Club Culture in Britain

Going to nightclubs, or ‘clubbing’ as it is called, is very popular in Britain. From the age of about 15 young people like to go clubbing at the weekend. Usually friends meet in the evening and go to a pub or a café, or just sit at home and chat. Then, late in the evening after 10 p.m. they travel to the centre of the town and wait in a queue outside the nightclub. The clubs are usually special buildings with a big space inside for dancing. There is a bar of course, and often a special room with chairs and sofas where it is less noisy. This is for people who are tired of dancing. They can rest here for a while. Some clubs only play one kind of music, but most have different music on different nights. If you want to go to a club you need to know what kind of ‘night’ the club is offering. Here some simple definitions of popular styles.

House. This is the most popular form of dance music. It can have vocals, but the most characteristic element of House is a fast beat (110 beats per minute plus) and keyboards and synthesizers. House is also known as ‘Techno’.

Garage. This music started in a New York club called ‘Paradise Garage’. It is a dance version of disco with melodies, lots of vocals, but a fast, high energy beat.

Acid Jazz. This is just a mixture of modern hip-hop beats and old jazz records mixed together.

Ambient. This form of music is characterized by ‘found sounds’. For example, a DJ might use a recording of running water or an old recording of a politician’s speech. These short recordings are called samples.

Trip-hop. This is a mixture of Hip-Hop and Dance music. It has fewer lyrics than Hip-Hop and more of electronic sound.

From Speak Out, 2005

 

1. Do you enjoy going clubbing?

2. How would you describe Belarusian club culture?

3. What music is popular with Belarusian clubbers?

Ex. 24. Why do hip-hop and rap appeal to young people? Study the notes, read the text and find out the components of hip-hop movement.

Hip-Hop & Rap

Many people would agree that the most vigorous youth culture to appear since the decline of the hippie movement in the early 1970s has been the hip-hop movement. Created as an alternative to the culture of gang violence in the mid-1970s in the Bronx and Harlem, hip-hop culture had three major components: rap music, break dancing and graffiti art.

By the mid-1980s, rap music as an expression of hip-hop culture had become the Next Wave of wider popular culture. Rap music, with its heavy emphasis on beat, rhythm and lyrics that were often based on realistic images of violent inner-city life survived, and like the first generation of rock and roll, it seized the attention and interest of young people. In the late 1980s and the early 1990s rap gained enormous popularity fuelled by movies, radio, MTV exposure and parental disapproval.

Unlike the hippie movement, where anyone could put on a tie-dye shirt and become a weekend hippie, the hip-hop culture did not provide a lifestyle that most American young people could completely accept. White teenagers could not, as much as they might wish to, become black. They could and did, however, listen to the music, wear high-cost sneakers, sagging pants, hooded baggy sweatshirts, and baseball caps, imitate the hair cuts, adopt the rap vocabulary suitable for their daily lives, mimic street speech, and admire from a safe distance the lives of prominent black rappers and athletes. Thus, rap provided a connection to the lives of those living in the chaos of inner cities, a connection that brought it a degree of awareness of social injustice.

The hip-hop movement and rap music provided the biggest addition of black street phraseology to youth slang since introduction of Harlem jive in the 1930s. The idiom of rap is not entirely new. Such neologisms as fly, fat/phat, and rap are very old slang, and much of the rap vocabulary dealing with violence can be traced to Harlem jive, gangster slang of the 1930s, or the war in Vietnam.

One of the three original components of the hip-hop movement was break-dancing, which started in the South Bronx as an alternative to gang warfare. It consisted of highly rehearsed, acrobatic, stylized dancing, a form of street art or street theatre that was most often performed either on sidewalks for tips or in organized competitions.

The language of breakdancers provided the bridge from black street phraseology to the idiom of hip-hop. Among many words used by breakdancers which are found in the lexicon of hip-hop, there were some slang expressions and terms that were unique to breakdancing. The term break itself is an old jazz term, meaning that the music and dancing continue within a song but the singer does not. In hip-hop culture a breaker was a dancer, and breaking was dancing. A group of breakdancers was a crew, a term which came to have a more generalized meaning. To cut someone was to expel them from the group of dancers. A breaker’s dogs are dancing sneakers, and gear is one’s performance clothes. Also included in the breakdancer’s essentials are a box (a large, portable tape player, short for boom box), used to play joins (tapes or songs).

The third component of hip-hop movement was graffiti. Graffiti is an Italian word which means “scratchings”or “scribblings”, and it was originally used by archeologists to describe drawings and inscriptions scratched with chalk or charcoal on walls and other surfaces in ancient Pompeii and Rome. They are important to linguists because the language of graffiti is closer to the spoken language of the period and place than written language. In contemporary usage, graffiti refers to writings or pictures, rude, humorous, political or sexual in content, drawn with spray paint or felt-tip pens on walls in public places, such as buildings, parks, trains, buses, toilets, etc. Graffiti is also found in rural areas, often on bridges and rocks along a highway. It is a form of self-expression, and though graffiti art has never moved beyond vandalism, it had a great effect on commercial graphic art, related to hip-hop culture. The technique and content of graffiti have also influenced several contemporary artists.