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GROOVE.

by James Cauty & Will Drummond

from an article for JAMS Magazine issue no.1 circa 1988

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The first of the component parts you are going to need to find is the irresistible dance floor groove.

Before we go any further we had better define "Groove"".

It is basically the drum and bass patterns and all the other musical sounds on the record that are neither hummable or sing-along-able to.

Groove is the underlying sex element of the record and we are afraid for U.K. Number Ones this can never be left too rabidly raw on the 7" format. It upsets our subliminal national moral code. We can cope with smut, but not grind.

Of course, there are the odd exceptions.

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In the same way that our sexual fantasies change and develop, sometimes double back over a period of months, so do our dance floor tastes in groove. It is always on the move, searching for the ultimate turn on and when you are almost there it's off again and you're left looking for a new direction.

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Black American records have always been the most reliable source of dance groove.

These records down through the years have inevitably laid so much emphasis on the alter of groove and so very little into fulfilling the other Golden Rules that they very rarely break through into the U.K. Top Ten, let alone making the Number One spot.

A by-product of this situation is that gangsters of the groove from Bo Diddley on down believe they have been ripped off, not only by the business but by all the artists that have followed on from them.

This is because the copyright laws that have grown over the past one hundred years have all been developed by whites of European descent and these laws state that fifty per cent of the copyright of any song should be for the lyrics, the other fifty per cent for the top line (sung) melody: GROOVE doesn't even get a look in.

If the copyright laws had been in the hands of blacks of African descent, at least eighty per cent would have gone to the creators of the groove, the remainder split between the lyrics and the melody.

If perchance you are reading this and you are both black and a lawyer, make a name for yourself.

Right the wrongs.

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Buffalo Gals is Malcom Maclaren's second novel as a primary author.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Malcom was born on January 22 in a flat at 47 Carysfort Road, Stoke Newington, north-east London, to Peter McLaren, a Londoner of Scottish extraction who was at that time serving with the Royal Engineers, and Emily Isaacs, the daughter of the tailor Mick Isaacs and the independently wealthy Rose Corr Isaacs, whose father had been a Portuguese Sephardic Jewish diamond dealer.

McLaren's parents divorced when he was two after Peter McLaren left the family home due to his wife's serial infidelity: McLaren later alleged that her lovers included the Selfridges magnate Sir REDACTED] and Sir REDACTED], owner of the retail giant REDACTED] Stores.

Subsequently McLaren was raised by his grandmother Rose, who lived in the house next door at 49 Carysfort Road with her husband and instructed the child early in life that, "To be bad is good because to be good is simply boring".

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