Mumdance x Riko

Following up another excellent showing from Lewisham youngsters Vision Crew on Rinse this Saturday, Mumdance chimed in with a one-hour Hardcore and Jungle special, featuring the veteran MC Riko Dan on mic duties. The set is all kinds of nostalgia, with lots of great moments, including Riko getting excited on Rude Bwoy Monty's Warp 10, the faces/hand gestures I was pulling on my own to Original Ses (particularly the John Holt sample), and the great speech from Riko just after (49:48 to be precise). There are some great references and shouts in there as well, some you probably wouldn't have heard back in the day, like references to Pressure FM, and Eastman (leading Kool FM 'guvnor') who would have been a direct competitor against Rinse in the 90s, who didn't let Riko on the station for having "too many gun lyrics". Albeit only an hour long, this is a decent little set, and made me realise how much I still love old school, despite not being from that time. (sidenote: did anyone stay locked to the 'dark techno' set afterwards? Probably the first and last time I'll ever hear Faithless' Insomnia on the station, although we all know there's a far better mix.)

"If you don't know about this music, you should be ashamed of yourself"

I wish I had the same knowledge of the Hardcore/Jungle eras as I do Grime, even Acid to some extent. There's so much golden music from that period, but little means of identifying it, a lot of records I've accumulated from that branch of this massive tree of Dance music that we continue to grow have been guess work, with probably 90 percent of them being belters, thankfully. Buying compilations to pick out tunes from was one of the better methods of building any sort of collection, then I'd check the remixes, spam-buy like 3 or 4 records from the artist and end up with a good portion of quality tunes. Using Discogs to look-up artists and then listen to the embedded YouTube videos is cheating in my book - the feeling of flicking through crates is still a thrill to this day.

A photo posted by Frankie Mines (@frankos9191) on Aug 20, 2016 at 11:00am PDT

Dreamscape!

A photo posted by Frankie Mines (@frankos9191) on Jun 26, 2016 at 6:20am PDT

Some other bits played that I particularity like:





Talking of which, if you've listened to Jammz' Underdog Season download earlier in the year, then you'd remember him taking on Remarc's Jungle classic from above, and it's gun-fingers-galore when Mumdance drops it in the above set.

Looking for some of the classic ragga-jungle samples recently, Discogs pointed me in the direction of a 1994 soundclash in Bermuda between King Addies of Brooklyn, and legends from my manor, Saxon. I can't find the sample Remarc used specifically, but this is definitely worth a listen, if not only for the amazing dubs but also BabyFace's blistering commentary - click here for the Soundcloud. I'll hope my interest in sound clashing is reinvigorated long enough for me to check out the 1994 world cup which gets a (bitter) mention at the start of the clash, after Saxon took victory at Sanctuary, Milton Keynes - later this club became the home of Sidewinder: one of Grime's biggest raves.

Riko also shouts a couple of names that you should know if you're one of the #RunComeFollowFriday crew. For all the reading massive out there, both Uncle Dugs and Billy Bunter have books available for pre-order over on the Music Mondays website, Billy's entitled 'The Love Dove Generation' and Dugs' 'Rave Diaries and Tower Block Tales, both of which essential reading for anyone with an ounce of interest in those scenes - try and jump on the orders quick-time for Dugs' book as you get an 8GB memory stick with all of the #RCFF interviews on there, pretty much pivotal listening for everyone with interests similar to mine.

More old-school and vinyl themed posts due very soon.

Skepta - Konnichiwa - Some Thoughts..

More rambling then reviewing, but all the same.

When I first moved to Lewisham in my pre-teens, the only access I had to Grime was my radio and one local record shop. I think sometimes people underestimate the reality of how important tape-swapping was back then (we're talking early noughties) and from a small bedroom in South East London with limited internet access, it was impossible to pick up stations such as Heat FM, where Skepta once held his own slot. Independence Records was a stone throw away from where I was living and it was there I grabbed my first Skepta vinyl and met someone who could provide me with all the tapes I wanted and more. The Tottenham born MC had a flow that was different for me at the time: not as blisteringly assaulting as say, Ghetto's, but far more assertive and commanding than the likes of Trim, encapsulating a seriousness not seen in Garage. This is as cliché as I'll ever sound, but who in their right mind would imagine that over ten years later, Skepta would be on the brink of securing a number one album?

 The build-up for Konnichiwa has been a much drawn out yet compelling period. As frequently noted by various journalistic outlets during the waiting time, Skepta has evolved as an artist immensely, binning the awful pop attempts and reverting back to the much sought after Grime icon  [this is best summarised via this article on Dazed]. Unlike the commercial world where artists tend to vanish in between big releases, we've had the Blacklisted & Tim Westwood mix tapes to fill the void between this album and 2011's Doin It Again, with no less than five singles off of the album to wet our appetites. Three of the five, in my mind, are instant classics. I outlined in this article for Complex UK the importance of Shutdown and That's Not Me and whilst Man might not carry the same social significance, it's another anthem which exhibits the stripped-back "tracksuit mafia" persona of Skepta that suits him a little better than the American influenced side.

 It discomforts me indulging in the over-categorising of music and it's irritating to further resurrect the time-old arguments of what Grime is and isn't, so I'll relay my thoughts like this: if you're the sort who craves for one-hundred percent Grime bangers, then barring (the quite incredible) Lyrics, you've heard the best of Konnichiwa already. Should you find yourself just wanting to enjoy a body of music, rap-tinted tracks included, you'll be replaying the whole album for a while. I'll think about those points whilst trying not to remain somewhere lost in the middle, all the while belting out the hook for It Ain't Safe at an absurd volume, but racing to the skip button just at the thought of the Pharrell assisted Numbers.

"Boy Better Know man went to the Brits on the train / think it's a game? / man shutdown Wireless then walked home in the rain"

 Features and nostalgic references during the album don't come any bigger than on my personal favourite Lyrics. "lyrics for lyrics calm" is extracted from a brief audio clip of the heated [2001] exchange between Pay As You Go and Heartless Crew, one of the moments that I firmly believe birthed the scene we love. In the way Pay As You Go (albeit more specifically Wiley) paved the way for Skepta, the North Londoner has played a big part in the rise of young MC Novelist, so it's of little surprise that Nov's supporting role on the track becomes one of the bigger highlights, with his hungry approach embodying the spirit we commonly associate with the best emerging talents and his smooth skipping on the track evoking memories of an early D Double E...

 There are points on this album where I do ask whether Skepta is being as wilfully obscure as made out, with Numbers being a prime example. Is he really comfortable being that laid back? Or is he using Pharrell's name to over emphasise the magnitude of the pirate radio-to-Drake narrative that Konnichiwa aims to showcase? Both are capable of producing music greatly superior but in honesty, besides the needless skits at the close of promising tracks such as Corn On The Cob and Crime Riddim, there is quite little to moan about on the album.

 There are more glimpses of the Skepta I alluded to in the opening paragraph on this album then there has been for a very long time. Whilst there may be a certain dissonance between the UK and US sounds, it's more of a welcome blend as opposed to a vulgar clash and for the first time ever, Skepta has delivered an album that guarantees replay value. Comparison is often a poor way of appraising music, but in the year where Kano drops the sure to be perpetually amazing Made In The Manor and Wiley hinting at something possibly as huge, Skepta manages to confidently weigh-in a titanic effort, rescuing his legacy amongst the Grime all-stars.