Artforum - Best and Worst of 1994

Artforum December 1994

BEST

Lords of Jungle

Jungle is all the rage in London: from every other car and boutique you hear its febrile beats, rumblin’ bass, and insolent ragga chat. Now that the sound has broken into the mainstream, most people equate jungle with dance-hall reggae-influenced hits like Shy FX & UK Apachi’s “Original Nuttah.” I prefer the sub-genre of ambient jungle, because it’s at once more experimental and more melodic.

“Renegade Snares (Foul Play Remix)” (Moving Shadow, import) unites my two fave a-j artists, Omni Trio and Foul Play, who pull off the remixer’s miracle of making a perfect original even more sublime: somehow they manage to extract even more searing/soaring orgasmitude out of Omni’s arrangement of soul-diva spasms and mellotronic synth-swoops. The drum-and-bass undercarriage is based around a break beat so crisp and fierce it’s like a cross between James Brown’s “Funky Drummer” and an Uzi. What I really love about ambient jungle, though, is its sentimentality—the gushing tenderness of the voices, the tingly, almost-twee piano motifs—and the way that fits the huggy, openhearted poignancy of the Ecstasy experience. Strangely, and thankfully, people continue to make this kind of music even though the luv’d-up E-vibe has disappeared from British clubland, replaced by a sullen aloofness.

WORST

Boys in the Band

The chorus of the would-be anthem by These Animal Men, prime movers in the Brit-scene “New Wave of New Wave,” goes “This is the sound of youth today” (Hi-Rise, import). The pat rebuttal would be “No, this is the sound of youth yesterday”—specifically of youth 1966, or worse, its charmless replay in 1979’s mod revival. But what really unnerves me about These Animal Men—and the same goes for the U.S. pop punk of Green Day—is that this is the first time rock revivalism has gotten around to exhuming something I lived through as a late-’70s just-missed-punk adolescent. I’ve always hated those old fogies who greet each new band with a cynical “seen it all before”; now I find myself one, as kids half my age pogo.

Still, everything about “This Is the Sound of Youth” is a tale thrice told and stingless. From the band’s legs-akimbo stage leaps, windmilling Pete Townshend power chords, and speed-freak stares to the video’s boys-will-be-boys plotline (the band as ten-year-old schoolkids throwing paper pellets at girls and cheeking their wrinkly old school ma’am), this is prehistoric stuff: a willful flight from all the things that make ’90s pop exciting (samplers, remixology, women’s ferocity), a retreat into a Luddite, homosocial nostalgia.