Burial: An Essay

First off, this isn't a proper essay in the schoolwork sense. Secondly, I'm not going to sit here and textually suck him off (or slate him). I am, however, going to talk about his music, what it means to me, and what I think its broader implications may be. While eating breakfast (that's how I roll).

Those of you who follow me on Twitter will have an inkling that I'm a fan. It took a while. I'd been hearing people rave about him for about a year before I listened to any of his work, and I must admit I was at first thoroughly indifferent to it. I'd heard Burial was this Dubstep wunderkind, but when I first heard his work it sounded like borderline Emo UK Garage. I stuck with the likes of Skream and Digital Mystikz a while longer. Fast forward to 2008 and the Mercury Music Prize nominations. His nomination brought him to wider public knowledge and renewed efforts to unmask the man, with tabloid newspapers coming up with wild theories as to his true identity. Add to that Hot Chip's Joe Goddard, who intimated to Time Out London (2006) that Burial had been a year above him at school. This piqued my interest, as I went to the same school (I was about four or five years behind Alexis and Joe). So I went back and listened to some more of his work (indeed, everything he'd done up to that point), and was enthralled.



After listening to Burial's work for over a year, and reading various interviews he's done with The Wire, The Guardian, or fellow Dubstep artist Blackdown, I realised that this was a guy who was musically saying some of the same things I've been ranting at my friends about: the music now is often too watered down by seeking popularity and sales; the younger ravers coming to the music have little or no clue where this whole phenomenon came from and don't care; we need a return to Old Skool vibes and energy, and less of the Weekend Warrior lifestyle raving. Of course, when I was ranting my friends' ears off, it was about Drum & Bass, but seeing as we're all hanging from different branches of the same tree, it doesn't matter much. Truth is truth, and I'm right because I'm right.
What strikes me about Burial's music isn't that it's new - his sound is distinctly riven with echoes of mid-nineties UK Garage (which I fucking hated at the time!) - but the purity of the Acid House ethic in his music. This isn't a man wasting time polishing the mixdown at the expense of ideas, arrangement, energy and vibes; he's getting his feelings out quickly, succinctly. The vocals, drums, basslines, keys and strings go for the gut. While not immediately dancefloor material, the tunes capture freeze-frames of sweaty South London clubs, urban panoramas (picture the Southern Trains route from Brighton to Victoria via East Croydon and Clapham Junction), solitude, and typically British "downcast optimism".





But beyond that, it captures where Rave got lost. That's a lot to lay at Burial's door, so I'll broaden it a little. Along with the likes of Mala, Loefah, Kode9, Skream, Instra:Mental, dBridge, Alix Perez, Equinox, Blackdown, and Cooly G, Burial's music fits into an emerging strand of artists who just plain ain't havin' it. Having grown weary of superclub chic, anthem bashing and quantity-over-quality, these artists have started making what I term Big People's Music. Music for the over-25 raver (I'm aware, before anyone mentions it, that Alix Perez is himself barely over 25, and Skream is 25 or younger) disillusioned with small venue closures and the ever-growing dearth of superclubs, 45 minute DJ sets, hearing the same five tunes cained by every other DJ every weekend, being surrounded by gormless 18 year olds without a clue about or care for the music and its origins. These artists are experimenting, stripping their music back to a pre-2003 vibes-orientated sound, cross-pollinating Dubstep, Drum & Bass, Afrobeat, true Electro and early House to produce electronic Soul music. Forget the high-passed Amens and predictable R&B vocals of Hospital Records. I'm talking about a revolution in music as big as the emergence of UK Soul in the early nineties. Labels like Hyperdub, nonPlus, Hot Flush, Scientific Wax, Darkestral, and Exit are pushing something as meaningful and paradigm-shattering as the very emergence of Dance music itself. However,with only the high-brow music media, bloggers and a handful of club and radio DJs giving it exposure, it's settling in for a long fight. Or at least, that's my perception.

So where do I see this all going, and what does it mean to me?



Take this tune for example, "Rendezvous" by dBridge. The sound he's working on at the moment, along with Instra:Mental and other artists on their nonPlus imprint is, to me, symbolic of the positive change within the Drum & Bass blueprint in the wake of Dubstep. Where many are trying to ignore Dubstep or simply emulate its halftime beat patterns, the sound of Club Autonomic is the synthesis of a new Soul sound, driven by Drum & Bass and Dubstep. The beat patterns may be different, but the spirit remains. This music is on a frontier, halfway over the edge and pressing on regardless; its glances backward aren't retro so much as informative and educational. And I fucking love it.
I love it because this is what I've been thinking about while the bovine masses of the D&B scene whine and complain like infants that Dubstep is "too slow" or "boring". These tunes won't get rewound three times by Andy C at whatever superclub. These tunes are for a more mature, more thoughtful, more music-loving crowd. I'm not saying that they won't appeal to Andy - they probably do - but his typical fan these days craves a different sound than this. However, don't take this to mean I have no love whatsoever for more typical/tearout D&B - I do - but the times, they are a-changin'. For me, as long as there are artists in that Big People's Music bracket, artists always looking for that next evolution (even if it's a dead-end), there is hope for electronic music.

Burial didn't do it all by himself, but he and many others are symbolic of the shift in what the discerning, older electronic music fan wants. We want to be moved, shocked, surprised, awed by music. We want to be so damn excited about it that we feel like the first time we went raving, the first time we heard this sound. We want to feel incapable of shutting the fuck up about this music, because it matters so much, means so much.

[I like that last bit. "It means so much." Because it really, truely does.]