EPISODE ONE: Aboard My Bass Bus
I live in London. London is 600 miles big and has 7.5 million people. It has 32 boroughs. It is full of ravers. Every weekend they come out from the buildings they live or work in and go raving. A lot of them do it during the week as well.
Ever since Jamaicans first landed here with their soundsystems and dubplates the activity of going out at night time and losing your head to exciting music has multiplied into multifarious forms. There are lots of different types of raves and different types of people. There have become genres of people. There are champagne drinking house ravers with shirts, heels and hair gel. There are squat ravers with dreadlocks and tattoos on their faces. There are also hip hop ravers with goatees and goateed intelligent techno ravers in hoodies, because the people have grown into sub genres and cross genres and multigenres.
This is London:
Here are some people raving:
I am one of them. I was writing about music when in 2005 someone took me to DMZ in Brixton. It was a bass-ship and on it I was propelled into a journey through deep bass into amazing new constellations. DMZ was a dubstep night. About the same time I bumped into an old friend and became part of a crew of geeks who gathered bi-weekly around the right hand speaker at FWD. Like DMZ, FWD played lots of dubstep. There was, at the time, also a lot of grime. Then I published a feature about falling into outer bass space, and everyone started calling me dubstep names.
I never meant it. Dubstep is not my favourite kind of music. And I hardly ever listen to it at home. The people genre thing is a kind of imposition that happens from the outside. It says a lot about perception. Just like the people from the 32 boroughs like to make mental pictures about each other, generally based on relative wealth and accent, and then take the piss of out each other, ravers tend to do the same.
Two and a half years since I got on the bass-ship, I have recently had two big raving events. In the same amount of time my crew of geeks has dispersed somewhat, and I have made a lot of new friends. Two of them are Blackdown and Prancehall. They have both already beaten me to writing about one of these events. Blackdown and Prancehall are both well known bloggers of the dubstep and related/unrelated grime scene. Actually, Prancehall doesn’t like dubstep so really he’s grime, but he likes bassline now a lot as well. Both of them talk about dancehall quite a bit as well. They both make opinions and often agree, lately particularly about a big grime star called Skepta’s Superman outfit and the flashgun DJing of grime’s Spyro. I agree with everything they both say.
I was a bit disappointed though when I bumped into Skepta outside Cargo last week and he was dressed normally. I said ‘ewww’ in disappointment and he told me off, I forgot to explain myself.
Still I have a different perspective on the big FWD rave at The End. This is mostly because I spent 95% of the nights standing just outside the men’s toilets helping my friend Chips take photos of people for the Observer Music Monthly.
Anyway, I saw lots of funny things helping Chips. The funniest was probably the girl who kept flashing her tits at Coki. Coki is famous for making these crazy spazzing basslines that sound like they are made of metal. Prancehall wrote about Coki and the tits girl already. I have to add though that I’m not sure what was funnier, the aggression on the crazy tits girl’s face or the bewilderment on Coki’s. Coki always looks quite bewildered as it is. (I once wrote about Coki and donkeys, you can read it up here as soon as I figure how to get up a project I was working on last year but which died very early up here somewhere). People think Coki doesn’t like them because he looks at them funny, but it’s really just because he is bewildered. Except in my case – he often looks at me funny and runs away, but that’s normally because I’m being a weirdo.
This is a picture of Coki I took at Mass last year:
The tits girl really made me think though, which is funny, because normally I mentally deride tits girls for being brainless. Coki is a bit of a rock star now. So is Benga, especially since the two of them did a track called ‘Night’ which is like the biggest thing in dance right now. It has been one of those rave things which supersede the shallowness of genre. Oh yeah. But when your bass-ship becomes so colonised you could compare it to Mick Jagger’s lifestyle, you really have to stop and ask yourself some questions. Have we lost the spirit of true rave? When I started hanging out with my right speaker geeks, raving was about getting away from people who went out to look at tits, and all the tits you see in the trashy papers everyday. It was about forgetting the fact you go to the cornershop and there are hundreds of magazines with tits all over them all up in your face.It was about getting totally, utterly lost in amazing sounds. It was a true thing of beauty. I went down by that right hand speaker and had astonishing listening experiences every other week. Now I seem to just hear the same banalities, like I am lost in a big sludge. Maybe I’ve just been expecting too much of it. Of course, the multi genres of raving mean there’s no one single facet to raving anymore. Maybe I need to do some more genres. But if I do, will I eventually get bored of them too? I remember when I was a teenager I went out raving a lot to jungle and then I got bored of it. I never thought it would happen again.
I saw some other funny things at the end like my friend Jam being quite high and Kode 9 remembering he’d forgotten to bring his Christmas present for my rave cats. It’s March now. I rang him before and reminded him about the rave cats. One of them recently ate one of his records. I think he has good taste. It was ‘Find My Way’, which is one of my favourite rave tracks from last year. Perhaps my favourite. Outside the toilets is generally a good place to hang out if you want to bump into your friends at a massive rave amidst the crowd of which you can’t possibly locate anyone you know. I wondered round a bit as well and saw funny things like superman Skepta getting jiggy to some funky house and my friend Guy Brazil going ballistic to our mutual friend Oneman’s set. Oneman mixes garage and dubstep. Blackdown and Prancehall both wrote about him recently. I did a jokey jokes interview with him a year ago (scroll down the page a bit), and I put my nose in Kode 9’s record bag. He said his favourite animal was a unicorn. Oneman did that is. I don’t know what 9’s favourite animal is. I will ask him. Here is a picture I made to go with it. Guy Brazil is on the right and Oneman is on the left.
Here is Keith after I found him having eaten ‘Find My Way’:
My other recent big raving event was DMZ’s 3rd birthday. Like the FWD thing, there were shitloads of people outside queuing to get in. The door people at The Mass are more nice than at The End though, so I managed to evade the wait with greater ease. I had some fun playing outside with Scientist, Kode 9 and Grumpy Claire before hand. Scientist wouldn’t give me his Fila jacket, and Kode 9 wouldn’t be a walking flyer for me, but Grumpy was really hilarious because she drank loads of port on the way there. People don’t often drink port when they go out raving. I’d put in a picture of Grumpy but she always runs away when I try and take a photo of her.
When I got inside I was totally even more bewildered than Coki with the tits girl, because there were so many people there, and a lot of them were saying ‘Hi’ and a lot of them were from other countries and I know them because I am dubstepped. I think I generally managed to be nice to the people I like. There was my girl Hera from just outside LA and Miro from San Francisco. I have been out raving with them both in California. Dave Q was there too, and so was Seckle. They are from New York. Dave was DJing. He always plays really interesting sets, even though he still mostly plays dubstep.
The truth is I have long past dubstep saturation point. I love a lot of the music still, but it’s harder to find among the herds and the steaming piles of imitative stuff. A lot of people have made this complaint. A lot of people take the piss out of me from the outside because they don’t understand the reason I’m still stuck in dubstep raving is because a) I’m in love with a lot of the people and b) when you find the good dubstep, it’s still pretty damn amazing.
And anyway, the best bits of the night were being downstairs when they reopened Third Bass and I brucked out a lot with Charles and Joker, firstly to Morgan Zarate and Charlie Dark playing luscious abstract hip hop, then to Plastic Ian playing a totally awesome breakbeat garage set with some early grime stuff thrown in. I love the soundsystem down there. Ian’s own track ‘Cha’ was the highlight as well. That track totally deserves a system like that. It kept smacking me in the face. I fought it back. I also bumped into Guy Brazil again. He was doing gun finger stuff. It was like a gun fight. The next day he was spitting on Oneman’s React FM show. He definitely sounded like someone that had been gunning up in a spaceship all night. In a good way. I also found Kode 9 again behind the system mumbling something about giving up trying to stay sober til his 4.30 am set and gurgling some neat rum. I eventually stumbled on to the night bus at 6am. I think at some point I leapt at Mala from Digital Mystikz’s shouting something about lions. I’ve been doing that a lot lately.
Just how long can I carry on raving like this for??!?!?!?!
(March 10th 2008)
forever RAVE.
I am desperately seeking a musical adventure
of interplanetary levels.
unfortunately
Toronto is a city, that forever sleeps.
So PLEASE party hard for me,
Comment by Kiwi — November 9, 2009 @ 3:01 amuntil I reach LDN’s
bass ripped shores.
Tender thanks you in regard to another notable article. Where else could anyone net that philanthropic of intelligence in such a holy acknowledge proceeding of writing? I be undergoing a debut next week, and I am on the look after such information.
Comment by Mike from usaonlinecasinos2.blogspot.com — May 18, 2010 @ 1:57 pmbest spam ever
Comment by decksandthecity — August 27, 2010 @ 12:41 pm