Hey everyone, welcome back to Sunday Skool. I hope you enjoyed learning a little about the sub-genre FIDGET. Today, I’m posting a great article from Factmagazine.co.uk. This article discusses what could be described as a ‘sister’ genre or possibly a pre-cursor to FIDGET that’s been blowing up in the U.K. for more than a minute. It is quite a varied genre and often FIDGET is simply considered BASSLINE.
Editor’s (Renaissance’s) Note: This should be interesting. As many of you know, bassline is my thang so I can’t wait to read Pappy’s take on the genre.
The more radio play tracks in the U.K. sound to me almost exactly like the 2-step genre of the 90′s [1 & 3 Kick with intricate snare & high hats on top (almost like a breakbeat) with R&B vocals on the top]. The big difference between a 2-Step track and the current BASSLINE track is the absence of the 2-Step beat, replaced by a 4/4 kick and a severely distorted bassline (often wobbly). Here is the first example that comes up when searching BASSLINE on youtube.
Wayne Scott-Fox – Freak Like Me (Bassline Remix) video
Here’s another not quite so cheezey track where you can definitely see a lot of similarities in the production of the Basslines.
Calvin Harris – I’m Not Alone (Herve’s See You At the Festivals remix) video
And just in case you forgot what UK Garage/2-Step was… Here’s an Artful Dodger mix (bassline) featuring Craig David (2-Step)
Artful Dodger featuring Craig David – Re-Rewind video
So here goes a great article discussing the origin of BASSLINE.
BASSLINE HOUSE AND THE RETURN OF ‘FEMININE PRESSURE’
After T2′s incursion into the charts, K-Punk welcomes bassline house as the Yin to grime and dubstep’s Yang; sensual, poppy, crazily euphoric, and cartoonishly abstract…
According to Simon Reynolds, bassline house is, “the drastic pendulum swing from yang to yin, testosterone to oestrogen, that I had always imagined would happen in reaction to grime, except it took so long to happen I gave up on it and just forgot.” It wasn’t only the dominance of grime that meant that the pendulum of the ‘hardcore continuum’ was stuck at the ultra-masculine pole. Dubstep, too, suffers from the same oestrogen-depletion, and both genres to some extent have their origins in a reaction – an over-reaction – to the ‘feminine pressure’ of late-’90s 2-step.
Both dubstep and grime have been shaped by their suspicion of the song, female voice and the kind of exuberance that was once the unique defining feature of the panoply of musics that developed out of British rave music. Dubstep and grime’s male moroseness corresponded not only to a deficiency of oestrogen, but also to a
drying up of serotonin. It was as if both genres had simulated the effects on the brain of long-term ecstasy use. Their affective state corresponds with that moment in a heavy Ecstasy-user’s life when the drug does not work any more, and continued caning of it produces clinical depression. The smiley face has become a screwface, and the drug correlate was no longer MDMA but the lassitude-producing skunk. Dubstep and grime’s moodiness seemed to assert a reality principle, functioning almost as a warning that collective exuberance is not sustainable. The moodiness of previous moments in the hardcore continuum – such as darkside jungle or techstep – was always mitigated by the hyper-kinetic propulsion of the beats and basslines. But, with with dubstep and grime, things seemed to have come to a dead stop, a skunked-out inertial black hole. The hardcore continuum had frozen into a permanent midwinter that appeared to be a terminal condition.With bassline house, green shoots have begun to peep through the permafrost. Bassline is a long overdue efflorescence of everything that grime and dubstep have excluded: in short, pop. Grime had a will-to-power but an ingrained hostility to pop; even though it evolved by a very different route, grime was continually dogged by the bling-toting spectre of US hip-hop. Dubstep, meanwhile, is a genre from which practically all of the elements of pop have been ruthlessly bred out. But, listen to a Bassline House mix and you find yourself seduced and infected by intoxicating songs. After the bitter asceticism of grime and dubstep, bassline seems like a fabulous sweet shop, full of delicious sugar rushes. Like its predecessor, 2-step, bassline is ‘sweet like chocolate’, but the obvious difference from the of 2-step is bassline’s beat: 4/4 as opposed to 2-step’s itchy, stratchy skitter. Also, 2-step was informed by an r&b-inspired sophistication absent from bassline, which recalls the barrel organ, freaky fairground quality of very early rave.
However, bassline is not simply a recapitulation or a ‘cut and shunt’ of previous Rave components. As Simon Reynolds argues, bassline house takes ‘bass science’ to a new level ‘with the ridiculously intricate sculpting of the b-lines and its interweaving of multiple basslines–the result resembling a writhing pit of snakes.’ Far from being some conservative concession to the established protocols of pop, bassline is what mainstream pop has so conspicuously lacked for the past half decade or so – a new pop mutation. Bassline is less a sweetshop than a Willy Wonka-style chocolate factory in which industrial production – this music is churned out at a delirious rate – combines with weirdness. Bassline is cartoonishly abstract, full of funhouse angles and bizarre geometries.
Screama and Zoe’s ‘Freak Me’ brings together all of the key properties of the genre – a catchy tune, and an assertion of feminine jouissance and a seething cakewalk of squelching bass. ‘Freak Me’, a bid for ‘boys not to be hasty’, takes the old r&b euphemism – ‘freak’ meaning sex – literally. Zoe says that she is being ‘made wet’ but the secretions in question have little in common with the slickness of r&b. In terms of its rendition of libido, bassline’s precursor is less r&b than Funkadelia, which similarly envisaged desire as a delirious, absurd mutation, a deviation from the proprieties of dignity and poise. ‘Freak Me’ transforms the tiresome cliché of love as an ‘emotional rollercoaster’ into a thrilling amusement park ride. Much like 2-step before it but in many ways more emphatically, the ‘feminine pressure’ of bassline is reminiscent of feminist theoretician Luce Irigaray’s claim that women have sex organs ‘just about everywhere’. The cartoon body implied by bassline is contour-less and polymorphous, lacking in specific erogenous zones because entirely given over to a diffuse eroticism.
Part of bassline’s appeal resides in the tension between the crazed euphoria of the sound and the often plaintive quality of the songs. Bassline’s biggest hit to date, T2 and Jodie Aysha’s [pictured left] ‘Heartbroken’, perfectly exemplifies this duality. But you can also hear it in two of Zoe’s tunes – the masochistic ‘Why Does Love Hurt
Me’, in which the subdued singer contemplates the pleasure-in-pain of love, and the deeply addictive ‘Lately’, where she falls victim to love as deranging and debilitating pathology (“lately I just ain’t been right, lately I cannot sleep at night”). ‘Lately’ could almost be Lily Allen if she weren’t a spoilt public schoolgirl gone mockney, and if she was using an updated, rather than trad, version of reggae as a backing. What is beguiling about Zoe’s vocals is that, in common with many of the singers on bassline tracks, they are ‘weak’, lacking in all the acrobatic, vibrato-trilling stridency that is standard in X-Factor Britain. These weak – or desire – incapicitated – vocals express sadness and longing in a way that empty demonstrations of vocal technique can never hope to. Bassline is what the British overground and underground have both been waiting for.
Good stuff. Since the article brought up UK Garage, check back next week when we discuss all things UKG: UK Garage, Speed Garage, 2-Step, etc.
Classic Track of The Week:
JACO – Show Some Love (Rhythm Invention Remix) [Warp Records] (1992)
JACO – Show Some Love (Rhythm Invention Remix) video
AND NOW, YOU CAN CONSIDER YOURSELF SCHOOLED!
Pappy Andrews contact info:
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