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

[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.