IdleRich
IdleRich
DELETED COS POSTED BY ACCIDENT with most of it missing, what I meant to say in its entirety is... as follows:
The descriptor "shallow" is not intended here as any type of insult cos I love this stuff, I just put it there to explicitly spell out how it is very much a yang to the deep electro yin. How they are connected (or not) but different.
It does seem that in the 2,000s in London they - I mean electro and electroclash - were both (coincidentally) in the ascendancy, at least as regards nightlife; in the other thread I mentioned Wang, Scand and Haywire as three heavyweight and great electro allnighters*, but at the same time you had Trash and also Nag, Nag, Nag as the latest incarnation of glammed up make-up heavy androgyny (I wonder if that will ever come round again), and their chosen soundtrack was a sex-positive sleazy-cheesy electro pop, typically delivered by bored monotone female voices saying something like "I love black leather it's so boring and sexy, wrap me in clingfilm on the motorway, lick my mechanical tits, such my electronic dick... oh yeah and let's take drugs".
For me - and with hindsignt - electroclash was really not from any kind of dance-music tradition, but rather was derived from the sort of electronic pop you could hear (or used to be able to hear) on the radio, only given an extra slice of what very conservative people imagined to be utterly depraved filth and a few tougher beats or whatever to rock the floor. And it was very effective, albeit arguably in limited way.
My feeling was that people into "proper" or "real" electro viewed electroclash with the same affection that they commonly reserved for anal warts. And I can see that there was something about the situation - in which these two types of music, these two scenes that really had very little in common except for their name and (maybe just about) the occasional shared palette of noises, found themselves sort of competing for the same (head)space as, though moving in totally different directions, they passed through it at exactly the same time - that might annoy the rather serious people who felt the scene that they had been into for years was suddenly being invaded by indie kids with pierced dicks telling them that their po-faced way of treating the music seriously and reverentially was all wrong.
So, in short, I'm saying that electroclash was not really a dance-music scene, at least to start with, it was more for people who liked "proper songs" and who wanted some proper songs that they could go out and dance to so that, just maybe, they could finally get rid of that annoying feeling that those idiots who liked stupid music with no words and which was based around repetitive beats were actually partying harder and having more fun than them even though Keith Richards was their hero.
So... electro was a storied and important scene as old as house and hip-hop themselves. which was still producing ice cool bangers and which was played and repped (either as a whole set, or just dipped into at times) by some of the world's greatest and most legendary DJs such as Stingray, Andrew Weatherall, Idle Rich and even Paris Hilton herself, while electroclash was just an anal wart on the genitals of music itself, consisting of tunes which at best were plastic rip-offs of far superior techno or electro tunes and which more normally were simply shit... end of story?
I say no, cos there was a little bit more, like I say, Dave Clarke remixed Emerge and surely there were others like that that were an abortive attempt at some kind of cross-pollination. And I reckon there were some electroclash tunes that were good in their own right... I remember I kinda taught myself to beat-match with Felix da Housecat - Silver Screen cos it had that cymbal (I think) crash on the fourth beat and I remember thinking to myse "If I can just get that noise to line-up then it will work!" for about ten hours a day, day after day after day....
Vitalic - La Rock 01 blew my head off when I started listening to it in a record shop and this massive grin spread across my face. I caned my copy of that so many times it is completely, utterly destroyed... sleeve and record look as though someone has scraped all the information and colour from it and then stamped it a few times for good measure. I mean, pretty much anything I own looks like that after a few days, but my first copy of that Vitalic EP looks as though it was recovered from a cupboard in the Mary Rose (an open one that exposed all the contents to the elements in fact...), truly if a millennial saw it they would probably say something like "I thought that vinyl records were not mass-produced until the 20th century?". And around the same time I bought that I remember seeing Bubble Metropolis on the wall of some record shop and being intrigued by all the quotes from the staff in the shop... a debate about whether it was the greatest electro EP ever, or simply the greatest music ever... or in fact was it just the greatest thing of any type that had or would ever exist. But when I got it home I definitely preferred Vitalic.
Whatever, there were some good tunes, there were some good DJs (Errol Alkan probably needs a thread to himself) and there was a lot of fun to be had I seem to remember. I'd like to hear what others think... any good ones I've missed? Do you agree that it was based more on electronic pop than other dance music, and if so, what was proto-electroclash? What else crossed over? What happened after that to electroclash? Just say some stuff about it guys, please...
*One of the few times where the old saw about waiting ages for one to come along, and then three arrive at once, is actually quite literally true.
The descriptor "shallow" is not intended here as any type of insult cos I love this stuff, I just put it there to explicitly spell out how it is very much a yang to the deep electro yin. How they are connected (or not) but different.
It does seem that in the 2,000s in London they - I mean electro and electroclash - were both (coincidentally) in the ascendancy, at least as regards nightlife; in the other thread I mentioned Wang, Scand and Haywire as three heavyweight and great electro allnighters*, but at the same time you had Trash and also Nag, Nag, Nag as the latest incarnation of glammed up make-up heavy androgyny (I wonder if that will ever come round again), and their chosen soundtrack was a sex-positive sleazy-cheesy electro pop, typically delivered by bored monotone female voices saying something like "I love black leather it's so boring and sexy, wrap me in clingfilm on the motorway, lick my mechanical tits, such my electronic dick... oh yeah and let's take drugs".
For me - and with hindsignt - electroclash was really not from any kind of dance-music tradition, but rather was derived from the sort of electronic pop you could hear (or used to be able to hear) on the radio, only given an extra slice of what very conservative people imagined to be utterly depraved filth and a few tougher beats or whatever to rock the floor. And it was very effective, albeit arguably in limited way.
My feeling was that people into "proper" or "real" electro viewed electroclash with the same affection that they commonly reserved for anal warts. And I can see that there was something about the situation - in which these two types of music, these two scenes that really had very little in common except for their name and (maybe just about) the occasional shared palette of noises, found themselves sort of competing for the same (head)space as, though moving in totally different directions, they passed through it at exactly the same time - that might annoy the rather serious people who felt the scene that they had been into for years was suddenly being invaded by indie kids with pierced dicks telling them that their po-faced way of treating the music seriously and reverentially was all wrong.
So, in short, I'm saying that electroclash was not really a dance-music scene, at least to start with, it was more for people who liked "proper songs" and who wanted some proper songs that they could go out and dance to so that, just maybe, they could finally get rid of that annoying feeling that those idiots who liked stupid music with no words and which was based around repetitive beats were actually partying harder and having more fun than them even though Keith Richards was their hero.
So... electro was a storied and important scene as old as house and hip-hop themselves. which was still producing ice cool bangers and which was played and repped (either as a whole set, or just dipped into at times) by some of the world's greatest and most legendary DJs such as Stingray, Andrew Weatherall, Idle Rich and even Paris Hilton herself, while electroclash was just an anal wart on the genitals of music itself, consisting of tunes which at best were plastic rip-offs of far superior techno or electro tunes and which more normally were simply shit... end of story?
I say no, cos there was a little bit more, like I say, Dave Clarke remixed Emerge and surely there were others like that that were an abortive attempt at some kind of cross-pollination. And I reckon there were some electroclash tunes that were good in their own right... I remember I kinda taught myself to beat-match with Felix da Housecat - Silver Screen cos it had that cymbal (I think) crash on the fourth beat and I remember thinking to myse "If I can just get that noise to line-up then it will work!" for about ten hours a day, day after day after day....
Vitalic - La Rock 01 blew my head off when I started listening to it in a record shop and this massive grin spread across my face. I caned my copy of that so many times it is completely, utterly destroyed... sleeve and record look as though someone has scraped all the information and colour from it and then stamped it a few times for good measure. I mean, pretty much anything I own looks like that after a few days, but my first copy of that Vitalic EP looks as though it was recovered from a cupboard in the Mary Rose (an open one that exposed all the contents to the elements in fact...), truly if a millennial saw it they would probably say something like "I thought that vinyl records were not mass-produced until the 20th century?". And around the same time I bought that I remember seeing Bubble Metropolis on the wall of some record shop and being intrigued by all the quotes from the staff in the shop... a debate about whether it was the greatest electro EP ever, or simply the greatest music ever... or in fact was it just the greatest thing of any type that had or would ever exist. But when I got it home I definitely preferred Vitalic.
Whatever, there were some good tunes, there were some good DJs (Errol Alkan probably needs a thread to himself) and there was a lot of fun to be had I seem to remember. I'd like to hear what others think... any good ones I've missed? Do you agree that it was based more on electronic pop than other dance music, and if so, what was proto-electroclash? What else crossed over? What happened after that to electroclash? Just say some stuff about it guys, please...
*One of the few times where the old saw about waiting ages for one to come along, and then three arrive at once, is actually quite literally true.
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