Jamie xx, history and the LOLification of dance music

Plus Hodge, Luke Wyland, Tim Reaper and more

A picture taken from the excellent Agnès Varda exhibition at the CCCB in Barcelona

How much does history matter to dance music? And is it really important how a song earns its place in your affections, when you are swaying happily to its hi-hat patter on a night out? 

These are two questions I have pondered a great deal over the past two decades, as I have gone from being a young person who goes out to clubs and also writes about dance music, to being an older person who doesn’t often go out to clubs, who also writes about dance music.

Your answers to these two questions may also dictate how much you enjoy In Waves, the second studio album by Jamie xx, a record that has sent me into a spin of uncertainty since I first heard it on promo a few months ago. To be clear: there’s nothing musically on In Waves that is that confusing, no blazing innovations that will make you furrow the brow in a mixture of delight and befuddlement, like the first time you heard Windowlicker. Jamie xx isn’t really that kind of guy.

I didn’t exactly come to this album with a clean slate, either. I don’t mind Jamie xx; I enjoyed We're New Here, his 2011 remix of Gil Scott Heron’s I’m New Here that marked his solo coming out, but nothing he has released since has particularly captured my attention. So, in all honesty, I wasn’t particularly well disposed towards In Waves when I first queued it up.

And things very rapidly went south. To find the problem (if, indeed, it is a problem) you need go no further than the album’s opening song Wanna, which sets out its stall by referencing two of the most important songs in the history of UK Garage, Tina Moore’s Never Let You Go and Double 99’s RIP Groove. Things are slightly clouded by the fact that RIP Groove itself samples Never Let You Go - a song that was basically the founding text of 2-step garage - and it is this snippet that Jamie xx uses, effectively sampling RIP Groove’s sample of Tina Moore’s tune.

You know RIP Groove and you probably know it very well. The song, with its epic drop and titanic bass line, is a get-out-of-jail card for DJs, one that should really only be used in times of maximum need, for fear of further blunting its edge, like dishing out penicillin for an innocent cough. 

And this, essentially, is the problem with Wanna. I love sampling, a process that has revolutionised music, producing hundreds of thousands of brilliant tunes. And, in principle, I feel like producers should be able to sample anything they want, so long as they give credit where due and don’t betray the song’s moral core. 

(I see, via an interview with Vulture that examines, among other things, Jamie’s sampling of Black artists, that Jamie xx feels the same about this.)

At the same time, did Jamie xx really need to sample something so obvious on the opening song of his album? What’s he going to sample next? Wild Thing? Smells Like Teen Spirit? Happy Birthday? The mind shudders. In employing such a big tune, it feels like Jamie xx is reaching for an impact that is somehow unearned, piggybacking someone else’s brilliance as a shortcut to the sublime.

I wondered for a while if Jamie’s use of the RIP Groove sample was explicitly intended to piss off older dance music fans like me. That , at least, would have been funny, an attempt to drive a wedge between older dance music fans and younger audiences, who couldn’t give a shit about such an obvious sample.

But no. The producer explained to Stereogum that Wanna was a song that he made for his DJ sets, the sample’s familiarity being the whole point. “I wanted to have something that was very recognisable, especially in the UK, then flip it on its head and sort of take people by surprise, and sort of maybe emotionally jerk a big crowd in a DJ set. Which is something I always like to do.”

Wanna, then, is a re-contextualisation Double 99’s classic song. After the RIP Groove sample has first made its impact, Jamie xx runs moody, semi-classical chords underneath it, which serve to give a new - if not particularly interesting - flavour to the well-known drop. 

Is this clever? It’s different, I suppose, but not really absorbing enough to justify the producer’s use of something so obvious. So RIP Groove can sound melancholic if you run some gloomy chords underneath it. So what? So can most songs. Wanna is a Soundcloud loosie of a track; a like-gate giveaway of a song to be stored on a hard drive and forgotten.

(See also: Floating Points’ ultra-will-this-do? use of the iconic I Feel Love synth line on his new album Cascade. And Caribou’s pointless remake of Pump Up The Volume. I’m calling it the LOLification of electronic music.)

Why do I care, though? I don’t want to be the older guy who complains about young people’s music; at the same time I don’t think we should blithely accept music as being worthwhile, simply because it is popular with young people. 

Young people are the life’s blood of popular music. But they also listen to some total nonsense. (And, yes, I know “young people” is a ridiculously broad term but you know what I mean.) No one wants to be the ‘old man yells at cloud’ of dance music; but I think sometimes that in trying to avoid this fate, a sense of critical thinking and history is thrown out.

We definitely under-appreciate the history of dance music. Why, for example, are Inner City not viewed with the same respect as Joy Division? History counts, particularly for dance music, which was created in the underground by Black, Latino and queer producers. UK Garage, of which RIP Groove is a classic, is a brilliant example of Black British creativity that still resonates decades onwards. (And if you’re wondering who am I - a straight, white man - to go to bat for dance music’s history then you may well have a point. But at least I care.)

Is it wrong, ultimately, to pick apart a Jamie xx song that introduces an album of good-time grooves, best suited for a life on the dance floor? Am I simply being over over-protective? I didn’t invent UK Garage, so why should I care what other people do with it? Jamie xx is clearly a talented producer, more than capable of producing dance-floor bangers. I am sure he also has a deep love for dance music’s history.

But Jamie xx’s music always feels slightly shallow to me, as if emotion is something to be toyed with rather than experienced and Wanna seems symptomatic of this. 

In Waves is a perfectly serviceable album of stadium house and 2-step, like Overmono without the industrial menace. You can easily pick apart the influences: a Todd Edwards-style vocal cut-up here, a French Touch-ish filter sweep there. But maybe that is the wrong way to approach this album? Why should I ask for innovation? Can’t I just let In Waves happen?

And just when I am coming round to the In Waves, settling into its grooves, here comes Life (feat. Robyn) and its flagrant rip off of Stardust’s Music Sounds Better With You aka ONE OF THE MOST FAMOUS SONGS IN ALL DANCE MUSIC HISTORY. 

FFS. Truly, Jamie xx giveth and Jamie xx taketh away.

Some listening

Hodge - Free (featuring Carolyn Harding)

Why can’t everyone make music like this? That’s how great Free is. The song is commercial without being facile; experimental without being overly obtuse; anthemic without catering for the lowest common denominator; a dance-floor screamer with an absolute throat-tearing vocal from Carolyn Harding, rousing Italo pianos, a bass line you could hang your hat on and a clattering, banging, rolling drum beat that marks the distance between tribal house and whatever subgenre of UK bass weirdness that Hodge often makes.

Luke Wyland - Unwinding

Portland’s Luke Wyland doesn’t like the world “looping”, as he explains in the intro to his new album for Balmat, Kuma Cove, and you can see why: his music doesn’t loop, as such, or really repeat, so much as unspool out of the speakers, in a pristine mountain-stream-flow of unlocked ideas. Unwinding - a very appropriate title  - is giving me strong Manuel Göttsching feelings, with its subdued, Prog-ish guitar licks, which makes excellent Sunday morning listening.

Things I’ve done

Line Noise - With Tim Reaper

My guest on Line Noise this week is jungle producer extraordinaire Tim Reaper (aka Ed Alloh), whose new album with Kloke, In Full Effect, is out now on Hyperdub. We talked about first raving experiences, obsessive behaviour, jungle vs. drum & bass and DJing a wedding with Aphex Twin.

Nubya Garcia - Odyssey

The first time I listened to Odyssey, the second album from London saxophonist Nubya Garcia, it was in the car with the kids, on a small bluetooth speaker, and it proved disastrous. It’s really not that kind of record, favouring close listening and concentration. And in those circumstances, it is a major work. Anyway, I reviewed it for Pitchfork. “Odyssey shows ambition and style. Garcia has said that she wants listeners of her second album “to feel like their imagination knows no bounds” and she aces this test on a record that is alive with intensity and rich with the luxury of inspiration.”

The playlists

There are two: The newest and the bestest, with all the best new music of the last three years; and the Newest and the Bestest 2024, which is a variation on the above that you can probably work out. You get all the songs here. And you even get some more.