Dance music well and truly dead?

Buick6

too punk to drunk
NO-one here would admit it. But last night after coming home frim a gig, I was listening in the car to some DJ mixes, and sure there were a little innaresting, but it occurred to me whats the really *COOL* pervasive sound : THE STARS ON 45 !!!

Now I know most of you fellas out there prolly weren't even born when this MASSIVE EURO PHENOMENA was number 1 everywhere, but it was basically the sginifier of the END OF DISCO around late 1980-81. It was basically putting a disco beat to 60s hits like the Beatles, Beach Boys etc... and it was terrible, blech 'orrible'..

SO now the DJ mixes do 'Stars on 45' to tracks by Gwen Stefani, Franz Ferdinand, shiot I even heard a SHOCKING remix of possibly of the the BEST dance trax of the 80s Blancmange's one-off masterstroke 'Living on the Ceiling'!! (yeah those Morrocan/Arabic inflections would be oh-so trendy with the urban-agit-prop set, it amazes no-ones capitalised on it!)

For all the appaerent advances of post-modernism (really has it ever done ANYTHING good since early hiphop, get honest here), it seems where we are now in 2005 the genre, sound whatever it is, is completely redundant.

But I do know there are Dissensus out there that can prove me wrong - I'm all ears - enlighten otherwise! ;)
 

Melchior

Taking History Too Far
Surely this is entirely subjective. Personally I'm finding lots to like in modern dance music and hip hop and "the hardcore continuum" and very little to like in rehashed rock music.

Acxtually, I'm exagerating. But The point is that the "progress" vs "redundancy" basically comes down to "I like this cos it sounds exciting to me" which is a personal reaction.
 

Logan Sama

BestThereIsAtWhatIDo
"*********is dead?" questions are fuelled by the rate at which we can accumulate information and music these days.

Looking back you can always cherry pick favourites and classics over the entireity of the existence of the genre. Now things move so quickly, but for many it still isn't fast enough. Without ever having to part with any money one can collect even the most upfront unreleased material via ripped mp3s online so that hardly anything suprises you.

I really think that the internet is slowly killing off the profitabiliy of art, and therefor stiffling it's ability to experiment.

As sales go down, the number of safe bet acts channeled into the mainstream rises. This even happens on a scene wide scale where the risks of going under as a label are much greater.

Sales are down across the board, but they are MUCH worse for smaller scenes, notably dance music.
 

k-punk

Spectres of Mark
Melchior said:
But The point is that the "progress" vs "redundancy" basically comes down to "I like this cos it sounds exciting to me" which is a personal reaction.

Right, so trad jazz and chamber quartets are equally as vital and urgent cultural scenes as any other musical genre?

Given that this is in no way a serious proposition, it's worth asking what the non-subjective factors that indicate the vitality of particular genres are. Obv popularity alone is not enough, but surely there are issues like degree of innovation in new releases etc etc.
 

Martin Dust

Techno Zen Master
I get the feeling it's slowly turning in on itself and is looking like the long lost son of Northern Soul but then I did get up on the wrong side of the bed today...
 
I liked Stars On 45. Actually, I've got the elpee somewhere.

Anyway, a few dodgy mixes ain't the end of the world. Who remembers that abhorant Jive Bunny thing in the late '80s? Good ol' 50s Rock 'n' Roll megamixes storming the charts during dance music's infancy. So fucking what? I've been as excited about underground dance music this year as I was in '88.
 

mms

sometimes
Buick6 said:
NO-one here would admit it. But last night after coming home frim a gig, I was listening in the car to some DJ mixes, and sure there were a little innaresting, but it occurred to me whats the really *COOL* pervasive sound : THE STARS ON 45 !!!

Now I know most of you fellas out there prolly weren't even born when this MASSIVE EURO PHENOMENA was number 1 everywhere, but it was basically the sginifier of the END OF DISCO around late 1980-81. It was basically putting a disco beat to 60s hits like the Beatles, Beach Boys etc... and it was terrible, blech 'orrible'..

SO now the DJ mixes do 'Stars on 45' to tracks by Gwen Stefani, Franz Ferdinand, shiot I even heard a SHOCKING remix of possibly of the the BEST dance trax of the 80s Blancmange's one-off masterstroke 'Living on the Ceiling'!! (yeah those Morrocan/Arabic inflections would be oh-so trendy with the urban-agit-prop set, it amazes no-ones capitalised on it!)

For all the appaerent advances of post-modernism (really has it ever done ANYTHING good since early hiphop, get honest here), it seems where we are now in 2005 the genre, sound whatever it is, is completely redundant.

But I do know there are Dissensus out there that can prove me wrong - I'm all ears - enlighten otherwise! ;)


yeah well that's what dance music producers do nowdays - covers of pop songs - it's a real shame but there you go.
 

rob_giri

Well-known member
Buick6 said:
For all the appaerent advances of post-modernism


Nick Gutterbreakz said:
I've been as excited about underground dance music this year as I was in '88.


Melchior said:
But The point is that the "progress" vs "redundancy" basically comes down to "I like this cos it sounds exciting to me" which is a personal reaction.


k-punk said:
Given that this is in no way a serious proposition, it's worth asking what the non-subjective factors that indicate the vitality of particular genres are. Obv popularity alone is not enough, but surely there are issues like degree of innovation in new releases etc etc.


the notion of the '***** is dead' can more easily (and less tenuously) be applied to popular culture, a scheme we can more accurately monitor and assess on a mass scale. Your judgement (like any cultural judgement), given its status as fundamentally a generalisation which can be salvaged from invalidity by the trust and acuracy of your intellect, is and can only be assesed on that level.

Underground music scenes are in many places in the world are thriving irrespective of their economic foundations. This of course calls into question the very nature of this 'thriving' - how can it be understood? Is it just how 'interesting' or 'exciting' it sounds to YOU? Is it how fundamentally innovative it is? Or is it just the scenious following of it? And that said, how do you judge that? Is the following based on the number of people at parties - and more importantly the number of people at parties who are interested in THE MUSIC and not THE SCENE? Judging these things leads you into very dangerous cultural studies territory (in this day and age)

The notion of post-modernity in this context, i think, is about how relevant academic evaluation is. In the era we can term high-modernist, if someone like Clement Greenberg told everybody, via his power of influence via his intellectual assessment, that a new 'thing' (ie Abstract Impressionism) was the thing, then it became the thing. Thus was the nature of modernist ideals, a unified culture that could be understood on such a macro scale. Post-modernity is about the breaking down of such illusionary unifications, and it came/comes not as an 'advance' merely a product of this era.

The notion of the 'advances' of post-modernism is actually quite a contradiction, as this 'post-modernity' is merely a way to describe the condition whereby any notions of 'advancing', and thus any notions of heirarchical, intellectual cultural evaluation, becomes redundant. In modernism we idealised advances and acceleration of EVERYTHING, and in post-modernism we accept the fallibility and unsustainability of such ideals, though can still accept genuinely their amazing value and their importance to THAT TIME. Thus, popular culture (and indeed 'music culture') globally has become not a unified diversity that is accelerating, but merely a scattered mass of cultural activity - it is just a bunch of people doing stuff. There is so much great music (in my/our subjective opinion) but it is scattered over genres, geography, language, culture etc. There is no substance in judging relevance, innovation etc in a way, because here we come to accept that with all our knowledge of culture there is no fixed, absolute value in any of it. Notions of genuine variables such as innovation seem to once again be illusionary elements that we can't help but cling on to just because they call attention to the advancement of something that we personally see as important. It appears to be all as relevant as each other.

There is no Greenberg around to show us where to go, it is all a relativity and thus we must learn to treasure those parts that resonate with us personally, accepting the heterogeneity of the entire spectrum of activity. For instance (and obviously the hi-low thing comes in) the avant-garde is not a select international group who are advancing us, they are just a bunch of people doing stuff, just like a bunch of hard-kandy ravers. The fleeting nature of cultural ephemera is hard to accept, but ultimately it must be (in order for us to move forward haha.

Personally this fact has driven me crazy at times, but it is something that in this day and age we must accept. I think a noticable feature of this collective acceptance IMHO will be (and is) the gradual dissaperance of culture that calls direct attention to this postmodernity. It seems to some to mean that we are going round in circles and are back to Romanticism, but i don't think so!! The challenge therefore is to no be such a jaded prick in cultural evaluation, which I have found (and i KNOW most people if not everyone has found) to be a really hard thing to do!


dig? ;)
 

k-punk

Spectres of Mark
childOftheBlogosphere said:
the notion of the '***** is dead' can more easily (and less tenuously) be applied to popular culture, a scheme we can more accurately monitor and assess on a mass scale. Your judgement (like any cultural judgement), given its status as fundamentally a generalisation which can be salvaged from invalidity by the trust and acuracy of your intellect, is and can only be assesed on that level.

Underground music scenes are in many places in the world are thriving irrespective of their economic foundations. This of course calls into question the very nature of this 'thriving' - how can it be understood? Is it just how 'interesting' or 'exciting' it sounds to YOU? Is it how fundamentally innovative it is? Or is it just the scenious following of it? And that said, how do you judge that? Is the following based on the number of people at parties - and more importantly the number of people at parties who are interested in THE MUSIC and not THE SCENE? Judging these things leads you into very dangerous cultural studies territory (in this day and age)

The notion of post-modernity in this context, i think, is about how relevant academic evaluation is. In the era we can term high-modernist, if someone like Clement Greenberg told everybody, via his power of influence via his intellectual assessment, that a new 'thing' (ie Abstract Impressionism) was the thing, then it became the thing. Thus was the nature of modernist ideals, a unified culture that could be understood on such a macro scale. Post-modernity is about the breaking down of such illusionary unifications, and it came/comes not as an 'advance' merely a product of this era.

The notion of the 'advances' of post-modernism is actually quite a contradiction, as this 'post-modernity' is merely a way to describe the condition whereby any notions of 'advancing', and thus any notions of heirarchical, intellectual cultural evaluation, becomes redundant. In modernism we idealised advances and acceleration of EVERYTHING, and in post-modernism we accept the fallibility and unsustainability of such ideals, though can still accept genuinely their amazing value and their importance to THAT TIME. Thus, popular culture (and indeed 'music culture') globally has become not a unified diversity that is accelerating, but merely a scattered mass of cultural activity - it is just a bunch of people doing stuff. There is so much great music (in my/our subjective opinion) but it is scattered over genres, geography, language, culture etc. There is no substance in judging relevance, innovation etc in a way, because here we come to accept that with all our knowledge of culture there is no fixed, absolute value in any of it. Notions of genuine variables such as innovation seem to once again be illusionary elements that we can't help but cling on to just because they call attention to the advancement of something that we personally see as important. It appears to be all as relevant as each other.

There is no Greenberg around to show us where to go, it is all a relativity and thus we must learn to treasure those parts that resonate with us personally, accepting the heterogeneity of the entire spectrum of activity. For instance (and obviously the hi-low thing comes in) the avant-garde is not a select international group who are advancing us, they are just a bunch of people doing stuff, just like a bunch of hard-kandy ravers. The fleeting nature of cultural ephemera is hard to accept, but ultimately it must be (in order for us to move forward haha.

Personally this fact has driven me crazy at times, but it is something that in this day and age we must accept. I think a noticable feature of this collective acceptance IMHO will be (and is) the gradual dissaperance of culture that calls direct attention to this postmodernity. It seems to some to mean that we are going round in circles and are back to Romanticism, but i don't think so!! The challenge therefore is to no be such a jaded prick in cultural evaluation, which I have found (and i KNOW most people if not everyone has found) to be a really hard thing to do!


dig? ;)


So, in a nutshell, it's all just a matter of opinion? :)
 

k-punk

Spectres of Mark
More seriously, though, I'm not sure that the analogy between fine/ high art and Pop really works (it's telling that Greenberg, rather than any Pop critic, had to be appealed to). Critics weren't required to legitimate the status of even such uber-canonic acts as Elvis, The Beatles and The Pistols... particularly in the Pistols' case, they were caught out and had to catch up with what the evaluation made by the populations....

CotB captures very well the flip from modernist to postmodernist time in Pop (also rightly drawing attention to the ironies attendant in such a periodization) but I see little to celebrate in the postmodernist situation. Isn't this just a way of saying that pop IS dead (or, better, undead). And a situation where postmodernist mix and match and lack of forward movement were normalized strikes me as even more deplorable.

Maybe Jameson has a lot to say here... it was he who argued very persuasively that the disappearance of a sense of historical time was a defining characteristic of the postmodern.... and that postmodernism was an expression of 'late capitalism'.... the Poptimist 'there's good music in every year' move seems to me a concession that pop is about consumerism, not populations or scenes....

I also think that part of our current malaise arises from the unwillingness to proclaim something dead... It doesn't really make sense to say that X or Y are dead, because there isn't much 'living' to compare it to...
 

DJ PIMP

Well-known member
Logan Sama said:
As sales go down, the number of safe bet acts channeled into the mainstream rises. This even happens on a scene wide scale where the risks of going under as a label are much greater.

Sales are down across the board, but they are MUCH worse for smaller scenes, notably dance music.
I think/hope this will even out as more and more people start selling/buying music online ala Bleep or the Kompakt shop. Buts theres problems with digital distribution, e.g. the lack of exclusivity. If anyone can download a track it decreases its value as the music is no longer tied to a physical locale (record shop/scene/community) which implies a set of personal relationships/experiences - the record shop staff or local DJs/parties where you heard it... and its infinite unlike a run of vinyl, so its lacks a sense of history or the temporal as well as physicality.

Its like you say re the net: when you can have everything, nothing means anything.

This has been happening for a while tho... like in dnb how its very hard to make a living from producing alone, you really have to be DJing as well. When anyone can download the music, the focus/value shifts back to wherever the novelty lies, e.g. the communal experience.

Its always been a struggle to make a living via art.
 
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Tim F

Well-known member
Dance music has <i>always</i> been about remixes of other stuff as much as it has been about original material. Yes there is a current vogue for sampling 80s pop hits, but this is really just a natural progression from the former vogue for sampling 70s disco hits. Likewise Franz Ferdinand getting the dance remix treatment is not so different from Madonna getting the same, except that rock bands in previous years might not have wanted dance remixes - i.e. the current openness of the dance music scene to rock music is mirrored by the openness of the rock music scene to dance music - the sense of flux and eclecticism is <i>generalised</i> and cannot, I think, be seen as something exclusive to dance music, let alone a sign of its death.

If anything i suspect that dance and rock are really in a strategic alliance to set up dancefloor alternatives to r&b/hip hop/dancehall/reggaeton etc. This is just one reason why the "dance is dead! rock is back!" narrative that the media have been pushing seems flawed.

The interesting 80s equiv. to current remix practice is not so much Stars on 45 but the Extended Mix beloved of 80s artists - I first thought this listening to Ewan Pearson remixes in 2003 and was ridiculously pleased when I then read an interview with him where he made the same connection. See also Tiefschwarz, Trentemoller and of course above all Jacques Lu Cont/Thin White Duke: what characterises many of the most memorable recent dance remixes of non-dance music material is the fact that they're more likely to try to expand upon and develop the original's motifs than to simply fit the songs into terms of genre [x]. This is not so much due to some loss of face on the part of dance music itself, but rather because the scene itself is interested in the relationship between dance production nous and song motifs, and also because the required signifiers of genre [x] (usually electro-house now) are somewhat hazy. Listen to an album's worth of Jacques Lu Cont's recent remixes, and, while all are undeniably dance music, you'd be forgiven for thinking it was just a collection of the best dance recent remixes by <i>anyone</i> rather than the work of one remixer.

"the Poptimist 'there's good music in every year' move seems to me a concession that pop is about consumerism, not populations or scenes.... "

Not sure if this is a clearcut opposition Mark: the "there's good music in every year" argument is as much about the fact that "there's good <i>scenes</i> in every year", against the (perhaps <i>more</i> consumerist) critical focus on whether the year has thrown up any new canonical inductees (e.g. 1991 is not considered a stellar year by critical consensus b/c of rave, but because of <i>Nevermind</i>). It's a simple recognition that any presumed scarcity of good music in a given year is as much a result of the critic's reluctance to acknowledge (to use Simon's formulation) Vibe Migration. In other words, it's precisely because music is organised in terms of scenes and populations that statements like "year [x] was a bad year for music" is difficult to support wholeheartedly.

An example: 2003 was probably a relatively weak year for dance music (and rock of course), but it was an awesome year for dancehall, which for about 24 months (mid-02 to mid-04) seemed absolutely unstoppable. So was it a good year or a bad year? The only way to really make such a judgment in a non-genre-specific way is to abstract away from the specific circumstances and logics of dancehall <i>as a scene</i>, and talk about these different types of music as different commodities whose values rose and fell, lifting the overall market to a higher overall value, or depressing it to a lower one. i.e. it is the language of the stock exchange.

If someone was entirely invested in a scene or a population, they necessarily wouldn't have the perspective to be able to say "[x] was a good year for music generally" - being able to make this statement entails a dilettante-universalist position that is also necessarily consumerist (again I make my provocative claim that even neo-rockists tend to be dilettante-consumerist in practice however purist-activist they may be in theory).

My relationship to dancehall is necessarily consumerist of course, but if yr test for judging the year in music is whether you personally and actively engaged in an exciting scene, then, living in Melbourne, I would have to say that there hasn't been a good year for music in my lifetime. It also simply serves to reinforce the maintenance of the "twas better when I was young" attitude which is already a staple of rock crit.

Indeed, the "there's not good music in every year" argument is less used to celebrate populations and scenes than it is to advertise Bob Dylan reissues and documentaries.
 

joeschmo

Well-known member
The only definition of "dead" that works=nobody is pushing a genre forward formally.

Which leaves room for lots of music, good and otherwise, to continue to be made in genres that are also, technically speaking, dead.

Whether it matters that the genre is dead depends on how much value you place on formal innovation.

And in this respect, yes, dance music is dead and has been for some time.
 

Tim F

Well-known member
How do we define formal innovation here?

I would argue that mainstream clubland is as formally innovative as it has ever been post-rave, and a good deal more so than it was a couple of years ago. I mean, I haven't come across much "formally innovative" music at all this year, but practically all of what i have come across has been dance music! If 2005 is a "weak year for music", dance music has been one of the strongest performers!
 

k-punk

Spectres of Mark
Tim F said:
Indeed, the "there's not good music in every year" argument is less used to celebrate populations and scenes than it is to advertise Bob Dylan reissues and documentaries.

Fair point, but, by the same token, the 'there's good music in every year' line is not usually used in the way that you - brilliantly - deploy it above.

It's the a priori nature of the claim that perplexes me... the idea that there is this kind of natural and constantly maintained level of pop brilliance that never goes below a certain level and which, if it is lacking in one area of pop will miraculously appear, by dint of some cunning of hysteria, in another genre. Can't there be global lulls, and can't specific genres die?

(Occurs to me also that genres aren't ENTIRELY sealed off from one another; except for indie, I suppose --- one of the reasons why it is undead is that it has lopped off most relation to stuff that isn't it)
 

joeschmo

Well-known member
<i>I mean, I haven't come across much "formally innovative" music at all this year, but practically all of what i have come across has been dance music!</i>

I can't be bothered getting into one of those long meta-threads about definitions. So why don't you just tell me what formally innovative dance music you've heard this year. I'd
genuinely like to know. And please don't say Kompakt.
 

Tim F

Well-known member
"Fair point, but, by the same token, the 'there's good music in every year' line is not usually used in the way that you - brilliantly - deploy it above. "

Granted - my point was more that I don't think either position is automatically correct or incorrect, it's more a case of more sophisticated or less sophisticated deployments of each. I should note that, of course, the scenes/populations line is much more interesting to me than "there is nothing interesting post-Dylan" etc!

It <i>is</i> foolish to suggest that there is always some a priori surfeit of pop brilliance - although i think the line "there's always enough good music from any year for any one person's listening lifetime" is probably meant in the spirit of an empirical observation. In the same way that saying "there's always enough food to feed the entire population of the world" doesn't mean that the universe requires this, but rather that historically this has been the case and is likely to continue into the near future.

Simon's line about there now being <i>too much</i> good music is probably the most interesting response to the poptimist position as we've sketched it: a sort of "you're absolutely right, and that's the entire problem!" bait'n'switch.

What interests me is how this response perhaps necessarily oscillates between the contention that scarcity encourages greater value (i.e. our sense of the quality of music is relative to how much we're exposed to and how familiar the music's ideas are) and a more objectivist position that really the music just isn't as exciting anymore, that even if we did have a regime of scarcity today it wouldn't be as good as the sixties/seventies/insert yr golden age here.

Simon is obv. well aware of this oscillation so i'm not implying that I've exposed a chink in his critical armour, but I'd love to see him develop it more fully.

"I can't be bothered getting into one of those long meta-threads about definitions. So why don't you just tell me what formally innovative dance music you've heard this year. I'd
genuinely like to know. And please don't say Kompakt."

Okay joeschmoe, here are some records which I consider to be formally innovative on sonics alone (and remember I'm using mainstream clubland as the yardstick here - I wouldn't claim that the following match, say, yr hypothetical innovative 2-step track):

Hell - Follow You (Dominik Eulberg Mix)
Andre Kraml - Safari (James Holden Mix)
Dub Kult - On & On (Guido Schneider Mix)
Trentemoller - Polar Shift
Recloose - Cardiology (Isolee Mix)
Triola - Leuchtteurn (Wighnomy Bros Mix)
Metope - Libertango
Will Saul - Animal Magic (DJ T Mix)
Booka Shade - Mandarine Girl

If you say "that's not mainstream clubland", then I'll have to ask what is, because these records are all getting played out by Pete Tong, Sasha, Digweed, Slam...

And then of course the above list is only dealing with relatively straightforward sonic innovation. I consider Jacques Lu Cont to be a totally innovative producer, but his brand of innovation is much more subtle, residing in his approach to arrangements, in his attitude to song vs track, emotions vs function, good taste vs bad taste...
 

joeschmo

Well-known member
I haven't heard any of those songs. Well, I've heard Cardiology and I've heard Isolee, but I haven't heard the Isolee remix of Cardiology. I woudn't call either formally innovative :) I probably set the bar on that a bit higher than you tho. Because I have heard Jacques Le Cont, and I thought his thing was doing recreations of 80s electro pop. At least that's what it sounds like to me.

And I should say that, personally, I don't really care that much about formal innovation. I don't think it's the key to 'life' in music. I heard some great rock music this year, you know.
 
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blissblogger

Well-known member
Tim F said:
Simon's line about there now being <i>too much</i> good music is probably the most interesting response to the poptimist position as we've sketched it: a sort of "you're absolutely right, and that's the entire problem!" bait'n'switch.


...

ah well the crucial distinction is that i've never said there's too much great music (that would be nuts), it's always been "too much good music" where good music is understood , i'd hope, as ultimately faint praise -- i.e. more like "pretty good" or at least "falls short of being truly amazing"

i also think a problem is that w/ technology and home studios and all that it's too easy to make quality-sounding stuff... and the sheer amount of past that has accumulated makes it too tempting to mix'n'match retro elements

it's almost like a critical threshold that musics pass (i'd say rock passed it in the early-mid 80s) when it's easier to rework and recombine than it is to keep pushing forward

(same probably with jazz at a certain point)

or perhaps all the push-forward directions left go to far into the unpleasure zone (e.g. metal uses up all the good simple instantly pleasing riffs and is obliged to go into the zone of super-complexification, blast-beats, vomitous vocals, uber-prog changes etc -- not saying the people in that don't derive pleasure from it but it's of necessity a minority form of audio-eroticism, an aquired taste, a bit of a statement)

maybe any given music has a sort of finite area where the innovative/advance type moves overlap with the pleasure/enjoyability/groove zone.... jazz, to keep moving forward, had to leave behind groove/melody/etc etc.... into unstructured abstract harmolodic atonal what have you

after punk, rock's "keep moving forward options" increasingly took into unpopular, uncommercial directions -- industrial/postpunk, and then later post-rock.... and so on

but dance music can only go so far though with moving beyond the pleasure-principle, the groove principle, danceability.... the innovation impulse ultimately leading to the empty dancefloor, the DJ playing to a few other djs, a couple of guys fucked on drugs, and that strange slightly scary guy with a beard
... the arc of innovation/extremity led to gabba and its even more noisenik anti-dance variants, to drill'n'bass, etc...

i do think of the whole micro-haus/German thing as being like sacrificing innovation to save pleasure.... or perhaps scaling back the role of innovation and also the standing of innovation in the scheme of things...
 
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