Cultural Cowardice

[padraig (u.s.)]

something else going on

ya not saying that's the totality just an obvious go-to

 

[thirdform]

right this sounds more like it

I guess I would ask - how does that work as the feedback mechanism luka mentioned?

like what is the interrelation between forming the tastes of students and standardization of the commodity?

cos they don't show up at college with pre-formed quintessentially bland taste

hard to overestimate just how big club music is over here, even the cheesy house/jump up variety. i was in n london and i would struggle to get rinse on the fm dial but there were bare 2step stations, a few jump up ones and eruption fm playing happycore. it's huge. the underground is mainstream. and then radio 1 has always patronised dance music in its own cynical way. rinse and its online stream. it's been everywhere.

 

[sadmanbarty]

students need for irony (jme and big narstie), possibly motivated by the embarrassment of being white, middle class, from the country and liking something that's ostensibly not.

 

[sadmanbarty]

i prefer 1994 jungle, but undeniably it's retreating from the sonic frontiers of 1993.

on a cultural level the populist inclination applied to something that musically radical has something worthwhile to be said about it, not by me though.

i suppose it's taking it out of the bladerunner context; there's a radicalism of saying 'this isn't sci fi, it's about real people now'. there's a distance put up if you say that it's futuristic machine music, which is eradicated if you say it's just normal people music. it's the choice between saying 'those crazy drums are a flying car city scape' or saying 'those crazy drums are how you feel'. the latter is a far more potent idea.

 

[sadmanbarty]

role play or reality.

 

[thirdform]

93 isn't really bladerunner though. unless bladerunner is the muck of sewers. which i never got from reading the novel. actually philip k dick is a fun novelist but not very dark.

 

[thirdform]

detroit techno is more bladerunner than darkcore.

 

[padraig (u.s.)]

how big club music is over here

right - I was actually in the middle of writing a relevant post

I've always viewed - as a foreigner - London as a cultural hothouse where via singular national concentration of media, resources, population density, etc, combined with an NYC-style influx of diversity, subcultures can rapidly rise, amplified by the closeness of space and your ravenous music media. something as weird as jungle could nevvvver have broken through here like that - it's too big and spread out. here you get - even still with internet - true regional scenes, in which the weirdness is contained. there's a bit in Gibson where he talks about youth subcultures rapidly sweeping thru the Sprawl, like that, via density of populace and information. I assume this isn't an original view, granted.

 

[padraig (u.s.)]

being white, middle class, from the country

how true is this of university students in the UK? close enough to equate middle-class taste with student taste?

 

[padraig (u.s.)]

it's the choice between saying 'those crazy drums are a flying car city scape' or saying 'those crazy drums are how you feel'

I once heard this described as "standing in the rain music"

 

[blissblogger]

feel a bit for the sorry for the students - they are in a bit of a bind

if they do show up to the party (like say drum and bass, just on the cusp of when it starts go linear and a bit shit - which is what they did do), then we (meaning us hipper-than-students types, even if we actually were students, which i suspect most of us were at one point), we say 'the students ruined it'

if they don't show up to the party, then it's like "oh they are crypto-racist, blinkered, aesthetically retrogade, scared of bad men etc

so they can't really do right

student taste as a signifier for middlebrow and a bit lagging behind the edge has been going for a long time

The Fall had an early song called "Hey! Student" which was about how all the students that infested Manchester had lame taste in music, not knowing about Can or whatever. Then M.E.S. thought better of it (perhaps noticing that students were starting to make up a significant proportion of their live audience, being NME readers and all) and changed it to "Hey! Racist" - which was much more attuned to the Rock Against Racism / Anti-Nazi League moment.

But then in the 90s, The Fall finally recorded the tune as "Hey! Student" - it was around the time of grunge and the lyrics were updated with digs at the likes of Pearl Jam.

Actually it's on the album Middle Class Revolt I believe.

 

[blissblogger]

M.E. Smith also used to say things like "I thought rock'n'roll was ruined when the students took over" - meaning Soft Machine and the Canterbury bands, which he said he always loathed.

I tend to stick up for the bourgeois contribution to rock - being bourgeois myself, partly, but also I think it's true - the middle classes did bring something when they showed up around 1966. I like Soft Machine, I like Pink Floyd (and not just the Barrett-era), I love groups like the terribly terribly English and diffident Caravan, or Hatfield and the North.

When I was in Reading for a conference a few months ago, one of the talks was by academics researching students and music, as it happens! They were trying to see if students could be construed as a subculture.

I didn't think so myself, not according to the classic definitions of subcultures, because of the lack of a style element. Then again, at any given era, a large proportion of students have a sort of look. it's not like being a skinhead or a mod, true, but there is sort of range with clothes and hair.

In the question time I broughtup this thing of student taste being equated with behind the times, and the academics (it was a duo, doing a joint research project) got a little defensive, pointing to the way that the college circuit had provided a space for a lot of interesting bands to play and earn money over the decades.

And that reminded me that actually during the post-psychedelic / progressive era, the university venues were vital - bands like Hatfield and the North could play there and get paid really well (the college entz secretaries had funds that came from student union fees, they were flush with cash and actually started to seriously compete with promoters and cause booking fees to go up across the board). It was such an important infrastructure for progressive music that Melody Maker had a regular column called Student Statement, with interviews with college promoters and bands big on that scene. I came across it when doing my glam era research, delving through years of music papers.

Unfortunately it got a bit boring, real quick. Because you'd have a band like Gryphon saying "oh we love the college venues, the audiences are so receptive. they're not just there to dance, they like to listen". You get that sentiment repeated over and over.

So you can see right there the IDM / "electronic listening music" reflex in chrysalis.

Meanwhile the Kidz were stomping their platform boots down the disco, to Suzi Q and The Sweet, or making the balconies shake as they stamped their feet when Slade played live.

 

[blissblogger]

so the question of what it is that the middle class brought to the party (meaning rock mainly, but it applies to other and later forms of music), well that would be a bit of subtlety, complexity, introspection, whimsy or fancy, cerebral-ness

and then what they take away or deplete significantly tends to be physicality, viscerality, and that basic shouty stompy release of energy thing

the brock out element

 

[version]

students need for irony (jme and big narstie), possibly motivated by the embarrassment of being white, middle class, from the country and liking something that's ostensibly not.

I think Man's Not Hot being arguably the biggest ever grime tune says it all really.

 

[version]

93 isn't really bladerunner though. unless bladerunner is the muck of sewers. which i never got from reading the novel. actually philip k dick is a fun novelist but not very dark.

The book's neither Blade Runner in title nor aesthetic, it's the film that's important.

 

[thirdform]

i don't think the student/not student is a judgment of legitimacy. if that were the case then i'd have to stick up for the filth. nice girls if horrificly boring boyfriends.

 

[thirdform]

so the question of what it is that the middle class brought to the party (meaning rock mainly, but it applies to other and later forms of music), well that would be a bit of subtlety, complexity, introspection, whimsy or fancy, cerebral-ness

and then what they take away or deplete significantly tends to be physicality, viscerality, and that basic shouty stompy release of energy thing

the brock out element

i dunno, loads of working class lads were big into jazzstep. j dilla type soul hop is huge in w/c scenes in england.

loads of middle class people into the crudest jump up.

 

[thirdform]

this is not to invalidate your point mind. i just there is something inherent in the logical marketing cycles of theswe genres that pushes them towards these limits. it's the way club music, despite its social aspect isn't really a spontaneous happening or can exceed its built in bounds of spatiotemperality.

 

[thirdform]

i mean this sort of thing stretches right back to the early 20th century right. working class classical music connesseurs.

 

[sadmanbarty]

loads of middle class people into the crudest jump up.

maybe a large-part of studentification is rockification. rhtmic dumbing down, surrogate guitars (in jump up's instance in the bass)