If the eighties will be looked back on as an era of big hair and drum machines and the nineties were all about raving in tye dye, how exactly will the noughties be remembered?

Damn, are we really at the end of another year already? A quick glance at the calendar confirms that, yes, we are, and that it’s not just a year that’s drawing to a close either, but rather a whole decade. Where did it all go?!  Seems like only yesterday I was seeing in the millennial New Year with my family (and 23 years worth of tinned food products) in our underground bunker, braced for the forecasted apocalypse at the hands of the dreaded ‘Millennium Bug’...

Of course the millennium bug never came, but in the 10 years since a whole lot of other musical movements, trends and styles certainly did. With that in mind now seems like a suitably poignant time to look back over the decade past and see how we got from there to here. In fact ‘looking back’ seems a particularly appropriate way of putting it since that’s exactly what we’ve been doing for much of the last 10 years - drawing influence from bygone eras and reselling them with a modern twist.

You only have to look at two of the earliest significant musical movements of the new millennium to see evidence of this, the ‘new rock revolution’ (lol) fuelled by bands like The Strokes, and the Electroclash movement which introduced us to the likes of Peaches, Fischerspooner and Miss Kittin. Indie kids and club kids have more or less looked like The Strokes/Electroclash bands ever since,  so  it seems pretty fitting that Strokes singer Julian Casablancas should choose to draw the curtain on a decade his band helped to kick start with his own (recently released) debut solo album.

Yet while ‘looking back’ has remained a constant in certain strands of music, others have shifted and evolved so quickly that they have now gone full circle, referencing sonic trends that are not even ten years old as being ‘retro’. At the turn of the millennium we had UK Garage. Then as MCs took over we had Grime, which itself spawned the more DJ oriented; Dubstep.  After that we had the more 4/4 driven sound of Bassline and UK Funky, and now coming out the other side we have producers like Joy Orbison, FaultyDL and Sully who are sculpting the next evolution of beats and bass with a heavy nod towards the UKG sound of ‘old’.

.... read the rest of the article in the new issue of SuperSuper!

Words by: Billy Idle

Article by supersupertv