Cyrus McNally McNally is a fourth-year
neuroscience student. Check out his verbose columnistry in the
history of modern music every Wednesday, same bat time, same bat
channel. E-mail: [email protected].
Click Here for more articles by Cyrus McNally
It is seldom that a bonafide freak, ghetto-born and raised as a
curmudgeon, vandal, thief, etc., should make it to the high
society: figurehead status, actor, suitor of Bjork and definer of a
whole movement of artistic expression.
While not considered a “founder” of the jungle
movement by any means, Goldie ““ a.k.a. Clifford Price ““
is a prime mover and shaker in the synthetic music industry of drum
‘n’ bass.
Born in the English midlands in 1966 to a Jamaican-immigrant
father and a Scottish mother, the artist grew up shuffled from
foster home to foster home, subject to constant torment from
schoolmates because of his odd complexion and societal
rootings.
Price entered a life of crime at an early age, planning
burglaries and muggings with his brothers, but soon found that as a
thief he was mostly unsuccessful due to what he calls the artistic
streak in him. Instead he turned to aerosol bottles and graffiti
artistry in Bristol, where a burgeoning subculture of social
outcasts and misfits came together for the sake of art ““ and
a lifestyle offering something different from the boringness of the
norm.
Now fitted with a set of gold teeth and long dreads, Price took
up the Rasta lifestyle, listening to electronically-modified reggae
music known as “dub” as well as second-wave ska, which
hit the English underground in the late-’70s in full force.
He also took interest in England’s embryonic hip-hop scene
and would take trips to London to witness all-day break-dancing
events.
By 1989, after spending a few years as street merchant and
dabbling with the criminal underworld in New York and Miami, Price
moved back to London, where the rave scene was in full-swing
““ almost a full five years earlier than its commercialization
in the United States.
A form of music was already being generated in response to the
popularity of the rave scene, known as “hardcore.” The
components of hardcore would further evolve into the type of music
Price would most heavily associate himself with:
“jungle.”
In the liner notes of his most recent CD Price said of the
newborn genre, “What I liked about it was, it was notoriously
out there. It was notoriously menacingly dark. And it was doing a
lot of things, because it was a hybrid. It was like something
adapting to its environment.”
He began only attending clubs that played this new hybrid sound,
such as Heaven and Rage, where DJs Kemistry, Storm, Grooverider and
Fabio let jungle (later renamed as “drum ‘n’
bass” to be more politically correct) loose into the streets
of London, where it quickly found a home and the nurturing it
needed to grow into a fully-pronounced genre.
For those who do not already know, the concept of
“jungle” is based around the “breakbeat,” a
sped-up, sometimes digitally-altered drumming sequence. It is
usually in the form of an extra long drum fill or solo from a funk
or soul record. Most jungle tracks compile several different breaks
together or play off just one, twisting and distorting the beats
through computer studio manipulation. Here, they become
unrecognizable collaborations of short but dense rhythmic bursts,
ready for sprinkling with digital blips and bleeps and a phat
synthetic bass line.
Obviously Price must have loved the sound, claiming it as
“the new urban blues.” It was the sound to match the
depression of England’s burnt-out rave scene and economy of
the early ’90s. By 1993, his first pioneering single under
the moniker Goldie, “Terminator,” had established him
as a primary body in jungle music.
In 1994, Goldie released drum ‘n’ bass’ first
concept piece; the 21-minute ode to the inner-city struggle for
survival, “Timeless.” The somber yet invigorating track
was arguably designed more for the headphones or home entertainment
setup than a dancefloor PA system, and expounded the computer
studio technique of time-stretching (extending a sample without
altering its pitch), first introduced in
“Terminator.”
Although the song is over 20 minutes in length, Goldie designed
it to play with the listener’s sense of time, making 20
minutes seem to pass by in six or seven.
Out was the lunacy of the hardcore aesthetic and in was the
search for validation in Goldie’s new preferred creative
outlet. A year later, the ever-reinventing artist released his
debut record and toured in support of Bjork, whom he dated and
would soon become engaged to (the wedding was eventually called
off).
With his graffiti artist roots, groundbreaking music, gold teeth
and daffy yet sometimes vicious demeanor, Goldie became a media
sensation in Britain, threatening publicists with his Rottweiler
Massive (named after the graffiti crew in Bristol whose members
would go on to form trip-hop outfit Massive Attack) while
simultaneously charming them with his engaging personality and
unique insight into the social relevance of jungle music.
Shortly after, he found a new career in acting, starring in such
films as “Everybody Loves the Sunshine” and in the Bond
flick “The World is Not Enough.”
Goldie’s innermost feelings of his “B-Boy”
roots were brought to light in his second release, the 1998 double
disc “Saturnz Returnz.” The first disk, 60 minutes in
length, is all one track, the highly autobiographical
“Mother.”
“Saturnz Returnz” was quickly dismissed by critics
as highly overindulgent and self-righteous for drum ‘n’
bass music, but could be characterized as “classical”
from the amount of meticulous arrangement and vigor Goldie put into
its creation.
An equally worthwhile look into his past, Goldie’s latest
release, “INCredible Sound of Drum ‘n’
Bass,” is a double-disc mix album containing selections that
influenced him the most throughout his side career as a DJ and
developing artist.
Although he has not released an album for almost a year to date,
one is supposedly in the works, and Goldie can be seen in
“Snatch,” where he plays the clueless small-time
gangster Lincoln. Goldie continues to DJ and present his artistry
through new and unique mediums to the public, remaining true to the
creative spark that set him apart from the rest in a ghetto youth
and continuing to reset boundaries for the urban musician.