Jungle Bells Rocked

For nearly 100 years Black musicians, from Duke Ellington to James Brown to Rebel MC, have used the term jungle to describe their own music. Why is it still so uncomfortable?

I was recently asked to submit some music for a holiday compilation. I sent over a track I’d made previously called “Jungle Bells” to see if it might fit their aesthetic.

They loved it, wanted to use it, and even offered me a chunk of change to license it. Exciting!

Then came the “but…” After hearing from some folks that the title was a “cause for concern,” they proposed that it be renamed “Drumble Bells.”

Drumble? I had to look that one up:

“Drumble:

To be sluggish or lazy; To be confused; To mumble in speaking; To do something ineptly; to bungle or bumble”

The track is called “Jungle Bells” because it’s produced in the upbeat and propulsive jungle style, so to use the word drumble seemed like a curious alteration. It’s certainly not my best work, so although it may be inept and bungling, sluggish and lazy aren’t terms that feel aligned with the vibe.

Semantics aside, I was curious about where the “concern” was coming from. As a cover of “Jingle Bells,” the title is of course a play on words that’s an important aspect of the work. Perhaps some of the folks listening weren’t familiar with the jungle genre? This could be understandable since, even though the genre has been around for 30+ years, it has generally remained underground.

As it turned out they were “familiar with” and even “a fan of” jungle, but they were also concerned that “the world is so sensitive and politicized these days, especially around racial issues.”

The term “jungle music” has indeed at times been used in derogatory ways. This genre though was primarily created by Black people who “thought of the term as empowering, an assertion of the Blackness of the music and its subculture, inverting the racist history of the term ‘jungle music.’” That was before jungle was “rebranded and colonized into the much more palatable ‘drum and bass;’ a genre that can be seen as the whitewashing and gentrification of jungle.”

I realize that I’m a super-music-nerd and can’t assume people have this context, so I shared the backstory with them, and even pointed out that there’s currently a jungle resurgence in which some of the most prominent producers are Black; a movement that’s been covered in The Guardian (Subwoofers at the ready! The jungle and drum’n’bass revival is upon us), and DJ Mag (The Return of Jungle).

Though I was honored by their offer, I told them that the title is integral to the piece, and because I believe an understanding of the racialized history of the genre is important, even if uncomfortable, the name should stay.

They respected my wishes but said that because their community is “hyper-sensitive and not particularly well informed historically,” even though they “love this stuff,” they couldn’t use the track without the name change.

This frustrating impasse was a reminder of how political correctness can go beyond doing the right thing, and cancel works and histories that themselves would otherwise do more good than harm.

As a white man in the United States, I struggle with my own demons, particularly in light of my love of Black music and its influence on my work. Cultural appropriation is a concern for me and I deeply hope those influences show in my music as homage more than theft.

But their issue with “Jungle Bells” wasn’t about cultural appropriation. They were concerned about racism in the name of a genre primarily established by Black people.

I learned the story goes back much further.

This Halcyon article analyzing the history of the word jungle as a name for the ’90s genre points to its use going back a hundred years by “two of the most important black musicians of the twentieth century: Duke Ellington and James Brown.”

“In the 1920s, Ellington cultivated what was known as ‘jungle style’ … [which] parallels neatly with Jungle music of the 1990s. The ‘bottom-heavy scoring’ of Ellington’s ‘East St. Louis Toodle-O’ (1926) exhibits an explicit preoccupation with low-end frequencies that, according to the DJ and [jungle] ‘originator’ Fabio, crucially distinguishes Jungle from Techno. Six decades later, the ‘Godfather of Soul’ James Brown released the ‘In the Jungle Groove’ compilation. One of the key progenitors of Jungle, Ibiza Records boss Paul Chambers, claims he first began to use this term with reference to this very compilation. Indeed, Noise Factory’s ‘Jungle Techno,’ released in 1991 on Ibiza Records, is the earliest recorded mention of this word within what was then the ‘Hardcore’ scene.”

The piece goes on to describe a “multiplicity of accounts explaining Jungle’s terminological roots,” including:

“MC Navigator’s claim that Jungle emerged as a predominant term from a sample in a Rebel MC track … Ripped from a yard-tape, the sample in question consists of an MC shouting out ‘all-a the junglists,’ a term originally used to describe the residents of the Tivoli estate in Kingston, Jamaica … This shout out to the ‘junglists’ equally related to MC Navigator’s experience living in the ‘urban Jungle’ of the Broadwater Farm estate in Tottenham [London], where they had ‘called [them]selves junglists long before the music ever came along.’”

Bob Marley and the Wailers’ “Concrete Jungle” comes to mind too.

Here we are, nearly a hundred years after Duke Ellington first embraced the term jungle by “his own choosing … not in a situation where his employer demanded it, but of his own volition as an expression of his relationship to the African Diaspora,” yet people are still uncomfortable with the word.

As I reread our email exchange about the holiday compilation, I was saddened by what appeared to be a willingness to suppress a difficult topic rather than bring the dialogue out into the open; a reminder that what can seem like well-intentioned sensitivities to “racial issues” on the surface can unwittingly, in this case, play into the ongoing erasure of Black art.

Alas, “Jungle Bells” won’t be included in said holiday compilation, and it certainly won’t change the world, however, if you’re so inclined you can still give it a listen as part of the “Santastic III” compilation where the track originally appeared in 2007:

Also, check out my article about, and DJ mix of nu-jungle music that’s been resurgent over the past few years. Nu Jungle ->