As with so many strands in modern music, the question of what is revival and what is continuation becomes extremely complex when you look at jungle.
The style erupted out of the initial rave explosion in the UK with a completely untamed but also artfully engineered complexity. It brought together all the highest common factors of the sounds swilling around in the rave: techno’s futurism; hip hop’s battle-mentality pursuit of excellence; Jamaican dancehall and dub’s soundsystem science, swaggering occupation of space and distinctive vocal samples; the pure groove and deep soul lineage of house; the intricacy of jazz-funk and rare groove; the ecstatic escape and psychedelic dread of the rave itself. All of that happened in just a couple of years. The elements coalesced in 1992, and jungle proper really dominated from late 1993 to mid 1995, before its more business-savvy alter ego drum’n’bass and its urbane cousin UK garage shoved it aside in British clubland.
A few scene diehards, particularly those who saw it as a continuation of reggae — stand up Congo Natty — kept the style alive, though, but its influence also crept out underground rhizomatically before resurfacing in the strangest array of places in the new century. The leftfield explorers of IDM, led by the likes of Luke Vibert, Mike “μ-Ziq” Paradinas and of course the daddy himself Aphex Twin, never let go of their fascination with the complexity of its breakbeats. They in turn fed into the birth of the uglier, punkier frenzies of breakcore via Venetian Snares and co. 2000s originators of dubstep like Croydon’s Skream, Loefah, Cluekid and Chefal and Bristol’s Peverelist and Pinch, who were often the figurative or even literal younger siblings of the jungle generation, wove its syncopation into their sparser, slower rhythms. Both the production and MC culture of grime periodically revealed its roots in pirate radio jungle — huge names like Dizzee Rascal, Flowdan, D Double E, Wiley and the late Terror Danjah making this explicit. By the 2010s, second generation drum’n’bass stars — notably Chase & Status, Breakage and High Contrast — consistently referenced the genre’s early days using the souped-up production values of d’n’b, bringing it to their now-worldwide audience.
But then… THEN it started getting stranger. Dubstep begat “post dubstep” with millennial hipsters taking the sublimated jungle aspects from their generation’s bass music into a more eclectic, crate-digging ethos. This provided the fertile soil in which records like “Hackney Parrot” by Tessela (later of Overmono), and the Soul Music album by techno journeyman Paul Woolford’s new Special Request guise, could take root and spread their influence. This same atmosphere of fusion provided the perfect opportunity for the collision of the similarly uptempo and rhythmically complicated Chicago footworking sound, with both generalist bass music producers (Om Unit, Machinedrum, Chrissy aka Murderbot) and the Chicagoans themselves (DJ Earl, DJ Manny, the late scene leader DJ Rashad) frequently merging the styles. EDM megastars like Skrillex blasted ’90s dance culture — including jungle — into fragments and beamed them out around the planet as grand spectacle. Original junglists like Shy FX, the Rupture crew and DJs Die and Randall (alongside Dismantle, as Watch The Ride) also returned to their roots and to jungle’s roots in Caribbean soundsystem culture, but again with entirely fresh sonic approaches.
Breakcore festered underground, where it gradually began fusing with other kinds of industrial, noise and experimental sounds including new twists like deconstructed club and hyperpop. In bedrooms and alternative scenes it turned into something that expressed information age rage and disjunction, particularly through queer and trans perspectives, still with the inimitable patterns of jungle integral to it — leading us to Machine Girl, Sewerslvt, femtanyl and a legion of renegade experimenters. Generational shifts in the UK — where not only OG jungle, but the rebooted versions from the likes of Chase & Status were part of the fabric — dismantled macho presuppositions and allowed the likes of Sherelle, Nia Archives and PinkPantheress to bring the original power of the sound into entirely new contexts across the underground and pop charts. Even the new era London jazz scene rolled jungle in with broken beat and experimental hip hop as part of their milieu and inspirations. In the mid 2020s, jungle is everywhere — its initial hybrid nature making it resilient and extremely fertile more than three decades on. For something that seemed to burn so bright and so briefly, its afterlife continues to surprise, delight and perplex in equal measure.
