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

Other examples of X?

[katstevens.livejournal.com]

- New Order
- Prodigy
- Groove Armada?

Sort of related...

[jeff-worrell.livejournal.com]

...though just as much to the earlier thread this week about Scouting For Girls et al:

http://music.guardian.co.uk/pop/story/0,,2246111,00.html

- relevant here, I think, as e.g. I am unable to parse this sentence at all: "(How the ambitious Kaiser Chiefs would respond to being classified alongside the Wombats is open to question.)"

[alexmacpherson.livejournal.com]

I vaguely agree with Todd Burns, fwiw, though I don't think he puts his case well at all. My beef with Justice is that you can't dance to it, it doesn't follow the rules of dance music, but it DOES follow the rules of rock music. It's dance music for rock fans to feel slightly better about themselves to. Saying "I like dance music, I like Justice, they're the best in that field" - which is what the bulk of the criticism has been - is like saying "I like hip-hop, I like MIA, she's the best in that field". ie, those people only really like dance music when it's NOT dance music, hip-hop when it's NOT hip-hop, and their refusal to actually engage with what dance and hip-hop fundamentally ARE prevents them from recognising this.

I also disagree that X is the best area, and I certainly don't think anyone should aim to end up there. It's like fusion cooking, a bit of this and a bit of that makes the whole thing seem either slapdash or just a bit grim. Of course, it can end up great, but this is more happy accident than the rule. Basically I think that formalism, genre rules and so on, don't really constrict so much as provide a template which the artist can make their own; and it bothers me when acts which make a big deal out of deviating from genre rules get so much praise for it. It's almost like they're saying that those rules, that formalism, and therefore the genre itself, is worthless.
Whereas formalist signifiers often act like a shared language, an indication that the artist is on your wavelength. (This could be the build-and-release structure of dance music; or the r&b/hip-hop tendency to quote lyrics or beats from other r&b/hip-hop; etc.)

[umlauts.livejournal.com]

I like the point Todd's making, and the way he's written it is entertaining but perhaps not the best way of getting it across. I don't think that any genre mix is better than any other, or indeed better than any pure genre. Most magic is content, not form, and broadly, all my least favourite music criticism celebrates form for form's sake.

[ninebelow.livejournal.com]

x = prance?

[pot80.livejournal.com]

I don't know if this comes across well, but in my blog post, I'm trying to make a case that Justice -- and a lot of other things I enjoy -- are in that white x zone.

Why That Todd Burns Article Is Rub

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

Some of the things Todd is saying are "more interesting" dance music than Justice:

- Glass Candy/Italians Do It Better
- Studio/A Mountain Of One/Balearic beardo re-edits
- Burial
- THE FUCKING FIELD

NONE OF THESE are by ANY STRETCH OF THE IMAGINATION more danceable than Justice, even if (like Todd) I like several of them a lot more. The first is italo with the pleasurably kitsch bits stripped out. The second is ROCK MUSIC and nothing else even if Tim Finney likes it. The third is fine but if "danceable" is our criteria for what dance music we like then I don't think so, dudes. The fourth is the most boring electronic record of the last several years, plus you 'can't dance to it'.

So he's not just making a Lexian bloghouse vs minimal argument. In fact I don't know WHAT argument he's making.

I've just remembered...

[katstevens.livejournal.com]

...after avoiding it for the entirety of 2006 I decided I quite liked 'We Are Your Friends'.

[sbp.livejournal.com]

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 - This is exactly what I don't like about dance musics. Thankyou for writing it down.

However I propose that our new musical efforts be in area X, because I like components of all three genres too. Look for rehearsal space!

[boyofbadgers.livejournal.com]

I've got a lot to say about this, but I'm too busy right now. In the meantime, here's what I said about this the last time it came up (http://boyofbadgers.livejournal.com/49647.html).

Meanwhile Jess weighs in

[awesomewells.livejournal.com]

http://idolator.com/347889/pazz-and-jop-essayist-says-you-need-to-stop-dancing-to-stuff-you-like

This is pretty on the money as far as I can tell. The key issue is that polls like this are by definition CONSENSUS picks, so who's to say individual writers weren't appreciating Gui Boratto or Pantha Du Prince or Efdemin or Heinrik Schwarz or whoever? What's more likely is that they were appreciating different records, whereas the whole 'blog house' scene was pretty much dominated by two or three monolithic albums.

But in any case, it's a poll of indiecentric critics, it stands to reason that any non-indie rock records will be consensus picks precisely because they're in the X zone.

[blue-russian.livejournal.com]

Lex, can I like dance music if I don't dance to it?

[mippy.livejournal.com]

Is Cassius in the same mould as Justice here? I know most rockist people in my experience like Daft Punk and whatever we call electroclash these days.

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?)

"Dance" = "Rock," discuss

[koganbot]

Your Venn Diagram putting "rock" and "dance" at opposite sides with pop overlapping them more than they overlap each other doesnt' seem right, if for no other reason than that "rock" and "dance" feel more like each other - to me - than either feels like Europop or Eurodisco or hip-hop or r&b, which are what make up most of the pop chart in the U.S., and most of the nonindie stuff on the pop charts in Britain. (Right? Well, not hip-hop, but r&b.)

[mackromackro.livejournal.com]

I LOVE THE DIAGRAM! However, it supposes one thing I do not agree with on sacred music grounds.

You must be POP in order to be both DANCE and ROCK.

I'm submitting my own diagram here to be more uniform in distrubution:



Most of my music growing up fell into the hot pink DANZRAWK category as does almost all Ed Banger, save Justice, which does fall into the covetted "!!X!!" middle.