We continue to explore the sources of inspiration for jungle and drum‘n’bass musicians. Without further ado, the YouTube channel Original Jungle Samples tells us about the instruments and voices featured in our favourite tracks. Today, we’re talking about one of the pioneers of jungle and one of the founders of ragga jungle in the early 1990s. The man who (according to one official version) gave this genre its name and has remained faithful to it for 30 years (he recently released the cool album Ancestorz). Meet Michael West, also known as Congo Natty.
A grandson of immigrants from Jamaica, bi-racial Michael West felt at least a little strange even in London. We know a lot about the difficult relationship between the black and white population in the United States. The UK also has its own problems, albeit not as obvious: Africans, Indians and Jamaicans, although they come from the territory of the British Empire, for long remained second-class citizens. And so they dealt with pogroms, dens, unemployment and clashes with the police. It was just like on the streets of Jamaica, as if they had never left Kingston. “Jungle. That’s what we called the place,” West recalls. And so, in this jungle, they started organising their own discos, since they weren’t allowed in the white ones. At the turn of the 1980s and 1990s, everyone mixed acid house, breakbeat, techno, rap and reggae. So West absorbed all these influences and created first the angry and political project Rebel MC and then another (X-Project), showing that it was still a struggle.
