Drum and Bass at the House of Fun

http://www.drumnbass.co.za/forum/...

is it so, Justin?

slag> the bit about the article? it's partly true. not quite how they remember it.

@justin- would be cool to hear your opinion on the article...

do you have a link to the article? Or was it back in the era of Student Life magazine?

interested> Firstly, the article was published 10 years ago, and I got a huge amount of flak from it then. I'm a bit surprised people are still going on about it now.

It wasn't about drum and bass per se, but the whole music scene in Cape Town. Don't know why the boys and girl on that board seem to think it was purely an attack on drum and bass. I do admit to having become disillusioned with d 'n b at that time - all that tech step stuff (with some exceptions) wasn't for me, and I definitely had no time for your Aphrodite type stuff either. But the article was general in tone. It was an opinion piece, not some descriptive let's not annoy anyone piece of writing. I thought it was quite funny too! Oh, well.

As for the "intelligent"/"dumb" comments, I have never used the word intelligent to describe music and never will. I didn't call the article "dumb and bass" either. That was courtesy of the sub-editor. Or editor. Who knows. It was ten years ago!

For the record, I was playing drum and bass tunes at the Funktion every Friday night around that time and I still have a fairly sizeable collection. Just moved on to other things is all. This night at the House of Fun is just a once-off bit of, well, fun.

When are people in this town going to stop getting so riled about criticism? While it may not be my thing, the drum and bass scene today seems very healthy to me. That an article written 10 years ago can start a whole thread over there is a bit odd.

slag> It was in SL. I don't have a copy unfortunately. Maybe someone has a back issue and can put it up somewhere?

Just remembered that article got me banned from Pickle parties so I guess it wasn't all bad :)

justin> lol, for real?

It's of huge interest the article, because of how the DNB scene is growing both locally and internationally. It would be a great opportunity for people on both forums to see changing attitudes....I grew up hating techno...

interested> I'd especially hope that some of the "kids" on the forum would make an effort to check this evening out.

There's an intersting thread/bitchfight that started on the sydneyfriction forum that i might post that was about the "intelligent" label. The site is, however, temporarily down.

slag> I don't know how interesting it would be. It was just a bit of a rant really. I'd probably be embarrassed by it if I read it now.

now now Justin, don't be silly, it's the heinous magazine and it's owners who should be burned at the stake. It's better than some journos stealing other people's ideas and then fucking them up, and besdies SL peddles smut to 15 year olds.

Justin> Did Ralph really ban you from Pickle parties for that?

Ralph Borland

Casual*> It wasn't an overt "you're banned" kind of thing, but they refused to book me after that (I'd played at all of the Pickle parties before the article came out) and had a cartoon on their next flyer with me styled as "Mr Badvibes" (or something) coming to ruin everyone's fun. It was hilariously out of proportion. And quite churlish too.

Adam booked me to play at some other thing before Ready D, where I was asked to play a drum and bass set. The irony!!! Ralph remained really pissed off though. Probably still is.

Funny thing is, I can hardly remember what I said in the article and yet here it is getting everyone uptight ten years later.

Justin: Thanks for clearing this up, because i know a couple of people in the Cape Town drum 'n bass scene that are still pissed off at you. It has become somewhat of an urban legend: "Justin Slack, isnt he that guy that...". I remember seeing the cover of the mag "dumb and bass" and thinking, this is not cool. As far as the actual article goes... not sure if i even read it. I think the reason a lot of people got pissed off, especialy Sublime, is that they were working so hard to build the scene at that time and it was going realy well... 300 + people every Sunday at the Piano Lounge, just to have it shot down by, what looked like at the time, to be you and the largest youth magazine in SA. I thought that a scene that was constantly growing deserved some encouragement rather than critisism. It was, and is, a youth movement after all and i think it deserves way more coveridge than what it gets. There are so many small "cool" genres out there with way more support from the media. Anyhow... it's all water under the bridge now and dumb ass bass is going stronger than ever in CPT and worldwide. It's gonna be cool to hear some oldschool beats out again and will give other people a chance to hear it out that didnt have a chance the first time round...

Chin> Thanks for that. I'm somewhat amazed that people are still pissed off. It was a general rant.

Tried to register on the drum and bass forum and respond on that thread but I'm not getting any confirmation mails. Perhaps you can cut and paste what I said? Just to clear the air a bit.

cool... just posted and cross linking.

justin animal> too right about there being a lot of genres that get support from the media because theyre 'cool'.
better to keep it that way, though, for the minute the hacks decide they have found something cool, it starts a process that takes much longer to rebuild than one bad article.
the list is endless: deep house, minimal techno, punk, disco, electro, and many others have all been amazing underground movements that have thrived musically until the media appointed them cool.
the damage inflicted on many of these genres - disco and electro being the prime examples - led to these becoming dirty words.
as i will continue to say ad infinitum, the majority of these genres are meant to be underground forms of music and were never meant for mass consumption.

Chin> Thanks for that.

bobby> I agree with what you said. Disco has only just stopped being a dirty word and is absolutely thriving at the moment in Europe and parts of the states (where Harvey plays) but is now called 'cosmic' or 'balearic' or 'Italo' depending on what strain you're banging out. Electro seems to be on the way back as well, but it has to be followed by the word 'house' apparently.

Justin> I'm sure Ralph has gotten over it.

casual: you used to go to the pickle parties? how old were you then?

Went to a few, not a regular by any stretch of the imagination. Was probably during first and second year of university, so 18/19 I guess.

I just know Ralph and Adam because they were three years above me at Michaelis and their sculptures were rad. Adam used to do those massive balloon sculptures. All I can remember from Pickle was the Smorgasbord poster, the Death of Mr Pickle poster (both of which I still have somewhere) and the colouring in competition they had the one night.

Justin (Animal Chin)> There are these young guys who do the show before us here on Unity Radio in Manchester who I think booked you guys for a night. I'm sure they had Counterstrike on a flyer. They play loads of your stuff too judging by the brief conversations that we have. I think they're called Hectic Harmoniz or something. Ring any bells?

The pickle of the horrendous flyer pickle or was this before that?

FA> mid to late 90's.

Justin>Ah. The hippies picked up the name some years after that.

Casual> i played in manchester in oct last year at a therapy session. cant remember what the club was called... i know the one dewd's dj name is kinda.

Chin> They're all really young - 19/20/21 and there's about 20 of them, so I couldn't tell you what their names are. The leader of the pack is a massive fat dude.

bobbyblank owe>i concur the quickest way to commercialize and destroy a style of music or scene (make that a life style) is to have a number one tune. if its played on a radio station every pleb and wanna be thinks it must be cool even though a week before they heard it and couldnt relate they suddenly swarm like flys to shit.

there is a difficult ballance that needs to take place between keeping a scene 'underground' and making a profit.
if you try to build a scene when is it big enough? is self sustaining enough? not when you want a new car.

Ah yes, SL. That was in the days when they actually used to pay journalists for articles was it Justin? what a joke that mag became.

Top night out on Saturday. Really good old skool drum and bass from Justin and Ash. A pity from the sound bleeding through from upstairs though.

A pity about the sound...

nathan: you went out?

b> yes. And hung out with Regan till about 2. Ha ha. I promise I'll make it out to a KR sometime. Just got to stop feeling so tired on Friday's though.

Saving my Global Breakthrough tickets for the Bug and Ame. I take it you'll form part of the "ultrahomogeneous" line-ups for at least one of them?

nathan> Thanks. Good to see you.

b> Indeed. They paid quite well at that time. Chris Roper was the editor.