'Cruelly ignored badass ghetto booty bass' duo Bodysnatchers. Perhaps some considered them rather two-dimensional.
There was a point a few years ago where you could look at someone in a club and tell exactly what type of music they were into, and exactly how dedicated they were in their adherence to a particular code. A drum 'n' basshead would be rocking the skinhead, hoody, trainers and baggy pants look, while house afficionados were all about the pressed shirts and short, sharp haircuts. Hang out at a breakbeat night, however, and there would be far fewer sartorial clues.
And that's the thing about breaks: it's hard to pin down, hard to define, hard to pigeonhole, hard to categorise. This is both a strength and a weakness. It allows breaks DJs and producers to beg, steal and borrow from any style in dance music, creating a rich melange of influences, but it can also be maddeningly non-specific. If you've danced in a club at any time over the past 10 years, you've probably danced to breaks. But unless you made the effort to investigate the beats you were listening to more closely, it's quite possible you wouldn't have known it.
Last week saw the annual Breakspoll awards, the ceremony which hands out gongs to the scene's major players at the venue which has done the most to bring the music to a wider audience, Fabric in London. For a full list of the winning acts, check out the official site.
Despite the grumblings of underground forumheads in certain quarters the night saw most of the major awards go to deserving recipients. In particular, it was good to see the best album gong in the hands of ILS, a producer who has been at the heart of what makes breakbeat special for almost a decade, and whose beguiling, haunting, tough but cerebral music seems to exist on a totally different plane to the rest of the scene.
For some time now, breaks has been moving in two distinct directions: one group of producers using drum 'n' bass as their platform, while another group look towards house. But ILS has managed to maintain a "traditional" breaks sound, comprising live-sounding drum breaks beneath synths, stabs and occasional guitar hits, without ever sounding tired or old.
If Ils is an example of the old guard still going strong, then best breakthrough producer Alex Metric is almost certainly the future. With a poppy yet cool glitchy sound that takes in both four to the floor housey beats and more traditional breaks, it's surely only a matter of time before the mainstream media start realising they have a homegrown Justice on their hands. Purists (and I count myself in this particular camp) may find it disgruntling that someone chooses to adopt a multi-genre approach rather than ally themselves strictly to breaks, but it's hard to complain when the beats are this tight.
The problem, of course, is that when artists who mix up their styles are becoming breaks' major players, it questions the integrity of the scene itself as a distinct genre. It seems to me that breakbeat has taken so many influences from other styles in recent years that it is in danger of losing its identity altogether. But when that process leads to the sort of glorious cross-pollination that is best single nominee 30hz - Daddio, with its insanely catchy clash of bassline house, breaks and garage, or the cruelly ignored badass ghetto booty bass of Bodysnatchers, it's hard to maintain a furrowed brow for too long.
Having said that, I hope that in the 12 months before the next Breakspoll we see the emergence of a "traditional" breakbeat act or DJ with the potential to rival some of the scene's major players, acts like the Plump DJs (winners of best single for the 80s-tastic System Addict), Stanton Warriors (think speeded up N.E.R.D.) and Rennie Pilgrem.
The stand-out newcomers of the past couple of years, Rogue Element and Dopamine, both seem to have moved away from breaks towards a far more housey blueprint. Whether that's for commercial reasons or simply down to the overwhelming resurgence of house music as dance music's most all-pervasive genre over the same time period is hard to say. But without a distinct sound to the music, there's a very real risk that identifying a breaks track will become almost as impossible a task as trying to point out the breaks kids by checking their threads.
