if you are burdened with the desire to steward a music genre (like me, with jungle) then i recommend you read energy flash: a journey through rave music and dance culture by simon reynolds.

this book does:

• give the broad strokes of electronic dance music history
• chronicle real events and quote real people
• have an aggressively european tilt and the author's genre bias

this book does not:

• offer conclusive explanations
• listen to the music for you
• replace going to shows

the name "jungle" comes from jamaica and its use in england is largely attributed to rebel mc around 1991 (also known as congo natty, conquering lion, etc.) and it was used all over the place very quickly. the prefix "ragga" means that the jungle is going to be good there is a palpable jamaican influence.

if you feel out of step with the timeline of electronic music history please look into that on your own; salient facts about jungle and other genres are pointless for anne hero to talk about. you can watch a documentary on jungle if you need. maybe you know the sounds of various electronic music and not their names? use your ears for this temporary resource. you can also check out the partially complete discography and bibliography of Energy Flash.

i will be using Reynolds' perspective as a baseboard for jungle's truths. nothing about Reynolds' work is rigid; he separates his storytelling by theme rather than chronology¹, and i think thats an effective way to recount history when your goal is answering some broad questions like, "how should i be dancing to jungle?" hopefully this blogpost will give you enough context for you to do your own research.

I want to impart some new ways to think about jungle music that you should explore on your own. please use this blogpost as a jumping off point for reading old magazine blurbs, inspecting CD liners, following 20 year old discogs forums beef, and talking to the elders in your community; i'm not a journalist, i'm just a junglist.. and if it's feeling verbose, just move to the next section. there is something for everyone here..

when you study firsthand accounts of rave culture on both sides of the atlantic you will observe the vocabulary tripping over itself because "rave" has vast differences in connotation, sound, and look depending on where in the world you are. anne hero is a raver but not THAT type of raver.. just roll with it, seen.

1. art history generally follows the same structure: studying trends at a high level against the historical events which caused artists to challenge their worldview enough to make something that looks different from their predecessors.. which is far more revealing and interesting of a history than simply looking at every painting ever, in chronological order.

imagine you are taking a course on the history of electronic dance music at a community college. what would the lectures consist of? can it be studied like art history? (watching primarily european technique across sculpture, architecture, and painting respond to major european events..)

studying artists and their bodies of work in isolation is not a good way to measure electronic dance music history because few are monogamous to one genre and it becomes problematic to decide which bodies of work are worth handling as historically significant and which are not (who decides which art is history?). and using music to measure the history of electronic dance music neglects the "dance" part..

the truth about "what happened" in electronic dance music history is something that can be answered by stories from ravers who were there: what they wore, how they danced, who they listened to, how it made them feel, why it stopped. after all, how granular can electronic dance music history get? personally, i think that the smallest unit of dance music history is an evening spent dancing with friends in a club. ²

regardless, electronic dance music history is an oral one (even publications of the era rely on talking to people who were there to get the scoop on trends in dance AND music). when i ask my american junglist elders about american jungle culture, i get conflicting answers on pretty basic questions— "which city had the biggest jungle scene? how did it get here? where did it go?"— i consider all answers to these questions correct.

in the early dance music scene, musical influences moved as fast as vinyl could get shipped to different cities. so a lot of genre demarcations and "who did what first" debates should be reframed as: people recounting their experiences as individuals moving through and informed by their regional mythlogies. in this fashion, i don't think anyone is "incorrect" about their rave experiences. although.. the fabric of this history is sheer and frayed from memory loss and drug use. and drug use. and drug use.

2. or perhaps a breakbeat is "smaller?" you can find me at a show and argue with me about this.. it would follow that we ravers are contributing to dance music history everytime we go to shows.. o_O

mom hero around december 1999

my knowledge of jungle was largely supplied by my mother ³, who lived through (and contributed to) the complete first incarnation of jungle in new york city in the 1990s. she watched the scene fracture (from drug use) and pivoted to hip hop soon thereafter.

jungle in new york city (ca. 1995-2001) according to mom hero:

• jungle found a home in new york city via hip hop (she recalls seeing KRS-One at many jungle shows)
• the same crowd would attend both jungle and hip hop shows (this means that they shared a wardrobe and movement vocabulary on the dancefloor)
• jungle was occassionally spread via word of mouth at reggae and dancehall music shops (this is how she found out about it)
• the crowds were comprised of breakdancers, graffiti artists, skaters, hackers, and all sorts of artists.
• towards the end, people were more interested in drugs than dancing (she was straightedge and loved to dance next to the speakers.. she was nearly deaf in her left ear by 30)
• she identified as a "raver" who went to "raves" (she had a huge stack of kandi.. she had stories of the people who she traded bracelets with)
• there was a healthy population of white boys who loved jamaica

all of mom hero's lessons were substantiated by energy flash as well as firsthand accounts in music magazines, forum posts, other junglists, etc. if this is an area of interest to you, i recommend you research this in your own time.

england's unique history as the most recent longest standing evil motherfuckers on the planet created a severly stratified class system which ended up fostering far more racial unity among working class people than anywhere in america ever had. (imagine if far right americans were so broke that they were no longer racist.. not happening) nursed by the reggae soundsystem culture of the 80s, jungle could not have happened anywhere else.

i picked up energy flash because it is important for me, a junglist, to understand the rave culture in england during jungle's inception and the years that followed.

to that end, i'm going to synthesize some of my thoughts with Reynolds' writing about the mechanics of jungle music itself.

3. you can read more about mom hero in jungle network issue one.

"jungle" invokes survival instinct. it's unordered and unfriendly. it belongs to the jilted, bored and frustrated. jungle is "anti-plur, the living death of rave" (p. 365). Jungle is an education in anxiety— and as Freud said, without anxiety, you are vulnerable to trauma.

the software of jungle is preoccupied with babylon woes ⁴, survival by violent means, and calls for racial unity worldwide. its hardware is pirate radio, breakbeat science, and uncleared samples.

anne hero's proposed pillars of jungle:

• piracy
• sampling
• breakbeats
• bass

4. Babylon is the historically white-European imperialist colonial power structure which has oppressed Black and subjugated non-white people.

junglistic features

What do you think of my proposed pillars of jungle? if you disagree, help make this post stronger by arguing with me in the comment section, at clubs, or in my discord server's debate channel.. the remainder of this post contains some quotes from energy flash which explores the junglistic departures from hardcore; exploring the consequences both aural and cultural are left as an exercise for the reader.

• piracy
• sampling
• breakbeats
• bass

piracy

pirate radio, uncleared samples...

London, 1992. unliscensed radio stations surged as a crucial part of the hardcore rave's underground infrastructure. despite the Department of Trade and Industry's "fresh package of draconian penalties," ⁵ these non-stop raves facilitated the biggest boom in the history of radio piracy in 1992-3. these stations feature a master of ceremonies (MC) and audience participation enabled by burgeoning cell phone use. you can still participate in this tradition from anywhere in the world via the internet! yay!

pirate radio works by supressing weaker radio signals in order to transmit your own—jungle takes over the literal mainstream via radiowaves.⁶ the stations engineered their setups to be difficult for the DTI to trace and dangerous for competing pirates to seize.

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5. "the threat of unlimited fines, prison sentences of up to two years, and confiscation of all studio equipment- including the DJ's precious record collection" (p.228)

6. "If the concept of resistance can be applied to British pirate radio, it's clearly on the level of symbolic warfare...'resistence through rituals', as opposed to overt protest. if the pirates are subversive, it's because they hijack the mass media, the instrument of consensus, in order to articulate a minority consciousness that's local, tribal, and utterly opaque to non-initiates" (p.230)

sampling

sampling has revolutionary implications: it is a radical break from real-time interactive playing in a natural acoustic space which governs most of music-making...(p.365)

jamaican b-boys in the united kingdom didn't have the same political context as the USA for rap to take off, so they used the other aspects of hip hop to create england's first native black sound. before jungle's formal inception, the early 90s saw the reconvergence of (at least) two major black post-colonial sounds, perfectly captured by Tribal Base - Rebel MC, live on Dance Energy in 1991:

junglistic hardcore finished it's trajectory into jungle as we know it within 2 years after this. this makes jungle "Britain's very own equivalent (as opposed to imitation of) US hip hop.⁷

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7. "you could make an equal case that jungle is a raved-up digitized offshoot of jamaican reggae. musically, jungle's spatialized production, bassquake pressure and battery of extreme sonic effects, make it sort of a postmodern dub on steroids. As a subculture, jungle is riddled with jamaican ideas- like dubplates (exclusive tracks given to DJs in advance of release), 'rewinds'... patois buzzphrases...exhorting the crowd to raise their lighters in the air... And by late 1994, the most popular jungle tracks were those based around vocal licks sampled from raggamuffin stars...") (p. 245)

breakbeats

alienating white people with breakbeat science..

it's a well documented phenomenon that white people have a hard time dancing to jungle. if you've gone to shows anywhere in the USA, you know what i'm talking about. i've always wondered why— they don't seem to have trouble with any other conventional dance music genres.. so what gives?

the answer may be in the breaks..

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"Eurodance pioneer Giorgio Moroder had deliberately simplified funk rhythms to make it easier for white dancers; the 'junglistic hardcore' that emerged in 1992 reversed this process, and for many ravers, it was simply too funky to dance to. That year, Josh Lawford of Ravescene magazine prophesized that the breakbeat was the 'death-knell of rave',and in a sense, he was correct. But it was more than just the disappearance of the four-to-the-floor kick that alienated ravers. Jungle's dense percussive web destabilizes the beat... Breakbeats made the music feel treacherous. The built-in safety factor in most machine-made dance music, the predictability that allows the listener to trance out, was replaced by a palpable danger...It was this edginess that drove many ravers out of the hardcore scene and back to house." (p.241)

"Jungle's militant euphoria is fuelled by the desperation of the early 90s. Composed literally out of fracture ('breaks') jungle paints a sound-picture of social disintegration and instability. But the anxiety in the music is mastered and transformed into a kind of nonchalance; the discruptive breakbeats are looped into a rolling flow. In this way, jungle contains a non-verbal response to troubled times, a kind of warrior-stance. The resistence is in the rhythms. Jungle is the metabolic pulse of a body reprogrammed and rewired to cope with an era of unimaginably intense information overload. As such, its rhythmic innovations will pervade popular music well into the twenty-first century, as insiduously and insinuatingly as rock'n'roll, funk, and disco have done in the past." (p.239)

"...Jungle's radicalism resides in the way it upturns Western music's hierarchy of melody/harmony over rhythm/timbre. In jungle, the rhythm is the melody; the drum patterns are as hooky as the vocal samples or keyboard refrains...This rhythm-as-melody aesthetic recalls west african music." (p. 242)

bass

the bass operates almost below the threshold of hearing- it is physically felt..

when i store jungle tracks in my brain, i think the hole i put it in is shaped like the bassline. it is truly the feature i value most. i don't have much else to say on this so here are the quotes—

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"bass is returned to its function as a physically felt harmonic/rhythic component rather than a stungun which punches home the chord changes-David Toop. Physically felt is the key phrase: jungle's sub-bass frequencies operate almost below the threhold of hearing, impacting the viscera like shockwaves from a bomb... Just as they had meshed together multiple strands of percussion, producers eventually deployed two or more basslines simultaneously. In jungle, bass- hitherto dance music's reliable pulse - became a plasma-like substance forever morphing and mutating."(p. 243)

"along breakbeat science, the other half of jungle's musical core is its radically mutational approach to bass. until mid-1992, the bassline in hardcore generally followed the 140 bpm...gradually, a slower bassline sound came in: at first, a seismic, sine-wave ooze of low-end frequencies; later s dub reggae bassline that ran at about 70 bpm beneath the hectic breaks. The half-speed bassline transformed jungle into two-lane music, tempo-wise. Just as if you were driving on the motorway, you could enter the slow lane, and groove to the skanking B-line, then shift to the fast lane when you felt like flailing to the drums." (p. 242)

a final quote-

"By 1993, eye contact was disappearing from the London hardcore scene; bonhomie gave way to a surly vigilance. Smiling was replaced by the skrewface, a pinched sneer expressing disgust and derision. What happened here? As hardcore evolved into jungle, it shed rave's emotional demonstrativeness and gestural abandon, which had originated in gay disco and entered white working-class body consciousness via Ecstasy...hardcore's nudge-nudge references to "rushing", its sniggery E-based innuendos, were replaced by roots reggae soundbites about sensimilla, ganja, and herb. There's a sense in which the disappearance of the Ecstasy vibe allowed young black Britons to enter the rave scene en masses and begin the transformation of hardcore into jungle. Ecstasy's effects of defenceless candour are probably too risky a cultural leap for the young black male, who can't afford to jeopardize the psychic armour necessitated by the very different black experience of urban life." (p.250-251)

it's not a coincidence that my art is angry..

-AH