The Wednesday Canon: DANCE DOUBLE HEADER!

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

A special double edition of the Wednesday Canon spotlighting those two titans of what top dance journo Ronan calls "album dance" - Basement Jaxx, and the Chemical Bros. Both blokey duos, both shifting plenty of units to the non clubbing inclined, both with a penchant for using guest vocalists from the worlds of pop, rap and Nindie. Let us see which of their hits rate, and which are RANK. You get FIVE per artist.




[Poll #717339]


And what of New Order, eh? Here's the official real actual canon:


1. Blue Monday (33 votes)
2. True Faith (31)
3=. Love Will Tear Us Apart (26)
3=. Regret (26)
5. Temptation (23)
6. Atmosphere (22)
7. World In Motion (16)
8=. Ceremony (15)
8=. Thieves Like Us (15)

And the best member is, obviously, Gilliang.

Comments

[chezghost.livejournal.com]

you've not heard 99% of Big Beat ;)

to me it very often did sound like that. i went to clubs playing it and loads of people danced. the Fatboy formula was dancefloor gold for some time so inevitably there was much copycatting of that but you could always differentiate between his thing and the Skint sound and that of the Chems, Jon Carter etc.

this reminds me of the argument i have with The Lex re Public Enemy/Bomb Squad beats. he claims they are shit but i can't remember what the reasoning behind this was, or i just derided it as heresy and went 'LA LA LA NOT LISTENING' until he sauntered off.

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

My problem with big beat was that most of it DEVIATED from the pop gold formula perfected by Fatboy/Chemicals - there was all sorts of stuff on Skint compilations trying to be jokey or 'moody' or what have you instead of just, to quote a PWC team talk, "hoofing it up to the big sample". So the line between big beat and boring trip-hop was thinner than it should have been.

[chezghost.livejournal.com]

I suppose at that point Big Beat becomes like Trip Hop/borderline jazz-funk only with, er, bigger beats - instrumental/occasional-sample business but at roughly half the speed of yer typical BOSH so less thrillpower from a dancing pov and more for skunkheads than amylguzzlers. Examples range from DJ Food's 'Dark Lady' to Hardfloor's 'Dubdope'. Naturally I love lots of this too :)

[mostlyconnect.livejournal.com]

I endorse this post. Did you my email btw?

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

If yr email contained a Czech pop track, yes!

[alexmacpherson.livejournal.com]

my reasoning was that old-skool hip-hop beats are quite boring compared with er nu-school ones: this makes me sound as if I'm in thrall to OMG!!11 Timbaland's futuristic production!!!!1111 but, y'know, there's a million miles between Illmatic and, I dunno, 'Southern Hospitality' or 'What's Your Fantasy?' or 'How Many Licks?'. And those million miles mostly consist of production, and focus-on-the-MC rather than focus-on-the-beats.

[chezghost.livejournal.com]

oh yeah i agree that it all became more focussed on the MC/lyrics as people figured that incessant scratching and complex beats were not really necessary to make people (esp. girls?) dance. people became more and more interested in what MCs were saying the onus was on them to innovate once producers ran out of breakbeats to sample and mess around with.