you're perhaps misreading this - the point isn't that mongrelisation & innovation weren't taking place or that they weren't possible but that the particular mongrelisations & innovations of ardkore were tied to a place/time that couldn't be replicated elsewhere. though I might also point out that some these innovations were in fact not thought of by anyone else before they come out ardkore & jungle.
who's overemphasizing the power of music writing? aren't all the ppl attacking SR & the HCC actually imbuing his work with a much greater importance than he himself?
No, I'm not, I'm disagreeing with it.
Look, the idea that there are isolated "continua" of music that created all electronic innovation out of nothing, a la some sort of musical Big Bang theory [even if we were to drop the kind of rigid idea of musical progress as a continuum, which in physics is not the sort of thing that takes in influences (or energy) from everywhere and makes them its own, but is instead a sort of relation between spatial and time elements that changes state in a continuous manner, without interruptions, flowings outward, or flowings inward] just doesn't make that much sense to me in the particulars. In a very, exceptionally broad way, you might say that all musics as they can be parsed into genres form a series of somehow connected "continua", and I'd say
maybe but beyond that sort of broad, universal level, if you go from major strains of music to genres to subgenres, ignoring the way they've all crosspollinated and built on one another historically and technologically--this view just loses metaphorical coherence. And I'm not the one who chose the "continuum" metaphor, Mr. Reynolds did.
I don't mind if people want to think of jungle and its little branchings off as some sort of distinctly British music. That makes all kinds of sense. That sort of music was never very popular in the U.S. But to try to claim that a sort of music that's cobbled together out of drum-machine sequences, samples, and tiny chopped-and-mashed synth loops is somehow wildly innovative in a way that no one else had thought of before--well, that reeks of overstatement. To add on to this that "underground" musics have some sort of privileged metaphysical status where they can avoid the mediation of markets and global cultural contributions and actually redeem humankind from capitalism...well, no offense, but that just seems dumb.
Enthusiasm for music is great, but one's personal enthusiasm for whatever one might be enthusiastic about doesn't somehow prove that one's metaphors are more coherent than anyone else's, nor does it make one a "better", more "engaged" listener than anyone else, nor does it make the music one listens to some sort of isolated flash of brilliance that would've existed independently of an entire tradition and history of formal musical and technological innovation.
Are you seriously trying to tell me that someone claiming that a cultural theory like a "hardcore continuum" is the same thing as a fact like jupiter (hence ignoring mediation altogether) is an entirely uncontroversial statement? It's laughably so.
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