Partying Like It's 2009
a.k.a. Revisiting the post-dubstep era—and some of the drum-heavy tunes that defined it.
I went to the first two days of Primavera Sound last week. It was fine. The best performance I saw all weekend was that of the Deftones, which was a little surprising because A) I was never really a big metal guy, let alone a nu-metal guy, B) they played a lot of post-White Pony material that I wasn’t familiar with, and, perhaps most importantly, C) they’re definitely not young dudes anymore. They absolutely ripped it though, and I’ve been repeatedly singing “Change (In the House of Flies)” to myself for the past several days.
On the dance music tip, my favorite moment of the weekend was also somewhat unexpected. On Saturday night, the festival tapped Demdike Stare and Raime for a four-hour B2B session at the Boiler Room stage. From a programming perspective, this was right up my alley, but it was also something of a risk; both the lineup and the crowd for the Boiler Room stage skewed pretty young and internetty this year, so scheduling an extended set from Demdike Stare and Raime—an intriguing combo that nonetheless appeals most heavily to older, slightly grumpy, Boomkat-reading, semi-retired clubbers (i.e. people like me)—was not exactly the obvious choice for what was essentially peak time on Saturday night. That’s not meant as a sleight to Demdike Stare or Raime; I was just worried that their deep crates and deeper knowledge of the hardcore continuum weren’t going to impress the average macrofestival attendee.
Those worries, however, turned out to be unfounded. The stage was crowded the whole time I was there—in fact, when I left around 4 a.m., there was a giant line to get in—and while I don’t think many of those people came specifically to see Demdike Stare and Raime, the normies on the dancefloor weren’t scared off or bored by the assortment of old-school jungle, percussion-heavy house and bass-techno mutations on offer. Even I didn’t recognize most of the tunes being played, but the energy level did noticeably spike at one point when Miles Whittaker (one half of Demdike Stare) was on the decks. He played Plastikman’s “Spastik”—one of the most beloved techno tracks of all time—into the drum-heavy shuffle of Altered Natives’ “Rass Out.”
His selection of the latter was my aforementioned favorite moment, both because I hadn’t heard “Rass Out” on a big soundsystem in many years, and because it reminded me that there was a time when that song was virtually inescapable, at least within a certain corner of dance music. That time was roughly around 2009 and 2010, when UK funky had properly blown up and terms like “post-dubstep” and “future garage” were eagerly being tossed around to describe the bass-oriented sounds coming out of the UK and beyond. Looking back at that era now, it’s easy to point to the success and influence of labels like Hessle Audio and Night Slugs, which effectively became the archetype for what’s now widely referred to as “bass music.” But as influential as those outposts were, they weren’t the genesis of the movement, and even at their height, they were still just a couple of nodes in a vast network of DJs, producers, labels, club nights, radio stations and more.
There’s been a not insignificant amount of nostalgia for that network circulating lately. Martyn’s new Through Lines retrospective specifically focuses on how UK and UK-inspired sounds evolved during the latter half of the 2000s and the early 2010s, and even includes a collection of essays that examine the topic more closely. (One of those essays was exclusively shared via First Floor last month.) Oneman, one of the post-dubstep era’s defining DJs (and one of only a handful that found fame without producing tracks of their own), has recently been posting a series of Instagram Reels in which he grooves along while revisiting old records from his collection. His selections vary, but many of them are half-forgotten anthems from what in retrospect was a particularly fertile time for UK-centric dance music.
It’s been said that trends usually take 20 years to come back around, but with the internet seemingly speeding up all facets of culture, that timeframe appears to be shrinking. While it is far too soon to say that post-dubstep is “back” in any significant way, especially when so much of dance music is still hung up on Y2K aesthetics, the backwards-facing examinations from folks like Martyn and Oneman are indicative of something meaningful, and much simpler than an actual “revival”: the generation that came of age listening and partying to post-dubstep sounds is increasingly aging out of the club. And given the highly transient nature of club culture, and the resulting deficiency of institutional memory, there is some real value in older heads reflecting on the past, even when they’re just asking, “Remember this tune?”
After hearing “Rass Out,” I found myself compelled to do much the same thing, and went back into my archives to find more gems from the post-dubstep era. More specifically, I wanted to find more stuff in the vein of “Rass Out,” with lots of drums, syncopated rhythms and, more often than not, nods to African and Caribbean sounds. Not surprisingly, I wound up pulling together a lot of UK funky tracks, along with a smattering of percussion-heavy house cuts and other non-UK tunes that early funky DJs were rinsing in their sets. As much as I love Hessle Audio, Night Slugs and many of their contemporaries, not to mention the countless artists and outposts they inspired—including the ones that directly folded in bits of American hip-hop, R&B and regional club music—when I think about what really touched off the post-dubstep hype, UK funky is what first comes to mind. (Yes, pre-existing genres like grime, garage and of course dubstep all played a role too, but I’d argue that UK funky, and specifically its close ties to house music, was what most directly facilitated the music’s growth and crossover, especially outside of the UK.)
The selections below aren’t meant to be a “Best UK Funky Tracks of All Time” list, or anything resembling a comprehensive representation of the genre. (Some of them technically aren’t even UK funky tunes!) They are, however, brilliant examples of a very particular sound from a very particular moment of dance music history. Some were massive hits. Others were just my own personal favorites. But everything below meant a lot to me back in the day, and they still sound great, approximately 15 years later. If you heard them the first time around, I imagine you’ll enjoy the trip down memory lane. If you didn’t, you may soon have some new bangers to put into your listening rotation.