Northstar (2004)

 

As usual, I'm late to the show and since recording this debut album, one of them is dead while the other lives on despite having chopped off his own penis during a failed suicide attempt, so I think I'll pretend it's still 2004 for the next couple of paragraphs if that's okay with the rest of you.

Northstar were one of a couple of west-coast acts incorporated in the Wu-Tang's extended family alongside Royal Fam, Shyheim, Killarmy and all of those guys. I first noticed them stood heads above the rest on the Ghost Dog soundtrack, then making similarly outstanding showings on other Wu-related compilations. Suddenly, a mere quarter of a century later, I rushed out and bagged me their debut album and here we are.

More than anything, Northstar have always stood out thanks to Christ Bearer, one of those MCs you could never mistake for anyone else. There's a unique skip or twang to his delivery meaning he sounds like no-one else and you can't help but listen and be drawn in. It's the same deal as you get with Paris. Although rhythms and subjects may differ, it feels similarly urgent, even important. As a bicoastal fusion, this may seem like a bit of a novelty deal, but the blend works beautifully. Where the RZA produces, his beats are cleaner than usual, less cluttered, working well alongside other material, notably the magnificently cinematic Luv Allah from Armand van Helden. We have the sort of lyricism you'd expect from Wu-affiliates over a westerly version of the beats you'd anticipate, so maybe closer to the Alkaholiks than Westside Connection - not much gunplay but no backpacking either, and certainly no filler. It doesn't jump out of the player as an obvious classic album during the first couple of plays but after a week or so I'd rate this one as at least in the same ballpark as Tical or Supreme Clientele. Christ Bearer really seemed to be a unique voice, but Northstar would hold your attention even without his involvement. They should have been huge.

Speed Garage Anthems volume two (1988)

I realise it's ancient history, and that when it was brand spanking new it was almost certainly as seen on TV, but I couldnae gi' twa shites. Keeping in mind that music appreciation is entirely subjective, this double disc was nevertheless as good as dance music ever got so far as I'm concerned. I'm not saying it was all downhill from hereon, but this compilation represents the point at which my dance boner achieved its greatest density. Conversely, I recall a degree of sneering dispensed in the general direction of speed garage, or 2-step, or just garage or whatever you want to call it. Chavs, welfare recipients, trainee mechanics and people who worked in high street supermarkets listened to garage and danced around their working class handbags to it at the weekend, with nary a media studies degree student to be seen unless engaged in some sort of anthropological survey. They probably didn't even read Mixmag, for fuck's sake.

From my perspective, by the mid nineties, popular music had mostly degraded into an undifferentiated chantalong mass of turdy indie shite performed by young men with ironic seventies haircuts, and yet I still required something by which to occupy my ears at work and keep me sane during those long, long hours of trudging around in the pissing wind and rain. Radio 1 was unlistenable, as were most of the music stations. Danny Baker hadn't yet taken over the breakfast slot at GLR, and Radio 4 got on my tits, leaving just Kiss 100 FM on the grounds that I could pick it up on my Walkman radio and Steve Jackson hadn't yet been replaced by a complete fucking tool; and this was the sort of thing Jackson played, regardless of whether or not you had a clue what you were listening to, and regardless of it being eight in the morning; and being London based, it really felt like our thing.

Without my bothering to look anything up on Wikipedia, speed garage seemed to be eighties deep house sped up a couple of notches with a few other elements chucked in - R&B, breakbeat, even a touch of jungle, whatever got the job done. It worked like acid by virtue of intense repetition, but with sounds combining the rich vocalisations of soul with the blunted sine waves and filtered sound of 8-bit games, forming a composite which would eventually mutate into grime, dubstep and others. Above all, what distinguished this music was the skipping rhythm straying from the solid 4/4 of pretty much everything else spawned of house music. I've digitally slowed it down in hope of working out what the fuck it's actually doing, but that beat differs from one track to the next, sometimes working with an offbeat, sometimes with hi-hats in a triple time signature, sometimes resembling a traditional reggae rhythm once reduced to a less manic pace. If the squelch of the TB-303 formed the core of acid - the element which draws you in, even transports you - with 2-step, it's that weird sped up clatter of hi-hat.

I picked this one up because it seemed to include most of the greats - Double 99, Ruff Driverz, Dreem Team, Industry Standard, 187 Lockdown, Roy Davies Jnr. and Armand van Helden's version of Spin Spin Sugar which must surely count as one of the greatest remixes of all time. It's over two and a half hours with one track morphing seamlessly and euphorically into the next, and with only a couple of lulls on the second disc where someone threw in a more radio friendly sub-techno hit presumably for the sake of the sales pitch - Bobby Brown and the endlessly overrated Faithless being the worst offenders; but the whole is so fucking powerful that a couple of dips below the average don't seem to make any difference. More than twenty years later, I stick this on and I'm back in south-east London in the pissing rain eating fried chicken - but in a good way - and it still sounds as fresh as the day it was spawned. So much for dance music as an ephemeral form.