RAGGACORE

Contents?

Is this all about sound, producing records and playing them on the dancefloor? Well, not- the discussion about Homophobia even reached Breakcore. The hatred against gays and lesbians in many Dancehall lyrics raised the conciousness, that it music is simply "not okay" because some (potential) underpriviliged black person from a poor country things it.
In many lyrics of Dancehall music which is influenced by christian cult Rastafari there is some critics of "Babylon" – a synonym for everthing evil in modern world (and reminding also at some very oldschool leftwinged rethorics). But this so called "Babylon" isn´t only the police or some corrupt government but also "battyman", the patois word for "gay"; who should be hanged, shot, stabbed, slaughtered and so on.

Many people don´t know this cause the Patois dialect from Jamaica has little to do with normal english so it needed some campaigns of gay and human rights groups to make this fact public.
When getting confronted with the fact that the music they were sampling contained lyrics like that, some Raggacore producers started to reflect and change. For example FFF plays only the "censored" version of his track "Battybwoy" (not even knowing before that it meant something evil). Other´s are cutting out homophobic parts or using cut-up techniques to create a new syntax with the words like ISTARI LASTERFAHRER does.

So there is a consensus that homophobia isn´t tolerated. This can be explained through the fact that Raggacore/ Breakcore has almost nothing to do with the Ragga-/ Dancehall scene which is mainly about hyping their stars from Jamaica. Many people in Raggacore/ Breakcore in contrast have their roots in Punkrock music with a more or less leftwinged attitude or in techno (and related electronic music) club culture which was never homophobic at all.

Conclusion

We´re looking forward if and how the whole thing evolves: a short hype or a established new style. In contrast to "classical" Breakcore most of the Ragga-releated stuff is more easily consumable and reaches a bigger amount and different people: It seems there are more connections to Ragga Jungle now (a scene very big in North America). So there are in the meantime people who like Raggacore but not Breakcore, because the first seems less chaotic.

There are also first contacts between the Ragga Jungle and the Breakcore-scene- which seemed to be like to parellel existing universes yet. But this is a development just started and propably could be a quite one-sided love affair: People used to Breakcore like Ragga Jungle too, but for most Junglists there is only Jungle and no other thing- especially not when it is experimental and distorted.

Therein lies the danger: cutting back the experimental elements of Breakcore to make cheesy and totally boring music for the masses just because it works on the dancefloor. This is what nobody wants.
The tension between dancefloor-compability and experimental music is the interesting thing about breakcore and NOT to make some monotonous loops but sometimes unpredictable changes and swifts in the music. The aesthetics of errors, noises and distortion is still much more attractive than the one based on clean, over-produced sound.

Also possible that 3 years later everthing won´t seem so fresh any more but only like a antique style some nerds did. Time will tell. At the moment it doesn´t look like that. The whole thing is growing and there are more and more records coming out. Also the sound is still quite unique: all producers/ DJ´s do the sound they believe in and not copying each other. So the huge rush with boring records containg Ragga samples didn´t happen yet, luckily. Let´s hope it will never occur.

It´s important at some point to remember that there is even more music out than only the one based on Ragga. There´s a whole universe out there to explore with interesting music.

Keep in mind that this whole thing is all about interesting music and not only about Ragga-samples.

LFO DEMON

(V1.2 / 27.9.2004)
(V1.1 / 24.9.2004)
(V0.91 / 29.5.20040)