Everything comes back. Even the British dance genre 2-step, which had long disappeared from our radar, is pushing for the gateway to the hit parades. Major pop artists such as Charli XCX, Disclosure, Mura Masa and Anne-Marie have already ventured into it. Many of our acts are also not averse to it.
This article is from De Morgen. Every day a selection of the best articles from the newspapers and magazines appears on NU.nl. You can read more about that here.
“Re-rewind / When the crowd say ‘Bo selecta’!” Look, that way you immediately know what 2-step is. The chorus of ‘Re-Rewind’ by Artful Dodger from Southampton is one of the most recognizable melodies in the genre. With that monster hit from the year 2000, Artful Dodger lifted 2-step – a derivative of the British metropolitan music style UK garage – to the top of the charts.
Well, in his own country the song shot to second place in the charts. For us, ‘Re-Rewind’ did not get any further than a 21st place in the Ultratop. Our country was also deprived of a real 2-step craze, while on the other side of the Channel in the first half of the noughties the copycats pushed each other until the genre even came out of the mouth of the English.
Just because UK garage never really broke through in our country, it is all the more striking that the genre has been used by more than one Belgian pop act in the past year. Singles by Flemish and Brussels rappers appeared all the time, eagerly pushing the bouncing rhythm of the 2-step under their voices.
The way in which the subgenre carefully intertwines itself with the fabric of native pop music in 2022 is typical of these times where obsolete cultural expressions are once again finding their way into the mainstream thanks to streaming and social media. But in the case of 2-step, it is mainly the recent evolutions in pop music that suggest a revival.
To fully understand that, we have to go back to the birthplace of the 2-step: England. There the attachment to the genre can easily be explained. 2-step is as British as punk, glam rock and The Beatles.
At the same time, 2-step is as indebted to black American music as it is to the aforementioned trio. Where British guitar pop once borrowed salivatingly from American blues, 2-step and its big brother UK garage hooked up with the house music from New York in the late seventies. UK garage derives its name from a kind of pet name for house music, ‘garage’, which refers to Paradise Garage, the iconic New York nightclub where DJ Larry Levan pioneered house around 1977.
In the early 1990s, the thriving house sound swept across the Atlantic to Britain via imported vinyls played in clubs and parties by influential London DJs such as Tuff Jam and The Dreem Teem, often in their instrumental dub versions, which a fresh look at the genre.
Because imported vinyls were very expensive, many DJs started to create their own interpretation of American house music. In their productions they mixed the soulful, disco-indebted black grooves with sounds from their own London biotope: the dark basses and hectic rhythms you heard at major rave festivals, for example, but also the Caribbean music that the Windrush immigrants brought after the Second World War. World War smuggled along. This link with black American and British Caribbean styles explains why contemporary 2-step mainly appeals to artists from hip-hop, R&B, dancehall and soul.
Pats behavior
You may be scratching your head at the profusion of mutations that the UK garage went through in the 1990s. Around 1997, when the beats started to pound faster and faster, the overzealous British music press dubbed that style ‘speed garage’. Around the turn of the millennium, the trend gave birth to impactful subgenres such as dubstep, with its pitch-dark, dub-related instrumental sound. Grime also emerged, a term that gradually came to be used for almost all hip-hop with British roots.
In Energy Flash, a standard work on the history of electronic pop music, music journalist Simon Reynolds considers UK garage as a more radio-friendly, female counterpart to drum and bass, a genre that developed almost simultaneously.
“The garage scene came about when the women fled the dance floor en masse, beaten down by the nasty, vicious, unmelodic mongrel form with which drum and bass had maneuvered itself into a dead end,” writes Reynolds. “They found refuge in the smaller so-called garage rooms that you found at many jungle parties: rooms where the music sounded more soulful and sensual. At that moment a massive light bulb started to burn above the heads of the London music scene, which made people realize: no women means no vibe.”
Unsurprisingly, the 2-step that soundtracked the turn of the millennium sounded soulful and sensual. His positive, hopeful sound often grafted onto modern R&B and therefore appealed not only to dance fans, but also fans of Destiny’s Child and TLC.
At the height of the hype, this mainly attracted a wealthy audience for whom fashion and appearance were just as important as the music. Scantily clad models who seemed to have stepped straight out of a rap video. Tightly fit male bodies in muscle shirts. Moschino’s migraine-inducing cartridges. T-shirts with ‘Dolce & Gabana is life’ on it. UK garage was not just a music genre. It was a real subculture full of brightly colored fashion and excessive bragging.
Which hits from that time ring a bell with you? How about ‘Fill Me In’ by Craig David, the pop star who also sang Artful Dodger’s ‘Re-Rewind’? Or ‘Gotta Get Thru This’ by Daniel Bedingfield, ‘Moving To Fast’ by Romina Johnson, ‘Sweet Like Chocolate’ by Shanks & Bigfoot and ‘Has It Come to This’ by The Streets? Perhaps you once went clubbing to the tunes of Wookie’s “Battle,” Zed Bias’ “Neighbourhood,” MJ Cole’s “Sincere,” So Solid Crew’s “21 Seconds,” or Sweet Female Attitude’s “Flowers”?
They are all cleverly constructed, extremely danceable pop songs, tough and elegant, jazzy and futuristic. They contain the feeling of a four-four time as you find in disco and house, only the beat is angular, syncopated, as in hip-hop and jungle. By the way, 2-step borrows the low, buzzing basses from the latter genre.
Belgian bombs
Anyone who ever listens to British radio stations such as Rinse FM or BBC 1Xtra, where the vanguard of pop is given a forum, has noticed in recent years the slow infiltration of electronic dance genres such as house and 2-step, which today effortlessly coexist with the new hip afrobeats. and grime are programmed. The hippest sweets are called Bklava, Yeek or Interplanetary Criminal. The fact that they are gradually finding a wider audience today is partly due to a young generation of music lovers discovering the electronic dance music of yesteryear online and coming up with new interpretations of a whole range of subgenres.
That dancer renaissance gained momentum in 2022 thanks to pop stars such as Drake and Beyoncé who emphatically put the spotlight on the black American roots of the genre. It suggests that the mainstream pop of 2023 will not only focus on afrobeats and Latino pop, but also on numerous electronic dance genres from the nineties and noughties.
Inspiring party collectives are already springing up like mushrooms in major cities. Like the London posse LOUD LDN, which organizes open-minded parties for women and non-binary people and is affiliated with young jungle artists with a large following of TikTok, such as Piri and Venbee.
In our country, in 2022, a lot of young rappers and R&B singers threw themselves on the 2-step anyway. Not only because of the untapped possibilities of the genre, also because the most popular hip-hop variants are artistically at their ceiling. With exhausted drill, trap or afrobeats it is difficult to distinguish yourself as a rapper from the competition today.
And behold: the Sint-Niklazen resident K1D was very successful last year with the very fine 2-step of ‘Murakami Flow’. Chardy from Brussels surprised with the football-loving dancefloor bomb ‘Messi’, the Antwerp Miss Angel polished up her international appeal with the energetic ‘Summer’. Pop singer Blu Samu also opted for cool 2-step beats in her song ‘Amor 2.0’. And Lous and the Yakuza from Brussels tweaked a similar groove until the irresistible electro of ‘Monsters’ remained.
The charts of 2023 could soon be brimming with exciting 2-step rhythms. So get those Versace sunglasses, the Gucci loafers and the Moschino jeans out of the closet. Rewind!
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