luka

Well-known member
Please don't subject thirdform to your compulsive social levelling. Just leave him be.
 

john eden

male pale and stale
It can be very individualistic. The centring of the DJ obscures the wider social relations that support it.

It is better when the DJs are also the dancers, the people who designed the flyers, the people who made the tunes, the people who set up and the people who cleaned up.
 

thirdform

pass the sick bucket
It can be very individualistic. The centring of the DJ obscures the wider social relations that support it.

It is better when the DJs are also the dancers, the people who designed the flyers, the people who made the tunes, the people who set up and the people who cleaned up.


Yes. we are talking about a particular ethos here, a particular standardisation of music, a particular cultural value set with specific cultural codes. not beat mixing two or more tunes. top post John, as always.
 

thirdform

pass the sick bucket
blissblogger. this is your time to shine. get in the ring. prove to the world proletariat that you will be the next luxemburg. the few paragraphs you will write on this thread will be quoted by generations to come verbatim. the 20 minutes you will dedicate to this will far eclipse the time it took you to right energy flash. the fruits of your labour will be encrusted in blood and fire. this is the ritual to end all rituals. you will define a new paradigm of magick (reinforced magick.) this is it. you're going to be our martyr for the revolution. go on lad.
 
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thirdform

pass the sick bucket
Zawahiri. it is 2033 and all the idols have been smashed once again. the whole world has surrendered to islam, including russia. The miniscule remnants of the enemy shivver and tremble beneath your feet, only to be tossed away by a powerful gust of wind from the almighty. you stand atop a podium in mecca. world satellite tv has zoned in on your face. you are going to proclaim the first pure islamic state in the history of humankind. there will be no dhimis. there is only one obstacle: America has not surrendered. You can nuke America but it will be playing your hand too early. you are going to bury America. you are going to turn the world upside down with your silver-forked tongue. this is your moment. you have 5 minutes. let's 'av it geezer.
 
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Numbers

Well-known member
There is certainly something almost-fascist about wanting to make people move to the rhytm you set. But doesn't that hold, with differing modalities, for all the arts? Is the writer, who forces you to sit down and stop everything else you were doing in order to read him or her, less of a fascist? It seems to me what you hint at is the basic constellation for most if not all arts: somebody performs and as a spectator, you decide to either accept or not what he or she does as a premisse for what you're about to experience.

Unless I am mistaken Umberto Eco's idea of an 'opera aperta' tried to subvert this idea, but only to a certain degree.
 

luka

Well-known member
There's different approaches. There's an exchange on the ragga jungle thread here
http://www.dissensus.com/showthread.php?t=7346&page=4&highlight=Ragga+jungle

between two DJs you're probably too young to remember
Luca, of Rossi B & Luca, who used to do a populist show on Rinse, a kind of Heartless crew selection of all the big tunes from different genres, garage, r&b, dancehall, whatever, which was a very popular format at the turn of the century, perhaps less so now, and a tasteful techno dj called Ben UFO.

Luca posted a jungle mix and Ben UFO responded by saying

"Anyone for an anthem bash bash bash bash bash bash"
 

luka

Well-known member
I think where Simon might resist this notion of DJ as Mussolini is through his understanding of the feedback loop operational between dj and crowd. There's a spectrum of course, that goes from Rossi B & Luca (give em what they want) to Ben UFO (give them what's good for them)
 

luka

Well-known member
Ben UFOs are certainly paternalistic, like the BBC in the 1950s, without necessarily being Mussolinis. It's related to, without being identical with, the dj as pedagogue model, which you see in Rodigan, in Gilles Peterson etc etc
 

luka

Well-known member
As a kind of root impulse lying behind all this is the tyrannical desire to monopolise the aux cord which, i suspect, is present to some degree in all of us here, at least on the music forum.
 

luka

Well-known member
One interesting thing to think about is the role of the crowd and the mass, shared experience, whether that can easily be characterised as either left or right. By playing the same music to everyone we standardise the input channel. By seeing the reactions of other people to identical inputs we get a very profound sense of them, both in their commonality and their difference. On the other hand control societies rely on standardising inputs, Burroughs talks about this in relation to the Mayan Calender.
 

luka

Well-known member
Another thing to think about is to what degree is our individual experience (I hate the word subjectivity) communicable, shareable?

How is this shared? (If it is shared)
 

luka

Well-known member
Now how mystical you want to get about the feedback loop is probably a matter of individual sensibility. Although even with a strictly materialistic framework you can account for a huge amount of 'reading of the room' what is desired, what is needed. If we use a model of dj as a reader of collective moods and collective desires, we have, potentially, a different figure than 'the controller'
 

luka

Well-known member
I think that music should be experienced collectively, that the primary experience of music should be within a group and private listening should be secondary but the story of technology, from the dawn of home listening, through Walkmans, iPods, mp3s etc is one of increasing atomisation. I suppose that before the DJ was the jukebox? Where the popular will is mediated not by the DJ but by the records loaded into the machine.
 

luka

Well-known member
One of the interesting threads, although it's not explored in great detail, in the book nomos wrote, is about this collective experiencing of sound. Interpreting sound physically, embodied reaction to sound, together. This is what you don't get in a seated concert hall, or in any venue in which the accepted code of behaviour is still and silent contemplation, sedentary listening.
 

thirdform

pass the sick bucket
There's different approaches. There's an exchange on the ragga jungle thread here
http://www.dissensus.com/showthread.php?t=7346&page=4&highlight=Ragga+jungle

between two DJs you're probably too young to remember
Luca, of Rossi B & Luca, who used to do a populist show on Rinse, a kind of Heartless crew selection of all the big tunes from different genres, garage, r&b, dancehall, whatever, which was a very popular format at the turn of the century, perhaps less so now, and a tasteful techno dj called Ben UFO.

Luca posted a jungle mix and Ben UFO responded by saying

"Anyone for an anthem bash bash bash bash bash bash"


I know who Rossi B and Luca are mate. and I'm all too familiar with ben ufo, too familiar for my own well being...
 
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