Goldie is generally considered to be the man who revolutionized
drum&bass, taking it public - like a
breakbeat version of
Kevin Saunderson, the
elevator of
techno.
Well.
Goldie, as an individual, sucks. He has not made a single track on his debut album, Timeless. (It sold over 150000 copies in the UK alone and is a damn good piece of music, though.) He used to make dental jewelry - that's how he got his name. Then he met a cool black girl with blonde dreads who was a DJ. That was Kemistry, one of the greatest drum&bass DJ:s ever. She showed him the music, and then he wanted to release a record. I'm not certain of the exact procedure Goldie & Co. followed when making the record. I do suspect, though, that he hung out with a bunch of producer homies, and told them how he wanted it to sound. However, the rest is history, as they say.
On his next record, he did do the producing. It resulted in a 23-minute opening track, dedicated to his dead mother, that was boring as fuck. The rest of the track was about as bad.
Well. When you are a world-famous "producer", you get to do a lot of remixes and above all, tour the world as a DJ. The man can't tell a 7 from a 12-inch record. My 73-year-old aunt mixes better than him.
N.B. - This is no joke. She actually is a very good mixer - she used to be a musician. But still, she isn't an eight figga nigga.
Some say that regardless of how much of the music he did himself, you should thank him for all the good things he have done for the drum&bass scene.
Others say he ought to be shot in the neck for making us listen to worthless "breakbeat" jingles and commercial spots.
He is an excellent writer, though. The graffiti in the Timeless sleeve is done by him.
UPDATE:
In response to turkderek's WU, I do sincerely apologize if I have contributed to the already vast amounts of misinformation in our society. I do have good reasons:
- I have good reason to believe that the final 37 minutes are similar to the first 23 - namely, boring as fuck.
- I had good reason to believe that Goldie's mother was dead, because I saw her sitting motionless for a full 60 minutes while listening to her son's record. I was wrong, she had only fallen asleep out of boredom.
And I never said anything about drum & bass having to be
phat.
UPDATE II:
turkderek's WU seems, sadly, to have gone to Node Heaven. However, I believe the major points of his critique still come across from my answers, and thus, I won't remove them since they further my own WU. EOD.