I Love Music

When it began three decades ago, drum and bass was known as jungle and built on rolling sampled breakbeats that, in pushing past 140 BPM, were considered wildly fast compared to house music, which hovered, then as now, in the 120s. By the mid-Nineties, leery of the racial connotations associated with the word “jungle,” the music became re-branded as drum and bass, or D&B, just as the music began paring down to rhythmic basics — staggered two-step beats replaced the rolling breaks — and sped up, over time, to a comfortable 170 BPM, allowing dancers to skank along to the sludgy, half-time bass lines.