It’s a swizz, bruv! A dissenting Londoner's eye view from Matthew Ingram. “For your info the tempo of the pirates has dropped right down. It’s all crappy Swizz Beatz remakes with bad rapping." Heard a few tracks like this coming through this summer—torpid tempo tunes with doomy fanfare riffs like the theme from Rocky. For some reason, the cheap’n’nasty production values that work with UK garage (and jungle/hardcore before), giving the music it’s ruff-and-ready, made-in-two-minutes charm, only make British rap and R&B efforts sound thin and weedy next to the megabuck phatness of US hip hop (the sheer size of sound in Ludacris's "Move", say). One reason UKG kids have picked up on Swizz and Ludacris must be that elements on those records—certain stab patterns and techno-y sounds—feel ravey. Those down-swooping drones in “Southern Hospitality”, the way “What’s Your Fantasy” actually sounds like a hardcore tune at 16 rpm.

Matthew further avers there's a large hole in my “punk garage” thesis: “hardly anyone is listening to it. HMV on Oxford Street has quartered their Garage bin. ‘There's just no demand for it’ one employee told me”. Well, yeah, 2step’s pop heyday is long gone. But I bet the basement of Blackmarket, or the little UKG specialist shops all over the East End or down Croydon way, are doing as brisk a trade as ever. Wall to wall white labels, of course, the titles written in black marker pen. It does seem like the scene’s gone way WAY underground again: pre-releases that never get properly released, whites that stick around for a few weeks and then that’s it, gone forever. Pirates making their own plates and not letting anybody else have the tunes, just like the reggae sound systems back in the day. If you want to hear it you got to stay locked. Make a tape.

More than anything, this moment--all those So Solid soundalikes with superfast sinuous rapping and warbly male R&B vox coming in at the chorus (very like punk with its glut of Sex Pistols xeroxes), all the abject B-line trax with "detuned churning lower frequencies" that Matthew says make him feel like puking--reminds me of ten years ago, the tail end of ’92. Hardcore, which had been top of the pops all summer, now untouchable, the lowest of the low. A market glutted with white labels, an awful lot of the music pure shite (but also weird one-offs that you hear once and never again, dubplates whose perpetrators suddenly pulled them off the market). Retrospectively, as old skool fiends, we can pick through the dung-stack and find the gems, and even the second-rate and third-rate stuff from '92/93 has appeal---nostalgic charm, historicity, plus we know with hindsight where this was all heading; you can listen to Goldie’s Phil Collins-sampling and truly lousy debut effort and track the lines that connect it to the Darkrider EP or “Terminator.” At the time, though, the output of pirate radio often did sound like an avalanche of garbage, the febrile entropy of a culture devolving. But you could dimly sense that this roiling soupy protoplasm might just be the primordial swamp out of which new life-forms would coalesce. I’d like to the imagine that the cruddy 88 percent of gutter-garridge is actually working like compost, fermenting the new. Shit music as cultural manure! So big up the sewage crews. It's a dirty job but somebody's gotta do it.

Youth of the nation. Check out the riotous code-flow of the text-mess massive. (Link courtesy of Sci-Fi Paul). Seems like literally thousands of crews are springing up across the land, a swarm of ravenous-to-make-it MCs. Dizzy Ras, Rolldeep and Wiley run t'ings this season; "heavyyyyy" and "grimy" and "going on terrible" are all jolly fine things to be or do. And I wonder if this "Demonbass" tune that one chap keeps shamelessly plugging is any cop or not.