FAVE SINGLES OF 2002

1/ DIZZY RASCAL – “I Love You” (white label)

And this year the criteria are… surprise, surprise, surprise. When the bass-blasts tear through like Rotterdam Terror Corps and the electro claps scythe ‘n’ shear like stressed metal, “I Love You” hits with the force of an aesthetic ambush: this ain’t UK garage as we’ve known it. Then the rap enters--a high-pitched male voice, weirdly poised between distraught and derisive: Roll Deep’s Dizzy Rascal making his solo debut--and you know you’re witnessing the birth of the New Thing; #8 in a series of convulsive renewals with the hardcore/pirate radio continuum. I want to believe this is the real-deal paradigm shift so much that I can’t trust what my ears are telling me: that it is.

Must have heard this about ten times on the pirates before anybody played the actual A-Side, the vocal cut. Increasingly the dubstrumental flipsides of top tunes seem to be preferred, as backing tracks for MC’s freestyling. It’s mostly Dizzy, with a girl cutting in now and then, and even after a score of listens I still don’t quite have a grip on the lyrics, whether there’s a narrative as such. It’s more like a panoramic, fractured overview of modern romance, unified by a consistent harshness of tone that mingles contempt, coldness, callousness, me-I-disconnect-from-you. Meanwhile, the fembot’s lobotomised voice incanting “I-love-U” in speak-and-spell tones seems to be there to parody or puncture the vacuousness of Barbie-style love und romance. Chilling but thrilling.

2/ DJ MARKY & XRS featuring STAMINA MC – “LK (Carolina Carol Bela)” (V Recordings)

After seven years of sweltering humidity Manhattan-style, I actually found summer in London---near-constant rain, the lowest amount of sunshine in a couple of decades---literally refreshing. Wearing a sweater in August: what a buzz! Besides, who needed sunshine with “LK” supplying the summer vibes? Marky Mark & XRS’s drum’n’bossa reworking of a Jorge Benjor & Toquinho tune from 1969 is the first D&B record I’ve paid money for since 1997. And it would hit our rented living room like a bolt of joy, either with the inanely-upful-yet-irresistible MC vocal or as the instrumental version.

Must admit there was a great vibe emanating from the drum’n’bass pirates this summer; the scene seems always to be on the verge of a comeback, but the music never quite makes it for me—good to see vocals and pop sensibility making a reappearance, but the beats are just too linear, still stuck in the one-bar loop rut that Tim Finney @ Skykicking’s identified as drum’n’bass’s post-techstep downfall. Likewise the beats are the least interesting thing about “LK”, supplying propulsiveness but nothing else; what makes it sublime is the plangent and sparkling cat’s cradle that is the pizzicato acoustic guitar figure, the gulf-stream currents of warm bass, and the nape-tingling vocal melody (hard to tell if it’s a straight lift from “Carolina Carol Bela”, or whether vocal science has been been brought to bear in repatterning it). Apparently this tune wiped the floor with Fischerspooner on Top of the Pops, which is just icing on the cake.

3/ MUSICAL MOB—“Pulse X (VIP Mix)” (Inspired Sounds Records)

Backing track of the year. Literally: it’s only raison d’etre is as a launching pad for freestyles. “Pulse X” (just one of a series of mixes: “Y”, “Z” etc) raises the same question as “Grindin’”: is this even music? Strictly speaking, it’s unlistenable on its own, outside the mix, and all the way from beginning to end. It barely has structure, just alternates between three simple, pared-to-the-bone patterns; rhythmic propulsion stripped of all affect, bar an aura of bleak purposiveness. Apparently people on the scene use the term “eight bar” to describe this style of nouveau 4-to-the-floor garage, ‘cos after eight bars it switches. Musical Mob’s own term is “raw for the floor” (the title of another of their tunes, which I yet to hear, at least knowingly). In “Pulse X”’s wake, there’s a whole mini-genre of this stuff, just beats and acrid bass, tunes like Rolldeep's "Creeper": not DJ tools, which is how such minimal and tracky tuneage functions in other genres like techno, but MC tools.

Apart from working as the spartan backdrop for the MC to ride, a beatscape to negotiate, the other main use of “Pulse X” is to be dropped for a minute or less, simply to rachet up the intensity level. When that doom-boom pulsekick pounds, boo! It’s a track that’s designed to be dropped, rewound once, maybe twice, and then mixed out again as swiftly as possibly.

A few months ago I googled to find out whatever I could about Musical Mobb, which turned out to be hardly anything, but it did pull up an old ILM thread from the early summer (the topic was trends in 2002 and whither-next for music). And there was “Pulse X”, mentioned in passing as “UK garage’s nadir”, a death-knell. Hmmm, maybe it is, within UKG's own aesthetic terms. But in creating its own scale of values and desirable qualities (concussive, punitive, flagellant, desexed, joy-stripped: Swans’ Cop meets Schoolly D’s “PSK What Does It Mean” meets Rotterdam Termination Source's "Poing") this track creates its own perverse aesthetic universe. Like “I Love You”, it signals the birth of the New Thing.

4/ LAID BLAK – “Scream & Shout” (Moist)

It’s not all darker-than-thou UK gangsta menace, this garage rap biznizz. All kinds of voices—playful, humorous, downright affable—can seize this moment. There’s room for Busta Rhymes dementia (see Robloe & Kin featuring Nor-T Jack Fever’s “Bounce”, below), for Shaggy-style comic loverman braggadochio, for Barrington Levy-like tender charm. Flitting between the last two modes, here’s Bristol crew Laid Blak and this overlooked gem of a tune, which is about as far from garage rap’s customary skrewface as possible. The bit where a tipsy-sounding Mc Joe Peng mumbles mawkishly “he is a nice and decent fellow, I am a nice and decent fellow, we’re all nice and decent fellows” might be my favorite vocal moment of the year. He’s such an amiable sort he can even get away with a move-on-up positivity sermon without making you cringe: “I don’t mean to make you paro/but what about tomorrow?/If we continue with this way of life we’re heading for pure sorrow/And what about our children?/What future have we gave them?/Enjoy it now ‘cos when it’s gone expect a little mayhem/I’m talking to my brethren/I’m talking to my sistren/It’s time for us to pick up the fight ‘cos we want our children to live right.” The jaunty “Original Vocal Mix” is the one to go for, reminding me slightly of prime Madness, but the more garagey DJ Lewi Dirty Vocal Mix is also good.

5/ GK ALLSTARS – “Garage Feeling” (GK Allstars)

This chart’s fastest riser; a week ago it would have been just crinkling the edge of the Top 20. “Garage feeling, come on ravers, feel what I’m feeling” is the chorus lick, but it doesn’t feel like garage: the ominous glower of suppressed thunder running behind most of this track is more redolent of the blaring noise-riffs on Trace/Nico/Ed Rush/Fierce tunes from ’96 (i.e. the kind of dirgefunk that originally drove the jungle massive into the garage in the first place). A lot of garage rap, it’s like No U Turn if they’d used MCs, and the MCs tried to match the sheer toxicity of the noise with their lyrics. The No U Turn boys talked about wanting to “hurt people” with their beats, of being on a “hurter’s mission”, and that’s what most of the MCing is about: verbal maiming, ego-mangling, rubbing people’s faces in their nobody status. Not this tune, though: “Garage Feeling” is a celebration, albeit one queerly pitched between euphoria and dread: a communal anthem for a scene organized around the dream of leaving behind your community and achieving megastardom. What’s to celebrate? Just the struggle, the determination, the confidence that you will triumph. Shining in the darkness.

6/ STYLES – “Good Times’ (Ruff Ryders)

B-boys on E, slight return. Well, the hip hop/Ecstasy raveolution didn’t quite pan out, but a handful of mersh-rap tunes this year continued the eerie-echoes-of-ardkore syndrome. Most notably this Swizz Beatz/Saint Denson co-production of the first single off the debut solo album by Styles, second-fiddle to Jadakiss in those unloveable Lox. Speeding up and doubletracking old-soul diva Freda Payne into a brace of bliss-giddy hummingbirds, this is pure ’92 business, complete with synth-gurgles out of “Papua New Guinea,” a subliminal stab pattern groove that’s like hardcore running at quarter tempo or even slower, and love-song-subverted-into-drug- song cheekiness (Freda’s swoony “I get high high high high/high on your memory high on your memory”). Except, except, this tune’s not about E, it's about weed. And it’s as harrowing and nihilistic a glimpse into the motivations for some kinds of recreational drug use as any smack or crack confessional. “I get high as a kite/I’m in the zone/All alone/Muthafucka case I’m dying tonight… I’ma smoke ‘til my lungs collapse…. Yeah I smoke like a chimney/Matter fact I smoke like a gun when a killer see his enemy... Shit, I get as high as I could/Cos if you see things/like I see things/I’ma die in the hood.” This ain't Cheech & Chong. With the fade-out's sign-off "I am the ghost/floating" making a chilling link between getting wasted and gangsta's "we already dead" fatalism, the title “Good Times” emerges as bitterly ironic--like Chic’s song of the same name was actually intended to be, as opposed to how it was taken by the disco nation.


7/ PLATINUM 45 featuring MORE FIRE CREW – “Oi!” (Go Beat)

Like “Bound 4 Da Reload” this took me about six hearings before I could get my head round it: so harsh, so rigid (those dead-eyed looped “hey”’s and cold cold claps), and, like “Reload”, so ruthlessly amelodic it initially appears to be completely hookless. But as with “Reload”, repetition proves it to be insanely contagious and something of a landmark release: a real generation divider, bearing the same relation to UKG-as-was that the first Casio-driven dancehall tunes like ‘Sleng Teng’ did vis-à-vis roots reggae. The jabbered words remain largely unintelligible to these ears, though, and I still haven’t worked out how you’d dance to it: the core pulse seems most suited to the pogo, believe it or not.

8/ VITALIC-- “Poney Part One” (International Deejay Gigolo)

Did this even come out in 2002? Heard it on the dancefloor a lot this year, though, and think maybe it got re-released in some form; what the hey. As Tom Ewing observed on NYLPM, this is not a song so much as a sound; in that sense it’s much more techno in spirit than Nu-Wave. It’s as if glamour somehow abandoned its human husks and became a freefloating ectoplasmic entity, a spectral incandescence, a brilliantine trembling and aching of the air itself. “Poney Part One” is the best example of electroclash’s definining irony/liability: for a genre dedicated to bringing back songs and stars, its best tunes are depersonalized instrumentals. If “Poney”’s magnesium-majesty were anything like the norm, the nu electro would fulfil and surpass the hype a hundredfold.

9/ CLIPSE – “When The Last Time” (Arista)

Does the world really need another Lox? “Obnoxious with the women”, endlessly referencing the powders that made their wealth and laid waste to their community, faces frozen in masks of disdain, leaving a trail of ho’s in their wake like used condoms, the aptly named Malice and Pusha T are not nice fellows. Still, for the Neptunes’ maddening noise-riff (gets me flashing on SMF’s
h-core classik “Rush Stimulator”), for Kelis chick-lost-her-mind vocal loop, and for this killer couplet about a girl stepping into his car--“She know from the beginning/She added to the list of them chicks that I done bin in”—I must confess I find this impossible to resist.

10/ GENIUS KRU – “Course Bruv“ (Kronik)
Like Laid Blak’s “Scream & Shout”, this tune (which came out late in 2001 I believe, but I loved it this year, so…) is loveable because Genius Kru are just so goddamn amiable. They just wanna spread “nuff love” and they’ll even share their drink with you, ye olde rave stylee. The brain-infesting chorus goes:
Male Voice: Can I have a sip of that?
Genius Kru: Course bruv!
Sexy Husky-Voiced Female: Can I have a sip of that?
Genius Kru (going up slightly in pitch): Course luv!!

The whole tune, with its ditzy string-section and bubblebath synth-swirls, is like an endless carousel loop of bonhomie. “Still having fun inside the party/Still got the Rolies and the ladies/Still don’t wanna hurt nobody.” Love it to the bone.

11/ PITMAN – “Phone Pitman/Pitman Sez” (Pitman)

Hip hop is so massive as a cultural influence in Britain now that it has spawned its own micro-genre of parody rap, with an undercurrent (a la Ali G) of genuine anxiety about the (Black) Americanisation of UK youth. But this 7 inch single, purportedly by a rapping Yorkshire miner, wouldn’t be half so hilarious if it didn’t actually have an authentic North-of-England flow that actually works as hip hop: the droning phlegmatic stolidity of the voice, its baleful bulk dragging through the beat. It’s a joke, except it sort of isn’t. As per Terry in The Streets’ “Irony of It All”, the UK has its own thugz, and while they don’t carry Uzi, you’d still do well to cross the road to avoid them. (Won't quote any lyrics, because if I started I'd end up quoting them all, like kids in the schoolyard the day after everyone's favorite sitcom).

12/ HEARTLESS CREW – “The Heartless Theme aka The Superglue Riddim” (Warner)

More positive G-rap: a wonderfully jaunty groove hooked around an insouciant whistling synth (like the kind of chirpy early-bird
milkman who drives you up the wall) while Heartless Crew rap about how their success is all down to years of dedication and honest graft dating back to the early Nineties: “When we go shopping buy the latest design/That that that that that’s mine/Heartless Crew we bought the whole shop/Some people thought that we hit the jackpot/Or if we done a move that was hot/but nah nanana nah we been working hard.” And if you thought their name signified war-of-all-against-all ruthlessness, think again: they’re heartless cos “our hearts are inna the music.” Aaah.

13/ JA RULE feat ASHANTI – “Always On Time” (Murder Inc.)
Ashanti’s golden filtered vocal might be the most gorgeous sliver of melody this year, and Ja Rule remains as loveably ludicrous as ever, from his DMX-to-the-power of 10 honey’n’gravel voice to his dress sense, which in the video for this song makes him look like he’s in Pilot or Sailor or like some superfly version of John Lennon in the early Seventies.

14/ MC GOD’S GIFT versus TEEBONE – “Tribute to 32 MCs” (Solid City)

A testament to the importance of MCs in UK garage, this tune pays homage to thirty-two true originals—from founding fathers like Creed, Kie, Sharky P, Munchie, PSG, Neat, Blakey, Charlie Brown (RIP), right through to nu-skool boys like Neutrino, Wiley, Asher D, Romeo. And what better method than the sincerest form of flattery? Expertly forging their signature licks and trademark catchphrases, God’s Gift crams so much V.I.B.E. into such small space, it’s enough to make your head explode.

15/ THE STREETS – “Let’s Push Things Forward/All Got Our Runnins” (Locked On)

An album artist, obviously, but if you’re going to record an Aesthetic Manifesto/Call-to-Arms you might as well release it as a single. But I’m mentioning this mainly for the B-Side “All Got Our Runnin’s”, one of my favorite tracks on the pre-release version of Original Pirate Material, but at the last minute inexplicably pulled and replaced by “Don’t Mug Yourself”. As well as being very funny and touching in a Madness-in-dejected--but-still-jaunty-vein sort of way, this song is totally radical in UK garage’s flash-yer-cash context: all spend and no thrift, the protagonist is paying for last week's "living for the moment" and struggling to make it ‘til next pay day.

16/ WILEY KAT featuring BREEZE, DANNY ISHANCE & JET LEE– “I Will Not Lose” (Wiley Kat)

In the quasi-orchestral mode of Pay As U Go Kartel’s “Know We” and Wiley & Roll Deep’s “Terrible”, this is a U.K. counterpart to Eminem’s “Lose Yourself”, the 8 Mile soundtrack megahit about seizing your opportunities ‘cos you may only have one chance to blow. As the idea of collective advancement fades from the U.K.’s popular memory, we seem to be becoming more and more American: suckers for the anyone-can-make-it lie that is the USA’s great ideological sleight of hand. Something about the way Wiley seems to almost choke up on the word “lose” in the chorus “I will not lose/Never, no way, not ever,” while martial tympani boom beneath him and a cello mournfully aches, seems to intimate that deep down he knows he might very well lose; and that winning in itself, within the terms of the game-as-set-up, is a kind of defeat. Because to make it means you have to leave so many behind.

17/ SOMETHING J/DJ MAXXIMUS – “Mercedes Bentley Vs Versace Armani” (Warp)

From the real thing to an IDM parody of 2step (Squarepusher ‘My Red Hot Car’ style). Well, not exactly: the story goes that DJ Scud was visiting these guys in Germany, and at some point tried to explain what UK Garage was about, as a culture, and played them a few tunes. And this track was the guys’ subsequent attempt to fabricate, from hazy memory, their own idea of UKG. Actually, it sounds more as if No U Turn had jumped ship from drum’n’bass in ’97 and really crudely leaped on the speed garage bandwagon. The more fucked-up and lurching “Dub Plate Remix” is the killer version. Like Scud/Errorsmith/I-Sound’s Roots Rock Ravers EP of last year, or the music of Hellfish & Producer, it’s the kind of phantasm-sound that makes you wish there really existed an entire subculture constructed around it.

18/ LUDACRIS – “Move” (Def Jam South)

It’s hard to take Ludacris seriously when he tries “menace”, but the groove itself intimidates with its slow-moving and bullying bulk. I especially like the scrapey drum sounds like a lion’s claws lazily worrying its prey to death.

19/ THE FOO FIGHTERS-- "All My Life" (major label)

I always thought this group were the definition of mediocre, and never understood why one of the great drummers of our time would abandon the kit for the mic’. But hey, he’s got another great drummer behind him, and this is the most dynamic and excitingly structured mainstream rock song I’ve heard in a while.

20/ JURASSIC 5 – “What’s Golden” (Interscope)

Bassline! But in truth I only really like this ‘cos it reminds me of The Stranglers! Seriously – the fuzzy melded keyboard/bass groove could be right off No More Heroes or Black and White, it’s a dead ringer for “Bitchin’” or “Nice “n’Sleazy” or even “Dead Ringer” itself. So domineering is that groove, I’ve yet to pay a second’s attention to the rhymes.

21/ BIG TYMERS– “Oh Yeah” (Cash Money)

What I like about this—apart from the supremely nifty and nubile groove—is its unexpected tone of monogamous affection and tenderness. This song is borderline marital! “No need to use a rubber/I'm your number one stunna/Now look what we done did/Messed around and had kids.” Probably just a calculated ploy to please the ladies, but could it be the Hot Boys have grown up?

22/ BLACK OPS Vol 3– “Howlin (Sublow Pressure)/Theme” (Black Ops)

With its bleep’n’bassy neo-electro sound and titular echo of Unique 3, ‘Theme’—so minimal they couldn’t be bothered to give it a proper title—suggests a Moebius loop of rave history. 1989: B-boys turn into ravers/2002: ravers turn back into rappers. But it’s “Howlin’” that’s the tear-out tune here: faecal blare of acid-bass, lupine whinny of synth, and funky-shuffle breakbeats that sound simultaneously frisky and ponderous, like the drumsticks are made of lead. Black Ops cru: one to watch for 2003.

23/ ROBLOE & KIN featuring NOR-T JACK FEVER---“Bounce” (Locked On)

In the gibbering-loon-on-the-mic tradition of Busta Rhymes, Slarta John and ragga deejays too numerous to list, the preposterously named Nor-T Jack Fever rides a limb-dislocating, wildly bucking robo-rodeo groove somewhere at the intersection of garage, dancehall, and Miami bass. Oddly the overall effect isn’t comic but faintly disturbing.

24/ THE STROKES – “Someday” (RCA)

With this song/video I finally got The Strokes: they’re the American Supergrass, right? The whole thing is all about the pleasures of being young: smoking cigs, drinking too much, staying up late, the odd bit of shagging, having good hair. And then writing incredibly tuneful and endearing (if slightly wet) anthems about it all.

25/ MISSY ELLIOTT – “Work It” (The Gold Mind)

Not nearly as good as last year’s “Get Your Rinse On”: the groove sounds kinda clumpy when heard on a big system, the garbled
vocal hook gets annoying real quick, the verses see Missy blatantly biting Busta Rhymes’s flow, and overall, the whole song seems to be little more than a concatenation of ultimately grating gimmicks and novelty effects. But for the ace video (that little white girl rocks!) and just the way Missy says “get your hair did,” this earns a smidgeon of affection.

The runners up:

Kevin Blechdom, I Love Presets EP and Your Butt EP; Clipse, “Grindin’”; K2 Family, "Danger"; 50 Cent, “Wanksta”; Purple Haze Crew, “Messy”; Dem Lott, "Dem Lott's Ere Now"; Adult., “Me and My Rhythm Box” [aka Adult’s “CompuRhythm Version” remix of Soul Oddity’s remix of Phoenicia’s “Odd Jobs”, on the Odd Jobs: Discrimination EP]; Eminem, “Lose Yourself”; Saftey Scissors Versus Kit Clayton, Ping Pong EP; Nas, “Made You Look”; Ultrasound feat. Elizabeth Troy and Specialist Moss, "Heavyweight"; The Rapture, “ House of Jealous Lovers”; Ashanti, “Foolish”; Groove Chronicles, "Riddim Killa"; Tiga & Zyntherius, “Sunglasses At Night”.

Fave Singles of 2002 should be up by week's end...

A typically interesting and elegantly written piece by Momus on what he calls “Sound Dust”, aka laptoptronica. Two things somewhat disconcerting here, though. First, as several people have pointed out on an ILM thread (which Momus links to at the end of his piece), for an “I have seen the future” declaration, it’s kinda tardy: this has been going on for a good half-decade, was theorized/manifesto-ed in the Wire and elsewhere (Mille Plateau sleevenotes etc) way back, and indeed many of its original advocates have succumbed to doubts and/or ennui, as the problems with the approach have emerged (the peculiar generic-ness and homogeneity of the glitch/click genre--for a supposed infinite universe of sound it sure sounds kinda samey and hidebound by its own conventions; also the sheer tear-your-hair-out tedium of seeing laptop stuff done as live performance). The other aspect, which Momus glides by with a “this doesn’t worry me” although pour moi it’s the most worrisome thing, is the extent to which this globe-spanning rhizome of sound-pulverisers is in bed with Official Culture: museums, art galleries, the Queen Elizabeth Hall, academic symposia, etc. It seems that this area of sound design/glitchtronica is being consciously developed as the junior wing of High Culture. And for me that’s quite problematic. It’s not exactly Deleuzian, being reliant on institutional support and governmental subsidy. Anything connected with museums tends to reek of sterility: keep your voice down respectfulness, edification, the absence of social energy. History would suggest that the Jamaican model of Social Darwinist cultural production (fierce grass-roots competition to achieve economic power and aesthetic triumph, resulting in an endless quest for “fresh”: both to lure consumers and to win innovator-kudos among your producer peers), generates better results than the French model of top-down patronage. The Jamaican model underpins not just dub and dancehall, but hip hop and the entire UK hardcore (rave>jungle>garage) continuum; the French model produced IRCAM. Nuff said.