This one is for Grammar Hammer, who got all excited about Lime when I announced the Hi-NRG tape, only to be cruelly deprived of even a SINGLE Lime song. And for the people who came to the show in Québec this weekend.
Most people aren't aware of this, but for a brief period in the 1980s Montreal was like the WORLD CAPITOL OF DISCO. Or one of a handful of capitols, anyway. This was right after everything disco-related in New York clubland and the US record industry had ground to a halt and become terribly unhip (the so-called "Death of Disco", to hear rock critics speak of it), but before Europe's Hi-NRG and Eurobeat scenes really took over. It was a weird transitional phase, wherein electronics gradually took over for live instruments—a crucial step on the road from disco to house. Much like its close relative Italo-disco, a lot of the Québécois Disco stuff is still big with house DJs here in Chicago. I found out about it through bargain-bin shopping as I was growing up in Kansas City, and it's always been one of my very favorite musical styles.And before you discophobes start yelping: Yes, it's corny. Yes, the lyrics are ridiculous. Yes, it's saccharine and blatantly commercial and synthetic and manufactured and all that junk we're taught to hate about music. But it's also amazing. It's really forward-thinking. And INSANELY catchy. Enjoy.
Ok, first things first. I AM HALF-WAY DONE. One half-year of mixtapes successfully hammered out. wheee!
Anyhoo, to mark the half-way point I figured I'd throw in a mix that a lot of people have been asking for (droon, joe joe, matthew e., and others)—a mix of ragga jungle. This is really the genre that got me started as a touring DJ / producer in the global sense: my first releases were ragga jungle records, and my first international gigs were ragga jungle gigs (hi guido & jak & tim & beni!)
So yeah, I decided to throw together a mix of classic ragga jungle tunes.For those of you wondering what the hell "ragga jungle" even means, let me break it down into its components:
Jungle music is a fast, breaks-oriented, bass-heavy genre of British dance music that emerged in the early '90s and later evolved into drum & bass, UK garage, grime, dubstep, bassline, & UK funky.
Ragga is another word for the big, brash, hip-hop influenced dancehall reggae of the 1990s—the stuff where the vocals sound a lot more like rapping than traditional reggae singing.
Add those together & there you go.
It was pretty big in the early-mid-1990s (I'm using "pretty big" in the same sense that dubstep is "pretty big" right now), and its heavy use of reggae samples made it somewhat divisive in the proper reggae scene. As a fun little side note, here are two dancehall tunes from 1995 (both on the WigWam riddim by A-Class Crew) that demonstrate the controversy jungle caused in the UK reggae scene:
And now here's the mix. Oh, and for the people who are undoubtedly going to be all "WHERE IS CONGO NATTY?!?!", I'm basically limiting myself to tracks that came out in 1994 and 1995. A mix of newer / second-wave ragga jungle will come later. It will include Congo Natty, so calm down already.
Over the last decade-and-a-half there's been a big disco revival afoot in the dance music (and, really, rock music) communities. Maybe you've noticed: since about 1997, a lot of music has borrowed really heavily from disco, whether it's French house acts like Daft Punk or Dimitri from Paris, or dance rock bands like The Rapture, The Juan MacLean, or even Franz Ferdinand, or next-big-thing dance genres like Electroclash & Blog House. I'm a huge disco person, but to be frank a lot of the disco-influenced output of the last several years has struck me as pretty obnoxious: unoriginal, derivative, shamelessly trendy, etc. Anyway, I've thrown together a little mix of disco revival stuff I've liked over the last decade. Enjoy!
This week I've got a tape of Ghettotech, which for you uninitiated folks is a genre of uptempo dance music we have here in the Midwest. The music (and the name "ghettotech" itself) originated in Detroit, and is essentially sped-up Detroit techno with a heavy dose of Miami bass music and Chicago ghetto house influence. It's fast, it's bass-heavy, it's got a lot of dirty words—it's similar to Juke, but there are some key differences that a lot of people overlook: ghettotech tends to stick to either four-on-the-floor style drum patterns or traditional Miami bass electro drum patterns, whereas juke is a lot more all over the place rhythmically; ghettotech makes a lot less use of the tom tom drum as a melodic instrument; and ghettotech tends to be "techier" or more futuristic sounding, whereas juke has a lot more of a pronounced soul, hip hop, and R&B influence. The last few years have seen a lot of music press types failing to understand this distinction, so take note. Anyway, here's the tape!
This week I've got a mixtape of one of my personal fave genres: Hi-NRG. This was a style of disco that developed in the late 1970s-early 1980s in San Francisco, New York City, and London. Primarily a gay bar staple, Hi-NRG predicted rave culture in a lot of ways: it was a faster, harder, more synth-driven form of disco, tailor-made to the club drugs in fashion at the gay discos where it developed: cocaine, LSD, amphetamines, poppers, quaaludes, ecstasy, and really just about anything else (but those were the biggies).
As New York Hi-NRG DJ / remixer Casey Jones said in David Diebold's book Tribal Rites, “It was a druggy sound. It was an ‘up’ sound. The whole scene in San Francisco at the time pretty much revolved around ‘up’ drugs. The entire gay disco scene has in fact, since the mid to late seventies, been influenced by music which would complement their drug highs.”
For better or worse, a lot of the clichés that permeate both dance music and gay music were really invented in this era (the down-up-down-up eighth-note bassline; the use of bizarro sweepy synth noises as transition devices; the whole concept of "synth stabs"—those short little synth notes on the off beat—which would later evolve into "putting a donk on it"; and the general upward shift in dance music tempos since the disco era, to name a few). I've started this tape with the tune that solidified the genre's name, and taken it from there. Enjoy!
This one is for Grammar Hammer, who got all excited about Lime when I announced the Hi-NRG tape, only to be cruelly deprived of even a SINGLE Lime song. And for the people who came to the show in Québec this weekend. 
