The Unassimilable Difference of Drum and Bass
May 10, 2020
A new documentary about the evolution of the drum and bass scene came out last week, and is well worth a watch.
The film tracks the scene from its roots in London in the 90’s, through to the sprawling international web it is today with all its offshoots and subgenres. It is interesting for the story it tells of the huge mutations music distribution and consumption has undergone in the last 25 years, and how drum and bass subculture has survived them.
DJ Hype makes a point (starting at 1:06:45) that where other UK-born underground music genres have often died shortly after achieving commercial success—garage and dubstep are his examples—this has not happened with drum and bass. He suggests that this has to do with the fact that drum and bass has consistently retained an underground infrastructure, while commercial success in other genres has often led to people leaving the subculture behind, which then collapses when the fashion cycle moves on and commercial incentives disappear.
Why this might have happened with drum and bass but not with garage or dubstep is hinted at by someone else when they say that drum and bass can never really be cool. Coolness suggests a kind of cachet whose exchange value is publicly agreed upon, even if only implicitly, but drum and bass is just fundamentally too fast and abrasive for that kind of value to ever stabilise in any context outside the subculture that created it. A comparison could be made with metal, another genre which has retained a huge thriving underground despite the birth and death of many commercial offshoots. The suggestion here is that there are some genres whose musical form makes them essentially underground, too different to be pastiched into something that can ever sit comfortably in a commercial landscape. Whenever someone tries the underground just sneers at them and turns its back.
If the capacity of the drum and bass scene to resist commodification lies in what could be called its “unassimilable difference”, then this probably tells us something about how commodification operates as a process in music culture as a whole. I was listening to some Tool tracks the other day and found it hard to imagine a band like them existing today. What seems to have disappeared is the very space they occupied in music culture: respected as innovative and anti-mainstream, yet with a broad enough appeal to act as public representatives for an alternative—but not underground—music culture that doesn’t really exist any more. The reason it doesn’t is just that there is nothing identifiable as a unified “mainstream” for it to be an alternative to (or to put the point another way: a Kerrang can’t exist without an MTV). The mainstream now is a much more diffuse entity, more like a process than a public space, one that more likely resides in the algorithms of Spotify and Youtube than broadcast entities like MTV. In a way the mainstream has gone underground, and it has taken with it the possibility of a public alternative culture.
This has in large part been facilitated by online platforms like Instagram which simulate the kind of horizontal connections between artists, audiences and promoters that exist in subculture. Now those connections are mediated by technical platforms which shape and mould them to their own interests. Commodification no longer speaks through vertical structures which authorise the value of music or artists (MTV, Radio 1, etc)—this work is done by the interfaces and algorithms that mediate horizontal peer-to-peer connections. The musical landscape ends up as it is now, somehow fragmented and homogenous at the same time: a million different aesthetics but no corresponding variation in musical form; subgenres without subcultures, undergrounds without infrastructure.
If there’s a lesson to be learned from the survival of the underground drum and bass scene it is that there’s a reciprocal and self-sustaining relationship between the form of the music itself and scene infrastructure. The infrastructure (private networks, independent labels, online forums run by and for scene members, etc) creates a local public sphere in which the value of a music too different for commercial appetites can be inscribed, established and performed. Meanwhile the unassimilable difference of the music stops the infrastructure of the underground from being absorbed by big tech, which would undermine the autonomy of its processes of value creation. The resistance of the drum and bass scene to commodification is deeply tied to formal and material properties of the music itself, and this in turn is what allows it to continue existing as an autonomous subculture.
Anyway, I’ll end these thoughts with a link to a d&b mix (mostly modern minimalish neurofunk) I made after watching the film: