@hikari considering our historic obsession with cultural hegemony, I have always found it deeply ironic that the most significant contributions the UK has made to music (by which I mean globally genre-defining or genre-creating, not outlier one-off acts) resulted from scenes heavily defined by their mixing of British and non-British cultures, often in underground or explicitly illegal contexts at the time (e.g. warehouse parties, pirate radio, etc.).

@gsuberland @hikari I’m not sure that’s ironic. Cultural mixing is where new ideas develop and blossom.

But I do absolutely think of a lot of Electronic music genres as specifically British, because this helps understand their evoltuion and commonalities (there are commonalities among the disparate (sub)genres of electronic music that developed in Britain that are very distinct from those that developed in America or other bits of Europe)

I also like thinking about things like this because they’re an explicit rebuke to the artificial definition of “britishness” that the tories have spent the last ~10 years attempting to promulgate.

@erincandescent @gsuberland it's a bit like the difference between folk culture and bourgeois/national culture, though all the stuff you speak of sprung up in the era of the latter

@erincandescent @gsuberland stuff like jungle has a very particular “folk”-ness to it in the hazy sense i mean. it was not a National Movement originally, it was people in a specific place who, i want to say, had immigrant backgrounds?

@hikari @gsuberland Is not all true culture “folk”? National movements for culture are inherently artificial; culture primarily goes “national” through propaganda. Often that propaganda has basis in fact, but it is generally intentionally distorted and homogonised.

I think it’s really important to ask “why did these musical styles develop in these places?” and so often the answer really comes down to the fact that London is such a culturally diverse place where a bunch of (primarilly Afro-Carribbean) immigrants had set down roots - at the time these were really starting to spring up - 1-2 generations ago.

Why did musical history take the course that it did? Because the children of those Afro-Carribbean immigrants and of families that had lived in London since time immemorial grew up together, went to the same schools, befriended each other, and traded musical influences with each other, combined with the fact that music creation suddenly started getting a whole lot more accessible and there was a social safety net sufficiently functional to allow people to experiment.