Wednesday, August 20, 2008

amazing, the virulence of the chav-phobia that erupts here and there amid otherwise gushingly praiseful ("fukin mint, that track" etc etc) comments (approaching seven thousand!) re. "Put A Donk On It" at youtube.



in between the references to "pikey scum" and "inferior brains", a useful definition provided by one scanlon69r:

a donk, it seems, is "a pipe/plank-sound... most commonly placed midway between beats, in the same place as hi-hats, but can be put in other places for different effects and such."



To me it sounds a bit like what I've elsewhere called the "butt-bumping bass-twang" in Hi-NRG of the 80s (does that make Pete Burns the original Scouse Houser?!), which gives an odd emphasis to the four-four, almost polka-like. Decidedly Euro in feel, very much anti-funk. Indeed it's tempting to posit Donk as the absolute polar opposite to funky house (even though both ultimately trace back to rave).



It's not just big in the North West -- the North East is a stronghold too, with this club being the donk equivalent of Niche maybe.

On Dissensus it's been pointed out that these parts of the UK just happen to be regions where there's never been much of a black population or a black music scene. And while Liverpool (as discussed in Rip It Up) does have a black population, for some reason musically it's very segregated. (Then again Wigan Pier, often mentioned as a donk stronghold, was surely an epicentre of the black music cult Northern Soul?).



Some raw discourse triggered by this from one woodsidetongz:

"glasgow (glezga 2 me) fuckin brill ere we fuckin go, h.t.i.d glasgow nut jobs lets go raven n batter a few cunts whahahahaha woodside tongz numba 1 in yer fanny . pulsator numba wan yeeeee haaaa 08 style gabba troopz fae ghell whahahahahahahahaahahahaa"

"lets go raven n batter a few cunts".... as innocuous as the sound seems and "nice lads"-y as the Crew come across in that video, when I first saw the Blackout boys' white-like-Dairylea faces and cropped hair and clocked lyrics
like the one promising to show you "what life is like on a life support machine" and like "one two one two/your face my shoe", i must admit I did momentarily flash on the Bacup Terror Group



Now if donk and jumpstyle could somehow join forces, that really would be sikk