Mix Master Mike gets to the heart of hip hop in 50 seconds.
Having Jay Strongman on board Soul Underground as Assistant Editor was a slightly surreal experience for me. I loved the music and the scene, but my knowledge of either was around 1% of Jay’s, so I sometimes felt like an imposter in my own magazine!
At that time, Jay was the DJ – a superstar DJ in the era before that title was invented – but the sets he’d play at the Dirtbox, the Mud Club, the Wag and elsewhere revealed an appreciation of music history and a openmindedness was rare then, rarer still now.
Jay was recently interviewed by Ross Allen for Ministry of Sound Radio – it’s a great listen, covering 80s clubland and the birth of today’s club culture. Download it here.
Jay’s 80s warehouse mix, created specially for the publication of Catch The Beat, is now available at Soundcloud
There aren’t many books of music writing that change the way you look at the world, but Ian MacDonald’s “Revolution in the Head” is one of them. Although its main subject is the music of The Beatles, it’s the introductory essay that should be required reading for, well, anyone with an interest in culture and why we are where we are now. MacDonald argues that Western society has been in a downward spiral ever since the Sixties, and comes to some surprising and controversial conclusions about who’s to blame.
I interviewed Ian in 1998, at a time when his reputation as a writer on music and culture could scarcely have been higher. Ian died in 2003.
In your introduction to “Revolution in the Head”, you discuss at length the fragmentation of Western society since the Sixties. How much do you think the popular culture of rock ‘n’ roll, The Beatles, Sex Pistols et al sped up that fragmentation?
It’s difficult to separate these things out. In a way, popular culture was and is that fragmentation. But the reflex response to that is, like some Conservative backbench reactionary, to look for someone to blame for it. And the fact is that the Sixties, and everything good or bad that’s flowed from that era, was the popular expression of mainstream society, of ordinary people. Trying to isolate popular culture in order to pin the blame on it for social fragmentation misses the point. Popular culture is us.
The right wing naturally detests the hippies and “Lefties” of the Sixties counterculture, but blaming them for social fragmentation makes no sense. They were arguing for a new form of social cohesion, an alternative vision of society. The social fragmentation we see now stems from the economic aspirations of the populist mainstream: the people who bought all those millions of Beatles records; the people who voted for Mrs Thatcher and then for Tony Blair.
Pop music has plenty of reprehensible qualities and it can’t be dismissed as mere unconscious expression, as a kind of halo of sound and image given off by society. Pop also reflects society back at itself, thereby encouraging certain tendencies often anti-social. But, in the end, pop is a product of our society – the society we made from our desires for more freedom, wealth, and self-fulfillment at the expense of the social regimentation that once kept us in our places. The problem is not in our pop records but in ourselves.
In 1993 I was commissioned to write a piece that had been on my mind for years – an attempt to reveal the roots of house music as being very different from where it had ended up. In the UK, at least, house was a very white, straight scene, so I hoped that an article exploring its black, gay roots would provoke a response, and offer a corrective to the rewriting of music history that was already so far advanced. It provoked more of a response than I imagined – Q magazine decided that their readers could live without this revelation, and ‘spiked’ the piece. It was published in The Wire and Attitude, but it’s a real shame that it never got a chance to provoke the readers of such a notoriously conservative magazine. Enjoy this blast from my journalistic past and please leave comments.
With the unending controversy about homophobia in black music, people seem to have forgotten that the blackest music of all, the real soul music, comes from a place that some would rather didn’t exist. But it does, and now – as ever – half the world is dancing to a queer groove.
The orginal article in 'Attitude' magazine
Which half? That depends on where you are. New York’s Roxy on a Saturday night gives you one answer. Every fortnight, up to 7,000 men – mainly black and Latino –gather in this vast club on the edge of Chelsea, now as gay as the West Village, to dance to the songs that Frankie Knuckles plays. This being Manhattan, Frankie faced real problems in bringing such a night to a venue not always famed for its peaceful get-togethers. He smiles knowingly as he describes the club owner’s reaction to the clientele. “He’s worried about a black or hispanic crowd, because of the serious problems he’s had with rap nights. He can’t appreciate that a straight crowd is completely different from a gay one. Gay people go out to have a good time: it’s based around sociability rather than the power trip.”
Looking down at the dance floor through British sensibilities, there’s no getting away from just how strange this is: the atmosphere is intense, sweaty, but still amazingly friendly and, well, soulful. It’s easy to be blasé about this, but that’s missing the point house music exists, as disco did before it, as the purest of soul music for people who want to hear songs of love, hope and, well, belonging. It may sound corny, but it’s true. Frankie puts it more succinctly: “What makes most gay clubs so successful, and has made this music so successful, is that this audience is looking for escapism. Rap sells to white kids who can learn about black life and culture: the gay crowd doesn’t need to be told about the tough life – they live it every day.”
There have been a few clubs which have managed to integrate black and white, but they’re a rarity. Why? Frankie looks at me like I’m an idiot. “That’s the nature of New York, the nature of the US.” The next morning, the papers are full of the story of a young black man, viciously beaten, for no apparent reason, by four white kids on his own housing estate. Over in Brooklyn, blacks and Hasidic Jews are just about maintaining a very uneasy peace, suspicious and resentful of each other despite having lived together for decades. Read more…
Over its 38 issues, Soul Underground attracted a huge number of writers, would-be writers, chancers and so on… but the early days saw around a dozen contributors responsible for pretty much everything between its pages. One of those was Brian Belle-Fortune, who wrote as Brian B – initials were big in the 80s… Nowadays, Brian is best known as a historian of pirate radio and for his involvement in, and championing of, the Drum & Bass scene (he wrote “All Crews”, the definitive history of D&B), but two dozen years ago, it was a different story…
When I walked into the Soul Underground office – in reality, the front room of David’s South London flat – I didn’t let on that I had spent a couple of years in the remedial English class, had failed English O-level and had definitely not attended any journalism courses. So what the hell was I doing there? I was passionate about music and London’s Underground club scene and had been since the early 80s when I discovered street skating and the beats of pirate radio rolling and dancing with our squads on the floors of the Camden’s Electric Ballroom. I’d check clubs like The Horseshoe, Le Beat Route and The Royalty in Southgate. My God… the music, the people, the clothes, the dancing, the sweat dripping off the ceilings… keep reading>>
This is a guest post from Paul Ablett, one of Soul Underground’s most prolific contributors, and someone with an ability to get a story out of the most tight-lipped interviewees.
Being a typical white middle class dance music fan in the late 80′s, interviewing house and hip hop artists often pushed me way outside my comfort zone. Most house artists were eager to talk while hip hop artists were usually more cautious, initially. They all liked to keep up appearances and live up to their persona.
I remember the House outfit Ten City trying to intimidate me (and other journalists, for that matter) by sitting on one side of a conference table like some peace treaty meeting, only to be turned into gabbling children when I asked them what was the first song they remembered hearing. Remember, Soul Underground and dance music journalism was in its infancy so we hacks were seen as curiosities. I got off to a bad start with Ice Cube by asking about LA gangs, only to be saved by promptly changing tack and asking if he remembered the first rhyme he wrote. Pushing back his NWA cap over his Jheri curls and looking lost in thought, he slipped back to his childhood, remembering how he composed one in a school class with a friend, without the teacher seeing. When I asked the same question of Busta Rhymes – at the beginning of his career, as part of Leaders Of The New School – he cleared the room of his over-exuberant homeboys and got serious about the interview.
If Soul Underground taught me one thing in becoming a journalist, it was that if you disarm them right from the first question, the real person comes out, not the self publicist.
Advance copy of 'Catch The Beat: The Best of Soul Underground 1987-91'
Well, it’s arrived, and I can still hardly believe it! A mere 19.5 years after the demise of my apparently-legendary magazine comes this amazing anthology from DJHistory.com. I’ll post more information soon about how this Lazarus-like resurrection came about, along with stories about the magazine and the stunning array of contributors who made it happen, but for now, I just wanted to let you know that it’s out there.
Buy now at DJHistory.com
