Imploding boundaries and exploding sounds - Johnny Ilan attempts to make sense of 10 years in bass.

A little over 30 years since hip-hop first shook the Bronx and dancehall started drifting out of the Kingston slums, urban dance music has been radically altered by the effects of technological development, hyper communication and the growth and globalisation of the consumer culture.

Whilst inventiveness, authenticity and the will to party still dominate the music, by the end of the 00s the ways in which it is produced, marketed, played out and consumed have significantly shifted. The depth and variation within urban dance music has grown exponentially. Our choices were once fairly well bounded by broad genres such as hip-hop, jungle and garage, but these musical movements have come to rely more and more on their regional and stylistic outliers for inspiration in a world that is more globalised, commercial and plural than ever before.

The 00s have been the era in which rappers are more successful as businessmen than musicians, where drum and bass found its way into high-end TV advertising, when niche third world genres are continuously claimed and discarded by a scene desperately seeking the commercially unadulterated but often too self-conscious to produce anything ground-breaking off its own bat.

Next : more thoughts from Johnny, plus his top five albums and singles...