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Book Review A youthful, multicultural, rag-tag community that rattled the status quo

Junglist
by Two Fingas and James T Kirk
Repeater Books, £10.99

JUNGLE music was the backdrop to a distinct British youth culture that evolved in the early 1990s. Sampling musical influences from hip hop and reggae, it was a heavyweight champion of dance music, characterised by throbbing basslines, looped percussive rhythms and rapid breakbeats.

Jungle was massive.

Junglist claims that drum and bass was “the engine which drove jungle” and for the uninitiated, Burial by Leviticus is often signposted as a gateway drug. Roni Size, Goldie and many others would later take the music mainstream.

Like the rave culture that preceded it in the UK, Jungle helped to create a youthful, multicultural, rag-tag community that rattled the status quo. It danced under the same roofs, used the same drugs, felt the same highs and lows, shared attitudes and developed its own way of life, but was ultimately shaped by a distinctly Black-British identity.

Reprinted more than 20 years after its original publication, this short book details four young men’s shared yearning to be transported to a place where their minds were hermetically bound to a Jungle music soundtrack.

It’s a search for somewhere between “unconscious thought and unconscious being” during a long weekend in a south London that is largely unrecognisable today.

Junglist is a quick-fire stream of thought that riffs on sex and relationships, drugs, ego, machismo and insecurities, without offering much in terms of profound or original insight. As befits something created by teenagers it is not written with any pretence of traditional style. This is a rediscovery of outsider art.

It rarely touches on politics, and its cultural analysis is generally underdeveloped, but it does make some relevant and insightful commentary on fashion and the roller-coaster of style.  

While missing a beat when drifting into prose it successfully captures a snapshot of a lifestyle that many will continue to enjoy and re-enact, albeit with a different soundtrack.

 

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