Autopsy of a Scene

Journal sielwolf's Journal: Autopsy of a Scene 3

Journal by sielwolf on Thursday September 07, 2006 @08:10PM

Caught a Bad One

Grime is dead, you can read about it in the news. Old, lying folded up in a suitcase at the side of the road. Only headless screams in memory telling of what tragedy happened here. I haven't come here to bury Grime. But I haven't come to say its eulogy either. The story I'm interested in is the one that seems to matter least: everything that existed outside of the music. It's because I think this story is important on the individual level. The story of Grime is a microcosm of music as a scene, as a place and as a body. Here and now.

A scene once was a local thing. But it was important and vital. A scene is more than just the artists but it is the whole audience, participating in creating a consensus gestalt. Scenes are what all music genres gestate out of. And while the artists give birth to the art, the scene is the midwife. These days, who participates and how has all changed. The life and times of Grime will let us dissect out those parts. From this cadaver we'll make discoveries.

So is Grime really really dead? Yes and no. Yes as an international phenomenon. Yes as a style that transends momentary fashion. Grime is a fad. So, no, Grime is still going to live on with all those guys who are like, so deep in it man, and like, will never give up the truth. And who knows. It might make a resurgence at some time. But then it'll still be an anachronism.

Since it is has no body and there are no vital signs, you have to read carefully to tell if something is truly, utterly done. The above article by Martin Clark is a perfect sample to get a pronouncement.

Clark can be seen as a classic rock critic: a failed musician. He'd probably call himself "unrecognized" but combine that with the usual rockist tendencies and you get a clear idea where he's coming from. Pitchfork picked him 'cause he's totally in the scene, you know? He's like down there in the fucking trenches.

The article basically breaks down the real flaw in Grime: it's one trick. It's all spastic hyperventilating gunfire sprees. The real question is what exactly makes it a genre instead of just a niche variation of all the other similar styles. I mean, take Hip-hop. We have the classic sort of 1977 Grandmaster Flash sound and soon it migrates out of NYC and forms these long distinct branches that feed back into each other now and then. Southern hip-hop had the Miami Bass sound and that migrated throughout Memphis and Atlanta and Houston to create what we have now. But through that, the Geto Boys were almost classically New York Kool G Rap in their stylings while Outkast had the similar stripes as contemporary West Coast artists on OutKast - Southernplayalisticadillacmuzik. And of course Cee-Lo appeared on that as a guest and later went on to do funk as Cee-Lo Green and his Perfect Imperfections and now as Gnarls Barkley. While those might be the edges of the sound, the median too has changed. Crunk has now finally hit a wall (though Lil Jon is going to try his best to keep it alive by milking the Hyphy fad 'til he ghostrides his whip into a tree) and Snap was a infuriating one summer distraction. And all of that for a single regional dialect of a genre of music.

So how the heck did Grime cut itself off from the whole family of UK Urban sound? Shit, Clark's article lists off at least a half dozen: 2step revival, garage, half-step, jungle. All these DJ seem to have played them all. There was Ska which grew into Reggae and Roots were toasters became deejays and we had Dancehall and Tubby threw on some electronic riddims and there was Ragga and then the Amen got cut and speed up and we got Jungle which had our thoughts go to building our own mechanical rhythm in Drum and Bass which spawned out a dozen children including 2-Step and Garage and all of this. But Grime for some reason was positioned as being completely fucking new and seperate. Everyone told us (from the 3000 word articles in The Wire to the weekly slurps on PFM) that this was like when Juan Atkins took P-Funk and melded it with Kraftwerk. A whole shift of the paradigm. Now it's obvious that that wasn't the case. If the true believers are sniping about how "road" something is or isn't, it's an obvious last gasp as everyone in the article (the DJs, Clark himself) all point to Grime just being the most recent stop on a cycle. So what happened?

"GuuuuuuuGHHH!" aka Enjoying the Highlife

Two things: Anglo and Hipster Inferiority complexes. Specifically in reference to Black (American/Brit/Carribean) music which is being consumed by a White (American/British) audience. That whole Black-White thing is heavy here, specifically with all of the built in social and economic class distinctions. The general rockist (and therefore Indie Rock hipster) gripe is that mainstream music is fundamentally insencere, contrived, artificial, manipulated, and tasteless. Actually I think there is a more truthful reason as well: mainstream culture, taken as the only component of your diet, becomes boring. We all know how this conversation goes and how then non-mainstream subcultures are then ascribed all the noble features that mainstream culture is said to lack. [I've always found it odd how liquid the terms ascribed to the mainstream are, particularly "White" which may include (arbitrarily) East Asians, South Asians, gays, Blacks who are too bourgie. The history of "White" is quite interesting itself as you can place the specific time period were Germans in the US went from being thought to looting the dead after the San Francisco earthquake to "one of the good ones" and when Irish became in. "White" is a tool used by people for whatever means they see fit in the culture wars.]

The problem with being White then (and here I'm using it in the overloaded self-hating pejorative) is that you carry your culture with you. To observe a subculture, let alone participate, changes it. It ends up becoming more White by default. Either the word gets out, the the mainstream learns the recipe and the originators get pushed out of the market (appropriation) or the originators rise up and into the mainstream (assimilation). Either way the culture disappears, just becoming another feature in the flat gray landscape. This is all complicated by the cultures themselves having a love hate with the mainstream. They love the money and power it provides, but they know that those things derive from their uniqueness seperated from it. So they define mechanisms to counteract appropriation and assimilation: Selling Out, Nationalism, Authenticity.

That last one is the killer. That's what hipsters survive on. Their whole quest is to carve individualism from their inborn uniformity as average white boys from an average household in an average suburb. Authenticity is what they lack... that and talent. A normal person would just use their given talent to develop their own unique niche. A normal person seeks to have their name recognized for achievements. But that is one of those White things: the first steps to celebrity worship. No, hipsters seek a trait that gives them free pass.

In the case of Grime, Hipsters were smarting from the blowback of their embrace of Hip-Hop. Hipsters have always been at the periphery of Hip-hop. They weren't there during the genesis giving them that crucial foot in the door. Hip-Hop has used Black consciousness as a defense from appropriation. For every white guy in 3rd Bass there was a Vanilla Ice or Marky Mark and no matter how good Eminem was he could never be "Real Hip-Hop". And their embrace of the golden age, gangsta rap, and hardcore only seemed to come years after those artists were vital. The hipster who rocks a Tupac album now probably said "That woman beater got what he deserved" when he heard the man got shot. Hipsters could only approach Hip-Hop at arms length or historically. Even indie rap (all the post-Company Flow/Dr. Octagon varieties) began to hear jeers of delution... from hipsters themselves. The indie rock set has even gotten right up to the front of the bandwagon. They've gone out to endorse and laud all the latest generation trap MCs (Jeezy, the Clipse). It's just that the boat had already sailed on them having any deep part in the Hip-Hop discussion. Then came Grime.

The Anglo angle was slightly different. The Briton hipsters always seem to be looking for that next revolution to call their own. If the best argument some guys make is that they've taken what someone else came up with and made it better then, congratulations, you've just described a Honda Civic. Even the long chain from Ska can be said to be a Carribean thing. The British have attempted numerous invasions of artists and styles. They tried to package Drum and Bass for mainstream appeal (which, like many crossover attempts by underground genres, were subpar efforts), they then shipped over British hip-hop artists (Roots Manuva, the Big Dada set), then it was Garage and lady dynamite and whatever the hell The Streets is branded this week. They wanted that something that they could say "Hands off! This is ours!" It's one thing to be loved. It is something completely different to be lusted after. Then came Grime.

What Grime was... well. You play a Dizzee Rascal tune (most of which are pretty boss). You hear his cadence and voice and say "ahh it's British Hip-Hop". "No," they shoot back, "It's GRIME!" Ahh. Even the production sounds British. All that post-Ska drum structure. But, no, they tell you it isn't like that at all. It's something New (you get the same vibe from automobile companies when they release a new model year).

Now the odd thing was that I was probably the best hope Grime had in the US. Of all the people West of the Atlantic, I should have been on board. I for one like Hip-Hop. I like all sorts but definitely the harder DJ Premier/Wu-Tang Clan era NYC hardcore that Grime has a kinship. I actually even like some British Hip-hop. That first New Flesh For Old disc had a lot going for it (too bad their next two bit enough fat dick between them to get the scarlet P for 'Pederast' branded on their foreheads). I also like a lot of Reggae, Dub, Dancehall, Ragga, Jungle, IDM. Just two years ago I really loved the Doom Ragga stylings of Kevin Martin as The Bug and razor x productions when he merged his bass aesthetic with some of the best deejays around (Daddy Freddy, Cutty Ranks). So I heard these tunes and... I didn't get excited. Not that it was bad. It just didn't have enough intangibles (good enough, different enough) to get me out and listening to more.

But it didn't stop. The hipster media was in full evangelical mode. Spreads, singles, interviews. The whole run. They were advocating out the ass... but why?

You could tell part of this was happening in the background because of all the calls for Instant History. Hipsters (Anglo and American) looove instant history. Albums aren't just great, they're Decade Defining, Socially Impactful. Now how you tell this weeks after its release date I have no idea. How you can reasonably differentiate the feeling you get from listening to something important versus something that you like because it just feels good... mmmm. Especially since most folks would just like an honest review. If this was the first record you got high too and you spent the next three hours teasing your then-girlfriend's muff with your tongue... shit baby, preach. But it goes back to that same psychological need for authenticity: something that will stand unchanged through time.

There is another name for Instant History: Hype. And the hallmarks of hype are obvious. All critiques become openings for ad hominem attacks. And all this instant histroy does is create fads that burn out within years of starting (years if you're lucky. Most fads don't survive flash to bang between taking the photograph and it appearing on page four in the Sunday New York Times Style section). All the message boards threads turned pretty quickly. They all started off with some overheate rhetoric ("Grime is better than any US hip-hop coming out right now") and went downhill from there. Folks were missionaries. They had a duty to bring the word to the world.

And that's when you saw it: confusing the message with the messanger. They finally had what they wanted. They were important. They were there. They were at the murder of Julius Caesar, at the Last Supper, at the one show the Sex Pistols played in Manchester. They could go back in their dark rooms and fellate each other about how they were all here at this important moment in history. Pitchfork created the above Month in Grime/Dubstep to put it on par with its monthly Techno (just a generic 'Electronica' bit) and Dancehall (with some Jungle) features.

But nobody cared. Worse... for all the hype, there was no traction. PFM went out and gave Wiley's debut a ridiculously high score. By the end of the year, the album didn't even make it onto their 50 Best of 2005 list even though lesser ranked albums did. Lady Sovereign got crazy hype with the hoopla of her spitting acappella for S. Carter and him signing her on the spot. But then she did weak shows, released a string of *eh* tracks and folks in the states wondered if they really wanted to pay to hear a female version of K-Fed? Clark's article then basically charts the rest of the tragectory. More albums came out to mixed reviews. No one cared. Roll Deep tried to crossover with mixed results. Months later the acolytes would talk about how it was compromised as if somehow that unholy White patriarchal culture had gotten inside and set about to rot. Now this month both Clark and the Wire have talked nostalgically about Dubstep and the magic of those old tunes while reflecting on the sputtering status of Grime. Everything old is new again.

The odd thing is that it didn't need to all happen this way. Scenes once were these slow cook things. The Internet has sped up the delta on these things for both good and bad. Scenes once required a certain internal gravity. The artist can't escape the audience, yes, but it too needs those acolytes and hype men. Music is itself inert. It needs a host to propogate. Someone needs to play it, someone needs to take it on tour, spin it in a club, talk about it, write about it, dance to it. Music needs a person to give it expression. Like an organism, technology has affected how quickly it can spread. But that too can be a mixed blessing. It can spread itself too thin too quickly and die out, limping along in small pockets of the world.

Now that happened in the old days too. Every where there were and are scenes, most you will never hear of, most which will evaporate at the end of the school year, most not really that good. Now though the mainstream culture is much more pervasive. There are no longer the persistent islands of youth as there once were to feed all the components of a scene. Everyone is supposed to go out and on demand their readymade styles and fashions. All compete against the Leviathan.

These are horrible days to be alive. But this is our address; we don't live anywhere else. Maybe Grime wouldn't have survived 10 years ago. Or maybe it would have. The threat is always trying to cash in on value when you should be investing in growth. It's really hard to tell people that. Scenes are individuals. You put money in front of someone's face, a lot of it that they won't make anywhere else, there's no reason to think they won't accept it. It might be impossible to ever keep a scene from going public before its prime. But the bullshit instant history talk that swirled Katrina-like around Grime did something far worse: it got intended consumers snakebit and distrustful. Once you lose someone's trust it's twice as hard to get them back to being objective. Folks have pretty good bullshit detectors these days and heaping it on can lose you the fight before it starts. Shit, Kevin Martin has talked of doing some singles of his production with Grime MCs over it. I'll buy that shit no question. Why? Because I've got a vested interest with the guy. I'm not going to pretend that I discover everything organically. But the avenues are open and I can chose my own way in. That's how all great things come to pass. Some just faster than others. Given enough injection of talent and skill, a scene will get its props. Maybe it won't go multi-platinum and headline the MTV Awards this year but it will keep the releases out of the PC trash can. I admit that all the heavy breathing turned me off something fierce to the music, like a bunch of Van Dutch hats and PBRs. Scenesters are kryptonite. Things are like that. Not everyone is skilled at the soft sell. We're not asking for hours of foreplay but at least don't think we'll throw up skirts and bend over a parkbench at a moment's notice. But we are always keen to anthropomorphize, ascribing our need to be loved onto something. As hard as you pray, music won't love you back.

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