Badly thought out way to get the bad thoughts out.

Saturday 27 December 2008

Funkle Fuck

Christmas is traditionally a time of both giving and committing suicide, and today I feel like putting my metaphorical hand in my pocket and my figurative head in the symbolic oven simultaneously by bigging up a producer who has had to contend over the past year with having the same name as that guy off Eastenders who did this tune, which I'm sure you'll remember:



Now - is there any other tune which so instantly evokes sitting barely conscious by the bar at Christmas as everybody else whispers sweet Rohypnols in each others ears, staring with limp dead-eyed despair at your beer saturated lap, as wet and unloved as a stone at the bottom of the Irish sea? Wishing that a miniscule fanatic would run screaming into the pub and straight up your bottom, into your lower intestine and detonate a half pound of C4?


Plus - look at his son! I've seen dribbles of sperm embedded in my pubic wig that were less deserving of being screwed up in a ball of tissue and flushed into a sewer. This is precisely why everyone fucking hates Martin Kemp and wants to see him and his coiffured-turd of a son hung by their necks until they look like two bottles of HP Sauce that somebody is squeezing too hard in the middle.


But ^ THIS ^ Martin Kemp deserves none of your hatred (yet). His tunes (listen to some clips HERE) are, a bit like his brother Brackles', weird and wonky with a lot of shuffle in the beats and manage to be deep without losing the jump-n-twist factor.

I'd describe them as 'Deep Funky', if the very thought of such a genre emerging, in a thousand colours of the vinyl rainbow, didn't make my fingers atrophy with horror. But like funky tunes, these tunes have the warm and/or energetic pulse of house music coupled with the swing and sub-bass of two-step. But there's an atmosphere created by the synths and arrangement which you don't really find in the (amazing) UK Funky tunes by producers like Roska and H-H-Banton, which have similarly interesting and bodymovin rhythms to them. I guess you can hear this mixture emerging in tunes like this:



Elements of the dubstep and funky communities/scenes are definitely engaging in dialogue at the moment - Kode 9, whose latest set at FWD was (to the chagrin of some) about 50% funky/percussive house, seems to be leading the way as usual in this respect (and of course FWD itself). And apparently Marcus has been playing some bits by Kode and Ramadanman.

It seems to me that there's a great deal of dubstep (not all of it - see Silkie/Quest/TRG etc.) now which has less in common with UK garage than with DNB/techno/hip-hop, which is fine, but that garage-connection seems strong in Funky, and perhaps some sort of Funky/dubstep hybrid will emerge in 2009 that will help strengthen dubstep's ties to its musical roots in two-step and latterly 'tribal' percussion. [L.D has also just remixed 'Do You Mind' and you can't forget D1, whose 'Oingy Boingy' bridges the gap nicely]

I've recently ranted about the merits of mixing things up on here, and I'd love to see either some slightly slower dubstep or slightly faster funky coming out in 2009 so that its easier to mix them together. When mixing house/techno/garage/funky together I find that dubstep is the only genre that is slightly harder to fit in, unless you pitch the funky up or dubstep down. But some DJs are already managing to do it effectively (see HERE jimmy for a great little Jackmaster mix)

Anyway- Mart's tunes are bleedingly obviously marvellous, and will wipe forever from your mind the image of Martin punching that old dear Dot Cotton in the boat outside the Old Vic for nicking a hanky from his bloomin pockets. That was the original point of this post until I put my pontificating cap on.