IdleRich
IdleRich
Northern soul (to pick one example) was not a genre of music at the time the tunes that make it up were created, it is a name applied retrospectively by journalists or DJs who wanted a collective name for the type of songs that they listened to together and played at parties and which they thought sounded the same - and it stuck pretty well. So, although no-one in the sixties or seventies went into the studio thinking "I'm going to record a northern soul stomper" the genre name caught on and has been used by loads of people since - collectors and djs and dancers etc. In fact, neatly enough in a kind of "completing of some sort of wonky lop-sided circle" manner, it's now quite possible that a retro minded group of soulsters could decide to make a stomping 140bpm soul seven at 2 min and 42 seconds long, and THEY, unlike their predecessors who had such a strong influence on their sound, might indeed say "we are going to make a northtern soul seven inch".
Arguably something similar happened when Lenny Kaye compiled the first Nuggets album. The tracks on it were not particularly rare and tended to be minor hits from all over the country... the songs were all out there but in the main they had not, as a rule, been linked together, so Kaye really did something that would have been posssible for anyone with the brains and initiative do it; he put the records on the same disc and said that this Dylan rip-off and this Stones copy and this bubble-gum thing share a common... something... in that they had usually been done in a very DIY manner and they tended to be one-offs for the bands and, er, something. In fact even now it's not that easy to immediately and briefly say what links all the singles that have been called garage-punk together, but, as is so often the case with great ideas, it made perfect sense on an intuitive level and the idea of garage-punk as a genre caught on for a wider audience. I very much doubt he was first to actually use that name (well he definitely wasn't the first, what I'm saying here is that he was not the first even in that context) but certainly that compilation made the name far more known around the world (and inspired a load of hard core collectors to make a million other compilations of impossibly rare tougher, cruder, purer versions of that sound).
Anyway, that was a long-winded and arguably quite pointless build up. I could have just said "here are three songs that I like, tell me if youi know any other similar ones" but that just seemed like a half-hearted and dispiritingly prosaic way to begin a thread. In fact, if I did it like that it wouldn't really deserve its own thread, it could just be stuck in the "tune of the day redux" thread or probably any one of many others, where it would get no replies and I wouldn't find any new songs. So instead I prefer to say that I am ceatinng a new genre - which has in fact already existed, hiding in plain sight - by pulling together a number (and that number is three) of tunes that to my ears are linked. The common features of these is that they are pop meeting electro. All of these three have moments of humour and could almost be called novelty songs, but I think that they are too good to be dismissed in that manner. And to me each feels as though they really captured a moment of magic that could not easily be repeated, which I'm guessing is part of the reason that they were real one-offs for the artists concerned (er, except for one of them).
Starting off with Men Without Hats - I love this song. Some of the remixes that came with it or slightly after mean it doesn't have to be that silly, but the version I (and probably you) heard first was surely the single one and that puts it squarely in the middle as the kind of acme of this silly-but-good-electro-pop genre. I love the line "We can dance, we can dance, Everybody look at your hands" which is somehow funny to me though I can't really explain why - in fact I also dig it when he says "And you can act real rude and totally removed, And I can act like an imbecile"
Dunno much about this next band at all, as far as I can tell they are about as one-hit-wondery as you can get, the comments say that they are English and I have no reason to disagree. Again it's not really electro but it definitely has electro elements to it. I dunno how they swung it but Lemmy is in the video for some reason - and it concludes with one of the greatest lines of all time "My name's Ted, and one day.... I'll be dead".
This last one is a bit different in that it wasn't a one-hit-wonder, but it ticks all the other boxes of being a pop-electro magic moment which is heavy on the humour. Though it is humour about date-rape so it obviously would be a bit more problematic these days. In fact I remember that there was some list of best 80s pop songs as voted by critics or some such in the Guardian a few years back and I was surprised that instead of this tune Tone LOC was represented by the similar but clearly inferior Wild Thang. I queried this with Joe Mugford cos he was one of the critics and, if I remember correctly, he told me that they had been steered away from picking FCM cos of its subject matter.
Great use of a sample too I think. I don't wanna go too far off track into a totally different debate, but I find so much sampling these days involves taking a good tune - often a really obscure one so it's not so obvious quite how much has been stolen - and just editing the worst bits of the song out to make it more streamlined and taut, and then calling it your own song. This by contrast is, to me, more what sampling ought to be, ie taking a few seconds from a rubbish song and using it differently to suddenly make it, and your song too, good.
So, yeah, there is my new genre, I would love to hear some other songs that are in it and I also welcome suggestions for a name better than silly-but-good-electro-pop.
Arguably something similar happened when Lenny Kaye compiled the first Nuggets album. The tracks on it were not particularly rare and tended to be minor hits from all over the country... the songs were all out there but in the main they had not, as a rule, been linked together, so Kaye really did something that would have been posssible for anyone with the brains and initiative do it; he put the records on the same disc and said that this Dylan rip-off and this Stones copy and this bubble-gum thing share a common... something... in that they had usually been done in a very DIY manner and they tended to be one-offs for the bands and, er, something. In fact even now it's not that easy to immediately and briefly say what links all the singles that have been called garage-punk together, but, as is so often the case with great ideas, it made perfect sense on an intuitive level and the idea of garage-punk as a genre caught on for a wider audience. I very much doubt he was first to actually use that name (well he definitely wasn't the first, what I'm saying here is that he was not the first even in that context) but certainly that compilation made the name far more known around the world (and inspired a load of hard core collectors to make a million other compilations of impossibly rare tougher, cruder, purer versions of that sound).
Anyway, that was a long-winded and arguably quite pointless build up. I could have just said "here are three songs that I like, tell me if youi know any other similar ones" but that just seemed like a half-hearted and dispiritingly prosaic way to begin a thread. In fact, if I did it like that it wouldn't really deserve its own thread, it could just be stuck in the "tune of the day redux" thread or probably any one of many others, where it would get no replies and I wouldn't find any new songs. So instead I prefer to say that I am ceatinng a new genre - which has in fact already existed, hiding in plain sight - by pulling together a number (and that number is three) of tunes that to my ears are linked. The common features of these is that they are pop meeting electro. All of these three have moments of humour and could almost be called novelty songs, but I think that they are too good to be dismissed in that manner. And to me each feels as though they really captured a moment of magic that could not easily be repeated, which I'm guessing is part of the reason that they were real one-offs for the artists concerned (er, except for one of them).
Starting off with Men Without Hats - I love this song. Some of the remixes that came with it or slightly after mean it doesn't have to be that silly, but the version I (and probably you) heard first was surely the single one and that puts it squarely in the middle as the kind of acme of this silly-but-good-electro-pop genre. I love the line "We can dance, we can dance, Everybody look at your hands" which is somehow funny to me though I can't really explain why - in fact I also dig it when he says "And you can act real rude and totally removed, And I can act like an imbecile"
Dunno much about this next band at all, as far as I can tell they are about as one-hit-wondery as you can get, the comments say that they are English and I have no reason to disagree. Again it's not really electro but it definitely has electro elements to it. I dunno how they swung it but Lemmy is in the video for some reason - and it concludes with one of the greatest lines of all time "My name's Ted, and one day.... I'll be dead".
This last one is a bit different in that it wasn't a one-hit-wonder, but it ticks all the other boxes of being a pop-electro magic moment which is heavy on the humour. Though it is humour about date-rape so it obviously would be a bit more problematic these days. In fact I remember that there was some list of best 80s pop songs as voted by critics or some such in the Guardian a few years back and I was surprised that instead of this tune Tone LOC was represented by the similar but clearly inferior Wild Thang. I queried this with Joe Mugford cos he was one of the critics and, if I remember correctly, he told me that they had been steered away from picking FCM cos of its subject matter.
Great use of a sample too I think. I don't wanna go too far off track into a totally different debate, but I find so much sampling these days involves taking a good tune - often a really obscure one so it's not so obvious quite how much has been stolen - and just editing the worst bits of the song out to make it more streamlined and taut, and then calling it your own song. This by contrast is, to me, more what sampling ought to be, ie taking a few seconds from a rubbish song and using it differently to suddenly make it, and your song too, good.
So, yeah, there is my new genre, I would love to hear some other songs that are in it and I also welcome suggestions for a name better than silly-but-good-electro-pop.
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