Chris Larkin
55 Lower Brook Street
Reading Berks RG1 6BU
"I have never encountered a situation so desperate that a
policeman could not make it worse". Brendan Behan
On 13 Jun 1996, Tony Reid wrote:
>
> > Words like beakbeat etc arent definitions but descriptions; its hard
> > to describe what something sounds like without them. Breakbeat is
> > referring to the drum pattern which seems to stop and start again each
> > loop (JK of Jamiroqai said its music for people who cant match their drum
> > loops)
> that may be what people are using that word for now, but the origin of the
> term "breakbeat" is from hiphop. basically what they were talking about was
> the part of the source tune where there was a "breakdown"--the most energetic
> section where the drums would be featured. in a breakdown the non-percussion
> instruments either drop out, or are minimized, so that the beat comes out
> more. the classic example of this (and most recognizable breakbeat) is in
> james brown's "funky drummer" when he says "when i count to four, we gonna
> give the drummer some...1,2,3,4!" and then all the other instruments drop
> out, the drummer plays the groove for a few bars, spices it up for a few, and
> then the band comes back in. before sampling allowed "looping" of the beats,
> djs would have 2 copies of the same record, and go back & forth between 2 dex
> where they had the breakdown cued up. instead of having to wait for the break
> (the most exciting part of the song), they would play ONLY the breaks. the
> dancers came up w/a special type of dance ("break-dancing") that was the
> equivalent in their medium of what the dj was doing--constructing routines
> that were solely built of steps usually in the climax of the routine. so,
> you can see that the original definition of "breakbeat" would be beats from
> the breakdowns. in a practical sense, it would indicate that the song being
> described would have looped beats probably of a hiphop flavor.
>
>
> > Another new name is trip hop which is exactly the same as hip-hop;).
>
> this is just inaccurate. admittedly, there's probably more in common than
> proponents of either bag is willing to admit, but they're NOT identical. if
> one must think of trip hop in terms of hiphop (which wouldn't be a bad place
> to start), consider it "experimental instrumental (usually) hiphop". one's
> much more likely to find bleeps and other electronic sounding elements, and/or
>
> more links to dub (reggae) in terms of mentality/sound.
>
> si> Yeah, but you sit down to listen to trip-hop ;-)
>
> not always. tranquility bass has done some tracks that i can get people to
> dance to (e.g. "cantamilla").
>
> t-bird
>
> ... ...and that's the t-bird opinion (whether you asked or not!)
>