Are You Now Or Have You Ever Been....?

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

One of the battlegrounds in the Hip Hop Wars was NME's "C86" cassette, a tape compiled by some of the paper's writers, later described as "the most indie thing to have ever existed". While many of the bands were later embarassed by it and while it suffers from the usual post-facto "OMG it wasn't a scene" backlash (sure, it wasn't a scene in the sense of bands working and collaborating together, but it captures a mood quite well), its legend lives on.

Here's a poll about it:


[Poll #829524]


SHAMBLE ON.

Comments

Re: THE HIPHOP WARS: a personal memoir

[mcarratala.livejournal.com]

1. As an NME reader in 86, it was certainly the rhetoric of the hip-hop faction to which I objected. I loved both the Shop Assistants and Roxanne Shante and felt confused – at fifteen, expecting things to make sense – to be told that this was ideologically impossible. Equally, I always found something underlyingly suspect about the "black music is always more vital" argument – it's dangerously essentialist. Mark is right: I felt I was being treated with contempt, by people who certainly had done nothing to earn anyone's respect – only Cosgrove ever seemed much cop. PH very tainted by his over close association with Weller, then at his most derided.
[Presumably that's Blues & Soul magazine you're referring to in point vi?]
2. To me at the time the enemy would have probably amounted to Luther Vandross (but not Alex O'Neal, who was tops), Tina Turner and smoothed up 60s survivors like Steve Winwood.

Re: THE HIPHOP WARS: a personal memoir

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

yes, blues and soul, thx!

i forgot to mention the BIG FIGHT over "hang the DJ" -- one side saying "THIS IS RACIST", the other side "no no he means TONY BLACKBURN"