Genre rockist beef (again)

[katstevens.livejournal.com]

Crikey, dance music beef is sprawling over the blogosphere following Todd Burns's dissection of Justice & Simian Mobile Disco fans over at Village Voice (thanks to Fluxblog for the link). Here's Idolator's view on the subject. All these articles I've linked to bring up reasonable points. HOWEVER there still seems to be this awful mindset that you are only allowed to like certain types of dance music (or rock music), and if so you can't like the 'opposite' type. And then there's the 'oh but it's all POP anyway so ya boo sucks' business. This irritates me in a way I can't really put my finger on, so I drew a Venn diagram to help me work it out:



The diagram above covers the genres I'm interested in ('everything else' I just don't know enough about to appreciate properly).

The yellow 'rock' part covers stuff like prog, indie and metal.
The green part would probably include Bon Jovi, Kelly Clarkson and My Chemical Romance.
The pink 'dance' part covers stuff like techno, electronica, drum-n-bass, all stuff you'd buy off Juno.
The purple bit would be Booty Luv, Kylie and Roisin Murphy.
The blue (un-named as I couldn't fit the text in on my crappy version of Paint) parts would be mum-pop ballads on one side, and hip-hop/RnB on the other, I guess. These could obv have extra crossover circles of their own, but I'm sticking to 'rock' and 'dance' here to keep things simple.

And of course, 'X' stands for 'Xenomania'. Clearly this is the awesomest section.

The articles I link to above seem intent on putting Justice and Simian Mobile Disco in the green or pink sections for better or worse, when I think they're obviously part of X. It's a difficult category to do well in, and a lot of the time it doesn't produce great results. But it can be WONDERFUL as we poptimists know. The ideal song in X would be one where you don't even notice the guitars or the bleeps, but they're still there (the song I have in mind right now is 'Something Kinda Oooh').

I sympathise with Burns in his dislike of dancing to Justice/Simian, because I prefer *to dance* to pounding 4x4 beats that build up and drop out and that you don't need to know the words to enjoy - getting your head down and grinding away for hours rather than having to 'sit the next one out'. But I would also therefore dismiss a whole bunch of stuff in the pink section (I can't really dance to breaks, for example). That doesn't mean it shouldn't be there! Or that other people aren't allowed to find it good!

But the real advantage of having X present in your genre-list is that rockism should be meaningless here. There are influences from every direction, and people who complain about their precious rock/dance being 'infected' by other stuff will be waylaid in the purple and green sections. Although after reading Burns' essay I get the impression he's doing his best to remove X altogether and make everywhere a battlefield. Sadface.

Comments

[carsmilesteve.livejournal.com]

rockist.


KIDDING, KIDDING.

X is the best area though, happy accidents are where all the stellar bits of pop happen. templates are kind of ok, but mainly so one can play *with* the rules, not *by* the rules...

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

yeah but to "play with the rules" don't you have to be a bit of a formalist?

(actually one area of fruitfulness is where the somewhat-formalist listener has hishead fkd with the accidental or unintended formalist-busting activity of the idiot-savant maker: the busting being a total free lunch on the part of the "doesn't really get what s/he just did but it's awesome anyway" artist-type...

one of my (many many many) beefs abt "influence" is that it is flailed around to firm up arguments from intentionality which are exactly not the point

[alexmacpherson.livejournal.com]

yes EXACTLY - this is why old-Timbaland was so amazing because he wasn't cack-handedly wading into the r&b genre and ripping up the basics just to be an "innovator" - some of his early stuff is TOTAL HOMAGE to trad r&b values and rules, but at the same time presented in a completely new way, but the innovations would never have had any heart if he hadn't been steeped in the genre already...

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

i guess to expand on my point re "influence" here, timbaland is someone so deep inside a tradition he probably doesn't see it clearly as anything but the shape of the world -- i oncep roposed that i wd be happy if ppl usin the phrased "i am influenced by" repalced it by "i believe in" -- and is looking to say things in that world that have never been said

critical beatz maven X [insert pet hate here], earnestly "critiquing" r&B/hiphop, are also 9perhaps) lookin to say things in that world thsat have never been said, but i. don't know the world well enough to notice that actually they HAVE been said; ii. are in bad faith abt their relationship to that world (viz to choose to "rescue" is an act of obsessive love; but obsessive love is not always the heriocally desirable thing it imaigines itself to be); iii. sometimes external point-missing is able to generate something ELSE (arguably "post-punk funk/disco" did this -- it taught us little in the way of NEW BEATS, but it taught us lots in respect of how music and words are at war with one another... )

[sbp.livejournal.com]

Should music teach us anything?

[alexmacpherson.livejournal.com]

yes, exactly to all of this.

[alexmacpherson.livejournal.com]

expanding: I think my case is predicated on the whole "no man is an island" truism; I don't think it's possible or even desirable to make isolationist pop music (not that I think Justice do, but they and people like them think they do, and think that isolationism is good); this of course doesn't preclude an artist being completely weird and unique within a tradition.

[jeff-worrell.livejournal.com]

heh but after the first accident, can it any longer be thought of in that way or does X become a template of itself? Xenomania are arguably in a rut now, judging by the last GA alBUM. One I happen to still enjoy, but IMHO it's as much a formula now as the one Status Quo are alleged to have developed in the 70s (cf. latest Popular discussion).

[katstevens.livejournal.com]

My venn is a bit misleading here what with me missing out the intersections for hip-hop/jazz/industrial/whatever etc. In reality X would be made up of absolutely everything, not just pop/rock/dance (that's just what the articles were focussing on and what *my* focus falls on). So I think there's still plenty of room for interesting X.

[jeff-worrell.livejournal.com]

Sure. And on that view of X, this is exactly what I look for in a record to.

My beef with genre is that people make the mistake of assigning artists to them. In reality they move about your Venn ALL THE TIME (because pop* is not static). So e.g. just cos an act might get in to X once with one record, doesn't give 'em the inalienable right to stay there with their next one.

*in the 'oh but it's all POP anyway so ya boo sucks' sense

[sbp.livejournal.com]

But by definition POP is what sells, so one would assume a certain amount of moving around to be just different enough that the new record will sell to people but not too much to alienate the people who have already bought your stuff.

[koganbot]

Excellent point, though some people move around genre a lot more than others. Celine Dion has been all over the place and no one seems to notice! And Kelly Clarkson can do hard rock that gets categorized as "pop" simply because it's Kelly and therefore the rock stations won't play her. And at the drop of a hat she can be dance pop.