Stop Talking About The Jungle Revival, It Never Left

Recent months have seen the rise of a repeated conversation that got a bit jarring. Whenever anyone began talking about the Special Request - Soul Music album, or any of Tessela's recent songs, there was always this theme that jungle was making some sort of comeback.  It seemed people were willing to embrace the older sounds because a bunch of producers had made a few songs in 2013 with breaks in them.

That's not to say anything bad about any of those producers. The Special Request album was one of the best of the year, and when you hear Tessela's 'Hackney Parrot' on a good system the tune bangs harder than any other track released in the last twelve months - but there seems to be a strange sort of amnesia causing people to forget that there are countless songs that reference jungle, breaks and hardcore every single year. It's not a comeback, because jungle or hardcore never went away in the first place.

Music scenes don't die and revive magically because a few producers made some songs. No ones going to look back at 2013, and think that was the year that suddenly jungle was back in the mainstream, and 2014 won't be that year either. We've had excellent releases such as Lee Bannon  - Alternate/Endings, Machinedrum - Vapor City and Om Unit - Threads in recent months, all nodding to the jungle and hardcore's stylistic motifs whilst doing their own, excellent thing.  The biggest piss-take of all when it came to conversations about jungle revivalism recently however has been the complete failure of anyone to mention jungle artists who have always been working within the scene amongst this current conversation. As well as the Special Request album, there was also a new album from bonafide jungle legend Congo Natty, aka Rebel MC, aka one of the best known jungle heroes of all time. Fair enough, the album wasn't great, but it's going to be tough for him to top any of his older anthems, like 'Original Ses' or 'Junglist Soldier'.

2010 was another year that was littered with great releases that all heavily referenced jungle or hardcore in one way or another; from producers across the whole spectrum of dance music. Listen to Skream's remix of Donaeo's 'Riot Music', Dark Sky's 'Something To Lose', or Ramdanman's 'Don't Change For Me'. All tracks massively borrowing from the hardcore scene of days past, and all great within their own right. Yet for some reason, people seemed to have the awareness that year not to blindly waffle on about an ongoing scene being revived.

2008 saw the release of the widely lauded Zomby album Where Were U in 92?. A whole album fully dedicated the sounds of UK dance lore, full of air horns and enough rewind worthy tunes to keep a warehouse of whistle-toting, camouflage-clad, 90s pill heads going for days. Once again though, no one was banging on about how this was going to be the return of the hardcore scene. It was generally accepted that the album was a nod to the past, whilst also being a continuation of new ideas from the producer.

An annoying trend from a lot of house or techno fans that liked the Special Request album was their continued refusal to be open minded about broadening their horizons; beyond a jungle referencing album, made by an established producer whose work they are already familiar with. This, again, is nothing particularly new. We all have our pre-conceptions about certain music genres, and we're probably guilty in some ways of dismissing certain genres out of hand without having paid much attention to them, but talking about a 'revival' of jungle - as though it died out and has only recently been revived - is a disservice to everyone over the years who's been keeping it going.

You can follow Patrick Carnegy on Twitter here: @patrickcarnegy