UK Garage In 2001 – Down Down BIZZNIZZ

Part 1: The Scene

I’m obsessed, I know; I bang on about it endlessly, analysing minute shifts and gradations, imagining radical mutations that only exist in my head, devoting reams of print space to nothing much in particular. And yet, despite all this, UK Garage is an awfully difficult area of music for me to write about. Difficult because I’m aware of how personally involved I am in the music’s success – an involvement that cleverer and healthier listeners tend to shy away from. Sometimes I feel like my patronage – downloading tracks, buying compilations, visiting clubs by myself if necessary, and then turning those experiences into something I can write about that might interest others – is all that keeps the style on its feet, keeps it generating delights for me in some sort of elaborate karmic feedback loop. To be obsessed with an artist is one thing, but to have such an attachment to something so abstract as a ìsceneî or ìmovementî is quite another, and even then UK Garage seems an odd choice, requiring a particularly skewed worldview. Clearly I’m not the right person for an impartial assessment.

For to immerse oneself fully within garage is not just to enjoy the odd track, but to wholeheartedly buy into - and believe in the success of - a musical narrative that stretches over a decade, encompassing whole genres (’ardkore, jungle, etc.) within a broader sound that can perhaps best be called ìthe sound of the piratesî. It’s to become so intimately associated with that story’s sonic twists and turns that the style’s constant musical characteristics actually become objective values in themselves, bestowing worth upon a track simply by being present. In fact UK Garage, much more than the sounds that preceded it, is music about that story, distilling every worthwhile element into a heady mixture that is undeniably ìpirateî music. In this way, garage is sonically more true to itself than jungle; the producers have a better instinctive understanding of the passage of the broader narrative they’re swept up within, and maybe because of that seem to know better where it should go next.

But where did garage go in 2001? The unbelievable rise of So Solid Crew excepted, from the outside it’s hard to tell that it went anywhere at all. It’s in fact arguable that by the end of 2000, garage had no sonic stories left to tell, having completed its street-to-academy progression by achieving both pop crossover (Arful Dodger, Craig David) and serious muso acclaim (MJ Cole, Wookie), not to mention its own breakaway sub-genre in the form of ìbreakbeat garageî. At any rate, it may have seemed as though garage had left itself little space to develop, and that the rise of the MC was a result of this: the areas of progression within the scene would now be vocal, lyrical and cultural, but not musical.

Garage’s chart-action less pronounced last year too, with less fabulously sparkling pop gems lighting up the higher reaches than during the Golden Age of The Artful Dodger. In truth there were probably more garage pop hits last year than prior, but their sheer diversity - from Misteeq’s enthusiastic helium-pop to Oxide & Neutrino’s angst-rave to DJ Pied Piper’s happy-go-lucky MC-vehicle to The Streets’ oddball geezers – undermined any impression of a full-frontal assault. But as any music critic will tell you, diversity and disparateness doesn’t equal interesting stories.

Instead, 2001 may go down as the year of breakbeat garage, and that would be a bit of a shame because last year this development, which had once seemed potentially invigorating, revealed itself to be a massive red herring. There were a multitude of tracks that followed the same deadening one-bar trudge of looped breakbeat + squelchy bassline, spiked with wacky noises or edgy dialogue sampled from martial arts films; a formula that quickly became played-out to the point of strong irritation. More crucially though, even at its best breakbeat garage comes across as both inessential and little more than a subtractive style: not only are creativity and invention thin on the ground, but the very stylistic foundation it rests upon – the use of a ‘funky’ and ‘natural’ looped break rather than 2-step’s trademark sub-Timbaland beats – excises the dangerousness of garage’s rhythmic excess, replacing it with a reassuring but unexciting familiarity.

At the same time, the sparkling pop-fluff vocal tracks began to lose their attraction, due to the drop in genuinely exciting productions (although as always there were exceptions like Selena’s trembling ìGive It Upî, and of course anything by Mis-Teeq) and the rise in the endless succession of useless remixes. With this radical tapering off at its extreme edges (pop vs. breakbeat), garage’s healthy diversity was beginning to resemble an Achilles’ heel. It’s easy to imagine many garage producers literally recoiling in horror from the twin dooms of over-sugared pop tracks and deeply uninteresting breakbeat dirges; consequently, instead of pulling the style into two distinct groups, these extremes actually cancelled out each other’s magnetic forces. The challenge facing producers was (and remains) discovering how to work past these two pitfalls, as opposed to simply remaining caught between them.