I am not a professional writer. I am not an academic (although simply by applying for and being accepted into a masters degree course apparently means I am trying to become one). I did an undergraduate degree in Music, but I graduated in 2007. Now it's 2020, pandemic lockdowns, musicians fearing for the very existence of their industry. And their livelihoods.
I came to Edinburgh, Scotland in January 2000. Having been brought up in Northern Ireland, and trying my best to carve out a living as a musician, I ended up in Scotland with a regular DJ residency in a club, various musical projects that resulted in some live gigs, writing and releasing music with my long-term partner in Beats, my brother Rik. All in a very local, non-commercially viable kind of way. We did our thing, we enjoyed ourselves, we occasionally made some money. I guess when you're made this way, you just have to do it.
To cut a long story short, I applied for a university degree in Music after wrangling with myself about what my future might hold and was accepted into Edinburgh Napier University in 2003. I graduated in 2007. Honours Degree in Music proudly displayed on my studio wall. I specialised in composition and did my major honours project on re-mixing and creative sampling, focusing mainly on genres like Trip-Hop and Lo-Fi.
So naturally, I promptly went off and became a guitar teacher in a music school! I played guitar since I was a kid, and on and off through my adult life as a working musician (which a lot of the time really means being a Barman, Waiter, Labourer, Call-Centre worker etc. and gigging for as much as you can manage in the evenings) so I could play a bit, but it was hard work at first getting to any kind of reasonable standard. I do OK now and I still run a teaching business to this day as my day job.
So what made me suddenly decide, in 2020, to go back to University and do a Masters degree?? Good question. I ask myself it regularly these days as I struggle to complete another paragraph! And even more confusing, what made me then decide to do an entirely written, scholarly piece of writing about Hip-Hop culture in the UK during the 1990s?!? Another good question.
Well, I guess the answer (or answers) are pretty simple actually. Because I love it. I am as much a music fan as I am a music maker. I have love for nearly every genre (at least for something in them all) and have over my musical life played everything from guitar & Bass guitar in Rock bands, to samplers and turntables in Hip-Hop bands. I think that my enduring love for Hip-Hop has always been in the sampling of sources from any genre I want, anything I hear could turn into a sample. With the introduction of Virtual Studio technology like Cubase VST (and by now Ableton) I felt like I could make music from other music like an artist makes collage - take something already made and make something else out of it. The ritual of 'Crate Digging' (hunting for vinyl records anywhere they can be found) was always something I loved, as much for the fun of listening to them all when I got home as for the golden moments when as useable sample that I knew nobody else had used before (or at least to my knowledge) would pop up and immediately go into the Akai, or into Cubase, upon which it could be warped, moulded, re-shaped and re-cycled into something entirely new. I love that, and I want to celebrate it. Not as some act of musical larceny, or some work-around for having no 'talent', but as a creative force that changed music making forever once it was established, and the music business from its highest heights to its most local level was never quote the same.
I was born in 1970. In 1990 I was 20 years old. It was the rave generation, we partied hearty & we danced in the fields and in the warehouses and in the clubs. We took the pills (both kinds!) and we lost ourselves in the music. I was one of the first in my peer group to go out and get turntables and start learning to mix records. But I grew a little tired of mixing the four-to-the-floor dance tunes. I loved scratch DJs, cut-up and merry-go-round looping DJs who played funky breakbeats and seemed to have an endless supply of records from almost any genre that they could spin into a mix, even for a few seconds, before moving onto the next loop. I don't think I ever came even close to being very good at any of that stuff, but I started to get some gigs as a DJ and carrying a record bag into a club was a hell of a lot easier than humping guitar amplifiers and drum kits up tiny staircases. Plus, you kept more of the money! But all the while, my car stereo, my headphones, my studio room at home, every music source I had played Hip-Hop. Or did it?
This is where my research questions started to arise. Yes, it was Hip-Hop from all over the world, but my first love was the stuff from the UK, the instrumental stuff. It was always hard to know what to call it, because even though I had no problems with the term 'Trip-Hop' I know lots of people did. But it always seemed right to me. It was always clubbier than American Hip-Hop. It was made by DJs for DJs, and when I first discovered DJ Food on Ninja Tunes, and read about how they were making records aimed at DJs to mix and scratch and cut with I was ecstatic to discover not only great records for DJing with, but a new culture, a new identity that I felt I could really take part in, in fact one that wanted me to take part in it. I was no longer a visitor in this American artform called Hip-Hop, I was a Trip-Hop DJ. A fully fledged, paid up member of a musical identity that belonged to the place that I was living in. One that wasn't telling me about guns and money, it was telling me that music for music's sake was good, was valuable. If there was a message it was "Hey, forget about your troubles for an evening and come dance with us", which went to the very essence of why dance music culture had become the prevalent mode of entertainment for my generation.