Jungle : The Life and Times

Once upon a time in a galaxy far, far away there was a music called Jungle. It’s primitive prototype Hardcore had taken on darker, heavier or more overtly soulful undertones and decided to ditch its ‘happy’ elements, thus initiating the demise of the super rave in a field somewhere around the M25. The cheerier types with their funny hats and large quantities of acid hung around and filled the warehouses in Milton Keynes and Essex, confused but delighted they were no longer robbed at knife-point by rude boys. Those that liked it deep, dark and funky followed the music into the smaller clubs through the early to mid 90’s, the music evolving into an ever faster fusion of Hip Hop, Funk, Reggae, Techno, Jazz, Acid and even Pop that would go on to be known forever more as Drum and Bass. If you ask an 18 year old how Drum and Bass sounds, he will most likely say ‘Pendulum’. Now don’t hit them. Pendulum has more in common with the original ethos of Jungle than most ‘Drum and Bass’ artists do nowadays, as they are a fusion. You may not like the things they fuse, but it is a damn site more interesting than that endless two-step beat accompanied by whichever sounds denote the type of Drum and Bass it is. Jazzy? Try some trumpet and Rhodes samples. Liquid? How about a dreamy chord that doesn’t change very much? And so on.

But how and when did it get to this predictable and stagnant stage? Both the main DJ’s and producers confused progression with ‘getting faster’ for many years until they realised they couldn’t push the 180bpm barrier for fear of becoming Gabba. But somewhere around the pre Re-Cycle days of 1997-1998 everyone started to run out of break beats that sounded any good at that tempo. So it was presumably all agreed in a pub in Camden that breaks were no longer important and that two-step reigned supreme. It was easy to mix, it was easier to make and the people didn’t need to follow the anything too tricky whilst ‘stepping’ on the dance floor. So everyone’s a winner?

Well not me. I liked breaks. I am a B-boy, and the B in B-Boy stands for Break. Jungle was killed by the lazy, aging DJ’s and producers that pioneered it. I have pinpointed the puncture wounds, blows to the head and deep impacts that led to the break beat finally being laid to rest in Jungle, or at least hi-pass filtered and mixed in behind a Dr Dre kick drum and a Timbaland snare. I still mourn the loss of the soul from something that I loved so dearly. Here are the bastards that did it.

1. Jonny L : Piper  : Grooverider remix [XL]

For someone that went on about funk so much on his radio shows, it was a complete mystery to me where it was to be found in this tune. Everybody played this in 1997, even me. But I didn’t realize how much it would affect the sound of the music I still hoped would come back around to a second ‘golden age’. Everything about the track is great, the mood, the strings, the killer bass line, the arrangement. It just has the crappest ‘boom tich’ beat I have ever heard. Listening to it now I think it would be a great piece of music to use for an anti communist video. It makes me think of people working in big industrial factories or marching to war in complete unison, showing no fear or emotion. I suppose it is the first of a new wave of robotic feeling tracks, possibly linked to the onset of more advanced sequencing and drum editing programs replacing a breaks natural feel with super tight quantization. That or the increase in cocaine usage in underground clubs, replacing the free love of Ecstasy with a sweaty arrogance and desire to talk at people rather than too them.

2. Nasty Habits : Shadow Boxing [31 Records]

An absolutely huge record from an artist who completely has the right to do a couple of rinse outs now and again. Doc Scott’s back catalogue from 1991 to 1995 reads like a highlights magazine for Drum and Bass classics of those periods. He always changed the groove, added something fresh, dark or funky that pushed the envelope entirely for the whole scene. That was until this piece of shit came along. I think he must have bet himself he couldn’t arrange a track in the time it took him to smoke a Silk Cut. I reckon he was mixing the fucker down before he stubbed it out. But I bought it. And the bloody remix, which was worse. Not because I liked it, but you HAD to have them in case you needed to resort to it with a very tough, very big or very generic crowd. It’s simplicity smashed up the place. Unfortunately it further cemented everybody’s belief that this was the only way forward, becoming another case in point that the only direction for D’n’B was snippets of Amen and big two-step kicks and snares.

3. Alex Reece : Pulp Fiction [Metalheadz]

Another huge tune, which was again so popular as a result of it’s simplicity. At the time it sounded like nothing else before it, and aside from a few obvious rip offs no one else really realised the power two-step could yield in 1995. Deep Blue on Moving Shadow was thinking along similar lines, but had nowhere near the success of his 1994 hit ‘The Helicopter Tune’ with any of his later stripped down percussive non-famous break productions. Reece here used bits and bobs from keyboards and sound modules to make his own kit, something which would be very obvious and instant to a producer now, but to those coming from a Jungle tradition seemed fairly alien. In many ways Reece came from a Techno tradition, which leaned more towards the Roland 808 or 909 drum kits reinforcing the single hits samples from unknown or less hard hitting break beats. And of course a lot of bedroom producers didn’t have access to clean clear drum machine hits like you can nowadays. This is pre Internet. This is pre PC. This is the ‘whatever I can salvage from these records on my 2 ¼ megabyte sampler’ days. In any case it’s uniqueness marked it out as something to be hugely copied, and in turn contributed massively to the end of chopping breaks.

4. Model 500 : The Flow : Alex Reece remix

All the same reasons as above, but it had clean break at the start which everybody sampled to death, meaning they didn’t have to make up their own one any longer. This meant it underlay the breaks in the mix to boost the impact of the kick and snare of, say an Amen, but meant the swing of the track was now dictated by this simple yet ultimately predictable rhythm.

 5. Everything But The Girl : Before Today : Dillinja Remix

I Loved Dillinja and thought everything he did was brilliant, but not this rinsed out turd. Not only did it give away the over compressed and distorted kick and snare break clean to be used on Shadow Boxing, it marked the beginning of the end for Dillinja’s contribution to break beat science. Listen to this and then listen to ‘Jah Know Ya Big’.

It’s pretty simple really, the faster the music got, the simpler the beats had to become. And as a social experiment, music is one of the most baffling. That a music can stagnate so drastically yet still convince enough people that it is interesting for so long is a mystery. I only hope that with the advent of Youtube people may discover what it could have been, what it should have stayed as and what were truly the golden years of Jungle, 1991 to 1996.

But then that, like so much of this on line non-sense is just my opinion. And really, who cares?

Juan Kossoff