I’m like VHI – constantly behind the music. What I mean is, I still listen to the same music I did in junior high school. Music trudges ahead and I don’t. One obscure musical subculture I’ve stayed strangely allegiant to over the years is “breakcore.” It’s a catch-all phrase for mostly loud, fast, noisy, beat-centered electronic music that sampled a lot of punk in its early days (ala DJ Scud’s Jackboots & Birds, pictured above) but now gets more mileage out of abrasive Jamaican dancehall chants. Wikipedia says it “encourages speed, complexity, impact and maximum sonic density.” That’s good enough a definition for me.
I’m not like my friend David. Where I’m behind the music, seems like he’s always way ahead. Seems there isn’t a low-rent house party where he isn’t behind the beats – like the last party we were at, where the stereo skipped anytime someone tipped-toed near it and the bass sounded as hollow as a fist on a card board box. David once even had aspirations to be a DJ, even threw down a few thousand for some decks, but it was an ambition he quickly relinquished after observing one too many cheezy-ass white dudes spinning platters with one hand and holding a droopy half-rolled blunt in the other. He did not want to be one of those guys.
I once felt the way about breakcore David feels about DJs: for years, my love of the music was at war with the seemingly frat-like stupidity of breakcore culture (probably summed up best by the gratingly “ironic” album art of Bong-Ra, full of bikes, butts and bikinis). When artist Rachael Kozak started her all-female label Homewrecker Foundation years ago (now defunct), the sort of stupid shit that flared up on list-servs taught me a hard lesson about hard music: radical, boundary-pushing politics don’t necessarily follow from radical, boundary-pushing music.
My attitude towards the tunes changed some once I discovered DJ /rupture. Firstly, he spins mixes so tight, dropping disparate sources loud and clear. The seamless Gold Teeth Thief mix starts at side A with Missy Elliot getting her freak on and ends at side B with Paul Simon getting all somber; and the two tunes are essentially bridged by an hour of breakcore and revolutionary hiphop. His site says, “His dynamic live sets simultaneously partyrock and suggest complex political undertones.” Under or over, I’m a sucker for any tone that’s political.
Above all, /rupture a.ka. Jace Claxxon proved to me breakcore could be literate. His blog provides the theory behind the music, as disprate and dirty like the mixes he spins. Who else features an obit for Baudrillard, the tune of a Turkish bellydancer, and a radical modernist lit take on T-mobile mall kiosks (at least I think that’s what it is)? All in a matter of days, all with a playful poetic wit that puts my plain-speaking prose (and my shameful use of alliteration meant to compensate) to shame.
But you know what? I’m still behind in my music. /rupture rolled through both Seattle and Olympia last week and I didn’t even notice until two days after he was gone.
