tl;dr: In Colour is a 6 or 7/10, South London Is Dead, Long Live South London.
How did Skrillex happen?
It's all very simple, really. You just have to start in Jamaica in the 1950s, as you do with most things.
"Must you explain ALL music the way Grandpa Simpson explains buying a new heel for his shoe?" Yes. Yes I must.
See, they had been getting this music imported from America called "jump blues". It sounds kinda like this. There's a strong shuffle beat and a horn section, among other things. It wasn't the sadder rawer kind of blues from the country - your Robert Johnsons and so on - this was blues made for dancing and general post-war jollity. However, you can only import so many 45's before the US vendors just plain run out of new songs.
So the Jamaicans decided to make some jump blues themselves. They REALLY emphasised that shuffle beat that was already present but subtler in the American stuff and this emphasis would become the basis for most Jamaican music to follow - it's called the skank, and this new Caribbean jump blues variant was called ska. It sounds like this.
Ska was wildly popular in the dancehalls and uniquely West Indian too - a real plus considering Jamaica was newly independent from the mother country and trying to establish its own identity - but this didn't mean Jamaicans stopped buying tunes from their friendly local hegemon - the smoother soul music coming out of American labels like Motown found its way to the island too, and this was reflected in the development of rocksteady in the mid-60s.
Rocksteady sounds like this, or maybe this and if you're wondering how that's different to ska the answer is "really, really subtly". Everything's got just a little bit slower, and a little bit more complex. The horns aren't playing the whole time like they were on "Carry Go Bring Come", they're used more as an accent. The extra time between notes and the influence of heavily produced stuff from Berry Gordy, Phil Spector, etc, meant that the musicians could try out deeper shit too. Check out the background harmonies on "Rocksteady" and "Rudy, A Message To You", and definitely clock how complex the basslines have gotten, that'll be important as we get closer to Skrillex, I promise.
Anyway, rocksteady was mostly music to chat to girls to - like the soul it took its influence from the songs were mainly framed around love, or the loss thereof - and just like soul did in America, rocksteady thus ended up woefully unprepared to deal with the will of the people as the jubilant Freedom Sound of the 1960s soured.
You might know about that bit in the late 60s and early 70s where, as racial tensions in America reached their height, acts like wannabe showtune guy Marvin Gaye and sunny, multiracial funk band Sly and the Family Stone suddenly got DARK. What's Going On?, asked Marvin, and Sly replied There's A Riot Goin' On. Notoriously apolitical Motown didn't just have to deal with Marvin Gaye going off the rails and writing tunes about the Vietnam war and ecology and black men killing their brothers, the Temptations started singing about runaways, it seemed like the Supremes were getting high as hell (they're actually singing about Vietnam too), Stevie Wonder suddenly wanted crazy amounts of autonomy like Marvin had gotten, so he could sing about the new Orwellian world we were all living in. It was all kicking off.
Reggae is actually the Jamaican version of this! Yes, everyone's favourite chill beats to smoke to are actually the rallying cries of a newly independent nation losing its way in the global community and succumbing to gang violence and rampant inequality. So, where rocksteady was clean cut and loved up, reggae was incredibly political. The other key was Rastafarianism. Without wanting to waste even more time than I already have on this tangent to a tangent to a tangent, Rastas are actually a very extreme form of Afrocentric Christianity. The dreads are to imitate Samson from the Book Of Numbers, the colourful hats are the pan-African colours that symbolise their belief that Haile Selassie, emperor of Ethiopia, was maybe the second coming of Christ, they're super distrustful of women like all proper religions are. They just SEEM chill because they smoke weed. Anyway, as these things often go when times are hard, Rastafarianism was becoming super popular across the island. Not just in the shanty towns that had sprung up in the wildly poor areas of Kingston, the capital, but among the restless middle classes too. This means reggae is also super religious.
All this - the politics, the religion, and yes, the weed - combines to make reggae what it is. Tempos are molasses slow, now. This is not necessarily music for the dancehall anymore. The complex basslines and harmonies remain but the mood is different now - the best word is militant. To illustrate this, above are Bob Marley and the Wailers in the mid-1960s. Their hair is short, they're sharply dressed, and they're singing a weepy Paul song about how much they love their girlfriends. Below are Bob Marley and the Wailers less than ten years later, hair long and knotted, deep into Rastafarianism and poverty, singing about setting slave owners on fire and stuff. It's like the "my friend ate ONE weed and this is him now" meme except deadly serious.
As the 70s progressed, certain producers started making a name for themselves in the world of reggae. People like Lee "Scratch" Perry and King Tubby would take popular singles and radically remix and play with them in state of the art studios. This was called dub, and it sounds like this. You can tell this is a dub because you can hear Rupie Edwards adding lots of delay and reverb and other processing to the individual instruments, and you can also hear him chopping stuff up - little slices of guitar, organ, and bell pasted (literally pasted, they were all working with actual tape) all over the song in unnatural arrangements that allowed the recording engineer to perform just as the original reggae song - "Everyday Wondering" by Johnny Clarke in this case - let the singer and band perform. You'll also notice that the bass is heavily exaggerated and it, along with the drums, constitute the vast majority of what's going on here musically. Keep drum and bass in your head for later.
Right, that's enough time in Jamaica. A concurrent development with all this music in the 50s and 60s was great numbers of Jamaicans (along with other West Indians (like my grandparents!), Indian Indians, and other Commonwealth residents) moving to the United Kingdom both for work and to help out the mother country. This is not really taught in school because [general vaguely-socialist ramblings] but these Commonwealth residents firstly felt a great deal of obligation to the UK - I'm not calling it the mother country for banter, this is legitimately how people felt - and wanted to help it in its hour of need (most of the country's eligible workforce was dead for some reason). Secondly, they were invited. My grandparents recall being given presentations by companies like British Telecom, the NHS (my grandmother's eventual employer) and the Post Office (my grandfather's) before they left school urging them to come over. They were not simply coming over here to steal jobs - they had been promised them before they left.
Anyway, along with scotch bonnets, the backbone of the English national football team for years to come, and copious racial tension, Jamaicans brought their music. Second-generation kids (the children of the original immigrants) latched onto the ska and rocksteady their parents carried with them, merged it with the nascent UK punk scene, and formed something called 2 Tone, which sounds like this. The disjointedness and otherworldliness of those mid-70s dub records inspired a lot of post-punk bands to do repetitive bass-heavy shit like this. Of course, the Clash were also heavily influenced by reggae around this time.
The important thing here was the sound system culture that was also brought across. In the aforementioned dodgy ends of Kingston-upon-Caribbean it became part of the culture to get some fuck-off speakers, a "selecter" (we call this a DJ) to play tunes, and an "MC" to 'toast' (kinda like rapping but not quite) over the top of them. This is where dub came in very handy indeed. The bass focus meant you could cause some serious damage playing dub at high volume through proper speakers, and dubs were often vocal-less, or at least not focused on the vocals at all, which made them easy to toast over. This combination of selecters, MCs, dub producers, speakers, and even the speaker designers would coalesce to form a 'sound system'. In the UK, this sound system culture was especially prevalent in Bristol. The guys from Massive Attack, including Tricky, all got their start in that scene.
Here's where things get messy. By the end of the 1980s, other fashions in 'dance' music had taken over from reggae and dub. In Jamaica things had updated a little bit, mostly technology-wise, to dancehall, which sounds like this, but in the UK we'd started raving. People were decamping to random fields across the country, getting sorted for E's and wizz, and dancing to various forms of electronic music until they physically couldn't anymore. One such style was called "breakbeat hardcore"; you took a drum break, looped it, added some hard(core), harsh synth stabs courtesy of techno, or some more upbeat natural piano and vocal sounds courtesy of house music, and you were good to go. It sounds like this. That would splinter off into a lot of subgenres, including that uberfast style of bouncy music with pitched up vocals called "happy hardcore" that's super popular in Northern England and is legitimately best understood as "the shit the kids are MCing over in 'mcing in tesco'", but of course, someone had the bright idea of combining the drums-and-bass-laden approach of breakbeat and the drums-and-bass-laden approach of the post-dub sound systems to form a new genre called jungle.
Jungle sounds like this. Fast drum break loops like in breakbeat, them little fragments of instrumentation just like in dub, MCs toasting to the beat in Jamaican patois just as they had done as part of sound systems for years. It was the perfect music for mid-90s kids too disillusioned for the euphoric rave music of the Second Summer Of Love - it was still danceable but it was noticeably darker. There's a lot of overlap between jungle and 'drum and bass', drum and bass came from jungle, and it's not my area of expertise so I'm not gonna bother delving into the minutiae like I did with ska and rocksteady,
EDIT: my friend harvey who essentially did his dissertation on things like the difference between jungle and dnb says the main difference is the drumming - like I said, jungle is breakbeats, but dnb is bespoke patterns that are thus a) more tailored to the songs they're a part of and b) 'cleaner'-sounding, as you'd expect a programmed drum machine to sound relative to a sample of an acoustic drumkit
but things noticeably change when UK garage (hence UKG) came into being, which sounds like this, or maybe this.
Things are noticeably sweeter, things are also noticeably slower, but we still have MCs chatting shit, and we actually still have that shuffle that's been hanging round since B.B. King's jump blues. It's just now being emphasised by the drums alone, rather than a rhythm guitar or a horn section. Just as jungle was going down far more aggressive paths in the late 90s, UKG appeared, and blew the hell up. This is how everything sounded when I was born. I remember watching the CGI vid for "Sweet Like Chocolate," I remember shouting "WE'RE LOVING IT LOVING IT LOVING IT, WE'RE LOVING IT LIKE THAT" along with DJ Pied Piper, and I remember "Gotta Get Thru This" by Daniel Bedingfield - the original bedroom pop wunderkind, fuck James Blake - being my favourite song aged 3. Around the turn of the millennium this style really captured the imagination of the general British public, but that wasn't to everyone's tastes. UKG is best understood as the British equivalent of "bling-era" rap, and if you weren't able to afford flash clothes and expensive alcohol at exclusive clubs, you couldn't be part of it, really. So people rebelled.
One rebellion was happening out east London way, in Bow. An unruly son of a reggae singer started making some lo-fi, minimal beats with aggressive basslines, in direct contradiction of UKG's flashier, slicker, poppier style, and started playing his stuff on pirate radio stations around the capital. His name was Wiley and it is a tragic shame that he died the literal day before Twitter was invented and thus never embarrassed himself on such a platform and made me feel ashamed to even mention him. A damned, damned shame. Wiley's cold, minimal style eventually became grime.
The other rebellion was happening down south, in my beloved Croydon. Just as jungle had started out a certain way and then got darker, UKG went down that route too, first as the more complex, less poppy 2-step, and then the cycle was completed as the 2000s began by adding those supercomplex drumbeats to some dirty, wobbling sub-bass. Things should be sounding familiar on this song from 2000, because we've finally, FINALLY reached dubstep. But Skrillex ain't from Croydon and he certainly isn't Jamaican, so we need to find out how the fuck he got a hold of it.
Sonny Moore started his musical career off in the post-hardcore band From First To Last. Good thing we covered emo and post-hardcore last time out or I'd be pushing ten thousand words on this nonsense. After suffering a lot of stress on his vocals and having to undergo surgery, he left the group and formed his own more electronic solo project. After one EP still rooted in guitar, with one of the worst fucking covers I've ever seen (below) he switched gears.
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| I mean fucking hell, dawg. What in God's name were you thinking |
The drop - these songs are made of buildup and drop the way a traditional pop song is verse and chorus - is the other thing that made this so much more likely to cross over. The drop as a concept really is irresistable, and Skrillex is very good at it - you will find yourself headbanging whether you mean to or not.
What remains a mystery to me is how Skrillex found dubstep? I google this and all I get is "dubstep beyond skrillex", "Skrillex didn't invent dubstep, the 90s did", and other such recapitulations of the history I just gave you, and no actual explanation of how this punk kid from NorCal got hold of a style of music pretty much specific to one borough, let alone one city, let alone one country. It's noted that he was a big fan of the stuff coming from Warp Records in Sheffield - fucking weirdos like Aphex Twin and Squarepusher that took jungle to strange new places like, um, Satie-esque piano pieces?; there's still a lot of gap between AFX's actually d'n'b-influenced works and Skrillex, though, and I'd like to know more about how that happened.
With Jamie xx the story is far simpler. He's from the Great South West, went to school in Putney, and became the producer and keyboardist for the xx while retaining a love for the jungle and dubstep that was born in South London. Jamie xx released his solo debut in 2015, at the same time Skrillex joined forces with polyglot electronic guy Diplo and conquered the charts again with Jack Ü. They represent two sides of the same coin, even though they seem like polar opposites.
Things were a lot different in 2010, as you should know by now. The xx were the buzz band, "Intro" would soundtrack, well, pretty much everything, from the 2010 election to, of course, a shitload of adverts, and everyone from London Grammar to AlunaGeorge would end up biting their sound, knowingly or not. Skrillex was still "that guy who left his punk band to make an awful EP". But over the first half of the 2010s various forms of electronica would propel Skrillex to the top of the pile. First, his patented brand of aggressive yet simplistic dubstep, dubbed "brostep" by nerds that didn't want it getting confused with the underground Croydon shit, became a huge deal around 2011 and 2012. I return to ads, because they, not chart performance or whatever the fuck else, are the true litmus test of success in the 2010s, to bring you this Microsoft-backed blast from the past.
This is "Too Close" by Alex Clare, a 'soulful' singer-songwriter in the Rag'n'Bone Man/Jack Garrett/Tom Walker/etc mould, being backed by Major Lazer for some reason. Originally his album sold very poorly but the success of this wub-laden Internet Explorer ad got him re-signed to a major label. That was the power that dubstep had.
As 2011 turned into 2012 another genre began to take hold. It was "Levels" by Avicii, God rest his soul, that kicked off the progression from dubstep into 'big room EDM', as it ended up being called. This wasn't a musical progression - they're both rooted in that "breakbeat hardcore" thing I mentioned years ago, but in the same way bullfinches are technically related to komodo dragons via the dinosaurs. The progression was public attention. As wubs and such became passé, the more restrained, more melodic, but still heavy as hell sound typified by shit like "Animals" by Martin Garrix or even "Don't You Worry Child" by EDM supergroup Swedish House Mafia came to the fore.
In Colour, though, basically pretends none of that happened. Its touchstones are far more theoretically underground. Jamie is a huge fan of the original jungle artists from the mid-90s, and you can hear shades of J Dilla-esque sampling from anything and everything in his work, as you can hear in basically anything released since 2000. A few more modern artists bear mentioning too. One is James Blake, who I've quite frankly talked about enough. The other is Burial, or William Emmanuel Bevan if you wanna be fancy. Burial came out of Wandsworth in South London in the mid-2000s making the kind of dark 2-step that was quickly becoming dubstep, but his take on the genre was noticeably more ethereal and nostalgic (in the modern sense, yes, but in the original too: "the pain of homecoming"). Clock the song titles on both his full length albums - "Night Bus", "Distant Lights", "In Mcdonalds". Burial has said himself his biggest early influences were the tunes his brother would bring home from early 2000s raves, and listening to his albums I feel the stories his brother must've told to be just as important. In that same interview he says HE never went to raves in fields nor warehouses, nor to festivals, nor to illegal parties. "[J]ust clubs, and playing tunes indoors or whatever." The longing his albums are imbued with, then, for the night bus, for the post-club scran, as much as for the tunes themselves, is all the more impressive knowing he's longing for a type of night out he never directly experienced.
I should say the person interviewing Burial there is writer - and massive jungle-head - Mark Fisher, who was one of the first people to really go hard for Burial in the press. Fisher's cultural application of Derrida's "hauntology" - the idea that Marxism continued to drastically influence, i.e. 'haunt' political discourse long after its supposed death - took shape just as Burial's music took shape, and they would reinforce one another. According to some dumb redditor the symbiosis was so strong that people took to theorising that Burial - who at that point was nameless and faceless, the doxx and his two selfies came later - WAS actually Mark Fisher. Just as Fisher argued that post-war visions of a future Britain continued to haunt the pop culture of the Britain that actually came to pass, Burial's music was haunted by the ghosts of proper 90s rave culture, which was all but dead at that point.
Burial's music is also haunted by the ghost of Old South London. The cover of Burial is an aerial shot of his ends, round Wandsworth Prison, and that's a couple miles north of where I grew up, and a mile north of where my father did, so I feel qualified to talk about what happened to South London in the 2000s. To put things simply, we got gentrified. Of course, there have always been posh areas - Th*tcher didn't settle in Dulwich Village for the nightlife and graffiti - but things really kicked into overdrive under Blair. A lot had already happened by the time I was cognisant; my father went to school in somewhere called Battersea, just north of Burial's Wandsworth, and when he went it was a complete shithole full of Chelsea-supporting skinheads, and violent black gangs on the Winstanley and York estates, home to UKG legends So Solid Crew and chef, I guess?, Levi Roots alike. Battersea now is posh enough that the kid like fourth in line to the throne went to nursery at my dad's old school. His first Saturday job was at the Sainsbury's in Nine Elms, which is now the unbelievably ugly American Embassy. There's a lot I witnessed too, though; tiny, tiny, things like the gradual removal of pretty much every petrol station within five miles of my house so the land could be developed for flats, hospitals consolidating into megacomplexes like St. George's and King's so the former premises of things like the Springfield Mental Hospital or the Atkinson Morley brain surgery centre could be developed for flats, and house after house on the road I grew up on adding lofts, and then being partitioned into, yeah, flats. It was seeing new Anthony Gormley sculptures being installed in Peckham, sorry, Bellenden, when we went to get hard dough bread and guava jam. (One of my favourite wikipedia edits was the fact that the page for Bellenden used to say "Bellenden is a term for an area of Peckham that you use when you're trying to justify spending £700k on a house in fucking Peckham", but I can't find it in the history now. Someone did change it to "Bellend Road" once though.) It was the best Caribbean takeaway we'd ever been to, on Nunhead Green, being replaced by a craft beer shop and an upmarket peri-peri restaurant.
The culture in a city, especially between neighbourhoods, changes all the damn time, obvs, and the economic implications of gentrification are the important thing - "I can't find a proper curried mutton roti :(" pales in comparison to "I can no longer afford my rent :(" - but they go hand in hand with the cultural impacts. Burial's tunes, then, sound exactly like how parts of London at the end of New Labour felt; sparse, abandoned (because businesses and people alike couldn't afford to stay), and dark. Fisher notes this similarity here. Burial does subtly note this too; there's the cover of Burial of course, but there's a song entitled "Southern Comfort", and a disembodied dub-style voice that shouts "South!" on "Pirates". Of course the death of raves and the death of the Old South are interlinked, too; you just can't hold illegal parties somewhere people are arsed about the value of their investments, pardon, houses.
Jamie xx isn't really like that. Where Burial evokes a place and time - more specifically, 3am on the bit of Trinity Road where it really fucking opens up and you can get to 60mph if you're a badman and the roads are clear - Jamie xx sounds like everywhere. There's no way you'd be able to tell he's from Putney (west of Wandsworth, I do hope you're keeping up, dear) just from listening to such a cosmopolitan album. There's those 2-step rhythms direct from Croydon, yes, but there's also: that Dilla-influenced omnivorism (Detroit); steel pans (the Caribbean in general); Young Thug (Atlanta); Brian Wilson (L.A.); Popcaan (east Jamaica); Hugh Masakela (South Africa); and more.
In Colour was pretty much universally beloved and ended up on all sorts of year- and decade-end lists, and feels like the crowning achievement of the xx - even though it's not technically a The xx project - for the decade. Jamie managed to fuse all these disparate strands into, and include the rest of his band in, one grand, decade-defining statement. Only I'm not sure it defines the decade in the best way.
I go back and forth on how I feel about In Colour, normally while listening to it. Somewhere around halfway through "Sleep Sound" I'm ready to declare it the best album of the decade, but then the dumb steel drum track happens and I'm off it. The buildup from "Stranger In A Room" to "I Know There's Gonna Be (Good Times)" has me losing the plot again, and then are two songs that really should have been placed somewhere else. Sampling the Beach Boys pretending to be the Four Freshmen on the same album you sampled the Freshmen themselves is a particularly wack choice in my opinion, though I see how you could argue for it as bookends. But it kept nagging at me that every time I came back to it, I liked it a little less, so I deeped it, and came up with this mess of a post.
The review in the Quietus is probably the most negative there was, and when I first read it, I thought "you lot really are up yourselves, aren't you?", and then I thought about it some more and ended up writing thousands of words on how right I think it might be. It raises some interesting points, though in a typically clickbaity way - the obvious pullquote is "club music for the neoliberal age". Jamie Smith is coming from a similar place to Burial, the review notes - "I felt like London was disappearing while I was away... listening to music that reminded me of home was a good way to feel happy about feeling sad". I don't buy it. Like I said, this sounds like everywhere, and while London is a cosmopolitan melting pot, that's not enough.
The Quietus also get at Jamie for not defending what's left of South London nightlife, and while I don't think that's fair - musicians don't have to make political statements because (e.g.) Boris doesn't know how to use an 808 - I see what they're getting at. The album feels spectacularly divorced from its surroundings and supposed inspiration, and combined with the perceived sanitation of a genre that arose from Jamaican protest music and anti-establishment rave culture, In Colour, and Smith's deafening silence, can definitely leave a sour taste in the mouth.
In order to try and place the album in this lineage I spent the first half of this post explaining, Smith uses all sorts of little speech samples apart from the musical ones. All Junglists; an obscure 90s jungle show from Radio 1; Top Boy, the grime Empire. I don't think these work in his favour either. The Eternal Shuffle Beat shows up sometimes, but there's no patois, and where everyone from Rupie Edwards to Burial cut their vocal samples to fuck, Smith leaves these fragments relatively in tact. Thematically, this has the effect of making things feels less personal - when Burial wrenches a genderless voice into howling "If I trust you" on "Archangel" it becomes his own, whereas the Beach Boys, Four Freshmen, Persuasions, etc on In Colour remain themselves - but musically that makes things far more lush and far less rhythmic. Big pads of singing like these vocal harmony groups produce are pretty much the opposite of the choppy drum sounds garage is known for, it smooths the jagged edges of the music. For someone whose calling card is minimalism there sure is a shit-ton of stuff like that happening on these songs that makes the drums and the bass, like, the fourth or fifth most important instruments in a genre called, you know, drum and bass.
Even the cover, a nice, clean rainbow, screams "tasteful", restrained, minimal. This is what everyone loved about the xx in 2009, but clearly after six years of increasing minimalism, in all facets of art and design, people were, for lack of a better term, sick to bastard death of it. You see something similar in everyone suddenly being mad at "Humans Of Flat"-style drawings because they were annoying to begin with and they've been fucking everywhere since the pandemic. Pop was at its most morose and muted and minimal in 2015, to my memory; there were all the Lorde and Drake clones clogging up the lower reaches of the charts, but this was also the year where the #2 and #3 songs were "Thinking Out Loud" and "See You Again", pure solo-guy-with-instrument restrainment-fests. "Take Me To Church" at #14 brought the same vibe. Even Skrillex, purveyor of some of the filthiest drops ever heard in the pop world, hit the charts with "Where Are U Know", which has a drop so weak it feels perverse to describe it as one. The emptiness that was so refreshing in 2009 against a backdrop of "I Gotta Feeling" and "Just Dance" was now all there was.
I think all this might be why In Colour falls a bit short of Burial, Blake, et al in my estimation; Untrue sounds exactly like driving back into Wandsworth from a rave just past Clacket Lane (I promise this happened; my parents would go driving at night and hear them from the M25), the streetlights of the Deep South blurring into one another as you race past them, the songs you heard replaying themselves over and over in your head, the details of the music slowly retreating from focus the way a tape wears if you play it too often. In Colour sounds like sauntering from your 2k/mo penthouse on Acre Lane to the club that replaced the Fridge to pay eight pounds for a Red Stripe watch, well, the xx, and be home by 11. You know I have to do it, now:
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| it's every week, blud |
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