boyofbadgers | When dance music goes bad

I've spent a fair chunk of this morning reading this ILM thread about new-not-quite-dance people, MSTRKRFT. Leaving aside the worrying PRML SCRMesque splng, the thread is probably not worth reading in full. It's mostly the same old indie-dance vs dance-purist arguments rehashed around a new band.

So, anyway, here's the thing: despite never having heard these chaps, I am fairly sure I'll hate them. And it's this quote that most convinced me:

I found it infinitely frustrating that Justice and MSTRKRFT would fill the floor with pogoing indie-twats who left at the first sign of anything techy [...] Bizzarely the same crowd was going mad for dubstep.

It's funny, I suspect that ten years ago I would have been on the side of the MSTRKRFT lovers, even though I was far more of music snob in those days. The difference is that, since then, I have turned from someone who only very occasionally danced when not trashed, into someone who will dance at the vaguest sniff of an opportunity. Whether I'm actually any good at it or not is debatable, but I love it like very little else.

Y'see, this is my problem with Big Beat and Breaks and all those other sorts of music generally characterisable as pissed-up and/or stoned student music: it's dance music for people who don't actually like dancing. Or rather, people who don't like dancing like ME.

There are two types of dancing that I do:

1) Indie and pop and r'n'b and whatever: it is all abt the hook and the song and performing and probably being a bit silly to boot. And maybe getting lost in the track, but def. not in the set.

2) Techno and house and minimal and so on: locking into rhythms, spacing out, thinking/feeling my way through the tracks, totally immersing myself in the music for very long stretches of time.

This is where these genres go wrong: they try and apply ideas from 1) to music of type 2). 99.9% of the time it just doesn't work; it's simply not fun for me to dance to. The elements interfere destructively and you end up with what sounds like bad pop AND bad dance.

Ah, but what of rave and bangface stuff and ting, some of you may be asking, do they not combine both? Well, yes, they do. But they do it in a way that when they are good, the hyperkineticism of the music adds to the pop-rush of the hooks. I rarely space out to the music, but the sheer energy of it all pulls me along. For rave to work it had (and has) to be based on techno - despite all the technicolor insanity on top, it's still about the bottom end, and it's still fast and hard and mechafunky - brutalism with groove. If you apply rave aesthetics to a different rhythmic sensibility you invariably end up with something that doesn't make my feet move.

I suppose this all serves as an apology for my becoming a dance snob. It's really not about hating fun, it's about 'fun' things sometimes not being fun. I want dance music I can dance to, not pogo to.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

From:

alexmacpherson.livejournal.com

I really don't know why I DO like stuff like Justice because when the pro/anti arguments are along these sorts of lines (my two types of dancing are pretty much exactly the same as yours Rick) it would make perfect sense for me to be anti. Except I'm not.

That thread did make me realise how much I loathe ILM these days and that this loathing actually extends to the electrohouse dudes as well (except Tim and Ronan obv). It's a really depressing place to talk about music - there are a number of songs I love so much that even a year ago I'd've immediately gone to start a thread on them, but these days you'd get some genre fascist or Jess type making sarky comments or nitpicking and no one else showing love. And the bobbins threads are almost entirely people listing records at each other rather than conversing.

From:

boyofbadgers.livejournal.com

Heh, I haven't got an enormous beef with Justice. It just seems a bit, I dunno, pointless. I prepared to admit that I am completely wrong wrt this particular proto-genre; the entry above was more an attempt to explain why music that occupies this functional/social niche doesn't do it for me, than crticise this particular type of it.

As for ILM, well, it's just too big for me to get a handle on it. The only things I am remotely up to date on are some v.particular bits of bobbins, and it's not fun talking abt stuff you know nowt about. Saying that, from what I have seen, I do think you might have painted yrself into a corner a little with yr anti-indie-isms tho ;-)

When dance music goes bad

Page Summary

Style Credit

Expand Cut Tags