I’m an old school junglist raver and first learned how to dance and let loose in a party to jungle music in New York City in the 90s. I was part of the original Konkrete Jungle scene when I was 15 and 16 and have some incredible memories of those times. This was a moment prior to Rudy Giuliani (yes, that same one) becoming mayor of NY and his draconian, ignorant nightlife crackdown. The underground was alive and well and there was an incredible energetic moment for dance music which was mixing with hiphop, dancehall, the popular urban music of NY.
I never connected with house music, techno or more overt ‘dance’ music at that time. It was probably too feminine and gay for my teenage boy self, and the overt mechanical darkness of the harder side of European dance music just didn’t appeal. I was a hiphop fan first and foremost, and jungle had that feeling, it was full of samples and references back to hiphop and reggae and focused intently on beats and bass. It was perfect and just what I needed at the time. Unfortunately the underground dance scene in NYC was crushed by Giuliani and at the same time Jungle was evolving into it’s colder, harder, more streamlined cousin drum and bass. I did like some of that, and got into some of the darker vibes, but it pretty quickly lost me as it deadended into a kind of big-room linear aggression contest. This is pretty similar to what happened to dubstep over time as well, when everyone got into a contest to out-drop each other.
Returning to the present day, we have this wonderful, energetic, lively and colorful set by Sherelle at the boiler room. Somehow over twenty years we’ve made a kind of full circle and the vibes are back. What has lead us to this point? Dubstep got boring and a certain group of those people moved upward in tempo to the Chicago footwork sound lead by DJ Rashad (RIP). Footwork is wildly fast, abstract and rhythmically inventive, much like Jungle but favored a ruthless 150 bpm 4×4 rhythm that for many people is a bit too intense. A few years later the concepts of footwork have miscegenated with jungle and grime in London at the higher tempo of 160 bpm and the results are delirious and full of life and energy. I am super super happy to hear this development because there is such a rich musical thread to pick up here, reinjecting rhythmic complexity and the soulful heritage of black music back into high tempo music. The internet is a wonderful collapser of time and space with the cultural archive of the world living on YouTube so we have a new generation of multi-racial, multi-gender kids here wilding out to a rich mix of tempos, rhythms and cultural references. I love it.
