Why I should have my internet disabled while I'm writing essays, really

[piratemoggy.livejournal.com]

I was going to restrict this to my own lj because it is very rambling and I've never made a post on here before. :0 I thought I might make it here though because the whole 'happy hardcore/eurobosh in pop or owt' thing has come up quite a lot during the League of Pop (err, at least I think it has) and so I thought it might be relevant/of interest. If it is wrong then delete it etc.

Right. So. Cascada. I have spent this evening trying Cascada.

I mean I can kind of see this is pop. It is definitely a sound which has been mainstream at some point and is still popular. However, I find it rather more complicated than, say, Aphex Twin (although I would be willing to argue that he's just Simon Cowell of the indie world ie: ultimately a force for pop insofar as Simon Cowell is basically pro-indie propaganda OR SOMETHING) or, like, I dunno ...I enjoy aggressive hardcore or whatever they call that these days but this sort of business has always left me rather confused.


Fr'instance, by comparison I like 'Fashion vs. Conscience' by Pthalocyanine a lot, I've been listening to it quite a bit recently following a bit of a guilty re-exploration of electronic hardcore and I'd forgotten how much I like it.

-'Fashion vs. Conscience' goes 'THUD THUD THUD THUD WHITE NOISE ARGH ARGH ARGH THAT SOUND HURTS THUR THUR WHUUUR THUDTHUDTHUD' etc. This I can understand, because it is basically just the aggressive use of electronic noise. We've been doing that for years, etc. The song in question is also quite funky in places but still, it has a sense of GBH about the whole thing. This makes it more accessible to me and also, I suspect, a lot of other people, than Cascada although by sort of definition, Cascada which has words and a tune and everything (I know the James Blunt fiasco disproves this arf arf arf etc.) and thus is more conventionally pop.
-Cascada terrifies the living poo out of me. I can't handle it, I have to turn it off and I can't get my head around it. What is it trying to do? I mean I just about got my thoughts together regarding 'Ready For Love,' which I got sent on the League of Pop but the rest is like... 'hey what wait what is this meant to be?' I mean if I was to reproduce the noise in words it might be fairly similar to my description of Pthalocyanine, above, to be honest but gah, argh! What does it all mean? Should it mean anything? Should I be drunk? I feel slightly like I'm at some after-hours nekkid Disney rave.

I mean Cascada are quite aggressive in noise and maybe that's what makes it very difficult to understand. I know this is the way Happy Hardcore goes but I... really can't get it. Well I sort of can but the thing is, aggressive hardcore makes me quite happy, this makes me feel a bit weird and off-kilter. I mean obviously it's pretty cheesy as well but then so is aggressive hardcore and industrial and y'know, cheese isn't generally a barrier with regards to my enjoyment of a record. Good god, I think there's a ballad section on the album.

I mean I don't quite want to write it off as just 'bad' because I think I might enjoy it if I could get my brain round it but ...I dunno maybe I am just too much of a prude or something. It seems like this should not be 'specialist' music, though and yet its definitely true that in a lot of places/circles this would be received with the same sort of fear and confusion that might have happened if you played a load of Municipal Waste at a school disco.

Yes, that was definitely a ballad section. Blimey.

Anyway, my original point, before I got wrapped up with 'omgwtf' was that Cascada basically sound highly experimental to me now. Should I consider this an interesting state of affairs or simply write it off as getting a bit old/being a bit young or being a bit close-minded or well... god knows? The thing is, it has come to be expected (by me and most people I know, at least) that a song will have a minimal tune at most and may well contain elements of catchiness but that ultimately, I expect to hear at least echoes of the sort of obnoxious "experimental" sound that wobbles on for about ten minutes without anything happening and thus that's become "safe," where this sort of tunefulness (although I kind of agree with my mum's hypothesis that happy hardcore is basically just thump and speed-treble ie: noise, albeit I don't have a problem with noise as a musical genre; I think her criticism that it's very mathematically constructed might well stick though, which might be what my problem is with it ultimately, somehow it all sounds a bit cynical on some level but then I guess so does intentional twenty-minute widdling) is more frightening. Does this mean that basically people don't like music any more?

There's no doubt that a lot of people listen to music for the dialogue between it and them and that music that 'speaks' to people is often the most celebrated and I'm tempted to suppose that maybe for a lot of people, it's a case of having a conversation more than music in the sort of conventional musical sense, partly because now we listen to music very separately (and indeed to separate ourselves, with headphones on every other person walking down a road) and it was originally necessarily a fairly communal experience. I'm guessing Cascada probably increases in its enjoyment/accessability within a crowd? Although I'm willing to accept this may possibly just be my own musical cowardice.

Obv. the more I think about this, the more I get used to the noise of Cascada. This is something to keep in mind if I am ever subjected to that interrogation technique whereby they make you listen to something horrible (eg: death metal etc.) for awhile- about 25 mins in I will probably get it a bit and then it should all be smooth sailing. Afterall, I used to find Steps a bit hardcore for me but I got round that eventually.

Oh no, why did they do that to Kim Wilde? That is highly unnecessary.

Comments

[katstevens.livejournal.com]

Great post! Unfortunately I cannot reply coherently as I have a b4st4rd hangover.

[byebyepride.livejournal.com]

I will have to listen to the album again and reply when I can remember it a bit better!

"specialist" music

[blue-russian.livejournal.com]

I have a difficult time thinking of this ("Ready for Love" - haven't heard the rest of the album and have little interest in doing so, to tell you the truth) as "pop" because I think the vast majority of people find that relentless 4/4 beat as difficult to sit and listen to (although, like you, I think you can either understand or get accustomed to most music if you listen to it enough). Sure, it's borderline - you could fairly easily remix it and put something less aggressive in there without totally destroying what you have now.

But then again, why should we say that just because this only "works" in a dark crowded club or blasting out of the windows of your car on a Friday night, that it's any less music than some light jazz-pop that really only works on Sunday morning while you're eating breakfast and reading the paper?

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

My understanding of Cascada is rooted in the research I did for work last year looking at profile sites - there was one in particular (which seemed to be mostly Scots) where LOADS of pages had Cascada embedded, or stuff very like Cascada, and the profiles were all about posing, raving, posting pictures of yourself posing while raving, etc etc (and pictures of Celtic or Rangers players celebrating goals) (and really horrible LJ-style icons with loads of glitter FX) (and cars). So I think of it as ready-for-the-weekend music - Friday On My Mind/Showin' Out, that kind of thing - very in-your-face and overdriven but also with this residual romanticism shot through out which is a hangover from the less melodic raver days.

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

So yes very communal :) (I skipped a whole para of yours somehow!) but also all about release so it's trying to be as sweet and hard at once as it can be.

[piratemoggy.livejournal.com]

That was what I was thinking- maybe it was very much a sort of call to revolution (or well no, that is far too pretentious a phrase but possibly you can get what I mean) because it's very seductive, compulsive music and yet there's a lot about it that's very 'if you don't get it, get out,' which I think is where I read the aggression in it.

[alexmacpherson.livejournal.com]

In a way I guess it is - how many times have you heard a call to a dancefloor in a song as a metaphor for personal revolution through liberation and hedonism? This doesn't do that but it IS that, for its audience. I have affection for but never listen to this kind of dance music; my ears are more attuned to electrohouse and minimal house/techno and Detroit techno etc, all of which could be summed up as "trendy dance music" (it is v possible that I am just an incorrigible hipster). But what I use my trendy dance music for is exactly what Cascada's audience use them and their ilk for: to get wasted of a weekend, take pills and dance all night with a big group of mates. Then we talk poncily about the music on the internet but for all I know so do they.

What I find most important about all of this music is the way it unequivocally tells your mind to forget, completely, about the world and your problems and all bad things, and for one night you can lose yourself in utter bliss and that this isn't mindless hedonism but something which can colour your entire outlook on life.

[martinskidmore.livejournal.com]

I'm a little mystified by this post - I can only call Everytime We Touch to mind, and that didn't strike me as at all difficult or extreme, just as fairly routine, fun happy hardcore. Do you not like happy hardcore generally? This doesn't seem so different from plenty of other stuff since it split off from hardcore long ago.

As for the combination of basic, simple pop with aggressive noise, is that some kind of equivalent of the same tendency in rock, as exemplified by acts like the Jesus & Mary Chain or the Ramones?

[piratemoggy.livejournal.com]

I think I probably should have cut quite a lot of what I wrote here, if it hadn't been 3am and I hadn't been writing it around reading for my essay. I was really more questioning the fact that this sort of intense melodic business has, to a certain extent or at least within the people I know (who admitedly are mostly indie) this kind of noise has become far more challenging than a lot of what's considered "out there" music, which seems quite strange to me. I wonder how far removed from melody mainstream music can move, for instance?

My difficulty with the whole thing is ultimately aesthetic, I have concluded. Although I also see the social thing as interesting- as I said in the post, this has become really challenging music, when really it's some of the most basic elements of what makes music... hrmm I don't think I am very good at expressing what I want to say here really.

[martinskidmore.livejournal.com]

Ah, I see. I highly recommend dubdobdee's magnificent article on 'noise' in music, as it is addressing some of these points, that what is considered noise is what is most difficult and unpleasant and disturbing to a particular group, not in any absolute sense. http://web.pitas.com/tashpile/noise1.html (it's long, but well worth it).

[byebyepride.livejournal.com]

Can you separate 'aesthetic' and 'social' categories though? Your suggestion that it's about what people have become used to seems to suggest that they can't be, i.e. people get socialised into liking certain sorts of things!

[piratemoggy.livejournal.com]

I don't think they can at all really, no. We all need 'ways in' to music and ways to think about them and they're always derived from social surroundings. What I meant with that remark was really that I think it is interesting that the prevailing (and by 'prevailing' I mean 'what it is talked about as in most media') conceptualisation of music has evolved into something so... non-musical, fundamentally.

My Happy Hardcore Theory

[byebyepride.livejournal.com]

One of the reasons I like what I am going to call here -- in affectionate parody of Simon Reynolds -- the post handbag continuum is that it seems to me about the closest thing the uk has to a genuine folk music. That is to say a music which belongs to people whose tastes and way of life gets almost no representation on national or state broadcasters. Obviously it is bought and sold like any other musical form, but its major stars and DJs etc. don't need deals with big labels. On the one hand this music is defiantly regional, and on the other -- as with Cascada, I think -- it is defiantly European, and thus embraces aspects of pop which distinguish European taste from British taste (I guess this is what you describe as cheesy). (How much of this difference stems from actual British people's taste, and how much from the way this is represented to them by the BBC, I do not know.) So imagine a pan-European underground movement where young folks gather in darkened rooms to listen to it, boy racers install enormous bass-bins to blast this stuff up the high street on a Friday night, teens on computers mash up commercial tracks in crude and inept but compelling ways, and within days every kid in school has the resulting mess on their mobile. (google DJ Rankin...) As Tom says, this sort of music is huge in Scotland, but I imagine it is big anywhere that there are young people who don't visualise themselves as, for example, intelligent and miserable and bound for university. OK this is a bit of an exaggeration, but this is basically ned music.

As for the sound: the Cascada album seems a great example of the more melodic end of post-handbag. The first four or five tracks all stick to the same (exhilarating formula): piano, vocal melody first verse, in comes the bass for second verse, bass and synths build for bombastic chorus, then the melody is run through for what would be the third verse, but with a comedy sounding synth. Repeat to fade, with possible option for long bouncing bass passages (for the DJ to mix something else in, I guess). Odd things about this album -- as you say, an average ballad (I think DJ Sammy started this trend when he released a stripped-down version of Heaven), and the rather lame cover versions, none of which is as striking as the originals which kick the record off. (My guess is that these are either filler, or there is a slightly different market being covered here, perhaps in Italian discos or something).

Musically: 4/4 obviously (this is the key difference from the post-hardcore continuum) which combined with the melodies (which could come from an early Madonna record, or from SAW or something) makes this sound incredibly white, not to put to fine a point on it) and sometimes I worry whether there's a Euro-fascist element to this: but the kids who play this on the buses in Edinburgh also seem to like R&B so I don't think we need to read too much into the racial politics. But it might reflect the rural / small town bias of this sort of music in the UK, as opposed to the definitely urban feel of the post-hardcore continuum.

I don't hear the noise you do; nor really the agression! I think the most forceful aspects of the music is the defiant two fingers to canons of good taste, including more sophisticated electronic and dance forms. I think 'experimental' is probably the wrong word to use, partly because one of the other interesting things about the post-handbag continuum is how little it seems to change, i.e. it's relatively stable and there isn't the same premium put on evolution and development. In fact I wonder if regional differences are more important than musical ones (i.e. it's not actually that easy to tell a Scouse House track from a Bouncy House track but if you're at Wigan Pier you're probably listening to the former!)

So I guess that most of your reaction is due to whatever you mean by 'me and most people I know': i.e. about what presupppositions you all share. My argument with pot80 during the League was partly about the extent to which internet consensus about music doesn't reflect onto the real social / regional divisions which shape music communities IRL.

Re: My Happy Hardcore Theory

[byebyepride.livejournal.com]

(I don't mean you only have friends on the internet! I mean that you and the people you know may have more in common than just knowing each other.)

Re: My Happy Hardcore Theory

[piratemoggy.livejournal.com]

I have just realised that basically what I meant to say was: I don't believe it's pop and this is confusing. In a way it seems to sort of epitomise the dichotomy (I suspect this is the WRONG WORD but it is the only one that's coming to mind- sorry, my brain has dissolved) of the fact pop music is sort of... not pop music anymore. Err. Actually I'm not sure I'm making any more sense.

Hopefully I am using up all my articulative ability on my essay, otherwise I should probably panic.

Re: My Happy Hardcore Theory

[byebyepride.livejournal.com]

The pop thing is interesting though, and I think you're right that the in-your-face tuneful bits, which are kind of fragments of old pop moved into a new context I guess are sort of pop-not-pop (I'm being inarticulate now!).

I tend to use 'pop' to mean music that anyone could like, and in that sense this is obviously pop, but in the way that most people use it, this probably doesn't quite qualify.

EXCEPT that there's usually one video in rotation on The Hits that comes close to this stuff, and Cascada obviously charted. I like the way the boundaries are hard to find, and the continuum runs through from the hardcore to what is basically pop-trance or something.

Re: My Happy Hardcore Theory

[braisedbywolves.livejournal.com]

It doesn't sound like anything but pop to me! I can't hear anything noisy or aggressive about either the track you mentioned above or 'Everytime we touch'. Frankly I thing you're all quite mad, and will elaborate on this when I am both sober and not posting from my phone.

[piratemoggy.livejournal.com]

They're all completely mad about Cascada at my (younger, although only by three years) brother's naval school, which seems quite mad to me. They're all over Scooter etc. too whilst simultaneously all over pop-punk... I'm not sure what to make of that other than possibly short attentions spans or something. It doesn't quite seem compatible with military uniforms but then I suppose that's precisely why they like it.

/detour

I agree about 'experimental' being the wrong word. I feel it is kind of pushing the boundaries of what can be considered music (for a lot of people- as you say this may be simply because the BBC tells them that it isn't) and that's really what interests me. Clearly it's treated as music as opposed to novelty and judging from what I've seen of 'ethusiasts' (albeit this is limited so my brother and his friends) but as you say the method of creation is quite roughshod... I don't know, I suppose what I mean to say is what you're describing with this underground of kids etc. and the music being shared for free, mostly, is that this is a very interesting sort of social movement in a lot of ways. As you say, it's not good taste or conventionally cool (convention again according to the BBC or whoever) but it's... hrmm. I don't really know how to express what I am thinking about here.

Right. It's extremely alien to most people, even to people like me who have basically no one else IRL who shares their music taste and who certainly have doors into it, it seems weird. I think what you say about the defiance is definitely true; the aggression I read in it is, I think, as I said to freakytigger above, the sort of 'either you can understand this or you can't' nature of the thing whereby it creates its own group... so I suppose it isn't pop? Even though it should be on a sort of technical scale. Hrmm.

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

I don't think the audience for it is thinking in terms of understanding or not, though. Something I like about it is that it's music that doesn't really seem to seek an opposition. (Which isn't to say its fans aren't oppositional to outsiders or even insiders who are self-defining as a different tribe: viz the Rangers/Celtic stuff) (But I really don't want to generalise based on a bunch of profile pages I looked at 6 months ago! I was much more chary than Alex of using the word "ned" f'rinstance)

[byebyepride.livejournal.com]

Obviously -- in answer to piratemoggy's question about pop -- this is all pop in as much as anyone could like it, but there does seem to be a strong relationship to a particular class amongst its audience in the UK.

And, yes I definitely paused over that word, but it's basically true in my experience -- I mean the audience is obviously wider than just juvenile deliquents, but I do think there's a very strong class thing going on, and it is precisely the class culture that the term 'ned' is used to stigmatise. So the folk I knew at uni who were from Ayr, or wherever, would laugh at the happy hardcore scene at home: they were far enough away. Perhaps the university aspiration thing was wrong, but there are far more like to be fans of this stuff at Heriot Watt or Napier, than Edinburgh, say.

Although perhaps I'm being a bit too Simon Reynolds about it!

Re: My Happy Hardcore Theory

[koganbot]

I agree with braisedbywolves and indeed think you are all mad, since "Everytime We Touch" is totally pop and went top 10 in America too and what it sounds like is straight up Europop/Eurodisco not that different from "Blue Da Bee" eight years ago or "What Is Love?" 14 years ago or innumerable hi-NRG or German or Italodisco songs from the '80s, the difference being that "Everytime We Touch" takes in some of the dance beats from the last decade and a half (but then the beats of Europop/Eurodisco have evolved to take in techno and house as those musics have evolved). I hear nothing remotely difficult of experimental or aggressively noisy about this. This is kind of what I thought Eurodisco of the '00s tends to sound like. I mean this beat, that beat, here a beat, there a beat, big deal. I was surprised at this hitting so big in America since hip-hop/r&b have such a hold on the charts that electronic dance and Eurodisco only score a hit every two years or so and there's no good way to predict what it will be or explain why this one hit rather than the other 74 just like it. I do react negatively to the misspelling of "every time," but that's the only thing I found difficult about the track. Not to say that all the social nuances of who listens and why that you and Moggy are talking about are irrelevant, but when something hits pop like this it's also getting a range that includes skaters and soccer moms and teenyboppers. I don't remember if it got any Radio Disney play (I kind of think it got either a little or none, but Disney is open to dance stuff from Europe: "The Cha Cha Slide" and 2Unlimited and "Blue Da Bee" are continually replayed as oldies).

Re: My Happy Hardcore Theory

[piratemoggy.livejournal.com]

I was thinking about this and decided I think possibly it's its lack of aggression, while still being IN YOUR FACE like some sort of really hyperactive ...thing that freaks me out a bit. This is probably because I am quite a shy person unless under the influence of intoxicants at which point all hell breaks loose. Whereas with Cascada there is something being unleashed but it is not particularly hellish.

[katstevens.livejournal.com]

My inital opinion on Casacada [warning: rubbish metaphor ahead!]: I don't think its particularly brilliant, but I don't think its mediocre either and that is very important! When I watch the video for that Savage Garden cover I am entertained - fascinated - that they are basically churning out 4/4 bosh with the least possible amount of effort or inventiveness, no new noises* or lyrical adventurousness. Yet it's still fun! Mindless, pounding fun. I'm very impressed that Cascada can make a soufflé out of twigs and mud (this goes back to dubdobdee's post yesterday on 'influence' where I mentioned that you don't just have ingredients A and B of a song but the extra method C in mixing them all together as well). The reason I don't find Cascada utterly brilliant is because there is the nagging feeling that the soufflé tastes a bit muddy.

As for the 'noise' part, it's harsher than most pop but it's still pop. Cascada want to sell records and they are doing so in a very efficient manner. Some people like the taste of mud and the lightness of soufflés.

The 'buzz' noise - why do many people find this harsh/unpleasant? It can be wonderfully soothing (cf Kompakt back catalogue), or spooky/terrifying ('Sweet Harmony' by Liquid). Perhaps it is an instinctive human reaction to run away from killer bees?

*unlike say, Fedde Le Grand and Bodyrox last year, who brought the 'vwerp' synth into the mainstream - of course us trendy underground minimal bobbins folks knew about it Aaaaaages ago :-)