13.06.1996

Life in the jungle

Jungle music is by far the most interesting and vibrant music made today. It daringly marries a strong, flexible organisation with musical contents that are explosive and complex. Listening to jungle for the first time can be a very disconcerting experience indeed - but first encounters with radical new forms often are.

The first thing that hits you is how fast the music seems. They get this by sampling other drumbeats and using electronic cut- and-paste techniques to piece them together. The result is the first electronic rhythm that really swings - giving a feeling of rolling, subtle change. In contrast with the high speed snare drum you soon notice the bass is playing a slow, languorous dub reggae line. This serves to open up the musical space instead of routinely dominating it, like most drum and bass in commercial music. But jungle does not use the freedom in a religious or idealistic way, unlike the avant-garde approach of John Cage with his appropriation of Zen and the mystery in silence (library music). Jungle liberates the space because it wants to fill it with life, not gaze in wonder at it.

The vocals are a mixture of tongue twisting rap and hip hop and Jamaican toasting, with its accent on direct social comment. Listen to jungle stations for a while and you discover a huge communications web with people calling in and immediately being acknowledged and included. They do not bother with inane chat or sterile requests, because the vital thing is not to domesticate the form but to set it in motion.

Jungle gains urgency from its unlawful, pirate status, but it has been made unlawful precisely because of its urgency. Unlike punk with its art-school, Oxbridge svengalis and glib borrowings from situationist texts, there is an integrity at the heart of jungle. It does not dabble in morose doubt or drunken anarchy. Think of the organisation required for a pirate station to keep one step ahead of the authorities - you need clear thinking and bundles of energy. But jungle is not over-organised in a way that stifles the imagination. It borrows freely from other musical forms - like using classical music themes - and employs all kinds of ambient noises from everyday life. Its exuberance and abundance is in sharp contrast with most other music today. Music that has lost its soul under the iron grip of capitalism and whose function can either be to only parody rebellion or to provide a vapid, sugary view of life.

It seems impossible to many people involved in music and the arts today to have any total, organised forum for their work. They are so used to having their work mediated by the quest for profit - like contracts, publishing rights, agents, etc - they sneer bitterly against all so-called idealists who want to change things. They do not see jungle music providing change: to them it is a world of drugs, base instinct and poverty. Of course, the truth is different. Jungle contains the most positive parts of Britain’s young, urban, (mostly) black, working class experience. They have to be tough and resourceful because pirate radio and jungle in particular are constantly being pursued by capitalism’s ‘cultural police’, the Department of Trade and Industry, who confiscate and destroy equipment, prosecute sponsors and spy on fund-raising events. This is much more than the bourgeois notion of life imitating art: this is what happens when art and life enter into dialectical struggle. It is no coincidence that the process has been stepped up, as the race has begun to tame jungle, by buying it off into the mainstream.

Communists should not pass by or fatalistically consign to commercial ruin, important cultural developments out of ignorance or elitism. We should fight any attempts to kill off or clean up jungle music.

Phil Rudge