WHEN Goldie says "ragga Jungle is over, it was just a trend" you listen, right?
Largely because this Wolverhampton born, 30 year old musician, painter and general gold teeth capped motormouth is undoubtedly one of the most authoritative voices in hardcore breakbeat culture, a visionary artist who revolutionised its sound not once but three times.
First there was Terminator, with its innovative process known as "time stretching", making it possible to stretch a vocal sample over any bpm range without altering the pitch, thus eliminating the "cartoon chipmunk" vocal effect that had both dominated, and become a bit of a joke, in "happy" hardcore up until that point. Hence we had a "darker" form of hardcore which came to be called "Jungle" and which Goldie pushed even further in 1993, with Angel, by layering Diane Charlagmane's jazzy vocal lines on top of 150 bpm breaks and demoniac synth vamps, prompting the highly prestigious Wire music magazine to note that "hardcore could become more conventionally musical without losing, its edge". Serious "musos" were similarly confounded by Timeless, a "hardcore symphony" which was described by Melody Maker as "the second of 1995's great modernist works" after Tricky's Maxinquaye.
But to focus on mere form is to miss the real point. From the outset, Goldie himself stressed that the darkness defined by Terminator was "a representation of how people were feeling" at a time when there was "a recession, winter, a country in decline". He also describes Timeless as "inner city ghetto music" rather than as "Jungle", fully aware that in its most superficial marketable form, Jungle has become little more than a reggae sample slapped on to a backbeat. He is also fully aware that Irish people in those ghettos of Britain "probably relate" to his previous claim that his own spur to fame is basically a need to rise above being marginalised as a "half caste" in British society; an outsider.
"I've said before that I'm half Paki and half nigger, but that doesn't really matter as much now as it did when I was growing up and you could use colour as an excuse for under achieving. What matters now is what level you are at in society," he says, agreeing "totally" that music such as hardcore has helped a new generation to "flesh out their own identity" and rise above feelings of social inferiority.
"But, again, making music that comes from a multi cultural society is not a thing about colour, it's about class. As you said in relation to the Irish in Britain, it's not just niggers that live in the hood. But as far as street music is concerned this is the first music I've known that really captures the rhythms that niggers have danced to. And Irish people here can relate to that because they are, in a way, white niggers in Britain. So it's the rhythms of oppression they dance to. That's what's really at the heart of the music. That's the darkness.
No doubt many in his audience also understand that drugs are an integral part of the dance scene. And of ghetto life. However, Goldie rejects previous reports that Terminator finally fell into its fourth dimensional focus only after he dropped a few E's, though he does stand by his claim that Timeless taps into his own memories of living beside the "first generation of rock stars" in New York, referring to crack heads, those who smoke rock cocaine.
"That's one of the biggest lies these days, like `I'll do an E now and in another hour I'll make the music'," he says, laughing. "I might have had influences from drugs in that you get high, you hear, see things then go back sober and see things in another light. Anyone who's dropped acid is never gonna see the same again."
To give shape to what could be described as virtual reality in his music Goldie frequently brings beats, sculpted loops, voices and synthesised sounds in and out of focus, like a face suddenly appearing in your favourite video game, then disappearing, or a cop with a cocked gun chasing you down an alley in the hood. He has warned that Timeless is the kind of cyberspace that should not be entered if you are on drugs; why, exactly, does he feel this Goldie government health warning is necessary?
"Because this music can tear people up, turn them around," he says. "And I've had a lot of people, who have been on drugs, go into it, get terrified, then come back sayin' you was right, man. Because it does become fourth dimensional for them, detaches them from being so called unconscious beings to being conscious, the widest possible sense. And many people can't deal with that leap into another reality, virtual or not.
NOT surprisingly, Goldie doesn't agree with the critic who claimed that tracks on the Timeless album, such as Adrift, will make Enya worried that he may be moving in on her market.
"That is so funny!" he says, laughing loudly. "Her music has" no soul, no depth at all. Whereas Adrift is dark, full of strange doors, punctuation marks, full stops, the kind of things I never hear in Enya's music. It's a dangerous track, though people can be deceived by the shine on the outside, which is why I say my music is like a Rolex on the surface, but jagged and cutting on the inside.
So does Goldie finally agree, then, with his music being labelled "artcore" rather than "hardcore", and with those who say it belongs in a continuum of "black futurist noise" icons stretching back through Public Enemy, Miles Davis in the 1980s, Sun Ra and Hendrix, taking in along the way his own, more contemporary heroes, such as Doc Scott? And did Goldie really recently claim he "could die happy" having created a work like Timeless?
"I don't care what they label my music but, yeah, I did say that, though I'm not so sure now," he reflects. "I'm still driven towards something higher, something better, something even more ground breaking. What is that? The drive to life rather than giving in to the death instinct - like me turning to art when I could just as easily have turned to violence. It's as I once said, I'd try mugging an old lady but end up escorting her across the road, because the artistic streak held me back, made me turn in another direction. And this is the direction I've chosen, mate. Making the music I make.
"And at the end of the day, cutting, edge music really does need cutting edge people to create it. And to listen to it. I'm not into just entertaining cheesy ravers. I'm into pushing things over the line."
