every night to datingdirect.com, where he looks for girls who are younger than him so he can practice his flirty-message writing skills. He has mastered the art of getting the girl to reply to him. He doesn’t often meet the girls though, because every time he meets up with one they look worse than in their pictures, and they bore him. One girl had really flaky make-up. Most nights he watches porn DVDs or drives aimlessly in his Mazda RX-8, with his GPS Sat-nav to help him find the way home. Or what about 17 year old Jason who thinks that MSN is going to help him lose his virginity, even though he never goes out because he’s too conflicted about his bodyweight to want to be seen? Or 22 year old Charlene whose boyfriend recently left her for a girl he met on myspace and spend her weekends tearily reading celebrity blogs and Heat online, wondering what it is she hasn’t got, and what it must be like to look like Angelina Jolie. Charlene likes listening to ‘Broken’ repeatedly on Digga’s myspace, and tells her friends she’s pleased that he has been signed to Atlantic. Secretly though, she feels like a little part of her just got taken away.

Aiden and James, in their observation tower, on Saturn.

When I first realised the softly blissed out tune that Oneman played at the end of his Generation Bass set was the latest ish from Darkstar (I had looked at Boomnoise wide-eyed and gone ‘what is this!?’) and was called ‘Aidy’s Girl Is A Computer’, I was taken aback to find out that Aiden is a technosexual. But then I thought about it. When a Japanese robot girlfriend has brought the once-distant future of love with androids, and the doubtful possibility of emotional returns that little bit closer, it’s not that surprising. (more…)

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Birthday Speech

Posted on August 25th, 2008

The best thing about this is not Jammer murking the fat American dude at the end, but the fact it was recorded on my birthday.

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Give me more bits

Posted on August 24th, 2008

Here is part 2 of my Blackdown & Dusk interview.

Farrah picture by Simon Toplis

FJ - I really liked a track on your album that had lots of Dilla-esque influences, was that a conscious thing?

MC - Is that Dis/East? (more…)

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Bums of the south?

Posted on August 20th, 2008

Drumzofthesouth sent me this photo she took of everyone at Generation Bass on Saturday.  Check out Nomad’s saluting pose and Joker’s subtle psycho grin. Isn’t Quest just the loveliest? And what’s that in Oney’s hand?

Clockwise from left: Nomad, Quest, Barclay, Joker, Sgt Pokes, Distance, Kulture, Cyrus. Silkie, Starkey, Mary Anne, Chef, Oneman. 

New Rinse newsletter is up. Happy Birthday to them for Friday. What a fucking awesome achievement.

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