For the unanointed, what is a Junglist?!
Here's a couple of definitions:
Urban Dictionary says a Junglist is 'a male or female who regularly listens to drum & bass/ jungle music. Junglists are also very aware of breakbeat culture, practicing most traditions in & around breakbeat & hip-hop culture (ie. graffiti, breaking, mc'ing, dj'ing)' .
Collins Dictionary defines a Junglist thus 'as a noun - a fan or performer of jungle music, or as an adjective - of or relating to jungle music'.
I agree with all of the above, and would simply add that alongside the music, its roots and the dance culture it is central to, Junglism is an ethos that can be stated as a simple acronym:
P.L.U.R. - Peace, Love, Unity & Respect.
So, to be a Junglist means holding up these four values as cornerstones of everything you do in life. This creates the community that is the DnB massive - all the fans and ravers, DJ's, MC's, artists, labels owners, producers, managers, promoters and everyone else involved, who contribute to the overall scene. It's been well over 25 years since Jungle / Drum&Bass properly emerged in its own right. It is one family, it is massive, and it has never been stronger or bigger.
Music IS my life.
No truer words shall ever pass my lips!
I wrote a short piece about how important music is to me and how generally it seems to be such a force in people's lives. You can read it on my blog from last year by following this link - Whispering In The Wind - 'Music Is Life'
I can't recall the exact age I became addicted to music, but music is the only addiction in life to which I am happy to add fuel. It's quite possible this addiction may well have begun when I was still in the womb! I do know my Dad, being the music buff he was in his early years, used to listen to a lot of Kraftwerk, Pink Floyd, Jean-Michel Jarre and many others when I was developing in that maternal sac. I'll never know if that shaped my love of music, but I like to think it did. Certainly, from birth up to around the age of 8 or 9, I know he played music a lot in the little spare time he had between long shifts at work. That had to have influenced me.
I showed an unusually keen interest in music from pre-school age according to my parents. Bearing in mind I was born in 1976, so entertainment choice was extremely limited, my favourite television programme by the age of 4 was called 'Music Time'. I literally would not leave the house without seeing it. By the age of 8, if memory serves, my Mum enrolled me with a classical piano teacher for weekly lessons. I very quickly got up to Grade 2 examination level. Shortly after this my parents, prompted by my Nan, also bought me a basic Bontempi keyboard to play at home.
I taught myself to play all sorts of tunes I liked 'by ear', I guess I was about 9 years old by then. One was the theme song to a TV programme called 'Ski Sunday'. I'll never forget the day my Nan and parents came into my room in amazement, having heard me play this tune note-perfect. They were in shock! I recall them asking me how I learned to play the tune. I simply said, "I just kept playing the notes until it sounded right." They were blown away, and it felt amazing!
I bought my first record at the age of 9 or 10 - the single of 'Cry Wolf' by A-Ha (oh boy!) - remember, I was a kid and this band was the big thing in the playground! From there my Dad had fairly regular 'music sessions' with me where he would introduce me to all sorts of artists from his huge vinyl collection of 60's and 70's music. We got into listening to his favourite records, and also buying the back catalogues of our shared favourites, and discovering new material and artists into the bargain. It was a golden time, a great gift from father to son, for which I will always be very grateful.
So my Dad guided and helped me to develop a wide and hugely varied musical taste from the start. I discovered a plethora of amazing bands and artists through him - Kraftwerk, Jean-Michel-Jarre, Art Of Noise, Joy Division, New Order, Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin, The Beatles, Deep Purple, The Doors, King Crimson, David Bowie, Queen, Jimi Hendrix, Peter Gabriel, Simon & Garfunkel, Madonna, Inner City, Prince, Michael Jackson, Dave Brubeck, The Eagles... the list goes on almost ad infinitum! A real smorgasbord of genres, styles and types of music across the spectrum. There was very little I didn't like.
Two particular genres of music piqued my interest right from those early days - the prog. rock of Pink Floyd and others, and the electronic music of Jarre, Kraftwerk et al. To this day, Pink Floyd remain without a shadow of a doubt my absolute favourite band of all time. Even post-separation, the surviving members of the group remain my favourite solo artists of all time too! Then there's the world of Electronica...
Through the music of Kraftwerk and Jarre I found a fascination with the emerging music genres of techno and ambient electronica, and soon after being introduced to the sound of Inner City I found a parallel love with the early Detroit techno and also Chicago house sounds. Later in the 80's this would be superseded by a passion for the breaks and beats and rapping of Hip-Hop, but that was yet to come. I loved electronic music because it felt like something I could be a part of, and in a way I already was.
I kind of outgrew piano lessons, becoming far more interested in my own little synthesiser at home and also bigger and better ones at friends houses. I was playing tunes by ear but also had started making up my own. My parents invested in my first proper electronic organ, a beast of a Technics, at huge cost to them. I was around 12 and was having organ lessons weekly. I got very good at playing, but was soon straying more and more away from the set pieces of my old and somewhat crusty organ teacher, spending increasing amounts of time making up my own music. I hated reading proper music scores, finding it a cumbersome, dull and thankless way to play the boring old tunes he set me each week.
At the age of 13, I was bought my first 16-bit computer - the Commodore Amiga 500. In short order, my best friend and I got hold of early Soundtracker programs and then MED - music creation software, along with loads of disks of samples and sounds to use. We were hooked! We started churning out tune after tune of our own creation. In a matter of a few months, we had recorded several 90-minute cassettes of our work. About a year after this, aged 14 or so, my parents stopped my organ lessons and sold my Technics organ, 'because I wouldn't play what the teacher set me'. I did protest and tried to explain I wanted to write my own music, with the computer and the organ together, but sadly this fell on deaf ears. It was rather a crushing blow, but I just got on with computer-based production and put all my creative energy into that.
By this time it was the start of the 90's and the rave scene was in full flow. We had begun to hear tapes of Rush FM that a friend brought down from London, playing hardcore rave music. Alongside this, The Prodigy arrived on the scene along with other early rave pioneers. We were sampling and remixing everything we could get our hands on, simultaneously writing our own original material too - all on Amiga 500's with no hard drive and 1MB of RAM! Those were amazing days. Sometimes we would almost finish a new track and the Amiga would crash, losing all our work! More than once we would just reboot and remake the tune from scratch, sometimes better than before! We decided we needed to name ourselves something, so we thought as we weren't DJ's we would be CJ's - computer jockeys! I was 'CJ Headhype', which very quickly got changed to CJ Shadow, and he was CJ Trinity.
By the time we reached 16 years old and left school, the rave scene was splitting in two - the 'Happy' Hardcore and Jungle scenes. It took one CD compilation, Jungle Mania, to convince me which way I was going. I already preferred breakbeats over four-beat music, stemming from my love of Hip-Hop. De La Soul and the whole Native Tongues Posse were my staple diet, and although I loved a whole cross-section of rap music, it was and is De La who have always stood out above the rest. I also had grown to love Bob Marley and the whole reggae and dub vibe. To me, Jungle was a perfect marriage of electronica, rave, breakbeats and reggae / ragga-style lyrics. A Junglist was born!
Aged 17 I went to my first rave - Fusion, Hastings Pier, 1994. It was mainly hardcore but in the middle of all that a guy called DJ Hype came on and dropped a tune I knew from the Jungle Mania CD - Dead Dred - Dred Bass. That was us erupting into life for the first time as ravers! Hook, line, sinker and copy of the angling times mate!! I was a Junglist forever, from that moment forward. Following this experience, my music production went into overdrive. I was sampling, remaking, remixing and mashing up all the Jungle I could get my hands on.
In '95 alone I made around half a dozen 90-minute albums of material. My mate was making increasingly more ambient, trancey, house-like stuff, which was cool as it gave us another string to our bow. I was putting out tapes to friends, they were copying them and sharing them out. None of it was strictly legal, much was just sampled Jungle tunes reworked, so I distributed if for free and always credited the source artists. I never made a penny from any of it. It was a hobby. I formed a kind of label, first called Q-P-I Music or 'Quadrosonix', then when I began to write more original works, self-constructed beats and my own lyrics and MIC work, it became Headlong Recordings.
At this time my mate CJ Trinity joined the RAF and was posted all over the country, so our time together became very limited. For me, college went by, then the world of work began. This change enabled both of us in our separate locations to afford better computers, better hardware and software - and to be able to create much better and totally original music - but at the cost of much less time to actually spend on production, of course! By the time I was 19, I was a Junglist raver every weekend, a proper amateur producer, a label manager of sorts, and somehow maintaining the full-time day job all at once. Add to the mix the birth of my son and you could say it was a very full life!
Also at this time, I had developed a passion for MC'ing. Going to Jungle and Drum&Bass raves to enjoy the music was one thing but the raw power and energy of MC's like Stevie Hyper D (R.I.P.), Shabba D, Skibadee, Det, IC3, Fearless, MC MC, Navigator, Foxy, Fatman D and many more I could mention just bowled me over. It was a natural progression for me to venture into spitting bars, as I had been writing poetry since around the age of about 13. From around '96 I MC'd live at quite a few private house parties, even putting on my own one-off live night in my home town in '98. I loved the vibe of bouncing off people's reactions and also working in tandem with the DJ and other MC's. People kept inviting me back, so I must have been doing something right! I recorded several sessions from back then which I still have in my archives.
My music production went through peaks and troughs through the late 90's and into the 2000's. I had formed a new label, Unborn Records, in partnership with my old best friend who now lived 500 miles away in Scotland. We launched UnbornRecords.net as an online platform for our music, and that of a few close friends. We got quite a bit of interest and lots of downloads, sold a couple of CD's, even got approached by one or two established labels. Things looked and felt really exciting. This lasted a while and it was a good venture but sadly it eventually fizzled out, due to time and funding constraints, and just life getting in the way. We were led up the garden path a bit by one or two 'music industry professionals' and also the whole industry was changing and starting to go digital. It was a rough time for independent musicians of all kinds.
I made the usual batch of CD's for friends to enjoy and released the whole album for free on the last.fm website where it remained for about 5 years. Sadly, 2005 saw a big halt in my musical creativity. It's a long story that I have more than covered before through last year's 'Whispering In The Wind' blog. To put it in a sentence, I had to take time out for what ended up being the best part of a decade to address my mental health and personal issues. I did it, I did the therapy, I worked at it really hard, and came out the other side. I'm 42 now and happily married, have three amazing kids and in the last 18 months my creativity has emerged from the haze of a battle against the longest creative block of my life. It seems strange to say it but I have honestly never felt quite so energised and young at heart! I've grown up - from the self-medicating raver, the lost mental patient and the man who felt his creative dreams crushed by the weight of life's problems and pain - to a bold, strong, clean-living, mentally healthy Junglist soldier.
Last year was all about writing my blog, and a novel which is in the works (an ongoing project). This year I am writing poetry and bars like never before, and since eliminating all mainstream media, television and other useless distractions from my life, I fill my spare time with music new and old. I am a delivery driver for my day job and have the good fortune to be able to listen to my choice of music as I do my rounds. I've found myself MC'ing to the latest DnB that I download and play almost every day. It's great practice, I'm writing and improvising lyrics and bars on the fly, and I am looking to hopefully find work actually doing this thing at properly organised dances. Watch this space!
Finally, it is with no small amount of excitement that I can say I have begun working on new music production. That huge creative block is properly gone! I am learning new software and have already put together the skeletal bare bones of a brand new album of all original material, alongside some remixes of various tunes that people have been requesting. This all takes a lot of time, of course, but it is my hope that I can start releasing new material as the year progresses. I am also trawling through my archives and old hard drives, remastering the best of the older material and releasing it for free anywhere online I can get free space. There's much to look forward to from me - and much to enjoy in the process of both discovering and creating new music, and rediscovering and re-releasing the classics from back in the day.
It only remains to say a massive thank you. First and foremost, to my Dad who gave me the grounding in music that has become my passion and my saving grace in life. Secondly, to my old mate CJ Trinity - it is a sad fact of life that our paths diverged and we are no longer in touch. I hope one day we will rectify this, but in the meantime, I would urge anyone who enjoys the more trancey, melodic, chilled-out side of things to visit his youtube page to check out his music, both old and new. Finally, to my friends and family - and to all the heads in the scene who inspire me, guide me, amaze me and energise me in equal measure - massive respect, big up yourselves and long live Jungle / DnB.
One love.
Copyright © 2019 R. C. Greenlow. All Rights Reserved.
