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poptimistsI 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.
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.
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Date: 2007-05-06 12:04 pm (UTC)