The sexy pendulum

Slothrop

Tight but Polite
N.B. I know this is actually a part of the hardcore continuum theory but what say ye?

Is it partly just a drift-then-reset thing? Like the natural tendency of competitive producers and MCs is to get more and more "for the heads" and drift away from utilitarian Friday night club beats, until eventually the Friday night clubbers get fucked off and move on to the next thing.

Not sure the Bebop / Miles Davis thing is the right way around though. Bebop was pretty much the ultimate heads music, all ferocious virtuosity, and about the first half of Miles' career was spent backing off from the fireworks and trying to make something - all the cool stuff into the modal era - that got back to bluesiness and emotional openness without just reverting to trad swing.

Eg


vs

 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
I'd dare say I made that bebop/miles reference just to provoke Barty and all the rest of the beatniks on here.

As you say, bebop was more the unsexy swing of the pendulum.

 

woops

is not like other people
Is it partly just a drift-then-reset thing? Like the natural tendency of competitive producers and MCs is to get more and more "for the heads" and drift away from utilitarian Friday night club beats, until eventually the Friday night clubbers get fucked off and move on to the next thing.

this sounds right and feels right but isn't there also the opposite impulse whereby weirdo beginners start out innovating and drift more to the mainstream, playing to the ladies and the friday night, as they get through the second and third album syndrome?
 

thirdform

pass the sick bucket
this sounds right and feels right but isn't there also the opposite impulse whereby weirdo beginners start out innovating and drift more to the mainstream, playing to the ladies and the friday night, as they get through the second and third album syndrome?

right. 93 jungle was weird as fuck, even 97 dnb had its weird moments, but 00-01 dnb was just not weird in any shape or form. it was just flat roller after flat roller. that's the time that all those ed rush and optical and bad company albums come out.
 

thirdform

pass the sick bucket
it's why I'm slightly peeved off that the hardcore continuum became the preserve of goldsmiths post-dubstep sociologists because they got it all wrong. if you think 93-96 jungle was more popular than 00s dnb then eventually you're going to end up being reverential and not avant-garde.

It's the provincialism of a lot of music writing in this country. everything orbits England.
 

thirdform

pass the sick bucket
if you want to make something truly populist within the 2010s/2020s context you will have to make pop dnb or screachy jump up. that's the thing with pop music, it's an impersonal process coded by the market, not a sphere to project desires onto. barty once quipped that my music is an oxford don experiment and in a way I can see where he's coming from, I value music where there is some kind of input or thought in its creation. The problem is to then swing to the other side and claim that just following the zeitgeist (out of some misplaced antihumanism or whatever) is in any way revolutionary. If anything, pop music has always been more humanistic in its timbres and textures. even a lot of the 00s dnb harkened back to rock music more than it did techno.
 

Slothrop

Tight but Polite
this sounds right and feels right but isn't there also the opposite impulse whereby weirdo beginners start out innovating and drift more to the mainstream, playing to the ladies and the friday night, as they get through the second and third album syndrome?

Yeah, true. Although in some sense that's still a drift away from the original core audience. I guess nuumology locates the nuum in a sort of niche-populism, and you can drift out of that zone in two ways. It's like the way that Island-era Bob Marley shifted orders of magnitude more product than soundsystem era Bob Marley but we still associate the soundsystem era with that populist dubplate feedback loop.
 
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thirdform

pass the sick bucket
like this is so blatantly a 96-97 techstep tune slowed down. when dnb for that brief while was in its alienate the lightweights anti-populist headfuck phase. before it discovered rock music and the grammies.

 

thirdform

pass the sick bucket
i get its hip to be contrarian and i would acknowledge that 93 jungle had a populism but it was still a tiny populism relative to 00s dnb.
 
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