Electric Kingdom: Episode One
1999
Nu Skool Breaks / Breakbeat / Electro
Allow me to start this post off with this one extended thought that was rattling around in my head as I was listening to this comp: literally no one knows what they're talking about when it comes to defining the terms breakbeat, breakbeat hardcore, and breaks, and that includes yours truly. You go on different websites that consider themselves to be authorities on the definitions of electronic music genres and they all happen to differ from each other. As it turns out, the consensus is that there really is no consensus and it's something that happens to be really annoying and frustrating.
And websites like Discogs contradict themselves internally, too. Like, they define breakbeat as a specific type of jungle-adjacent rave music that was popular between 1990 and 1993, but then you look at Discogs' top releases for that style and a lot of them don't match the website's own definition of breakbeat at all.
So, I've come up with a way to delineate all of this. And I know I'm just someone on tumblr whose case to be made only ends up adding even more to all of the convolution, but I think I have a logically foolproof method for categorizing all of this stuff. But it takes some pained explaining, so strap in.
Let's start with where most of the confusion is probably derived from in the first place: the musical term, "break," which is also referred to as a "breakbeat" or a "drum break." The break is the foundational element of a song that unites all of these styles of music that I'm about to try and describe to you all. It's a sampled piece of music, usually from a 60s or 70s funk, soul, jazz, or R&B record, that acts as the rhythmic base for the entirety of a track or at least a significant portion of it. In this context, a "break" and a "breakbeat" mean pretty much the same exact thing, but a "drum break" is a more specific type of break, in that it consists of either only drums or mostly drums. Some of the most famous drum breaks are the "Amen" break, the "Funky Drummer" break, and the "Apache" break.
The genres of breakbeat, breakbeat hardcore, and breaks all use a break in their music. But here's how I see these three genres differing from each other:
Breakbeat is the umbrella term for any form of electronic dance music that uses a break as a foundational rhythmic element. But it differs from jungle and drum n bass in that the break in a breakbeat song isn't necessarily the focal point of the production. Jungle and dnb like to tinker around with, combine, and layer drum breaks as their main draw, but breakbeat isn't so much concerned with that.
Within breakbeat then are a bunch of subgenres, the two most prominent of which are breakbeat hardcore and big beat. I would classify breakbeat hardcore as being that early 90s jungle-adjacent rave music that Discogs simply just wants to call breakbeat instead. Big beat, on the other hand, is a form of breakbeat that broke through to the mainstream in the late 90s and early aughts with acts like Fatboy Slim and the Chemical Brothers. It sounds poppier than traditional breakbeat and it uses a lot more rock samples, too.
Another confusing thing here is that The Prodigy are both one of the biggest and greatest breakbeat hardcore and big beat acts of all time. The way you differentiate them though is between their early work, like their Experience album, which is breakbeat hardcore, and their later material, like The Fat of the Land, which is big beat.
And that leaves us with one genre left to define, which is breaks. Discogs defines breaks as all forms of break-driven electronic music that isn’t jungle or drum n bass and also doesn't meet their definition of breakbeat, which again, is that early 90s jungle-adjacent rave stuff. Contrarily, Rate Your Music considers breaks to be a word that's merely interchangeable with breakbeat.
But I see breaks as a whole other thing entirely, which is a style of music that actually falls under the hip hop umbrella. To me, breaks is a style of music that gained popularity between the mid-90s and early aughts that simply cuts and pastes and splices together numerous breaks and samples in order to create one, continuous track. And it doesn't really use much in the way of synthesizers or drum machines; it's just a well-put-together string of old samples. And I don't mean The Avalanches, who use literally thousands of samples in their records; I mean those hip hop-minded breakdance-types of DJs and producers who were trying to find a way to make the cardboard-mat-mentality of the 70s and 80s relevant again. A lot of people already call this kind of music breaks, but they tend not to differentiate it from big beat or breakbeat, and it's really different from both of those things. You can find breaks songs in things like Fatboy Slim's own DJ mixes from the late 90s and early aughts, for example, as he alternates between breaks and big beat tunes, and you can also find them in a fantastic compilation called Revenge of the B-Boy.
Now, here's where all of what I just carefully laid out gets fucking torpedoed, and it's because of one guy named Rennie Pilgrem. Rennie Pilgrem is a British dude who heralded in a new type of breakbeat in the late 90s. This style fuses drum breaks with elements of electro, it tends to be more technical and minimal, and it's much less loud than other forms of historically popular breakbeat. And what'd Pilgrem decide to call his new subgenre? Fucking nu skool breaks, of course. And because he coined this style of music that he happened to pioneer himself, the name is universally accepted. This motherfucker. I was trying to make this all less complicated and he made it even more complicated. Whatever. Nu skool breaks is breakbeat and it's not related to breaks. There, problem solved.
Electric Kingdom: Episode One is a compilation that encapsulates what was then a new frontier of nu skool breaks in 1999 rather well. It's not really my cup of tea, but some tracks on it are pretty cool, and it has a 4.3 rating on Discogs, meaning nu skool breaks heads like it a lot. The opener comes from Rennie Pilgrem himself and it kind of sounds like the intro music from if that street racing video game series, Midnight Club, came out a few years earlier for N64 and PlayStation. I tend to dig the heavier, darker-sounding kind of stuff with the super fuzzy basslines though, like the back-to-back pairing of "Rocweiller" by Sons of Mecha and "Electro Bitch" by Thomas Krome. Not so much a fan of the lighter fare on here.
Rennie Pilgrem & The Thursday Choir - "Some Place Funky (Back To The Future Mix)"
Sons Of Mecha [VR Boy & DJ Erb] - "Rocweiller"
Thomas Krome - "Electro Bitch"
