Island
2000
In The Mode
About This Album
It's easy to blame The Man. Joblessness. Prejudice. Michael Bolton covering "(Sittin' on) the Dock of the Bay." Yet few things were more cause for alarm than the self-destruction of jungle. What once began as an infuriated call to arms to take back a piece of dance culture that they once helped create, the British black underground saw such an extraordinary and deeply innovative new genre saturating the clubs, being name checked in every "credible" pop band's interview, and then quickly shuffled off into Nike ads. They should've known that The Man likes to assimilate. Indeed, with drum'n'bass in such pseudo-intellectual dire straits (helped put there, ironically enough, by Reprazent's own New Forms), it was a fine time for an album like In the Mode to have its say. And Reprazent, at least, are saying they've had enough.

The level of punk fury and torrential modernization is high all throughout this record. "In and Out" with its accelerated heartbeat, "Ghetto Celebrity" with its raucous Method Man cameo, "In the Tune of the Sound" with Rahzel's stellar beat-boxing: The jumpy uppercuts of rhymes and pounding polyrhythms seem to reach the very limits of jungle's schizophrenia.
Track List (try tracks 1,2,3,4,5,7,9,11,12,13,14 and 16)

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