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

My chains are finally free

[koganbot]

So, I show up after everyone's gone home, but anyway, my problem in your leaving out hip-hop and r&b isn't just that you left out something important and big, but that hip-hop and r&b are always pilfering other musics and never lose their sense of themselves in the process. (Yeah, I know that you can argue with my italicized words, especially given the indie hip-hop guys who are always complaining that hip-hop has been corrupted by the biz and has abandoned its community and its golden age of greatness in the pursuit of mammon, etc. But these guys aren't in the picture, really.) Which is to say that as genres hip-hop and r&b seem to sidestep all the problems that are being discussed here.

But then, from my distance the whole British "dance" and "pop" thing seems like a sore thumb, whether it's "Oh oh oh look look look see how we're taking our genre deeper down into its own basic elements" or "Oh oh oh look look look see how we're combining all these pop and dance elements into glorious fun." Either way, the whole thing seems too studied to me.

(But then, I'm the guy who thinks that techno is just rock with another name - or is what usurped the "rock" role in Britain when the genre "rock" stopped rocking.)

(And by the Boney Joan Rule I get to love Big & Rich for pulling an equivalent Oh oh oh look look look see how we're combining all these metal and country and dance elements at once, congratulations to us. But maybe it's no surprise B&R weren't able to maintain the energy, and John Rich has been shining recently much more as a producer or songwriting collaborator than when he's the name on the marquee.)

But what I'm saying is that hip-hop and r&b seem to be social areas where you can be ambitious and self-aware without the whole thing carrying clanking chains of self-justification with it.

Or maybe the hip-hop guys are better at concealing their clanking chains. Or maybe they flaunt the chains - hip-hop guys acting tough is perhaps a blatant clanking chain of self-justification - but in a way that's so so generic and standard as to be ignorable. (I'm contradicting myself here, aren't I?)

Re: My chains are finally free

[katstevens.livejournal.com]

> But what I'm saying is that hip-hop and r&b seem to be social areas where you can be ambitious and self-aware without the whole thing carrying clanking chains of self-justification with it.

Ah but that's why they're not on the diagram. Or, at least, why no-one is writing badly-phrased articles about the hip-hop/rock 'crossover problem'.

(Haha, one could say that's because the problem could be summed as 'Limp Bizkit')