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The KLF – What Time Is Love? (Live at Trancentral) (Official Video)
NEW YORK (RichTVX.com) – “What Time Is Love?” is a song released, in different mixes, as a series of singles by the band the KLF. It featured prominently and repeatedly in their output from 1988 to 1992 and, under the moniker of 2K, in 1997. In its original form, the track was an instrumental electronic dance anthem; subsequent reworkings, with vocals and additional instrumentation, yielded the international hit singles “What Time Is Love? (Live at Trancentral)” (1990), and “America: What Time Is Love?” (1991), which respectively reached number 5 and number 4 in the UK Singles Chart, and introduced the KLF to a mainstream international audience.
The KLF
The KLF (also known as the Justified Ancients of Mu Mu, the JAMs, the Timelords and other names) are a British electronic band formed in London in 1987. Bill Drummond (alias King Boy D) and Jimmy Cauty (alias Rockman Rock) began by releasing hip hop-inspired and sample-heavy records as the JAMs. As the Timelords, they recorded the British number-one single “Doctorin’ the Tardis”, and documented the process of making a hit record in a book The Manual (How to Have a Number One the Easy Way). As the KLF, Drummond and Cauty pioneered stadium house (rave music with a pop-rock production and sampled crowd noise) and, with their 1990 LP Chill Out, the ambient house genre. The KLF released a series of international hits on their own KLF Communications record label and became the biggest selling singles act in the world in 1991.From the outset, the KLF adopted the philosophy espoused by esoteric novels The Illuminatus! Trilogy, making anarchic situationist manifestations, including the defacement of billboard adverts, the posting of cryptic advertisements in NME and the mainstream press, as well as unusual performances on Top of the Pops. In collaboration with the Extreme Noise Terror at the BRIT Awards in February 1992, they fired machine gun blanks into the audience and dumped a dead sheep at the aftershow party. This performance pre-announced The KLF’s departure from the music business and, in May of that year, they deleted their entire back-catalogue. Drummond and Cauty established the K Foundation and sought to subvert the art world, staging an alternative art award for the Worst Artist of The Year, and burning one million pounds sterling. Although the duo remained true to their word of May 1992, with the KLF Communications catalogue remaining deleted, they have released a small number of new tracks since then, as the K Foundation, The One World Orchestra, and in 1997, as 2K. Drummond and Cauty reappeared in 2017 as The Justified Ancients of Mu Mu, releasing a novel 2023, and rebooting an earlier campaign to build a “People’s Pyramid”. On 1 January 2021, after years of silence, the band began uploading their long-deleted catalogue to streaming services, in a five-part series of compilations Samplecity thru Trancentral, including Solid State Logik, Come Down Dawn, and further releases to come.
1990s in music
Popular music in the 1990s saw the continuation of teen pop and dance-pop trends which had emerged in the 1970s and 1980s. Furthermore, hip hop grew and continued to be highly successful in the decade, with the continuation of the genre’s golden age. Aside from rap, reggae, contemporary R&B, and urban music in general remained extremely popular throughout the decade; urban music in the late-1980s and 1990s often blended with styles such as soul, funk, and jazz, resulting in fusion genres such as new jack swing, neo-soul, hip hop soul, and g-funk which were popular. Similarly to the 1980s, rock music was also very popular in the 1990s, yet, unlike the new wave and glam metal-dominated scene of the time, grunge, Britpop, industrial rock, and other alternative rock music emerged and took over as the most popular of the decade, as well as punk rock, ska punk, and nu metal, amongst others, which attained a high level of success at various points throughout the years. Electronic music, which had risen in popularity in the 1980s, grew highly popular in the 1990s; house and techno from the 1980s rose to international success in this decade, as well as new electronic dance music genres such as rave, happy hardcore, drum and bass, intelligent dance, and trip hop. In Europe, techno, rave, and reggae music were highly successful, while also finding some international success. The decade also featured the rise of contemporary country music as a major genre, which had started in the 1980s.The 1990s also saw a resurgence of older styles in new contexts, including third wave ska and swing revival, both of which featured a fusion of horn-based music with rock music elements. Reflecting on the decade’s musical developments in Christgau’s Consumer Guide: Albums of the ’90s (2000), music critic Robert Christgau said the 1990s were “richly chaotic, unknowable”, and “highly subject to vagaries of individual preference”, yet “conducive to some manageable degree of general comprehension and enjoyment by any rock and roller.”In December 1999, Billboard magazine named Mariah Carey as the Artist of the Decade in the United States. In 1999, Selena was named the “top Latin artist of the ’90s” and “best-selling Latin artist of the decade” by Billboard, for her fourteen top-ten singles in the Top Latin Songs chart, including seven number-one hits. The singer also had the most successful singles of 1994 and 1995, “Amor Prohibido” and “No Me Queda Más”.
