the decade dance

i've been thinking more about big beat.

i reviewed the debut album, zeppelin 3 (har har) by philly band/dj project pink skull, using an extended comparison to the chemical brothers' dig your own hole as a central throughline - as inspired and informed by [head skull bro] julian s prcss' reference to it in this article. here are some excerpts [yes! self-quotes!]:

"Zeppelin 3 doesn't sound much like the vast majority of electronic music produced this decade, with a rough-edged, acid-washed sensibility that evinces little of electro-house's garish, '80s-refracting gleam or minimal's streamlined polish. . . . most of the album consists of highly abstract, restively mutating groove-based tracks that land somewhere in between breakbeat and acid house, overlaid with squelching psychedelic synths, percussion breakdowns, snatches of saxophone, and tortured, unrecognizable vocal fragments, and embellished with a dizzying array of effects. In other words, it's not far off from the bulk of Dig Your Own Hole..."

the comparison actually took me by surprise - this album definitely sounds more like classic chembros than anything i've heard in ages (even the chems own recent work), but the connection didn't even occur to me at first, even though i've been semi-actively searching for signs of a big beat resurgence. part of that's because i've been struggling somewhat to really enjoy pink skull - i still like them more in theory than in practice, mostly because although they fare pretty well with chemicalesque eclecticism, psychedelicity, bombast (to some extent), weirdness, and general beat science, they never really nail the pop part of the equation. [it helped somewhat when i realized that "gonzo's cointreau," which you can stream or download here, is this album's "block rockin' beats," if it has one. (it doesn't.)]

which means it doesn't particularly sound like big beat more generally - the chemical brothers, and those first two albums specifically, may have set the template for the style, but a lot of their followers (most notably fatboy slim, the genre's most visible practitioner) took things in a somewhat different direction - more overtly poppy, more streamlined, and, inevitably, more predictable (which isn't necessarily a bad thing - just, more formalized, less experimental.)

i realize that i haven't been very precise about what i mean by big beat - what exactly a resurgence would sound like. the wikipedia description is pretty accurate, i think, and i'd argue that justice, simian mobile disco, and others have been utilizing several of the elements mentioned there, though certainly not all.

this also makes me think about how truly different dance/electronica in the 2000s has been from its most prominent strains in the '90s. m. matos pointed out recently [in his review of the effortlessly enjoyable rex the dog album, which is tremendously bombastic in its fashion, which i'll probably write up tomorrow] how relatively static and unchanging things have been lately:

"Four years would seem like a lot longer ago in dance-music terms than it sounds here. It's been that kind of decade: especially compared to the '90s, the best dance records of 2008 don't sound extremely different than those of 2004, or 2000."

this has meant, somewhat strangely, a paucity of distinct subgenres: as big beat, trip-hop, downtempo, drum'n'bass, and the cut'n'paste/sampling/turntablism based style of dj shadow and the ninja tune stable (um, instrumental hip-hop?) effectively ceased to be significant forces in the broader musical discourse (or, as they lost their luster and we stopped paying much attention to them), we've been left with a far-more-thorny-to-disentangle/subcategorize array of styles (tech-house, digital disco, microhouse, electro-house, the omnipresent, near-meaningless "minimal") that share a pronounced and relatively direct connection to house, electronic disco, and synth-pop. these styles, in turn - effectively direct off-shoots of disco - were prominent in the '80s but were relatively out of favor in the '90s, when they informed merely a portion of the varied electronica spectrum, namely the slick, buffed trance and house music which fueled and dominated the rave scene and mainstream club culture (and are still evidently going strong), and the filter-house of the french touch cohort, which effectively formed the bridge to the new millennium, specifically in the form of daft punk (even as the related but more omnivorous sound of artists like basement jaxx fell somewhat by the wayside.)

of course, all of this decade-based generalizing is to some extent simplified and suspect, but it does seem to work surprisingly well. a lot of things do seem to change around the ends and beginnings of decades: like '77-79 before it, the turn of the '90s was a major turning point for music - specifically '88 (in the UK) and '91 (in the US), for different reasons, but also the early-to-mid '90s more generally - and so was '00-'02, as i'll get into in a minute.

i don't mean to suggest that all of these kinds of music haven't had more continuous trajectories: there were certainly '90s-era forebears of contemporary minimal-style techno (basic channel, for one), just as there are still some practitioners of most of the various '90s styles - fatboy slim and the chemicals still soldier on, as do plenty of others. still, at least from my perspective, as somebody who entered the techno-loving picture c. 1997-98, there have been some dramatic shifts in the relatively prominence of these various strains.

to be specific: the forms that i'm positing as prevalent in the '80s and '00s share a relatively straight-up 4-on-the-floor house/disco rhythm and a sound palette that draws heavily or exclusively on synthesizers. neither of these things is true of the styles i listed as big in the '90s, all of which have much more pronounced influences (something that barely even seemed noteworthy at the time) from hip-hop and/or rock, especially classic and psychedelic rock - in its rhythms (breakbeats, heavy funk, accented backbeats), its sounds (guitars, big boomy drums, eclectic sound effects, and vocals by rappers and rock-styled singers as opposed to soul/disco divas), and also in its song structures and overall presentation.

indeed, the rockiness of '90s electronica (and big beat specifically) seems to have had a lot to do with its success - it's no coincidence that it was the prodigy, a _band_, were the first techno act to really break in the states, and broke bigger than pretty much anyone else to date (oh right, moby.) big beat probably had more bands than any electronic style before or since except for trip-hop - lo fi allstars, lionrock, apollo 440 [and now pink skull] - though the majority of its acts were unquestionably duos (why was that?), most of them pairs of producers who enlisted MCs and vocalists on a per-track basis. (sort of like hip-hop in reverse.) as the decade went on, the lines between rock and electronica (and rap) increasingly blurred, what with high-profile fusionists like nine inch nails and garbage, mainstream (rock) artists like U2, blur, and other assorted britpoppers dabbling in (generally rather big-beaty) electronica, and armies of dabbling experimenters spanning the art-pop spectrum - beck, björk, beastie boys, cornershop, soul coughing, etc. (a sector i've discussed plenty) - all getting their remix on. one could think of all this as electronica bending itself in various ways so as to conform to rockist prerequisites and become thereby more broadly palatable. which is hardly a problem: the results were definitely kaleidascopic and fascinating - like most fusions, it was fertile territory.

perhaps it's a coincidence, but right around or slightly after the turn of the millennium, when big beat was imploding, or seemed to be, due to overexposure (shades of disco '79), staleness, and apparent stagnation, and unadultered, non-electronicafied rock was attempting to reassert itself (mostly unsuccessfully), a rising tide of anti-rockist sentiment was beginning to make the world (or at least the musosphere) safe for the re-emergence of disco, synth-pop, and the like - "pure" (or at least more roots-informed) forms of electronic dance (which, to be sure, also carried their own sort of rockist, unintentionally elitist appeal) - as galvanized by daft punk's widely lauded discovery [2001], which ended up having an unforeseeably wide-ranging influence on the decade. [ironically or not, the chemical brothers had staked out a similar direction on surrender ('99), to middling success, but they were already starting to be seen as has-beens by '02, despite the impressively fresh-sounding come with us.] all of which had the (arguably reactionary) effect of segregating mainstream rock from mainstream dance - reversing the trend of integration that had characterized the late '90s - and killing (at least for the time being, and still) the prospects of electronic music truly gaining mainstream popularity in the states.

now, as i have discussed at length in the process of attempting to genrefy it, there certainly has been plenty of rock/dance fusion this decade, but, as i've argued, it's fundamentally from the way that fusion worked in the '90s. compared to the somewhat overdetermined cut-and-paste genre-blending of the last decade (the "collage" aesthetic central to big beat among various other styles), this stuff feels like a more cohesive and organic combination, which makes sense since it's rooted in the way the genres developed together, "naturally," in the post-disco fallout of the early '80s, often obscured from mainstream scrutiny - some strains of synthpop and new wave became commercially successful, but the original dance-punk, electro-disco, and other sorts of post-disco experimentation were relatively underground until recent years.

meanwhile, arguably, jungle/d'n'b didn't so much fade from favor as segue into ukg, grime, and dubstep, effectively strengthening its connection to hip-hop and distancing itself from electronic dance music proper. as for trip-hop and instro-hop, well the avalanches were certainly fresh in '01, but shadow's sophomore alb and rjd2's debut were a good ways from the zeitgest in '02, while diplo's florida ['04] seemed like a total throwback, and this year's return of portishead felt like a completely alien occurence.

so it goes. now another decade is coming to an end, and it's hard to say what might be in store. we may see a continuation of cyclical pattern - it seems likely, though hard to exactly envision right now; things have felt relatively static of late. the only substantial new trend of the last few years that comes to mind, at least in terms of things that have potential widespread impact, is the smallish but still-burbling-along '60s soul revival [which, it just occurred to me, as it's specifically british, perhaps a decades-late upshot of the northern soul phenomenon that kickstarted dj and dance culture as we now know it [q.v. the excellent last night a dj saved my life, which i have just finished reading, and about which i'll have more to say com'n up], could be taken as yet another example, like rock'n'roll and house/techno themselves, of the brits appropriating a black american genre and selling it back to us as white, though the turnaround took especially long this time.]

anyway. the midfield general album drops here in the states next week. i certainly don't expect it to make any major waves.... but you never know. the pink skull album, which doesn't sound all that much like the general's (it's better, i suppose, from an artistic standpoint, but who cares, it's just not as fun) hasn't garnered all that much attention, but some have been hailing it as innovative and forward-looking, and i could certainly envision a similar aesthetic gaining traction in the future. i closed my review by calling it "a worthwhile and promising step in the ongoing exploration and integration of dance music's interconnected past and future." which sounds a bit clunky and vaguely meaningless, even to me, but actually sums it up fairly well, i think. maybe we'll end up looking back on 2008 as the start of another something else. nu rave, indeed. bring on the next, big, thing.

i don't even know who liz phair is

a/k/a mincetapes likes/loves/hates the ninetees edition

first, i didn't see radiohead. they played in camden two weeks ago - i think it was the pablo honey 15th anniversary tour. i've been trying but i can't quite manage to regret it nearly as much as i regret not seeing them two years ago, when it was because i couldn't, rather than because i didn't quite feel up to it at the time (and didn't have anybody to go with.) sort of a shame about that (the not regretting), but i guess i'm just not quite as hyped about live concerts (and/or rock music) as i used to be...

[come to think of it, much as i certainly enjoyed in rainbows and will happily welcome further developments from the band in the future, there would have been something rather nice about them calling it quits after hail to the thief; a perfect ten-year run, an impeccable career-summarizing album to cap things off, possibly the tipping point starting from which the hype and hoopla generated by their past triumphs as the quintessential millenial exponents of rock>otherthanrock will inevitably overwhelm and overshadow their future musical endeavors]

then, i went on a 1.5 week road trip through new england, which some dude told us should be a movie soundtracked by vampire weekend. it was a couple times, that being nava's go-to pick, often, but also maybe my favorite "normal" album of the year yet - it's pretty normal, isn't it?, in a um 90s indie rock /popsense - i haven't managed to get sick of it, except for the yelps in "a-punk" which i never liked to begin with. we also scanned recent transmissions from some old '90s crustys: beck, spiritualized, portishead, all albums which i bought new-ish (but cheap-ish) out of some vague sense of obligation, and all perfectly pleasant. the pleasure receptors in question may lean a little backfacing on the nostalgia-to-newness scale, but ain't nothing wrong (or new) with that. (third, to be precise, successfully manages to not quite qualify as pleasant, but i have gotten to the point where i enjoy it despite the still-uncomfortable resonance of s/t.)

we also listened a couple times to that "certifiable indie roadtrip classic" [not really sure where the "roadtrip" part comes in though...], exile in guyville. it does sound pretty good in the car, and it gets the gang good and riled up in that golden midsection ("fuck and run" > "divorce song") though a bunch of it sort of fades into the background, too textural and wispy to carry well over the road hum. though, the point presumably, it is an impressively solid eighteen tracks - which is pretty much what it takes to be a road-trip-worthy contender against hand-picked mixtapes: no obvious skippables.

anyway, guyville is fifteen years old this year, in recognition of which fact liz phair and her fanbase have decided to overlook the fact that they've more or less been ignoring each other for the last decade, and have a couple of tentative trial get-togethers to reminisce about the good ol' days (and laugh awkwardly about that whole 'selling out' business.) philly was one of five cities that liz graced with live performances of her debut, in its entirety, this summer, and i dutifully and enthusiastically bought my tickets as soon as i found out.

the show was a lot of fun. not surprisingly, and there aren't really many surprises to report. i'd been curious of how some of the more "experimental" stuff would come off live - it is, in general, an album whose recording and production (viz, ramshackle and lo-fi) are fairly central to its character - but it all came across pretty faithfully in a standard four-piece rock set-up, with some pedals and a decent array of guitars to provide the requisite timbral variety, piano where necessary. she did the album, with a bit of banter along the way (mostly, unnecessarily, apologetic - her noted stage nervousness was in evidence but thankfully not dominant), invited a guy up to sing the high bit on "flower" (he did a good job too), asked us how many had bought the album back in '93-'94. i couldn't raise my hand (i mean, i was only 11!), but i did get it probably around '97, so i felt pretty down with the nostalgia vibes. then she did an encore with an ok new song ("ding dong the witch is dead..."), and "chopsticks" and "polyester bride" (!), both of which i first heard on mixtapes made by my first girlfriend.

so yeah. good stuff. it will be very interesting to see how she navigates the apparent attempt to regain indie favor of which this (reissue+concert series) seems to be the opening gambit. she's got a new album in the works, back on an indie (dave matthews' ato, also the current home of radiohead, and fellow '90s refugee mike doughty), and i imagine there will be some amount of crit-scene fanfare when that comes out. so, when she tours it, will she play stuff from s/t and somebody's miracle? (aka the sellout albums, though truth be told liz phair is really not that far a cry from her 'classic' stuff - it's really just the production sheen - plus it totally rocks.) or will she stick to her '90s canon and try to pass off the intervening years as a shameful misstep?

somebody shouted out "rock me all night!" at the tla show and she just chuckled, nervously, probably unsure whether to take it as a request, an ironic jeer, or a cheeky come-on.

will be interesting to see. and if this falls flat, we can always look forward to the whitechocolatespaceegg anniversary tour in 2013. right liz? (er, pretty please??)

hot like neon fucking neon

there is a certain kind of music - one of the most definitive and popular kinds of the 2000s, and arguably one of the few truly new ones - which does not have a name. (not unlike the decade itself, come to think of it.) i know, it seems veritably impossible for this to be true, but it is.

sure, people have had to try to come up with things to call it, inevitably sweeping trans-genre portmanteaus like "electro house", "dance rock", "disco-punk," "indie/electronic", "electro-pop" and perhaps most promisingly, but ill-fatedly (too belittled, too late), "new rave." but none of these really come that close to hitting the mark. in each case these terms most properly designate something too specific for them to stand in comfortably for what must by now be accepted as a full-fledged, albeit hybrid and certainly multivalent, genre of its own.

the making time folks - who are the kings of this thing here in small-town philadelphia, end up making up their own endless, goofy, hyper-hyphenated (orjustshovedtogether) descriptors for every new party flyer.

when i've had to call this genre anything i've usually resorted to "hipster dance," which at least seems vague enough not to alienate large swaths of what i mean to talk about - and then there's the recently vogueish "blog house," which is somewhat more imprecise than it maybe suggests (is it actually supposed to refer to house music? not as far as i can tell - it seems to be used in pretty wide-ranging and indiscriminate ways.) but there are some serious problems with defining music in terms of its primary/perceived/intended audience - hipsters; bloggers (each of them more or less a stand-in for "music fans," anyway) - notably that they don't tell you much about the music, and they almost inevitably take on a derogatory tone. see: "teen-pop," "mallpunk," "yacht rock," "handbag house," "bubblegum," and "anorak pop" (if that's a term), (possibly: "backpacker hip-hop," "stoner rock" and "beardo disco." "college rock" on the other hand isn't derogatory, just meaningless.)

"blog house" has the additional problem of being sort of self-defeatingly oxymoronic, um, by which i mean that dance music (which, above all, is what this is) is by definition social music, not intended for sitting around the house (yeah, i know) and listening to on the internet. that sucks!! besides, "blog house" doesn't even have a wikipedia entry (shocka!) so it must not really exist. (i've certainly never heard it!)

anyway, it's pretty clear what the genre is: roughly, the point of intersection between pop, rock, dance, and electronic music. those are all nice broad umbrella terms, perfectly useful for what they are. (though "dance" is often vague nearly to the point of uselessness; it being basically, as i've argued before, a doublespeak substitute for "disco") and it's okay to use three or four of them in combination to describe an artist, as i've found myself doing on numerous occasions recently. but given the large and growing set of artists who are setting up shop in the considerable, roomy overlap between these four ultra-expansive genuses, owing allegiance to no one of them in particular, it would really be handy to have shorthand for the region of that intersection, which could at least serve as a starting point for further hyphenated neologisms.

for starters, you could try to identify which are the artists who trend more to one side or the other: the rapture, phoenix, mgmt and !!! on the rock side; junior senior, the go! team, the tough alliance, and maybe datarock slanting pop; simian mobile disco, mylo, justice and soulwax holding it down for electronic dance, while junior boys, royksöpp, goldfrapp, and the knife kick it electronic pop. whew, that was hard to do, and definitely imprecise, even as an example, and some of these are just the fringe cases; artists towards the outer edges of this territory i'm staking out, though definitely significant contributors to its development. you could also throw in folks with more overt hip-hop elements (m.i.a., spank rock, diplo - certainly very much a part of the same cultural milieu) and go further in the dance-pop vein (annie, robyn, erlend øye, lykke li) or the indie-pop vein (architecture in helsinki, of montreal, los campesinos!), and not forget the scene's immediate electro-clash forebears (felix da housecat, tiga, fischerspooner, adult.) there are the djs (optimo, a-trak, girl talk, dave p), producers (playgroup, maurice fulton, calvin harris, joakim), labels (modular, kitsuné, vice) bands (bonde do role, ladytron, scissor sisters, css, out hud), visionary/iconoclast solo acts (peaches, jamie lidell, muscles.)

and, of course, there's the james murphy, aka lcd soundsystem, aka 1/2 of DFA (plus tim goldsworthy) - both the remix/production team and the would-be genre-defining record label - pretty much the godfather/figurehead of all of this activity, who fits into every one of the above categories. and just might be the most important/pivotal/whatever, awesome, musical person of the decade.

and those or just the people i know and like. i haven't listened very actively to chromeo, new young pony club, klaxons, ghostland observatory, or the presets. and i'm just starting to digest the most recent crop: teenagers, crystal castles, does it offend you yeah?, hercules and love affair, neon neon.

blah blag blog. okay, so why am i bringing this up? (well, it is pretty interesting isn't it? i mean, i'm sure that this has been discussed before, given the prevalence of these artists in - it cannot be denied - the blogosphere. but i haven't really read an attempt to taxonomize or analyze in an overarching, big-picture way, what's going on here.)

for a couple years now, i've had this section of my cd shelves (er, back when i had cd shelves), which started as a small hodge-podge (le tigre, dopo yume, some dfa stuff, couple of electroclash things, whatever) wedged in somewhere abutting and imprecisely connecting the sections of mainstream dance-pop and dance-oriented electronica of yesteryear and today. as i found myself repeatedly forced to stick things in there that didn't fit anywhere else, it gradually grew into an extremely colorful (lots of pink spines!) and unruly shelf or two which was nevertheless impossible to deny a certain sense of cohesion. at this point i'm experimenting with 'alternative' methods of music storage, and have accepted a stalemate in the ongoing game of arraying my music collection as a visual/physical representation of my mental musicographical organization scheme. but it's still fun to talk about genre.

without feeling any compulsion to make explicit definitions or draw strict boundaries (you can put them wherever you like, but as usual they won't help too much), i'd reflect for a minute on what the specific qualities this music are, apart from the broad strokes of its adjacent mega-genres. certainly pastiche - an accumulation of multiple and various distinct stylistic sources - in a sense, a specific aesthetic of derivativeness - is a central (not quite defining) feature of many of these artists. yknow, yr basic postmodern schtick.

but there was pastiche-pop in the '90s too, if not, maybe, in quite the same way, too too much before that. cornershop, the beastie boys, st. etienne, pizzicato 5, cibo matto, and maybe most especially beck, among others have plenty in common with all of this stuff - dance-focused (or at least beat-based) artists who incorporated pop, rock, hip-hop, electronica and r&b, generally in a sunny, fun-loving vein. i've talked about this milieu before; no need to rehash much here.

in contrast to more recent stuff though: those '90s artists are more cutesy, even "jokey" in a fairly self-aware way. even the campiness of junior senior or the go! team feels unabashed in a way that can't be said for the arty stereolab or dimitri from paris or even shibuya kei (deee-lite is another matter, but they're of a slightly earlier epoch.) which doesn't necessarily mean that one era's music is more authentically fun than another, but there is a straightforwardness to the current stuff, especially in terms of its relationship to danceability (significantly, the culture surrounding this stuff in '90s was not really dance culture - which was more focused instead on somewhat segregated strains of electronica; raves, etc. - but rather alt/rock culture - britpop; the college rock c. the indie revolution; new york "downtown" art music scenes, among other things.)

another distinction of the '00s corpus i'm discussing is that a lot of it rocks, hard, with big stupid guitars. with the exception of garbage (pioneers, as i always maintain), it's hard to think of any '90s groups that fused pop and dance music with real rawk guitars, despite their popularity as sample fodder for big beat artists like fatboy slim and apollo 440. this could certainly be related to my point about straightforwardness, as rock often entails an earnestness and assuredness that doesn't really work aside winking cuteness. (unless it's a wink that specifically references rock, a la electric six or the darkness, who may or may not be that winky anyway.) (something could also be said about 90s and 00s eclecticist dance music in relation to the electronica of its era - trip-hop, IDM and big beat vs. the more unilaterally house-inspired 'minimal,' micro-house, techpop, neodisco and what have you.)

also, the reference points for '90s artists tended to be the 1960s, and especially what i like to talk about as an 'internationalist lounge aesthetic,' if you glean my meaning. (though straight-up '60s pop/rock too, though girl-group and motown would have to wait a bit longer for true resuscitation.) these days, on the other hand, it's all about the '80s - mostly, as mr. murphy said and i love to quote, "borrowed nostalgia for [an] unremembered" probably reductionist version of that decade - post-punk, new wave, synthpop, fringy/mannerist disco excess, etc. in the '90s, apart from obviously being too recenet to revive, one might argue that some of it was still feeling the brunt of disco backlash, a couple decades on. the 60s>90s/80s>00s dichotomy is evident all over the place, in pop culture, politics, american society in general, and this isn't the place to get into that (it's been discussed before too, for sure.) (what happened to the '70s? well, lots of things. mostly that people get that confused with the '60s a lot. also punk.)

to be honest, "pastiche" isn't all that good a word for talking about '00s hipster dance music and culture. it skews appropriationist, to be sure, but the synthesis is smoother than that (the collage aesthetic of mashups and quick cuts and endless remixes notwithstanding), and plenty of groups stick within one relatively defined style or sound (even if its a hybrid one), rather than flaunting their eclecticism. in fact, the primacy of sound and style, over compositional/lyrical content - beats, grooves, riffs, and hooks (easily snatched and recontextualized for a bit o' the ol' thrill of recognition) over memorable songs or even melody per se - is a rather curiously defining feature of 00s dance music. consider the canon: "house of jealous lovers," "losing my edge," "galang," "let's make love..." "d.a.n.c.e," "hustler," even "move your feet" and "over and over." who are the songwriters in this scene? you might point to james murphy, again, but we can't really expect the man to do everything for us, now can we?)

finally, there is truly a recognizable "scene" surrounding all of this, which i'm not sure (i guess i wouldn't know?) can really be said about that '90s stuff. there was a lot of bellyaching in the late 90s and early 00s about kids not dancing - something that has surely changed (tho, i dunno, the rapture were still whining about it two years ago in "wayuh," but who cares about the rapture anyway.) there's just critical mass. these artists are constantly remixing one another, touring together, putting each other on their curated mix compilations, etc. etc. in philly, anyway, most of them play dance parties rather than proper concerts - new rave, indeed! and sure, there's plenty to dismiss and dislike about the spazzy/dayglo myspace aesthetic, the rampant disposability of plenty of this output (many of those aforementioned remixes, to be sure), the hyperactive, compulsive download/messageboard culture, and the weirdly unconvincing brand of hedonism that accompanies a lot of it. also, who asked for an '80s revival in the first place?

thing is, stuff gets tagged eighties-throwback so often these days that it's become all-but-meaningless, if not inaccurate. i don't pretend to really remember the eighties very well (much less do i feign nostalgia), or even the earliest nineties (though i probably should.) but if it sounds like it's from the eighties, it's probably going to sound like the 2000s. and, somehow or other, that's still managing to sound pretty good. more on this to come...

the chimerical brothers

chimerical -
1. Merely imaginary; produced by or as if by a wildly fanciful imagination; fantastic; improbable or unrealistic.
2. Given to or indulging in unrealistic fantasies or fantastic schemes.

Title: SupaSt*rDeeJayz
Format: continuous DJ mix [79:50!], currently available on CD-R (18 tracks) or mp3 (2 or 18)
Date: 28 June 2007

Contents:
0. don byron introducing biz markie (from "schizo jam") (1999)
1. the magnetic fields "let's pretend we're bunnyrabbits" (1999)
2. rinôçérôse "la guitaristic house organisation" (1999)

3. stereolab "cybele's reverie" (1997)
4. björk "alarm call (alan braxe and fred falke mix) (1999)
5. mj cole "slum king"(2000)

6. basement jaxx "red alert" (1999)
7. daft punk "aerodynamic" (2001)
8. the chemical brothers "hey girl hey boy" (1999)
9. timo maas "ubik (the dance)" [from deep dish's renaissance:ibiza] (2000)
10. cajmere/green velvet "percolator 2000" (2000)

11. blur "song 2" [white label remix] (1997?)
12. bis "action and drama" (1999)

13. beck "mixed bizness" (1999)
14. beck "mixed bizness (nuwave dreamix by les rhythmes digitales)" (2000)
15. beck "mixed bizness (cornelius remix)" (2000)
16. beck vs. ac/dc "mixed bizness" ("highway to hell" mashup) (2000)

17. jay-z "nigga what nigga who (originator 99)" (1998)
18. alice deejay "better off alone" (1999)
19. the chemical brothers "elektrobank (dust brothers remix)" (1997)
20. garbage "when i grow up" (1998)

21. outkast "B.O.B." (2000)
22. the faint "worked up so sexual" (1999)

23. keoki "jealousy (dj dara remix)" (2001)
24. everything but the girl "compression" (1999)
25. roni size/reprazent "railing" (1997)

26. *nsync "digital get down" (2000)
27. beck "where it's at" (1996)

28. cornershop "butter the soul" (1997)
29. blackstreet ft. dr. dre "no diggity" (1996)
30. biz markie "just a friend" (1989)
31. missy elliott "funky fresh dressed" (2002)
32. yo la tengo "you can have it all (2000)

33. lauryn hill "every ghetto, every city" (1998)
34. the supremes "my world is empty without you" (1966)
35. al green "here i am (come take me)" (1973)
36. moby "run on" (1999)

37. wyclef jean ft. r. kelly & canibus "gone til november (the makin' runs remix)" (1997)
38. the high and mighty ft. mos def & mad skillz "b-boy document '99" (1999)
39. outkast "ms. jackson (mr. drunk remix)" (2000)
40. cibo matto "sci-fi wasabi " (1999)

41. beastie boys "intergalactic"/"super disco breakin'"/"body moving (fatboy slim remix)" (1998/1998/1998)
42. madonna "don't tell me" (2000)

43. pharcyde "officer" (1994)
44. don byron "the penguin" (1996)
45. pizzicato five "baby love child" (1994)
46. the roots "adrenaline! " (1999)
47. ol' dirty bastard ft. kelis "got your money" (1999)

48. notorious b.i.g. ft. puff daddy & ma$e "mo money mo problems" (1997)
49. marc ribot y los cubanos postizos "postizo" (1998)
50. cornershop "funky days are back again" (1997)
51. david byrne "like humans do" (2001)

52. jane's addiction "been caught stealing (12" remix version)" (1990)
53. <+}0 "pussy control" (1995)
54. the strokes "someday" (2001)
55. don byron and existential dred "mango meat" (1998)
56. they might be giants "no one knows my plan" (1994)

57. soul coughing "circles (ashley beedle [?] remix)" (1998)
58. afrika bambaata and the soul sonic force "looking for the perfect beat (instrumental)" (1983) 59. fatboy slim "praise you" (1998)
60. madonna "like a prayer (12" dance mix)" (1989)

as is typical, this dj-mix is doing double duty (at least): 1st and foremost, i created it specifically for ben galynker's bachelor party/weekend this past june. it was first heard that weekend (albeit in incomplete form - i'd only gotten as far as track 46 or so, and i later went back and made some substantial edits and additions) and we gave it an epically intense and exhausting seven-person carpeted-apartment dancefloor workout. aka the old college try.

the mix is an homage to and a celebration/recreation of ben's and my days of djing together as crunkadelia productions (2000-2003.) note, for instance, the plentiful presence of our holy dance music pantheon: beck, björk, beasties, the chemical brothers (ben's faves - i came in as more of a fatboy booster but he converted me to their chemical preeminence), madonna, moby (since discredited) and outkast. (it took us a little longer to get into prince.) i'm quite sure that every track on here got played at our parties at least once; most of them numerous times; and many of them carry some especial significance or memory or other, which are definitely not worth enumerating here...

[okay, well, just a couple: we sang "let's pretend we're bunny rabbits" together at merge records karaoke in chapel hill NC in 2004. "la guitaristic house organisation" was sort of our deejaying themesong; we had a special synchronized "posing" dance that we would do to it. ben used to make fun of me for playing "here i am (come and take me)" all the time, so it merited inclusion as the only pre-modern selection (i.e. pre-living memory, i guess, which in this case means pre-1989, except for the bambaata) - sly stone's "thank you" would also have been fitting. lastly, we memorably first heard "pussy control" at the after-party for one of the first-ever pig iron benefit events.]

2ndly, and correspondingly, the mix serves to celebrate and encapsulate a particular era in music history, at least as i experienced it. it marks the ten-year anniversary of the late nineties; the midpoint of 2007 being exactly, roughly, a decade after the beginning of that era. accordingly, the tracks date, almost exclusively, from 1997-2001, with the early-'00s entrants feeling more like an extension of the general late-'90s vibe than the beginning of something that would flourish into the new decade. many of the earlier tracks were things i hadn't heard until the era in question, and they're certainly things i was listening to/spinning out at the time.

the crucial rule for this compilation, more than actual release dates, was whether i was actually aware of (and into) the songs at the time; hence, there's no retroactive inclusions of tracks from these years that i only discovered after the fact. (most of them came out when i was in high school, but i didn't hear a lot of them until college.) obviously the multiple songs by one artist rule is out the window.

dance music in the late nineties and early two-thousands, as i remember it and as represented here, felt vastly different than it does now - it had a populist, boundary-defying, free-wheeling and fun-loving sensibility that's pretty hard to detect in the subgenre-dense, blog-dominated, post-post-ironic electro/dance/hipster-pop scene these days. it's definitely starting to make a comeback - i hear it in the party-hearty enthusiasm of bonde do role, justice, the go! team, and (especially) australia's muscles; the infectious disposability and youthful vibrance of pop-rap's recent regional micro-crazes; the gleefully omnivorous abandon of girl talk and a-trak's dirty south dance, and even some of m.i.a. and lcd soundsystem's looser, less pensive moments. but it's been missing in action for quite some time - electro-clash, dance-punk, microhouse, minimal techno, neo-disco, retro-italo, and the like all took themselves distressingly seriously, with a stake in their own coolness and muso-cred that is pretty much wholly absent in the bulk of the music included on this mix.

another striking difference is how blurred the lines could get between alternative/underground and "legitimately popular" (before both the dominance of "indie" and its recent, gradual emergence into mainstream acceptance/cognizance.) somebody like stereolab or cibo matto or roni size might have seemed like the province of the artiest, clued-in few; the cutting edge of hip - but they were all on major labels (as were almost all of the artists on this mix.) in the wake of prodigy and daft punk's breakthroughs, with the ascendance of u.s. rave culture, and, especially, the dominance of moby's play, big beat techno still felt like a viable commercial possibility. and i've written before about the "great failed hope" of the eclecticist pastiche party-music vanguard, which is repped all over this thing. moby and wyclef seemed like visionaries. and i was even excited about jazz!

and, of course, some of it is undeniable capital-p Popular, including the kind of rapturous, all-conquering hip-hop party jams that they just don't seem to make anymore, now that outkast and missy have all but fallen off. of course there have been plenty moments of ubiquitous pop magnificance throughout the '00s ("crazy in love" "ignition" "since u been gone" "toxic" "hollaback girl" "umbrella" et al.)... i don't want to feel like a curmudgeonly, past-worshiping naysayer here...but when's the last time commercial thug rap came up with something as glorious and gleeful and inescapable as "mo money mo problems"? and don't you dare say "gold digger." (or "crazy.")

by the way, for all its specificity of purpose and concision of scope, this is a strong contender for the craziest mix i've ever made. i think that, in keeping with the general attitude at play with much of this music, i was pretty much trying to see how ridiculous i could get and still get away with it. for instance, mashing up four different remixes of the same song. or an extended juxtaposition (well over three minutes all told) of probably the three premier dance-based electronica auteurs of the era (b-jaxx, d-punk, chembros.) or the preposterous cornershop/blackstreet/biz moment, which used to be much more rhythmically freeform before i bowed to peer pressure and shoehorned it into a nice dependable 5/4. or the beastie boys double-fake-out. or the back-to-back sequencing (unfortunately much more potent in theory than in practice) of roni size apocalyptic, best-album-intro-ever "railing" and *nsync's unjustly overlooked (particular vis-á-vis j-tim's wholesale critical re-appraisal) po-mo-pop pièce de résistance "digital get down" (very possibly the first teen-pop song i ever loved, way back when i heard my sister's copy of no strings attached.)

[and incidentally, layering "where it's at" over the double-time of "digital get down" as the transitional moment from lo-to-hi bpm is in honor of ben's doing the same thing with moby's "feeling so real" at our "hello and okay" party.]

it definitely gets a little overboard (a little?) at the very end bit, which came in a flurry of inspiration as i also realized i was running out of time to fit it all onto a single cd-r (an obvious necessity) - which required all the tracks to be layered on top of each other a little more than i'd have liked, and also necessitated a rather abrupt ending instead of letting the "like a prayer" remix play out longer like the inevitable anthem it is. (i never owned this and still don't, my pre-music madonna knowledge still being shamefully limited, but as every swattie knows it is the proper and necessary way to end this mix - albeit of course, this being crunkadelia, in remixed form.) the "praise you like a prayer" mash actually works surprisingly perfectly, except for the small (and damning) fact that they're in completely incompatible keys. which i could have fixed if i was making it on the computer instead of recording live from decks. oh well. next time.

apart from the many things ben introduced me to, or we discovered together, shout-outs are definitely in order for: listening to WBER "rochester's modern rock alternative" (in the car with my dad); working my way through Spin's top 90 of the 90s list, amazon.com's best-ofs from 1999 and 2000, and the end-of-decade lists from the british magazines i browsed while in london over new years; being turned on to all kinds of things via the Elvis Costello listserv e-mails; downloading from Napster via dial-up; obsessively looking for every remix by and of my bunch of electronica faves (fatboy, lrd, massive, air) - why were remixes so much better in those days?; repeatedly quitting and re-joining BMG music club; hearing music for the first time in my friends' cars (this never happens anymore) or even on the bus to school/track meets; attempting to DJ parties in my living room using a little four track mixer; making cassette mixes back when i wasn't such a stickler about not reusing the same tracks; hearing some incredible song i'll never be able to identify in a french clothing shop, and then being erroneously directed to the deep dish trance mix that i dutifully purchased, which had some good tunes at least.

and, of course, the almighty CYCLOTRON 3000: Disco Light for the Third Millenia. bought from eBay for $15 incl. shipping.

and one more time: "...let's play that house shit"...."what house shit?"...."you know..."the stupid house shit!"

download part one here.
download part two here.
zip files of the mix in the form of eighteen cd-burnable tracks, is here. (only 128 kpbs - sorry, only way it'd fit.)

real is the old fake

this just in:

full speed ahead
rock and roll is dead
the girls and boys from the mickey mouse club
clocked it in the head

those are the opening lines of "fake is the new real," one of the more immediately arresting songs on the recent debut release by soul/r&b/pop songstress alice smith. the album, for lovers, dreamers & me, is pretty good - it might be great after a few more spins. it might be offering a genuinely new perspective (and perhaps one way forward?) for the whole soggy morass of neo-soul/adult-contempo-r&b/singer-songwriter pop, though it might also just be those same things again, particularly well-executed.

but i mostly bring it up to tussle with those lyrics for a minute. in case you didn't guess, the tone of the song is flatly disapproving of the state of affairs ("we're living in phony times," etc.) the predictable rockist party-line of course, though conceivably it could have been a celebration of the teen-pop revolution...(did anybody ever write a celebratory song about rock and roll being dead? that would be awesome. and how glad they were not to have to rock out anymore?) more interesting is that it seems several years out of date - not that such a sentiment is unpopular in 2007 (in time, we can only hope...) - but, hey, the mickey mouse gang aren't boys and girls anymore.

it's an excellent, succinct summary of some major trends in pop music c. 1997-2003, but the story doesn't end there: as of 2004-06, rock is back in pop again in a major way. granted, it may not be the kind of rock and roll to which the song presumably means to refer; and it's hardly made an incursion against hip-hop/r&b - but the lyrics don't complain about those things. come to think of it, isn't it a little funny that an artist in smith's genre-cluster is bemoaning the death of rock, and complaining about teen-pop? what's it to her? (well, it's a society/lifestyle issue too, but whatever. )

in fact, it turns out that the song, which was written by imani coppola, dates back at least to 2002, when it was on coppola's independently released little red fighting mood (about which the internet contains almost no information.) her other contribution to for lovers, the funky, show-tuney "woodstock," is also recycled, from another '02 indie album, whose title - post traumatic pop disorder syndrome - may tell us something about her mind-state at the time. [eta: album title correction, from the horses mouth - also, "fake" is on both albums. let's reflect on how the correct title affects the implications i had insinuated.]

imani hails from the class of '97, probably somewhere near that cardigans/beck(/cibo matto/cornershop/etc.) funky alterna-pop realm i was just discussing, possibly with more of a neneh/lauryn hip-hop vibe, possibly more fiona/paula cole songwriter territory. i get the sense that the word "quirky" shall be applied liberally.

[project: somebody needs to come up with a name for this music/phenomenon, the late '90s artsy, eclecticist pastiche party pop/rock vanguard, which was in some ways a great failed hope for the fusion of art and commerce - people don't make records like this any more, or if they do they certainly don't sell. hint: i've definitely used the collage/college pun before to invoke this stuff.]

i haven't actually heard chupacabra, or any of coppola's music, which i probably should if i'm going to talk about her. but basically, she had a major-label debut that for whatever reason didn't lead to a major-label career; dropped out of sight (but not out of music, apparently); just released her second reasonably-available album, which sounds "difficult" (hard to say if that's in the interesting way or the boring way.) i'd had the impression that she had done more songwriting for other folks, like pop folks, in the interim, apart from this smith album, which has plenty enough indie integrity (and soul integrity to boot) to be a perfectly sensible match. but i may have been confusing her with chantal kreviazuk, about whom i also know nothing.

ok, well it would have been more interesting if i could link imani more directly to the kind of industry-approved teen-pop that she attacks so pithily (not sarcasm: i really like that stanza!) but come to think of it she was a kind of teen-pop herself - she was only 19 when her debut came out, and she got an mtv hit out of it if nothing else. no big shocker though that she's joined the ranks of the failed-star music-biz disaffected (aimee mann, brie larson, plenty other major-label dropouts that i'm having trouble thinking of) and seems to be doing the fringy artsy indie cult-following thing á la ani difranco and [sorta?] me'shell ndegeocello (or jane sibery to name somebody less multi-racial - or, sorry, issa, wtf.)

i guess this was a mostly failed attempt to continue the game of drawing links between '00s (teen)pop and '90s alterna/rock/songwriter/etc. (wow, look at that comment, dave; we were so gushy then!) (oh right, we still are.)

speaking of mia doi todd - oh whoops, we weren't, but she certainly fits in here - bertine's 1999 debut album, morbid latenight show [from before she started using her surname - tho with a name like zetlitz why would she wait?] turns out to be surprisingly close to what i had expected the golden state to sound like. bit of a trip-hop thing to it (think morcheeba); definitely "pancultural" as heather puts it, and generally jazzier, loungier than you'd expect from her later work - though it is still dance-pop, more or less. but it doesn't seem like "diva" territory to me, much more auteurist - she writes all her own tunes (!) - and not too far off from that the self-consciously hip, eclectipastichepop posse. neat. [eta: actually, she didn't write all of the tunes - amg lied, and eventually i went downstairs and looked at the liners. but, she wrote all the lyrics, and wrote or co-wrote almost all of the music.]

there's nothing i can't stand as much as good modern art.

tomorrow night i'm djing for (the first half of) the opening of an art show. looking forward to it but it's a funny mixture of probably going to fun and also not really that big a deal. trying to figure out what to play/how to approach it. want if possible to somehow use it to promote my deejaybizness, to which end i'm making some copies of those two mixes i posted here recently.

anyway, i've been playing around with records all morning. part of me wants to do a relatively straight (well, and relatively obscure) soul and '60s pop set, at least for a while, but then we'll see, because i'm just as liable to veer off into oh, frinstance, abdullah ibrahim, ada, john lennon, daedelus, steve reich, why?, the aluminum group, gary lucas, nat king cole, mahjongg, ry cooder, schneider tm, the jimmy castor bunch, camera obscura, asa chang and junray, enoch light, bill frisell, moreno+2, matmos, ashlee simpson. i'm planning to pack a wide enough range of records to allow for some fortuitous fluctuation. (though it may well end up being exactly those artists.)



in the meantime, here's something that's actually not very relevant there, but is in keeping with the (original) brief of this website. it's a mixtape i made last summer for laura for her birthday, with all songs about art. i'll explain the title. it's called "the eyes the ears", which is the english translation of "les yeux les oreilles" which is what the parisian music listings publication lylo stands for (as laura told me.) t.e.t.e. of course is the french word for head. so there's yr rather duchampian pun. (fitting cuz one of the songs is about duchamp.)

tracklist:


the sides have titles, which are listed on the tape: the eyes first; the ears second. fun to make tapes based on lyrical unifying concepts like this (especially around topics where there just aren't that many songs) 'cause you end up with combinations of songs that never would have come about any other way. in this case, some rather unlikely cuts of high-minded "serious" songwritery stuff which was sorta more my bag several couple years back (dire straits, paul simon, steely dan, xtc, e.c., - not to suggest those aren't most of my favorite bands ever), similarly literate hipster-types (al-group, llamas), scrappy punk nerds (art brut, futureheads, thermals, modern lovers), and the some sneaky inclusion of purely instrumental jazz (byron), d+b (mocean worker) and idm (sybarite, boc, jxb) trax that just happen to be named after artists.

there's a roughly (art historical) chronological sequence to side one, after the 1,2,3 intro punch of ifrb's best ditty, tmbg's indelible start-stop pop classik, and art brut's bludgeoning thesis statement: starting with paleolithic, jumping straight ahead to the 20th-century torch-passing lineage of picasso>duchamp>warhol>basquiat (good a story as any, right?) and then the awesome (and awesomely named) architect renzo piano (on whom i one wrote a paper, the research for which included an unwitting visit to germany.) "rrose selavy" (like "rene m." on side 2) is way too long for it to be included on a normal mixtape; i was only too happy to let it fill up the space here - and it's a nice tune to boot. (one draft also included stereolab's epic and maybe only tangentially relevant "brakhage.") then there's the generic (not art-historical-specific) topicality of "venice" (which i adore) and two tracks ("artists only" and "in the gallery") that i would probably never have put on a mix under other circumstances.

on the second side: "wanted" stands out like a sore thumb as the only hip-hop (actually, the only black artist period unless you count don byron [oh diss, just kidding don]) and also somewhat envelope-pushing in the topic dept (it's about graffiti - does have some interesting things to say about it though.) elsewhere "guernica" breaks the 'only include good music' rule [i like blanket music, but that album and that song in particular are somewhat painful - but it's such a no-brainer topically that i had to include it], "art class" breaks the 'don't reuse songs' rule [i've used it for several mixes, but in particular another mix i'd made for laura - but never mind, it's a total bleeding masterpiece and definitely one of my top x indie rock trax if i had to name], jonathan richman struggles but manages not to break the 'don't repeat artists rule' [if the modlovers and jojo solo can count, surely ifrb and jxb can too, even singing about the same artist - it was a close call not putting jr's "salvador dali" on (but it's not really that good.)] and dar breaks some kind of rule for being a song i'd never even heard, but i just happened to have a random burned copy of the album it's on. meanwhile it's hard to say quite what "no culture icons" is about, except that it roxxx, and i've always had a soft spot for "wrapped in grey" (an unabashedly drippy ballad) and especially the 'your heart is a big box of paints' bit.

so that was that. not too painful rite? i think the tape came out quite well, and it's certainly chock-full of idiosyncrasy. if i'd made it even a few weeks later, steve malkmus' "post-paint boy" would definitely have found a well-deserved spot.

anyway. in real life i've been thinking a lot about the '90s lately. re-read this awesome article/list. started posting in the poptimists livejournal pazz/jop polls, for '95 and '96. i'm contemplating a mix paying homage to my earliest days as a dj, for hi-skool parties and first year or two of college - centered around '99 and a year or two before and after. (so many great fatboy slim and les rhythmes digitales remixes!) so stay tuned for that. a couple insights in the meantime though: the 90s many highlights notwithstanding, the 00s really are such a better decade for music. can i possibly say that objectively? i feel like it's objectively so. (though even i could think of counterarguments. secondly: my pick for single of the decade is third eye blind's "semi-charmed life." i feel quite strongly that, though it may not have been the best song released in the 1990s, it epitomizes the decade for me perfectly, and it is devastatingly great. sadly, it just missed the cutoff for p+j voting for '97 (top 25 yes?) ah well. 1997 was an incredible year for music.

[ooh ooh, just got back from tower records where the latest lovely fruits of the going-out-of-business insanity were copies of the new records by don byron and various productions, just sitting there on the clearance table as if they were waiting for me specifically - for about five bucks apiece. definitely gotta play some o that jawn 2morrow.]