I guess the condensed version of below is: you can take UK garage out of London, but you can't take the London out of UKG. And why would you even want to? No, you don't have to be "there" to feel it or understand it, but it's a faulty logic leap to then conclude that questions of "there"-ness are irrevelant and outmoded in these easy-access days of the glorious interweb. Because "there" permeates every fibre of the music.

Mass(ive) media. Philip Sherburne spins an interesting piece out of the tension between his renewed passion for UKG (must hear this Platinum 45 track he's banging on about) and feeling frustrated because he doesn't know who the music is aimed at and how they consume it. I must admit though I'm surprised he feels like he's not got enough sociocultural background to get a proper "read" on what garage rap is "about'"-- mean to say, apart from my own blogging activities and others on the unofficial gutter-garridge webring (Luka the prophet, firing on all cylinders at the mo'; Ingram, finding it harder to stick to the hibernation resolution than he thought, glad to have you back bro) it's not like UK garage and its constituency is undocumented, is it? This subculture hasn't sprung out of nowhere, surface sonic details aside at core it's essentially the same thing, the same system/infrastructure/"people", as jungle, which (I'd have thought) has been thoroughly placed and analysed both journalistically and academically. Plus now with garage rap you have the words which actually TELL you what it's about; even when there's a hyper-real fantasy element to the thuggism, the fantasies-as-social-facts-in-themselves tell you things. I'd say UKG w/ MCs as a social text is currently one of the richest and most transparently legible reads available, Lunnun accents and hyperspeed rhymes notwithstanding.

Still there are some things that obviously get lost in the transatlantic translation, and maybe i can assist with Phil's perplexity vis-a-vis the fact that Platinum 45 maker of mad sick underground beats as twisted as anything out of Cologne is also Platinum 45 as in Platinum 45 Featuring More Fire Crew as in Number 7 UK pop hit "Oi!". I suppose if you live in America land of Clear Channel and hits that take months to build and months to go away once they've finally clawed their way into the top 10, it's hard to understand how it can work in the UK with singles that are massive hits without ever really being pop. It's been like this at least since hardcore or earlier still with aciieed -- tunes that are so popular with the massive and on the pirates that they can shoot straight into the charts without any mainstream radio support. I'm sure "Oi!" got minimal play on Radio One and Capital or even from Kiss, but the sheer demographic heft of the garage nation propelled it into the Top Ten. And then the kiddies TV show appearances follow.

This is one of the most interesting, little understood things about London pirate radio -- it's not so much an underground as a counter-mainstream. It's like the scene has its own mass media which make up a world that people can live inside and ignore the "real" pop world. Scroll through the FM dial at the weekend and the garage pirates almost outnumber the legal stations, plus these days you get pirates operating every single week night as well, with different crews having regular shows at specific times (see luke's heronbone blog for a Radio Times style breakdown of when to tune in). As a result of this, in their own heads and within the parallel pirate counter-mainstream universe, these MCs and crews are already stars, long before the outside world acknowledges them as such or even knows they exist. Most of the time it's the case that every so often one or two of the pirate-universe "hits" slips through into the chartpop universe. But every so often, the entire pirate universe manages to superimpose itself in a mass putsch and become the real-world pop music, almost totally supplant and displace it. That's what happened with hardcore in 91-92 and that's what happened with 2step in 2000. Hard to believe now but Artful Dodger and Craig David were underground right up until the last minute before they became chart overlords. In '91 Prodigy remained underground even when they were Top 5 with 'Charly' and 'Everybody Is The Place', then gradually became a pop group and then a rock band. And Dizzee Rascal will still be underground when "I Luv U" gets it XL rerelease in a few weeks and goes Top 30. (On which subject check the CD-single's B-side 'Vexed' which renders irrelevant the last six years of electro, and the tear-jerking tenderhearted "I Luv U" remix, showing off Dizzee's vulnerable side). Crossover success doesn't diminish the records or dilute them, it becomes an enhancement, a collective triumph for the massive.

This ability to be underground and pop simultaneously has something to do with how music from the hardcore/pirate continuum is innately populist anyway, addressed to a "people". It's like the difference between the crowd and the in-crowd. With other forms of electronic music, "underground" means unknown-to-most: IDM for instance defines itself as for-the-chosen-few, whereas rave is something like for-the-chosen-many. It's all to do with the scene's will-to-power and out-reach. Pirate radio after all is a form of broadcasting not narrowcasting, anyone can tune in or stumble upon the stations by accident. If you are broadcasting this stuff on the open airwaves you are by definition not cultivating culthood or following the small-is-beautiful-is-superior-is-cosily-incestuous line. There's an availability of access there, so fucking easy in fact that no Londoner has an excuse not to be plugged into it as far as I'm concerned.

Ah but there's the rub, the catch: it's. a. Lon. don. thing. The sense of place is paramount (as per Luke's recent comments on the different East End manors ,or More Fire shouting out to different postal districts, E3 and E11). Contra Deleuze, territorialization is a positive force (none of that technoculcha post-geographical bollix), an intensifier. Indeed there's almost a sense in which you have to physically be in the orbit of terrestial transmission, the radiowaves passing through your body. Kinda mystical I know, but I'm sure that's the reason I've never felt like tuning into those pirates who do actually stream live on the web, it seems contrary to the spirit somehow (I'd rather have the mailed-cassette-as-field-recording than the digitized illusion of "being there", which would be fucked by timezone disparities anyway). Does this localized tribe-vibe thing make anyone who isn't "there" through no fault of their own automatically an outsider? Yes, but so what, the records rock with or without the context, can be taken as sonic objets d'art or munitions to mash up the dance as you prefer. And the fact that a music isn't aimed at you or made with you in mind doesn't mean you can't make it your own. Even if a music or scene doesn't "belong" to you, you can belong to it -- hip hop being the paradigm example here of a music whose signal is received as a Call by huge numbers of people across the globe despite the fact that it was not really beamed at them in the first place .

Talking of trivia and its life-affirming value, here's the missus celebrating the TV micro-trend of gay-hosted talk-shows, namely Isaac Mizrahi and Graham Norton (whose show is beginning to catch on here via BBC America.

If it was available on the web I would also link to a provocative piece entitled "Thick Plus: Dumbing Up In the Age of Consumer Enlightenment" by Steven Daly and Mark Jordan, as it represents a sort of opposing view, and contains an obliterating critique of Norton as part of a general broadside against the cult(ure) of "Irony, Frivolity, Cheekiness, Glibness, Knowingness, Campness", whic together constitute in the authors's words "Dutch Elm disease of the soul". The piece focuses on mostly-UK manifestations of meta-popcult that laughs at itself or encourages the viewer to see through it/feel superior to it even as they consume/enjoy it. Robbie Williams is a paradigm figure here. Seeing Robbo a few months ago on the MTV Europe awards I was struck by the fact that while he truly excels at all the marginal aspects of being a pop star--going on chat shows, doing MTV Cribs, all situations where his blend of charm and smarm work wondrously--he's truly pisspoor at the traditionally central functions of the pop star, like dancing, singing, projecting songs with emotional conviction, being sexy (he looks like a cross between Norman Wisdom and Grant Mitchell). As he sings he's constantly meta-mugging and pulling smirky grimaces, stepping outside his own performance to mock himself (rolling his eyes) and the process. It's like schmaltz with the camp appreciation in-built, showbiz that undermines itself by drawing attention to its own staging and overstatement. "Let me entertain you" my arse.

A barely controlled rant (and co-written by a former member of Orange Juice to boot!) "Thick Plus" struck a chord when I read it about a year ago, 'cos the whole syndrome of heterosexualised camp had been on my mind, initially spurred by thinking about Radiohead and whether they represented a return to earnestness, the unabashed seriousness of Rockism, and whether that was a good thing or not. What interested me particularly re. "Thick Plus" with its jibes against Norton and Robbo (what is his sexuality, exactly?) was how one negotiates the sticky problem of critiquing mainstreamed camp as a new decadence without ending up with this classic polarity: a stern and forward-thrusting "heterosexual modernism" that opposes itself to effete postmodern irony (superficial, celebrity-worshipping, inauthentic, gossipy/bitchy, trivia-obsessed). In pop terms, that polarity (culture-warriors versus fops, basically) would translate to something like Young Gods versus Pet Shop Boys, or more up to dately, Gabba-Garridge versus Electroclash. I suppose the crucial if subtle distinction here is that a sensibility that was dissident in its original gay context (after all, didn't camp, with its acutely heightened sense of irony and awareness of the performative, constructed nature of sexual-social roles, historically originate as a survival strategy in gay culture? Susan Sontag, are you out there? drop us a line, love, willya?) takes on a different aspect when embraced by the hetero mainstream. So, er, that must mean it's alright to think Graham Norton a silly and vaguely pernicious twat then, right?