Mokum

A throwaway comment on Twitter ended up throwing me back to some old Mokum tracks... didn't even know these guys still existed... thought the scene/label had been annihilated /sublimated by the I Wanna Be A Hippy crossover/dance-smash...



...the pisstaking sub Blue Sunshine look on the video seemed to cause a rift between the appearance (from outside The Netherlands) and the reality but it seems I missed the point a bit about what it was about... i.e. from here, gabber seemed inexplicable / impossible in a broader cross-cultural mileu... only worked whilst vaguely tainted w/ actual insanity, facism, inarticulate rage...

That seemed to be the marketing scam in the UK: 'Look at these crazy motherfuckers - it's like Rapido gone stabmental!'

while... in reality I think gabber was more complex than that - there were undoubtedly lots of nerve-shredding headbanged skins but there were also sub sub sub happy hardcore fans, shaking their booties with big smiles on their faces....

Anyway... digging a little deeper and you'll find that the Mokum artists were never counter-cultural in the sense I thought; Technohead had already had a hit under the Tricky Disco name, itself an exemplary pop bleep from Warp...



And Tricky Disco were, of course, Greater Than One/GTO who had more than a few industrialish connections way back to the mid 80s...

The links between Technohead/ techno heads and Industrial are not spurious: Mokum, for a moment, in the UK, stood apart from the bleep artists... the early releases were out there, talked about (pre I Wanna) in similar breaths as Power Electronics; the racks weren't far apart... your Whitehouse fan would consider a Mokum track as a first wedding dance.

I bought a few of the Mokum compilations and used them to shed people at parties that had gotten out of hand - people didn't go mental, they went... it seemed like outsider music and, in the absence of the internet, it was impossible to find the sources that would prove it otherwise... then I Wanna Be A Hippy rolled out and things started to change...

(compare and contrast with how people felt about Whitehouse etc before and after you could access info about them - in fact, I talked about that here...)

So, I drifted off... gabber became another genre that died in me... it never fitted my drugs (made the error of taking the wrong drugs in a gabber field, didn't make the same error twice), didn't fit where I was heading musically, seemed simultaneously inaccessible and over-accessed; snobbery ensued and I assumed that everyone else lost interest too...

But they didn't. It's still out there, Mokum's still going strong, gabber's morphed into even more ridiculous highspeed angles: speedcore, cybergrind, splittercore...



and then extratone...



which comes fullcycle with the Nazi imagery and kinda outCakes Chris Morris... Shatner's Bassoon will quake...