Drum and Bass as Cultural Accelerator

Drum and bass is one of the fastest electronic dance music (EDM) genres to achieve significant cultural attention, often running in excess of 170 BPM (beats-per-minute); around twice the speed of the soul and funk records from which its ‘breaks’ are sourced. Its emergence via dance clubs and raves in the deindustrialised spaces of inner-city London during the early 1990s points to an interrelationship between the stratified experience of speed in an accelerated culture and the effects of post-industrialisation on the genre’s mainly urban and working-class participants, many of whom have been socially and geographically immobilised by the fast and fluid transactions of deterritorialised techno-capital. This chapter considers the role of drum and bass as both a form of cultural resistance within underground EDM against the socially deleterious effects of an accelerated culture, while palpably embracing the jouissance produced by speed in its sonic and wider cultural contexts.