jungle can be pandemic art
I mentioned the other day that I’d read a little Raymond Williams and found the idea interesting that part of the time-and-placeness of a time and place is best captured, or arguably only capturable, through art, which led me to wondering about art that expresses the pandemic-times-ness of pandemic times. (By the way, Buttondown's update its format so the archive of old posts is easier to navigate: https://buttondown.email/nateholdren/archive/) Today I had a thought while looking for music to listen to while working. Before I go there, I just want to say, all blessings upon the people who put together playlists and whatnot simply for the love of the music and the sharing of it. I've been trawling around on Mixcloud and there's so much good music there. The other night I also enjoyed this massively, DJ Randall playing a set of early 90s jungle https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UgK8h9xRFls
and there's also this as well by him: https://soundcloud.com/metalheadz/randall-metalheadz-re-mastered-history-mix
So yeah I’ve been on a minor kick lately for jungle. I've always liked that stuff casually but have only dipped in casually here and there, most recently I think because of the last releases by San and Russ Booker on the Rua Sound label: https://ruasound.bandcamp.com/ This kick has come and gone many times in my musical life but this time around it's, I don't know, kickier. It's hitting harder for me.
Now, this is not a genre I’m fluent in, so to speak, far from it (and that kind of fluency is something I don't want to care about but I do despite myself - or rather despite the self I'd like to be, the self I am being more weight of dead traditions weighing like a nightmare upon my living brain...). I just know that some music in the genre really, really grabs me and I like that. I lack a vocabulary to say what is and isn’t grabbing me and am unsure where to go to hear more. (This is all much easier now, and frankly less urgent, but it’s somewhat similar to when I first got into punk at around 14 because a friend loaned me a handful of CDs - it grabbed me very much and I wanted more, but how?!)
I looked at the wikipedia page trying to get more stuff to listen to and there was an interesting bit about the emotional tenor of the music footnoted to Simon Reynold’s book Generation Ecstasy - a copy of which I’ve owned for years, unread, because who has time for recreational reading?!
Trawling around a bit in the book turns up these bits: “jungle's militant euphoria is fueled by the desperation of the early nineties. Composed literally out of fracture ("breaks"), jungle paints a sound picture of social disintegration and instability. But the anxiety in the music is mastered and transformed into a kind of nonchalance; the disruptive breakbeats are looped into a rolling flow. In this way, jungle contains a nonverbal response to troubled times, a kind of warrior stance. The "resistance" is in the rhythms. Jungle is the metabolic pulse of a body reprogrammed and rewired to cope with an era of unimaginably intense information overload.” (page 250-1) “Jungle's dense percussive web destabilizes the beat, traditionally the steady pulse of pop music. Breakbeats make the music feel treacherous. The safety factor intrinsic to most machine-made dance music, the predictability that allows the listener to trance out, was replaced by a palpable danger. Jungle makes you step in a different way, wary and en garde. It was this edginess that drove many ravers out of the hardcore scene and back to house” (253) Over time as the music got more intense and skittery, jungle became “ a rhythmic psychedelia. Unlike sixties psychedelic rock, which was "head" music, jungle's disorientation is as much physical as mental. Triggering different muscular reflexes, jungle's multi-tiered polyrhythms are body-baffling and discombobulating unless you fixate on and follow one strand of the groove. Lagging behind technology, the human body simply can't do full justice to the complex of rhythms. The ideal jungle dancer would be a cross between a virtuoso drummer (someone able to keep separate time with different limbs), a body-popping breakdancer, and a contortionist.” (253-4)
In broad strokes that speaks to what I like in this music, though I listen to it while sitting and reading or typing, or while standing up and washing dishes, I’m not a dancer, and I listen alone, not communally. Still, it’s the unsettledness that’s a big part of the appeal and also specifically the sort of pacing around back and forth across the line between anxious and excited. To a significant extent is just matches my internal mental state a lot of the time, particularly when I’m working with music in my headphones (let me tell you, writing sucks, ugh! and this stuff is great to write to), and/or thinking about the world in broad strokes. The relative abstraction, in the sense of mostly being lyricless or just repeated vocal samples as well as in the unpredictability of the variations on the beat (but offset by the comforting fact that it’s still very much rhythmic, just a complex rhythm, this isn’t the sound of randomness so much as a rhythm that’s racing, demanding, and hard to predict in its particular movements), also fits with the sort of open mouthed “I need to say something but can’t” - a tiny exhalation of air quickly cut off in a glottal stop (an unvoiced “uhh”), probably best represented in type by “...” - sense of the world being fucked beyond articulability.
This by the way is what my favorite Bad Religion song is about - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DKXVyizc4Bc and, also by the way, I once had this song be present at a time when I feel like I really genuinely needed it. Briefly: I was underemployed and working cash in hand, checking my bank balance daily, counting how much cash I had to buy groceries, etc. I’d come up short at the end of the month but one of my roommates had loaned me three hundred bucks until pay day and I was feeling like cool, I made it, this is great, and I wanted to celebrate by cooking a nice meal for all of us, so I go into the grocery store and hit the ATM only to find that after depositing the three hundred dollar check from my roommate I had fifty bucks. I called my bank and what had happened was my paycheck had bounced. I walked out of the grocery store, got in my car, and sobbed a while with my face in my hands, ugly crying hunched over the steering wheel in the parking lot. After a bit I turned the car on to go home, feeling defeated and fucked not just now but forever and to such a degree that I couldn’t have put it to words at the moment - part of the need to sob, I think, is that words vocalized in anything like normal speech don’t suffice for some experiences and emotions) and I happened to have that Bad Religion song in the tape or CD player, I no longer remember which. It was just what I needed at that moment, noise and words for and about distressed wordlessness, plus a sense of connection with other people in that same condition.
Anyway, I wonder if jungle is apt to the structure of feeling for pandemic life (I’ll add that I think part of pandemic life is fracturing of the sort I wrote about in my Broken Sociality essay, in that we’re all living in the same world but that world distributes social fates very differently and perception and response to different social fates differs massively, to put it mildly: more simply, some of us are very fucking aware it’s still a fucking pandemic, and others are, well, not! and I think jungle is also apt to that as well), including the condition of not yet having been able to make adequate meaning of all this. The horror and grief plus its current (at best) only partial processability - grief interrupted, prevented - is for me anyway a kind of wordlessness (he said, after having written 1100 words here - yes, but none of them adequate! prewriting in search for and, hopefully, service of a future adequate expression, though maybe this degree of nightmare is never adequately expressible verbally, hence the ongoing need for sobbing and shouting and abstract art?) and that worldlessness manifests in part in restlessness, metaphorical more often than literal pacing around but still, it feels a bit like wearing clothes that are itchy and too tight, as well as insomnia as my mind struggles to wind down. All of that is, I don’t know, if this makes sense, bodily in a lived sense but not necessarily bodily in the narrow sense in which a stubbed toe is a bodily experience - tied to myself in ways that influence how I feel and what I do rather than being anything I choose, so to speak. Not sure I’m making sense there, fuck it. My point is that there’s a kind of submergedness, a part of the iceberg below the water that I know is there by its effects but can’t directly perceive all of, quality to the present and how it feels to be in the present - with those effects coming out in my body/mind/self in a sort of ‘damn, this hurts, why am I like this?’ kind of involuntary way. I think what Reynolds talks about as the bodily aspects of jungle fit with that - treacherously destabilized in a way that the body and self can’t keep up with or express in coherent words. But it also sounds good and is controlled and controllable, being music, which helps process the experience, helps depict the time-and-placeness of this god awful time and place. So yeah maybe jungle is really good pandemic art, regardless of intent.
Trying one more thought here: if memory serves, I said in the post about Williams that maybe artists in expressing a time and place do so by working holistically and in taking in that work art audiences inhabit a kind of holistic cognition insofar as the work represents that time and place as a whole. Maybe part of pandemic life is living in a social world (and in relationships with other people) that is in important ways genuinely, deeply fragmented so that resists being holistically comprehended: to perceive it holisitically is to be pulled out of the social experience of life in that context, because part of life in that context is experiences of opacity, fragmentedness, relative incomprehensibility. Maybe jungle reflects some of that in that it evokes what it feels like to live amid all that but not in the way done by realist art that depicts life in that context? I'll add that I think to some degree this is really what life under capitalism is like per se, the pandemic being a kind of 'be what you already are, just much louder and more intensely' era - like the intensifications a caricature artist does. (Imagine a scene where a caricature artist draws a normal caricature of a person, the person looks at it, then their normal face melts and remolds to literally become what the caricature depicts. Pandemic times are sort of like that for capitalism I think, though I could be wrong.)
And yes, I’m aware I’m likely overreading and overgeneralizing from my own tastes. If I had a punchline it’d go here, lacking one I can say I will be it as a way of life.
Over and out, friends. Keep on trucking.