The vicissitudes of the hardcore continuum and the great deceleration.

An extremely interesting debate has been occurring of late as regards the status of Simon Reynolds’ concept of the “hardcore continuum”. Here it would appear there are two chief claims being made by the defenders of the continuum: that the new bass-music (dubstep, funky, wonky, bassline) fits broadly within the remit of the continuum, and that it is demonstrably less innovative than before. The counter claims from those in the generation below run that the model itself is overdetermining their response to the new, and that as such the argument is incoherent (running both that “funky, wonky, dubstep, bassline, etc… can all be safely fitted into the HCC model” AND “but they don’t fit the model, and HENCE are indicative of a generational decline”).

Putting the model to one side, I would want to focus on the most interesting claim made by Simon Reynolds and Mark K-Punk, that of the declining innovatory potentials of UK bass music, one which the younger generation fail to fully address. For whilst I agree in part with those such as Dan Hancox who argue that too little attention is being paid to the ways in which these new forms draw strength precisely from that which escapes the limitations of the continuum, be that G-Funk for Joker or Afro-House for funky, I also firmly contend that the rate and depth of innovations in this field (and indeed every field of musical cultural production) has slowed down. The reasoning for this is historical and material, and in part serves to evade the intergenerational backbiting which forms the libidinal matrix at the core of this particular dispute. For contained in Mark’s assessment is some notion that creative processes, whilst socially and economically conditioned, retain a degree of individual freedom- and hence it is a moral failing on the part of this generation to not have produced innovations comparable with their forefathers. I believe we have good reason to reject this argument, and to take a historical and material view on the processes which have informed the creation of British urban dance music over the last 18 or so years. In part it is the very capitalist realist processes which Mark so often rails against which condition the thinking that what has been always will be so (or could be so, perhaps).

In considering precisely why it is that late capital seems to endlessly reproduce in the cultural field an entropic retrospection and reiterative nostalgia would it be absurd to deem cultural resources as operating in an entirely dissimilar way to energy resources? Oil and natural gas are the products of millions of years of lifeforms absorbing energy from our sun and the actions of the earth’s geology, and hence are strictly finite. In much of the discourse surrounding energy crisis it is a commonplace to consider the thesis that the twentieth century was an absolute rupture or aberration, powered almost entirely by the global tapping of hydrocarbon energy resources to enable an unparalleled technological expansionism. That capitalist ‘realism’ always covers over its intrinsically radical status blinds us to the fact that recent history is borne entirely upon the back of a brief window of opportunity created by an utterly contingent and ultimately meagre resource. I would want to argue that in a similar sense the unbearable necrotic grip of the postmodern exists partly in response to the approach of another looming impasse within the field of cultural resources. In a similar fashion perhaps, the total output of the world’s cultures to date might be considered to equally have a material limit. For much of the history of the world these resources were accumulated, but in a manner which prevented immediate exploitation, either geographically isolated from each other or lost to the passing of history. The twentieth century might indeed be read in cultural terms as an unparalleled exploitation of previously geographically (and chronologically) inaccessible resources. In an oversimplifying model we might consider there to be three kinds of resources which enable rapid development in the cultural field:

1. Geographically remote resources- cf gamelan – made available by ever expanding globalised capitalism;

2. Historically previously forgotten/under-exploited resources- cf: dance punk – made available by ever increasing technologically assisted access to previously out-of print or difficult to obtain back catalogue;

3. Technological developments- cf: timestretching in early 90s Jungle… and which obviously exists in some kind of dynamic relation to (1) and (2).

In terms of the HCC the primary drivers have been (1) and (3), though perhaps of late it has been increasingly (2) (for example in the return to 2-step in the works of Burial, 2562, Martyn etc). Against this we might position a basic endogenous rate of change which is far less rapid, which has received in the last hundred years an unparalleled and ultimately artificial stimulus. From the current perspective it seems as if geographically remote resources are increasingly ‘dry’, the historical pockets of wealth, the exploitation of which have marked the last 20 or so years of pop culture, also looking ever more threadbare. Technology too appears to be in a state of consolidation rather than exponential growth, and hence the rate of change is reverting to a previously slower rate. That this has occurred within a economic and social system which has evolved against the backdrop of a far greater velocity means that even when resources are scarce, the economic and mass-psychological need (or perhaps we might say addiction) to a high velocity of innovation is maintained- leading, we might argue, towards the necrotic grip of retroism and aesthetic consolidation. In a sense capitalism has reached a point where geographical expansion is no longer possible, there is no outside left absorb. Given this, and the limitations of the endogenous cultural growth rate for the forms of capitalism which have evolved in this period, the deterritorialization of time itself is the symptom of an underlying resource poverty. The depressing conclusion of such a hypothesis being that once we have divested ourselves of the seamless dyschronia of capitalist-realist ideology our future appears to hold little but a protracted return to cultural and economic ice-age austerity.

Rather than thinking it is the postmodern issue of “clotted influences”-- a panoply of overly diverse and diffuse influential materials to draw upon leading to an incoherent output, as theorised by Reynolds—instead it is the very exhaustion of these materials which is at the core of cultural deceleration. For example, it is only possible for techno to absorb the hip-hop breakbeat ONCE, which initially gives rise to an immense new field of possible musical forms, but which over time become gradually worn out. So whilst I would defend funky and wonky as noteworthy innovations demanding serious attention (in the last year or so they have occupied 90% of my listening within the field of electronic music) it is indeed correct that if you played a wonky track to someone five years ago they would be unsurprised, whereas a ’97 techstep track to a raver from 1992 would seem like a radical step forward. Part of what Reynolds argues with the HCC was that a certain social, technological, and distributive network was able to synthesise influences in a way which led to emergent genres which were not immediately reducible to a mere additive process upon their influences. In contrast, he identifies much recent bass music from the UK as simply the sum total of their component parts, never reaching the point where something new emerges out of the chemical reaction between influences. But instead of this being a failure of modernist will (or desire for the new) as I detect in some of his and Mark’s arguments, the real problem is the sheer mass of history. This is operative not merely in the sense of a psychological pressure, which I think is insufficient to explain the current processes, but instead as a matter of generic “niches” within the cultural-ecosystem of dancers. I can't help thinking the real problem is percussion: after the hyper-on cut up funk of jungle and the sick alien-suave swing of UKG, there appears nowhere uptempo to go. The question is of how many uptempo stable "attractors" exist within such a limited set up. The hivemind or parallel processing capabilities of “scenius” (a complex meshwork system with certain key "sorting points") is certainly great, but not infinitely productive, especially given the eventual solidification or standardisation of previously fluid dynamics into institutional frameworks (which include the very theory of the continuum itself of course, although this perhaps has only a limited feedback potential back towards the producers/dancers etc). Hence the contemporary status of much UK bass music as being, if not actively retro-necro (which is unfair I think) perhaps simply consolidatory in nature. Whilst consolidation has always been an element of musical creativity, the exhaustion of stable attractors within a given consumption milieu (dancing, listening) means that it is left to simply additively utilise external influence-components, rather than achieving new emergent syntheses, characterised by the “shuffling of a deck” of possibilities already established elsewhere. This does not necessarily make for bad music, per se, and I am much more likely to listen to the latest Joker or Starkey tune than sit mournfully reminiscing over old Omni Trio 12”s. But the libindal investment in The Now, the addictive cultural expectation that what happens in this time is Important, (concurrent with the bad/misread Deleuzo-Guattarean notion of affirmation at all costs, and the injunction to “Enjoy!”) must not be allowed to blot out the all too real state of affairs. Ultimately it is a question of the mindset induced by capital’s de-temporalising hypnosis- in actuality what we have experienced is merely a blip, perhaps never to be again repeated, 150 or so years of extreme resource binging, the equivalent to an epic amphetamine session. What we are already experiencing is little more than the undoubtedly grim “comedown” of the great deceleration.