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Back When I Went to Raves

I was just thinking about some of the first music I was catching a vibe to back in my early days:

Missy Elliot MC Hammer Snoop Dog Squarepusher Ronnie Size... omg, Ronnie Size, so, raves were huge, and electronica was being diversified and defined as all the electronica genres we know today -- I remember my DJ friends sitting around as the sun came up, arguing passionately about what key musical elements separated, say, House, Tech House, and Deep House.

Anyway, one emerging genre was a subsection of break-beat drum & bass called Jungle. It’s a usually crazy-fast break beat, with a kind of swing and a lot of fills and drops, and it was one of my favorite types of music to hear at a rave.

Here’s a good example of some pretty classic sounding Jungle being cooked up in a home lab -- i basically lived with and helped throw parties with several versions of this dude specializing in different genres

and actually, here he is detailing some of what the 90′s electronica music scene was really like in terms of how the music was being physically produced, which, at the time for me and my friends it really seemed like a musical renaissance. Computers were becoming an experimental option for common musicians for the first time, but only by combining computers with the existing hardware of the day, like, people were taking apart their video game consoles and wiring them into sound mixers and stuff, it was crazy....

Okay, so, raves were like mini music festivals, and just like a music festival has different stages, you’d usually have like two to five DJ set-ups in different rooms or on separate dance floors spaced out, with different types of music at each. Often the raves I attended had a Jungle room.

Now the thing is, because it is technically drum and bass, theoretically a person could rap over it. And people started to try. You maybe can tell from the artists I’ve listed up there that I might be really into that -- SO at some raves there started to be some Jungle DJs that would just, hook a mic up and let people who wanted to try to lay some lyrics down do their best. Every once in a while you’d get some kid on the right mix of drugs or whatever and they’d hit the zone hard and flow magic over like five tracks in a row without stopping once for a breath, and it was very dope. So some professional Jungle DJs eventually did some collabs with professional MCs.

I remember the first time I heard Ronnie Size team up with Reprazent to do a Jungle Hip Hop song called Dirty Beats, I lost my shit. It came out in like 1999, and when he says “new sound” it was true, like, you’ve just heard the music above, people trying to rap over that was, well, it almost seemed impossible to fit something to it. And the video they made for it captures something, like, I tried to spit over some jungle a couple times at raves and it really feels like the music is being wielded against you to prevent you from being able to do it. Anyway, here’s Dirty Beats by Ronnie Size and Reprazent