Are you ready for some Brutalist Jungle Tekno?
Just found via sitemeter: Mentasms, which features a post on Jungle and Brutalist architecture - containing a particularly fine paragraph concluding that Dubstep is the hardcore continuum's equivalent to Foster or someone, a mollifying Modernism that merely reassures that the revolutionary moment isn't dead, rather than recharging it. Excellent stuff.
posted by owen hatherley at 1:50 pm
18 Comments:
as an aside DJ Red 'Enta da Dragon' (Twisted Individual Remix) track 2 on Drum and Bass Arena CD 2 is jaw-droppingly hard - brutalist in the sense of being battered with a concrete block.
Nice also to see old Omni Trio sleeves - I can now cry over all the records that went to the charity shop when I moved four years ago - putting away childish thing, bugger...
An intriguing proposition, but I don't quite buy the idea that Brutalism was counter-cultural in the same way that Jungle was. The depressing thought is that we've lost a intrinsic vitality to our actual culture, rather than simply experiencing a lessening head of steam in a revolutionary impulse. The battle at the time, I feel, was won. Brutalism was establishment. It's just that new ideas were able, in the longer run, to out-compete. Foster's new work of the C21 cannot be viewed as claiming a place on the same continuum, or as pretending to radicalism - it just is what it is, another new idea that has out-competed the older ones.
Brutalism got to inform the architecture of the National Theatre, but Jungle was never (so far as I'm aware) on Top of the Pops.
Brutalism as establishment - yes, and that's definitely one of the things that the likes of Ghost Box play off - the weirdness of the establishment under social democracy - so obv it's nowhere near an exact fit (although Mark Owens' New Brutalists-New Romantics is possibly a more exact comparison) However I love the way the proprietor of Mentasms writes of both forms as things that you have to make an effort to like, and that once you've gained that taste you can't see the world in the same way again.
Let's also remember that brutalism was not 'out-competed', it was subjected to at least a decade of horrified public criticism via everyone from the GLC to Prince Charles, something from which it is only just recovering, and as art history at that.
Also, one shouldn't totally write off Foster as divorced from any kind of radicalism - he did after all start off by working with Buckminster Fuller, and Britain had no place for his work until only around a decade ago. Perhaps Foster (and glassy high-tech in general) like Brutalism, is an establishment aesthetic which has roots in something non-establishment. Although it's a long shot...
(also the foster point was mine and Mentasms should not be held responsible!)
"Jungle was never (so far as I'm aware) on Top of the Pops."
If I remember correctly, Shy FX feat. UK Apache's 'Original Nuttah', whilst the most well known example, was only the tip of the iceberg as regards jungle in the pop charts. And I think they were on Top Of The Pops as well!
'Original Nuttah' is one of the greatest records ever made. The video is also very exciting.
But I think after that, and M Beat's 'Incredible' Jungle tried everything possible to make sure it didn't get on Top of the Pops, for better or worse...
It's a connundrum is this, and it's got me thinking. Owen, I think you're right that the key thought here is that difficulty in art/building/music has a tranformative effect, but what if (to put aside any distiction between architecture and music for a moment) the difficult, the avant garde, is becoming more, um, avant, further away than intelligent decision-makers can reach.
There does seem a disconnect, to me, between the politicians and other pragmatists the avant garde were able to inform with no great difficulty in the 50s-70s, and the situation today.
Perhaps you're right that this is purely an art historical perspective, and as a result I can't help but see the 70s as a turning point in how the 'difficult' was viewed by elites. That's why, after 30 years or so of this situation, we're compelled to think of Brutalism as 'radical', when in fact, before the crisis of modernity, it would simply be seen as 'progressive'. No struggle for accepatance, or any particular need to serve time or pay dues.
The Mentasm piece is great (Joey Beltram reference?) and I liked the emphasis on the formal closure of Jungle by dubstep. Casting my mind back to the time I also remember how it was articulated in class / 'race' / consumption terms initially. The turn to dubstep was a turn to the 'classy', sophisticated, 'dressing up / going out', champagne (was it Cristal back then?) aesthetic. It also seemed to be coded as 'black' (although this may be a dubious extrapolation by me). This was directed at dirty, grimy, 'hybrid'
Jungle - supposing an overlap between aesthetic and experience. It very much posed itself as a revenge on 'proletarian' Jungle.
As an aside reading Fredric Jameson's 'Marx's Purloined Letter' and I noted this 'Ressentiment is the primal class passion', although it seems to fit my bewildered attitude to dubstep at the time and still today.
you got it very wrong ben
Mmm, 2-step and dubstep have become very different things, although the latter derives from the moodier b-sides of the former, and 2-step seems more aspirational WC as a reaction to an increasingly studenty jungle (with techstep, etc)
oops, what an idiot (thanks anonymous / Owen). Getting too old to comment on 'modern music' obviously. Tail between legs retreats
Reading Mentasm's piece again, I feel that - rather than the work of any particular "High Tech" star architect - a better analogy for dubstep might be the Brutalism Lite seen in high profile buildings in inner urban developments that are trying for some "edginess".
This style is strongly correlated with regeneration speak such as "cultural quarters".
[By my definition, Brutalism Lite =2/3rds IKEA modernism + 1/3 exposed polished concrete for show.]
Nah, comparing music styles to architecture styles by describing the variations in drums, bass, rhythms uses a totally subjective interpretation. If one wants to find common ground between brutalist style and music styles, they can also go for techno, ambient, minimal, industrial, hell even heavy metal. The attributes that are compared could quite easily apply to most modern urban or electronic musical styles.
Of course they can, that's what's interesting. Folk who like aforementioned urban and electronic music styles tend in my experience not to have really ever thought about the environment around them in the same way they do about sound, partly maybe cos architecture seems like such a rarefied discipline. I can't see why a man who appreciates Black Sabbath (or No U-Turn, or Marvellous Cain) should be so unlikely to similarly appreciate the Bull Ring (or Rodney Gordon, or Thamesmead), that's what I'm getting at in a half-arsed and tangential way.
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