Breakbeat: Meaning (information, definition, explanation, facts)

This article is about breakbeat, the genre. For the technique, see break (music).

Breakbeat (breakbeats or breaks), are a collection of sub-genres of electronic music, chiefly exemplified by drum and bass and jungle, usually characterized by a non-straighted 4/4 drum pattern (as opposed to the steady beat of house or trance).

The History of Breakbeat Part I - "Fever in da' Bronx"

In order to understand where you are going, you first have to know where you are coming from. At least that's what many historians claim if you ask them why they get paid to do what they do all day long. But let's be honest: Who hasn't wondered why we have risen above the animal kingdom (at least up to 90%), why things are the way they are, or simply where such brilliant things as condoms, mothballs or the toilet flush came from? Since these are subjects that, though of interest, are completely out of place here, let's devote ourselves to a more suitable question: Just where do our beloved breakbeats come from?

Tricky. Where do you begin? How about the classic saying: "It all started with the drum?" And indeed, the history of rhythmic drums is closely intertwined with the history of humanity. But the question of when the first Australopithecus on his forays through the savannahs of prehistoric Africa noticed that it not only hurts like hell to hit your head on a hollow tree but that it also sounds very interesting is probably no longer definitively answerable today, and would moreover be beyond the scope of our modest magazine. So where to begin? What was the inception of what we now know as breakbeats? In order to resolve this, it might be better to disassociate from the history of the beat for a moment and to ask yourself when exactly the word "breakbeat" first emerged in a modern context. Yeah, let's try that.

Before the breakbeat there was the break. This term that originates in jazz describes those passages in musical compositions in which all other instruments are dampened so that the beat alone can work its magic. Consequently, the term "break" should be construed in its original meaning as an intermission in which the drum solo alone ruled the stage. Breaks in the late 1960's and early 1970's were a staple of Funk, and "King of Funk" James Brown's drummers Jabo Starks and Clyde Stubblefield weren't the last to user their drum solos to demonstrate what beats were capable of. This sets the time frame for the first emergence of Breakbeat, and now really only two things are missing from the show: The stage and the actors.

The stage for this spectacle was provided in the early 70's by the Bronx, the notorious New York City neighborhood which to this day puts a sparkle in the eye of those in the know. The main characters involved are quickly determined as well: The breakers, breakdancers or simply B-boys, and a young Herculean black man of Jamaican descent named Clive Campbell, today known better as the man who invented Hip Hop, the legendary DJ Kool Herc.

Like many cutting-edge discoveries in the early history of music, Breakbeat was born on a sweaty dance floor, the one of the dance club Fever. Let's go back to that night in 1974, in the West Bronx, to the dance floor at Fever. Kool Herc is behind the decks, the place is packed and people are getting down to dance, or rather, to Hustle.

The Hustle was the popular dance of the fading Disco era and Herc chose his records accordingly: Late Funk and Disco. But not all club-goers participated in the activities on the dance floor. A few trainspotters, disaffected by their surroundings, were always waiting quietly for their moment to shine: The break. The energetic rhythmic sections were the fuel for their performance, the breakdancing show. Breaking or breakdancing allowed these boys to draw attention to themselves, to be the stars of the evening for a short moment while surrounded by Hustle dancers, and their artistic performances regularly pushed the dynamics on the dance floor to a climax in which the energy exploded. This would not go unnoticed by an attentive DJ like Kool Herc, and that legendary night he tried an experiment. Driven by the intention to extend the part the breakdancers required for their show, he had thought about how to achieve this and that night in 1974, with the help of two turntables and one mixer, he mixed the rhythm sections of different tracks seamlessly one after the other for the first time. The audience flipped, the breakdancers freaked, and the dance floor exploded.

This was the making of a recipe for success, a whole new style of music: The Breakbeat, the root of Hip Hop, Drum & Bass and the genre still known as Breakbeat today. Kool Herc's example was quickly adopted and inspired numerous DJ to imitate him and to shape and form this new kind of music. Even if Herc's mixing style may seem primitive to the contemporary eye - after all, he wasn't doing anything close to beatmatching yet - he nevertheless has every right to the title Originator. Twenty years later the Chemical Brothers invited the long since retired Kool Herc to London to be a guest DJ and open for their shows, and in doing so paid respect to the man who laid the foundation for their own music: The inventor of Breakbeat.

Well. The history of Breakbeat is a confusing affair to someone who is interested and does a little research. Although the origins are easily determined, the thread gets lost quickly in the frenzy of the burgeoning European club culture of the late 80's and 90's with its mad speed of ever-changing music genres. At this point of a comprehensible temporal course of events, we have omnipresence: Breaks were everywhere - whether as filler or a leading style element, they took root all over the place and coagulated into a phenomenon which, like a vacuum cleaner, absorbed all influences it possibly could. A phenomenon that assured Breakbeat a steady spot on club dance floors and that coined and formed contemporary club and music culture. I'm talking about Hardcore.

The birth of Hip Hop in 1974 in the Bronx first brought Breakbeat to the forefront of a radically new youth subculture which quickly took the world by storm. By the early 90's, Hip Hop had become a worldwide phenomenon, and Breakbeat worked its irresistible appeal on both sides of the Atlantic. The commercial success became apparent with the first airing of MTV's Yo Rap show in 1988, if not before that. But Hip Hop was not the only popular export from U.S. clubs to find open ears and hard-dancing feet. At the same time, unnoticed by the general public and the music industry, there was an even more powerful wave that came crashing into European clubs, which had its roots in Detroit heads and Chicago clubs: Acid House and Techno.

Even if the first attempts failed by English DJ's to use new foreign music from the U.S. to fill the void that had been left in the musical landscape by the downfall of Rare Groove, number one hits like M/A/R/S' Pump the Volume and S'Express' number two hit Theme From S'Express marked the offshoots of England's Acid House wave, which, through DJ's like Paul Oakenfold and Danny Rampling and their club nights The Future and Shoom and through the discovery of Ecstasy, quickly gained momentum and culminated in 1998 in the Second Summer of Love. 1990 brought another, even bigger wave of original radical music that broke free from the ideals of Chicago and Detroit and that, with its raw energy and open hedonism, expressed its independence through the screams of thousands of dancing ravers: Hardcore.

A simple picture after all? The history of Breaks is that of Hardcore? We can only answer that with "Yes but no." Just as today there is a confusing, multifaceted zoo of styles and preferences, there are many different takes on what exactly Hardcore was. Less a clearly delineated genre than a lifestyle, Hardcore by the end of 1993 encompassed such different genres as Northern England's Bleep & Bass, the Southern Breaks-based Hip House and Ragga Techno, Pop Rave a la Shades of Rhythm, the Belgian-German Tekkno and last but not least the heralding revolution of Hardcore Jungle. All of these, having a different accentuation each but nevertheless closely interwoven, set the stage for the most scorching development phase of electronic club music we have seen to date and created a solid residence for Breakbeat on the dance floors at clubs.

Low frequency oscillations - Bleep & Bass: When talking about Breakbeat these days, no matter which BPM, one subject will come up sooner or later: The Bass. Bass from soft to hard, grinding, drilling, huffing, rattling, wrenching, cramming, pounding… you know, Bass. If you want to reduce Germany to one word, it would be Techno. For England it would be Bass, a science that has seen its first light in the Northern part of the island, more specifically Sheffield. Inspired by Unique 3's sub Bass monster The Theme, Steve Becket and Rob Mitchell erected the now legendary label Warp and dedicated themselves to the exploration of Bass. Deep frequencies, low frequency oscillations or simply LFO was distinctively the name of one of the first and most successful acts on Warp. LFO aka Mark Bell and Gez Varley, on their quest for the ultimate depth charge, created a myriad of classics that remain unforgettable to this day, among them their probably most well-known track: LFO. The experiments with bringing out a bigger, fatter, and more powerful bass led to exotically inviting methods such as the use of test tones from samplers, which was reflected by track titles such as Testone by Sweet Exorcist. Classics like Nightmares on Wax's Aftermath, 808 States' Cubic and Orbital's Chime owe their existence to such bass probes and defined the Hardcore sound of the North: Bleep & Bass.

Shut Up And Dance's fast Hip Hop: While low frequencies received the undivided attention in the South, the North was on a different track. Distinguished by Black music, the Greater London area with its influences of Hip Hop, Funk and Northern Soul's Rare Groove, was the home to two young Blacks, PJ and Smiley, known better as Shut Up and Dance (SUAD). On their label of the same name they released tracks in which breakbeats took the place of programmed beats. Notwithstanding earlier experiments in this direction, among others by heroes like Tod Terry, Frankie Bones, Lenny D or Fast Eddie and Tyre, it was left to SUAD to help bring about a breakbeat breakthrough in the dance floor context. Their approach undermined the Do It Yourself ethos of Hardcore. In cut and paste style, armed only with turntables, sampler and sequencer, they got to work and started to pitch Def Jam records from 100 BPM to 130 BPM and rap over it. Their methodology was also an expression of their self-image, in which they saw themselves more as a fast Hip Hop crew than a part of the rave culture from which they kept their distance, one reason being its blatant glorification of drugs. Track names like Here Comes a Different Type of Rap Track, Not the Usual 4 Bar Loop Crap were obvious statements in this direction. Not only drugs were criticized in SUAD lyrics, but sociological issues, racism and the increasing commercial exploitation of electronic dance music were themes as well. Despite their conflicted relationship to rave culture they were accepted by ravers with open arms and the Hardcore trend of Hip House they unleashed became a huge success, which crowned in the SUAD track Raving, I'm Raving. Meant as a parody of the party craze, the track quickly became a Hardcore anthem and the first nail in the coffin of their budding career. Raving, I'm Raving was based in large parts on Walking in Memphis, a piece by Marc Cohen who promptly sued SUAD for breach and damages because they had generously declined to get permission from Cohen's record label. The subsequent lawsuit and derivate expenses caused SUAD to preliminarily go out of business until the unnerved pair reemerged on the stage with the statement Phuck the Bizz. Nevertheless SUAD had achieved an avalanche of new breakbeat-based tracks, among them some by Ragga Twins who had been signed by SUAD's label and who, with their combination of B-Boy Breaks, Dancehall Reggae, Dub Bass and Euro Techno riffs, painted the rising sun of Jungle onto the horizon.

Energy Flash - Hardcore Tekkno: Southern England's Bleep & Bass or the more Northern Hip House had little in common with the Hardcore from the mainland. The Belgian-German axis around legendary labels like R&S or PCP with acts like Lenny D, Mundo Muzique and Joey Beltram drove Hardcore into even harder territory by fusing their EBM and Industrial influences with Techno, resulting in a faster, more aggressive and energetic mixture. Beltram's Energy Flash and perhaps more importantly Mentasm were early anthems of this new Hardcore culture in which hardness and speed were en vogue and manifested themselves in terms like Tekkno. Mentasm in particular, because of the famous mentasm stab, turned into a key track of all Hardcore genres. The ear-splitting sound of the mentasm stab which was celebrated in tracks like T99's Anasthasia or Cubic 22's Night in Motion became the unifying trademark of a whole generation of Hardcore producers on both sides of the Dover Channel and also influenced Breakbeat acts like 4 Hero, Doc Scott and Rufige Cru (Goldie) who shortly thereafter would play a vital role in the conception of Jungle, the precursor to today's Drum & Bass.

The Road to the Charts - Hardcore becomes mainstream: By 1992 Hardcore had finally evolved into a self-contained genre which, especially in England, was based on breakbeats and samples and was having more and more breakthroughs to the mainstream thanks to acts like Altern8, Moby, Human Resource, Shades of Rhythm and last but not least Prodigy. In January '92, Prodigy's Everybody in the Place shot straight to number two in the UK charts, something that in the same year was paralleled by SL2 with On a Ragga Tip and Shut Up And Dance with the previously mentioned Raving, I'm Raving. Prodigy's Liam Howlett, Keith Flint and Maxime Reality represented a slightly smoother, mass-appealing form of Hardcore, without ever really separating from it completely, and became one of the most influential Breakbeat acts ever who, after three top 5 hits, had the honor of being the first Hardcore crew to have a commercial success with their Experience album. If it wasn't the case before, most definitely now Breakbeat had established a solid place in the dancefloor business.

Speed freaks - Into the jungle: While the big rave anthems enjoyed their accelerating chart success, in London an even more radical form of Hardcore sprung forth. With hectic breakbeats, Dub Reggae bass and high-pitched vocal samples these tracks seemed in tune with the tradition of Shut Up and Dance-influenced Breakbeat House, but their emphasis on beats and bass was uncharacteristically more aggressive and energetic, which gave the music an artificial, mind-altering quality which SUAD's fast Hip Hop never accomplished. Without adopting the sociological graveness of their predecessors, the predominantly Black producers created a genre that molded their experiences in the urban jungle with rhythm and sound. And the music got fast. From 1992 on at the latest, Hardcore was also a culture of speed. In the beginning of 1991 the average rave track was still chilling at 125 BMP but by the end of 1992, 150 BPM was no longer a rarity. In the search for the ultimate kick, the DJ's used rebuilt turntables to speed up their tracks by up to +20. The high speed changed the music, melted the elements into a mass of rhythmically pulsating sound, Beltram stab, Italo-Piano riffs and high-pitched vocals. In their competition for the newest, most innovative sound, labels like Moving Shadow, Suburban Bass, Reinforced and producers like Rob Playford, Andy C, Goldie aka Rufige Kru, Hyper on Experience, Hype and many, many more drove forward at mach speed this new form of Hardcore. I Bring You the Future, the Future, the Future thumped the vocals from Noise Factory's Breakage #4, and they were not mistaken. This sound became the basis for the first fifteen minutes of fame of Breakbeat, and the Ibiza Label covers prophetically bore the key word which lent its name to the new movement: Junglizm.