oxide and neutrino - wtf?

2) On the shift in cultural paradigm - absolutely and definitively yes. I bought a Sunship album from '98 and listening to it I was shocked to fully realise just how much UK Garage as a style has changed and pretty much completely rejected its origins. On Sunship's album the songs are basically Todd Edwards-style garage tracks with garage snare patterns and oddly programmed kick drums... which I had expected, but after listening to so much current stuff it was a shock to go back and listen to what was frontier stuff not too long ago. How we ended up with hyperspeed, agressive ravey UK hip hop with sharp post-Timbaland beats in two years is quite difficult to say. The difference between hardcore and jungle is actually smaller, methinks.

3) On its success - think of it as the urban black/underclass equivalent of Britpop (only not so backwards-looking, and reacting to US hip hop rather than grunge) - at once a strong pride in local culture and music and a yearning for close-to- home but charismatic supastars. Songful UK garage generally has better tunes, but O&N/SSC style stuff has more interesting personalities - perhaps the least "faceless" style to have arisen from within dance music ever? I also imagine that with US hip hop and r&b so technoid at the moment it's been comparatively easy for a lot of people to stylistically "jump ship".

1) relationship with the charts. These guys want to get paid enough to have hatas, and that's not gonna happen if they get too grimly repetitive - the kidz will stop buying them.

2) relative rinky-dinkiness of the music; strip off the rapping and a lot of this stuff isn't actually hard, just very cold-sounding (obv. The Streets' "Has It Come To This" is neither, but closer to oddly appealing garage-muzak).

If anything, the next wave of crews will have to be less monochromatic and more broad-minded than SSC to get the attention the latter have received for their novelty alone. SSC = inevitably perhaps too connected to a specific sound (he says without having heard the album). I think subsequent groups will have less difficulty avoiding this, and be less likely to do well if they don't avoid it - for a good example, see Pay As U Go's "Champage Dance", which swaps SSC-style tech-paranoia for some Oris Jay-style dancehall-latin-beats, like a darkside version of Wookie's "What's Going On" (more thoughts on some of these issues in a forthcoming article).