Opinion: The Death Of The Real Genre?

I have an admission to make: I invented “future garage”. Well, okay, not the term itself - that was coined back in 2003 for a much-admired mix CD by Oris Jay and J Da Flex. But its more modern usage. I originally used it in a 2008 review of an early release by London producer Spatial, simply as a passing description of the 2-step beats with high-tech atmospherics that were being explored by the likes of 2562, Ramadanman, Martyn, Geiom and co at the time.

It was never intended to define a genre, purely as an aesthetic call; I had no idea it would catch on to the point where a thriving Future Garage Forum would be operating online and the NME would be touting it as a “new scene” for 2011 (as it did recently). Now, bear with me... I want to examine this a bit: not because “future garage” itself is a particularly exciting sound (although it certainly does still have its moments, with current tracks by FaltyDL, Sepalcure and Arethis to name just three showing plenty of life in 2-step beats), but because it is an interesting illustration of the wider problem of talking about genre in 21st century club music. We could just as easily look at the problematic phrase “post-dubstep” to illustrate the complex relationship between scene, sound and era that exists at the moment. But let's stick with “future garage”.

Back in the day, J Da Flex himself was perfectly happy with the term: “I guess it made sense to be called 'future garage' at the time,” he says; “as it was a progression from the sound being played before that stage. 'Dubstep' didn't encapsulate the genre yet because there were different styles being played. You had the breaky garage which was the kind of stuff Zinc was making, and 2-step with the hard basslines which was the stuff myself, El-B, Zed Bias and Oris came with.

When the half step sound really started to come through later, then the word 'dubstep' was used and the sound came into itself. But in 2003 it was still undefined.”

This time round, however, he doesn't think it feels like a move forward from what came before. “There are a lot of people now who don't know the roots of the music,” he frowns; “so it's funny to hear them use this term that was already used eight years ago. I met some up and coming DJs the other day who'd never heard of El-B or Oris Jay or J Da Flex, yet they talk about 'future garage' as if it's something new, which speaks volumes! And their music was just nothing new.” J Da Flex himself certainly has no truck with revisiting his old 2-step rhythms, seeing the razor-edged techno/dubstep he now makes with Brighton's Hizzle Guy and Dismantle as the real progression from his past work.

There are, though, plenty of the younger generation of artists and DJs who do know their roots, but would agree with J Da Flex on the attempts to update garage. Deviation’s Alice Moxie, and DJ Oneman – whose mixes of old garage tracks with dubstep at FWD>> helped pave the way for the current rediscovery of 2-step rhythms – both came of age in the garage years, and are both uncomfortable with attempts to update the sound.

 “I would just never use the term,” says Alice. “It just grates with me. Garage will always be garage and from my teen years. It's what I grew up listening to. I think certain producers run with that name but just end up making music that sounds like everything else. I get sent a lot of music that people title as 'future garage' and every time I can almost predict exactly what it's going to sound like: usually not that original and very stripped back. I'm not hating as sometimes there's great garage-inspired music, but that's not that often.”

Likewise, Oneman says “it's strange really considering my background in garage but I just can't catch on to it like the old stuff. It's just old 2-step beats with some kind of new synth work over the top, but my problem is it's trying too hard to be cool and to sound like its 'father sound' at the same time. There's a lot more interesting stuff going on at the moment where people are genuinely doing new things, without having to reinvent something old.” Bristol's genre-mangler Sam Baobinga is more specific: “A lot of the future garage around seems to have smoothed the sound out into borderline blanditude. It's neither got the super cheesed-up swagger of the TwiceasNice-style champagne singalongs, the balls-out 'oomph' of speed garage, nor the weird dread moodiness of the El B / Zed Bias stuff.”

DJ/producer Whistla, on the other hand, unrepentantly waves the flag for the term as a lover of garage music. “It's not about futuristic sounds as such, it's about a desire to give garage a future,” he explains; “It's moving garage away from being an 'old skool thing' – all about reminiscing – towards being a fully-fledged scene that will last and last, much like how house has lots of variants: deep house, handbag house, hard house, vocal house, soulful house. That is what future garage is about, driving it forward with new ideas and new interpretations, but still being garage.”

Garage scene veteran MJ Cole is in semi-agreement with this aim: “When 'future garage' emerged again as a term 2-3 years ago, for a while I liked what it was about, as it clearly separated itself from 'old school UKG' - something I have a love/hate relationship with these days.” But he's certainly not willing to go as far as Whistla and give future garage a living identity of its own. “However,” he continues, “I don't think things like 'future garage' and 'post-dubstep' are definite enough now in order to make themselves unique. The genre terms which come through now are just tiny fluctuations and waves of new energy.”

And here is the crux of the matter: current terminology – “future garage” and “post-dubstep” being the most obvious terms – seems to imply just that sort of fluctuation, turbulence around the edges of existing forms, rather than any major innovation happening. London's pirate radio is as likely to have straight-up deep house as any radical new sound. The mid-ground between grime and dubstep is increasingly blurred. Clubs/labels like Numbers, Hoya:Hoya and Night Slugs each have their own distinctive hybrid sounds that are almost but not quite genres in themselves, styles old (juke/footworking) and new (moombahton) are being adopted worldwide but generally only as extra colours for DJs to add to their palettes: it seems like a fairly confused and confusing state of affairs.

No wonder, then, that some people end up trying to find ways to avoid the question of genre altogether: when I asked Kode9 about “future garage” and “post-dubstep”, his first response was: “My currents thoughts are that if I critique them, acknowledge them or even utter them, they will become stronger, so I shall proceed to carry on as if they didn't exist until one of them gets in my way, then there will be trouble!” Rinse FM's Scratcha DVA is even more vehement: “Real genre's out the window, mate. People think they can twist a few knobs and name it another genre. It's pathetic, it's all a big mess to be honest.” Numbers lynchpin (and Red Bull Music Academy graduate) Jackmaster can't be doing with any of it – only semi-joking, he says “it's all just techno isn't it?”

There's a real tension here. On the one hand, most people don't want to attach themselves to a spurious genre name which limits their sound or feels like a journalistic invention. And it's also easy to feel that “real genre”, to use DVA's term, is being dissolved in the ever-faster whirl of available information: what some have called “cultural entropy”. But on the other, everyone still wants something they can belong to. There's something special about feeling you are a part of the “house nation”, or about being “junglist for life”, and even – or especially – in the era where all music is available all the time, it's only natural to gather around one particular sound or scene you identify with and want to give that a name. There's something admirable, certainly, in Whistla's and others' dedication to garage and desire to keep the musical movement alive and innovating rather than falling into revivalism. But is this desire for a “movement” even feasible in the weird wired world of the 21st century?

Well maybe. But club music has particular qualities that stop it turning into a homogeneous mass, and is seemingly guaranteed to throw out a viable new movement just when everyone expects it least. Since the birth of disco or even before, it's been hard to pin the music down, because it is always happening everywhere at once – clubbing or otherwise engaging with DJ culture is dependent on immersion and repetition, layering and blending of sound and experience, and it's not about those single, spectacular, iconic events: there is no Woodstock or Sex Pistols at the 100 club moment in dance music. It always relies on social networks, always recycles itself – through sampling, remixing, revivals and crate-digging – and always needs more and more and more music to keep itself moving. In all of these ways, it pre-empted the digital age, and so in fact the issues of blurred boundaries and information overload are nothing new for club music. It contains the best and worst of music and always has. But it also contains the strategies for avoiding the worst and keeping the best regenerating.

Ten years ago, when I first started writing professionally, received media opinion was that ‘90s dance music was burned out, and the movements that were beginning to form – electroclash, folktronica/nu-folk and 8-bar, sublow and all the other sounds that would feed into grime and dubstep – could only ever remain niche concerns. Yet here we are a decade on, with house, techno and drum 'n' bass all having evolved and regenerated into genuine and living creative forces once more, grime rappers clambering up the charts and the very few heads who frequented the first FWD>> nights leading a vast global movement. Even those beardy nu-folkers, so easily written off back then, built a psychedelic scene and network that made superstars of Fleet Foxes, Laura Marling, Caribou and co.

The point of this is that we need to be careful what we write off. Very, very few people ever imagined that the moody basslines of “the FWD>> sound”, “new dark swing” or – yes – the original “future garage” would ever amount to anything more than a specialist interest for a micro-scene of red-eyed boys in dark rooms. But with the fierce, perhaps slightly insane, dedication of the Big Apple staff, the Tempa/FWD>> organisation, and perhaps most of all DJ Hatcha, those sounds became dubstep and conquered the world's clubs (and pop charts). It only took a very few people and the right conditions for that to happen – it's not something that anyone can force, but it proved that even in the internet age a grassroots movement can establish itself.

So however valid the criticisms we hear of “future garage” now – or indeed of “post-dubstep” or “boombahchero” or “witch house” or “purple wow” or “dayglo hip hop” or “glo-fi” or “neo 8-bar” or “turbo aquacrunk” – might be, it only takes a few people with that slightly insane tenacity and dedication to hide that sound away in a couple of club nights and a couple of obscure blogs and for it to mature into something that can turn a serious number of heads. Not to say that every spotty herbert who invents a new twist on an existing sound is the next Skream or Benga, of course – just that club music has a very uncanny, and perhaps slightly psychedelic, way of turning the ridiculous into the sublime, so watch what you laugh at now, or the laughs might be on you in a couple of years time.
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A postscript: much as this article might seem to defend the naming of genres, it is also absolutely vital to let go of attachment to these names sometimes and see the bigger picture. Kode9 puts it thus: “The interesting and defining thing about UK music over the last 20 years is that is suspended between the attractors or hip hop (and sometimes reggae) at one end, and house/techno at the other. The last thing we need is for British music to be subsumed into either a European or North American mega-genre.” MJ Cole sees it very similarly, though less rooted in the UK: “What we're seeing now is one big mass of Western club music which has it's roots in hip hop and the rave music of the ‘80s,” he says.

But even with this viewpoint, genres and sub-genres can still have value. Cole continues by describing these as the “waves and fluctuations” around the larger scenes, fluctuations which for him include “UK funky, Dutch house and future garage. They're all related to one another, and yes, the definitions do have a purpose in my opinion as they create interest and keep peoples minds and ears active.” This squares with Whistla's vision of a continuum of sound definitions, all the way down from the perennials like house and hip hop to fleeting names that may only exist for as long as a group of friends use them: “some of the briefly-used names in clubs are purely descriptive devices, but those can grow into fully-fledged scenes, which I feel is how new things are usually born."

Even Jackmaster – with his record-shop hat on – concurs that micro-genres and neologisms have a place in helping punters to understand and locate new sounds. “Well yeah,” he concedes; “all of these labels are totally necessary for sales and healthy discussion of music, I agree, even if it gets on my nerves. But honestly when I talk about music with friends there are two genres: good or bad.” It may sound like a cliché, but it's an important point: genres and scenes have their places, and important places too, in the development of music, but it's the moments when those melt down when the magic happens.

It's the wot-do-u-call-it moment of a genre – as a wise man once put it – or, in MJ Cole's words, the “sweet spot of dance music that we're at now where I can play what I like in a set without clearing the floor”. Or it's the moment when a black British producer plays a lethal d&b classic at the wrong speed right in the throbbing heart of Berlin techno and makes it work. So I'll leave the last word on genre to Scratcha DVA: “I played DJ Krust’s Warhead at 130bpm in Berghain,” he says sagely; “I don't give a fuck. Just make good tunes, that's it.”

Joe Muggs is a London-based music writer and reviewer for the likes of The Guardian, The Wire, Word, and The Arts Desk. He also runs a blog (sort of), and recently put together the compilation Adventures In Dubstep And Beyond for Ministry Of Sound. You can follow him on Twitter here.