Simon Reynolds, early rave evangelist, has been posting what seems to be increasingly ill-considered posts about the hardcore continuum (check here at Dissensus for merely a fragment of the debate) and the (in his eyes lack-of) merits of dubstep and now ‘wonky’ both in relation to the nuum and as genres themselves.
However, this week it really kicked off after a particularly misguided Reynolds blog on ketamine and wonky in The Guardian. You can read that here.
Zomby responded pretty furiously to this with this:
The Guardian, Ketamine and Wonky….
No one does Ketamine right ? ..i thought it died in the late 80’s after that shitty Madonna tour ended, maybe you know more…..
though i have seen a crusty white dude with dreadlocks rolling around in his own puke ‘going off on K’ in Brixton not long back ..dunno how inspirational a event for a artist that is however.
None of us make ‘wonky’…the notion is similar in descriptive terms to calling Heavy Metal ‘Loud’ or Jungle ‘Fast’ ,adjectives cannot function as noun’s..
its fairly unimaginative and ignorant by this point, at first the term was used loosely as it was a playful in-joke for producers working in disharmonic structure or notation, to make the link to Ketamine is wild.
Next time you write a piece in a national newspaper try have some accuracy or even some intellectual property on the creativity or artisty of the music/artists rather than lowest common denominator music journalism i.e ‘Drugs & a new music’. http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/musicblog/2009/mar/05/wonky-ketamine-dubstep-zomby
Read it through Shutter shades on Hoffman 225’s, its more believable that way.
There was a Paragraph that work’s.
“Listen to Zomby tunes like Spaceman and Aquafresh (off his recent 7-track EP for Hyperdub) and it’s like someone’s taken the monochrome diagram that is dubstep’s rhythmic grid and scrawled woozily all over it with fluorescent marker pens.”
The genre known as wonky is really dividing sides right now and the first generation of rave journalists seem to be falling into the anti side, if there is such a thing. What is perhaps so very wrong about this is that the genre is really only in a stage of infancy and this kind of reportage by someone who is hugely famous for his work on dance music coud be quite damaging, especially when it is so wide off the mark. It should be remembered that dance music took so long to be recognised in the music press simply because of all the dodgy old rockers who were too scared or ignorant or jack-ass-stupid to know anything about the rave scene. It was never a listen-at-home music- it has to be felt. This does not preclude having an opinion on the music of course, far from it, but when you are writing for a huge national paper (even if it is in the web version) it is pretty out of order to pen a piece based entirely on some kind of intuition of a scene for which said writer has no experience whatsoever, especially someone with the calibre, talent and nous of Reynolds.