The Wire 300: Simon Reynolds on the Hardcore Continuum #3: The State Of Drum 'n' Bass (1995)

Nine months on, General Levy's "Incredible" looks like a fluke; despite radio play and a seductive melody, Metalheads' "Inner City Life" failed to crack the Top 40. Jungle doesn't look like it's gonna become pop music after all. Maybe sped-up breakbeats will always prove too disruptive for mass consumption. But the real problem, I suspect, is that the Song is simply too staid and unwieldy an entity to ride Jungle's unstable, self-rupturing aesthetic. So far the best attempt at song-oriented Jungle is Princess's "Say I'm Your No 1", as remixed/re-produced by Steve Gurley, formerly of Foul Play: here, two different kinds of swing (Eighties R&B and drum 'n' bass) entwine perfectly to make for as nubile a slice of 'lover's Jungle' as you could wish for. Generally, though, Jungle - like most post-rave musics - isn't about songs, it's about hooks. Jungle's radicalism is that its drum-patterns are as catchy as its synth-motifs or vocal samples, e.g. Omni Trio's "Renegade Snares", where the snare tattoo is the mnemonic, rather than the stuttering diva-chorus or three-note piano figure.

Omni is about as pop as drum 'n' bass gets these days. Since the explosion of media and record biz interest last Summer, there's been a concerted shift by the scene's leading artists away from anything that panders to mainstream sensibilities. Determined to sabotage the co-option process and protect Jungle's underground status, the key producers are studiously shunning anything that smacks of either Ragga (the term 'Jungle' has been displaced by the more neutral and formalist 'drum 'n' bass' ) or pop appeal. Instead of hefty chunks of melody or lyrics, vocal samples tend now to be the merest mood-establishing tint of abstract emotion; keyboard motifs rarely amount to anything as memorable as a riff, just timbral washes and jazzy cadences.

Esotericism, elegance and elitism are the watchwords. Jungle's current obsession with being 'deep', its disowning of its roots in rave, has coincided neatly with its belated rehabilitation by the very people who once derided and ignored Hardcore back in 1992-93. As a result, drum 'n' bass has been reintegrated into the spectrum of 'cool' music, where it rubs shoulders with trip-hop and intelligent Techno. Accompanying this legitimisation process has been a subtle rewriting of history, with Detroit-aligned icons like Carl Craig and The Black Dog being cited as formative influences by some artists, while other key ancestors, perhaps too redolent of Ardkore's 'one dimensional' juvenilia are conveniently forgotten (Joey Beltram, Mantronix, The Prodigy).

None of this would particularly matter (the politics of hip being as irrelevant to true creativity as ever), except that Jungle's new legitimacy, and the scene's flattered self-image, is feeding back into the music, often to quite deleterious effect. Here I survey some of the directions in which artists are pushing the music in a misguided attempt to make it 'grow up', then focus on those who are really extending, rather than diluting, the renegade essence of drum 'n' bass. Jungle no longer needs uncritical boosterism; the scene, like Techno and Ambient before it, is reaching dangerous levels of over-production (in both the quantitative and technical senses). The time for discrimination, for rigorous aesthetic definition, is overdue.

Perhaps the biggest trend in Jungle right now is fusion. Drum 'n' bass has always been a hybrid, anti-essentialist style. In the early Ardkore days, this took the form of a collage-based, cut-up aesthetic. That fissile approach has now been replaced by a seamless emulsion of influences. There's also an explicit reinvocation of 70s jazz-fusion, and of later styles influenced by that era (jazz-funk, Detroit Techno, Garage). A crucial mid-94 release that trailblazed this smooth-core style was E-Z Rollers' "Believe"/"Rolled Into One", tracks that combined jazz-tinged chords and lambent, tremulous textures over float-like-a-butterfly breakbeats. What was initially so captivating and unusual about "Believe" and "Rolled" - the mellow mellifluousness - has subsequently become a hegemony of tepid tastefulness. Tracks like DJ Krust's "Jazz Note" or DJ Phantasy's "Atmosphere" amount to little more than 21st century cocktail music.

Jazz here signifies flava not process; there's no improv-combustion involved, just the use of a certain kind of chords. 'Jazz' also relates to a very specific British black tradition, where said chord-sequences and a polished fluency connote relaxation, finesse, sophistication, upward mobility. And so on KISS FM an influential DJ like Fabio will praise a track's "rich, lavish production -real class!" then exhort breakbeat-fans to "open their minds". All this passionate advocacy on behalf of what is basically fuzak draped over unnecessarily fussy breaks.

Perhaps the two most totemic figures behind the phusion phad are Alex Reece and Rupert Parkes (aka Photek, Aquarius, Studio Pressure, et al). Revealingly, neither were around in the Ardkore era, but only got into Jungle when it became 'musical'. Parkes's reputation resides in his having made Jungle sound more like 'proper' Techno and less like its own baaad self. Straddling both genres without innovating in either, he's infected Jungle with Trance's funkless frigidity and pseudo-conceptual portentousness: just dig those track titles, "Resolution", "Book of Changes", "Form & Function"... Parkes actually admitted in i-D that he and his posse "have more in common with Carl Craig's music than we do with the majority of Jungle". In mitigation, it must be conceded that the last Photek EP, The Water Margin, shows improved command of swing and groove. But overall, everything that Parkes is applauded for bringing to Jungle actually detracts from its ferocity.

I should have said much the same of Alex Reece, judging by the emollient slinkiness of his Latin/jazz tinged debut "Basic Principles", but he's redeemed himself by creating the monumental "Pulp Fiction", which is due out on the Metalheadz label any week now and has been the national anthem at LTJ Bukem's club Speed for months. Based around an epic bassline distantly descended from George Clinton's "Loopzilla", and featuring a horn motif-cum-solo redolent of Miles' coked-out early 70s paranoiac phase, "Pulp Fiction" dramatically expands drum 'n' bass's spectrum of moods and sources without blunting its edge.

Another notable sub-style, pioneered by LTJ Bukem, picks up on the cosmic/oceanic imagery of fusion and ambient. Based around 'quiet storm' diva-murmurs, nebulous texture-swirls and a radical uneventfulness, Bukem's 1993 classics "Music" and "Atlantis" were heretically at odds with the staccato freneticism of Ardkore. Sadly, this aqua-funk serenity, as perpetuated by Bukem & Co via his Good Looking/Looking Good imprint, seems to have become an aesthetic cul de sac, if self-parodic titles like "Rain Fall" and recurrent use of clichéd dolphin-like noises are any indication. Bukem's latest, "Horizons" is closer to jacuzzi than gulf-stream; its synth-arpeggios and watery texture-washes are way too New Agey, as is the snatch of Maya Angelou poesy that witters on about how "each new hour holds new chances for new beginnings/the horizon leans forward, offering you space to place new steps for change". Bah!

Forming a triangle with nu-fusion and oceanic Jungle is a subgenre - call it 'hyper-soul' - that draws on the same kind of soothing, silken 70s sources as G-funk, e.g. harmony groups like The Dramatics. A pivotal track here is Doc Scott's "Faraway". At first a rather sickly confection, with its limpid trickles of wah-wah guitar and breathy angel-sighs, the track comes alive when it strips down to guitar/bass/drums, sashaying with an irresistible panache. By far the best G-funk junglists, though, are Hidden Agenda, if only because "Is It Love?" has ten ideas where most tracks content themselves with three, veering from dubwise menace through summer-breezy soul shimmy (frothing Moogs, you half expect to hear a clavinet come in any second) to sinister phusion, and back again.

Drawing on the most oversubscribed elements of all these three mini-aesthetics is an overcrowded Second Division of drum 'n' bass units, artists like Essence Of Aura, Higher Sense, Adam F, Sounds of Life, Wax Doctor, JMJ & Richie, Obsession, Northern Connection, ad nauseam. Together, they have installed the consensual middlebrow sound of '95. Start with an unnecessarily elongated, 'teasing' intro; roll in the heavy-on-the-cymbals breaks; layer some wordless female vocal samples (measured, tasteful passion only, no helium-histrionics please); drag out the track, through percussive breakdowns and wafting synth-interludes, for eight minutes or longer; rinse the mix to get that airy, 'just brushed freshness' that sounds good on a really crisp stereo (lots of separation and ear-catching stereo-panning effects, natch). There's nothing shallower than the music made by artists who have been persuaded that Depth is where they should be at, but who don't have what it takes to get there.