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

[koganbot]

it's all chopped-up and awkward instead. Which is closer to the rules of rock, really.

Closer to the rules of rock? I'm not understanding you. Some rock is awkward, but that's just its not being very competent. But since when is rock "chopped-up"? Most rock is monotonously monomoniacal in its rhythm; it's just that a lot of time it isn't a good rhythm (as opposed to rock and rock 'n' roll grooves of the past).

Seems to me that hip-hop and jungle and grime - not to mention the Houston screwed-and-chopped thing - are much more chopped-up than rock is (discounting a few avant-gardish rock subgroups) but that they're sometimes playing a game of chicken with the groove, which is to see how much you can chop up the groove without losing it. Hip-hop seems to do this best.

Back in the day, I recall white people having trouble dancing to James Brown because the rhythm was too "confused." Which is to say they had trouble dealing with syncopation, even though the syncopation made the groove better. Disco was an easier beat for white people.

Also, I'm basically too late for this conversation, but it seems to me that techno in Britain in the '90s and maybe into the '00s functions socially much as rock did in the '60s, as a kind of progressive busting-up from the "underground" dance scene, that techno definitely has its avant-art-prog tendencies, whether they're called "prog" or not. And it's the tendency to go "hard," meaning brutal and/or difficult, that's one of the things that distinguishes techno from Eurodisco and Italodisco and Europop and that connects it in my mind with rock. (And if you look historically at Bronx hip-hop and Detroit techno and Chicago acid house, in some respects these are movements away from disco and towards a more experimental or progressive approach. The name "acid house" might have been something of a coincidence, but the 303 really was functioning something like a psychedelic wah-wah guitar. I don't know this history all that well, but I don't get the impression that in Britain the underground garage was aiming at the average teenybopper Spice Girls fan. Underground garage had social ambitions, right?)

[chezghost.livejournal.com]

good point re syncopation. jungle had a similar reputation re dance difficulty among a certain section - that was more the deadly combination of syncopation and high tempo. and most people who enjoy the modern 'build and release' approach to dance music first and foremost do not strike me as interested in jungle at all (either now or then).

[katstevens.livejournal.com]

I think what Lex means by 'chopped up and awkward' as that dance music is for the most part continuous - individual tracks are designed to be mixed together into others, and doing that seamlessly wins you many points. You *can't* mix the majority of rock music together like that - one track stops and the other one starts, and even the best indie DJs find it hard to overlap rock tracks in a coherent way. This could be down to more obvious differences in vocal style, instrumentation, more prominent riffs throughout (this is where the build-up/break-down of dance and disco is so useful). Of course you get rock tracks that *do* have similar beats, vocals, riffs, build-ups and break-downs - but I'd call that dance music :)