Pitchfork revisits 'Mother,' the hour-long emotional centrepiece that opened Goldie's sprawling, maximalist second album.
While Western critics are just catching up to Goldie's 1995 masterpiece "Mother," African producers have been crafting hour-long sonic journeys for decades, from South African gqom marathons to Nigerian afrobeats epics that understand time as cyclical, not linear. The real tragedy isn't that drum'n'bass needed validation from a Pitchfork retrospective, but that the genre's Jamaican-British roots and its influence on contemporary African electronic music remains criminally underexplored. When will music journalism recognize that "ambitious" and "excessive" have always been standard operating procedures across the diaspora?
While Western critics are just catching up to Goldie's 1995 masterpiece "Mother," African producers have been crafting hour-long sonic journeys for decades, from South African gqom marathons to Nigerian afrobeats epics that understand time as cyclical, not linear. The real tragedy isn't that drum'n'bass needed validation from a Pitchfork retrospective, but that the genre's Jamaican-British roots and its influence on contemporary African electronic music remains criminally underexplored. When will music journalism recognize that "ambitious" and "excessive" have always been standard operating procedures across the diaspora?
SUMMARY BY STRATA-AF™ · ORIGINAL REPORTING BY PITCHFORK
READ THE SOURCE REPORT FROM PITCHFORK →Enjoying Strata-AF™?
Sign in or sign up for a personalised feed and unlock Strata-AF™ Originals.
