RUFF HOUSE: Part 1

YO. Haven't blogged in ages and thought I'd ease myself into with a big splurge of youtube.


Big debates going on ATM about the state of the scene.

Some people think that a return to first principals - in Dance music, this means House - is just what the doctor ordered for the Dubstep scene, and that the space where 'UK Bass' - a vom inducing term that tries to hide that we don't got a sound at the moment - and House collides is a particularly fertile one. I think it probably makes House a bit more interesting and UK music a fuck lot more boring.

But also, I don't see why there's any need for it to happen, when around 2006 Grime producers cottoned onto American and European Funky House - like this:




And rather than subtly incorporate a few UK influences around the edges of this, totally transformed it into something hard, gully and ridiculously fun, bringing it into an amazing tradition of hyper energetic, multi-cultural UK dance music that reaches back through Grime, Dubstep and Garage all the way to Jungle and Rave. UK Funky. This post is basically a 'fuck me, UK Funky was/is/can be so good! LOOK HOW GOOD IT IS.

This time round I'm going to be focusing on the darker, ruffer stuff from 2007-2010. What was great about UK Funky though is the way it mixed this harder aesthetic with loads of amazing gyal tunes, big poppy vocal numbers and kept the ideas of light/dark, male/female, pop song/dj tune gloriously in tension, so I'll look at some of the other strands + the more recent output from the scene in later posts.