Hardcore

Jungle, ambient jungle, techstep, speed garage, darkcore, grime, dubstep, funky… Since the early 1990s, a series of musical styles has spread from the UK to dancefloors around the world. These electronic musics took shape around a passion for bass, breakbeats, dancehall sounds and the clatter of orchestral samples. Fueled by drugs (ecstasy, ketamine) and for a long time inseparable from pirate radio, they make up what British critic Simon Reynolds (Rétromania, Le choc du glam) has called the “hardcore continuum”, the better to emphasize their shared history. In this book, Reynolds looks back on his own experiences to help us (re)discover a host of EPs and legendary or forgotten tracks. He reclaims their radicality against class contempt, listens to female/male relations being transformed at the heart of the infrabass, and reinscribes them in the trajectories of the Anglo-Jamaican diaspora and English multiculturalism. With its high-intensity writing, somewhere between essay and reportage, this ground-breaking anthology is a sensitive tribute to the energy of the rave, as well as a manifesto in touch with innovation and dancefloor catharsis, at a time when hardcore sounds are returning to exorcise the “generalized anxiety” of a capitalism gone into turbo mode.