Gwarn!

Just in case the preponderance of waffling about Literature on here has led anyone to believe that I’m labouring under the misconception that I’m some sort of intellectual, I would like to share the following YouTube.com links to 14 minutes of early 1990s promotional music video material, representing four of my favourite compositions of all time:

SL2 - On A Ragga Tip
2 Bad Mice - Bombscare
808 State - In Yer Face
The Prodigy - Charly

They don’t make ‘em like that any more. Those videos are so skanky they make punk look like opera, and large chunks of the records are technically borrowed or stolen to boot. Bombscare in particular is a masterpiece of minimalism: there’s only about seven loops in the whole record, and that’s typical of the genre. Of course, this is because most of those tunes were put together on kit with considerably less memory and processing power than the average modern mobile phone. And I don’t mean individual bits of hardware, either, I mean the entire studio probably had less clock cycles and bytes of RAM combined than your current freebie contract mobile does. Imagine getting to No. 2 in the charts with something less complicated than your average polyphonic ringtone: that’s what SL2 did.

I honestly love those tracks more than almost anything else ever committed to vinyl by man. If, by some bizarre twist of BBC scheduling, one of my more far-fetched ambitions should ever comes to pass, and I one day find myself a guest on Desert Island Discs, I hereby promise, with the internet as my witness, that I would nominate one of those tunes in my selection, so help me Vint. I’d be quite happy bouncing around my little atoll to the sounds of 2 Bad Mice.

3 comments 2007-01-28 22:03 Categories: Music