How to save techno

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

http://www.pitchforkmedia.com/article/feature/142152-the-month-in-techno

Comments

[katstevens.livejournal.com]

Good column, but DUDES that Reynolds quote is one of the w4nkiest things I've ever read:

"thinking about how it was all underpinned by a quasi-mystical faith in beats as somehow figurative: a belief that the tremors that each breakthrough by auteur-producer or scenius alike sent through the state of pop somehow correlated with or could be equated to tremors through society..."

ARRRGH

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

when is this quote from? i think for a while there WAS an over-arching "faith in beats" (or in scene) (or actually most likely in E) at the back of the rhetoric of the "Second Summer of Love" -- what would be interesting would be to explore how widely it was shared, once you got beyond the aceeed rhetoricians

[katstevens.livejournal.com]

Column dude says it was from his blog so I assume recently?

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

simon's gift -- for good and evil -- is spotting "people like us"* within any scene: it's how he makes [_____] safe for the chattering classes, essentially

i think he's good at seeing such people, and characterising their utopias, favourably or otherwise -- what he's REALLY bad at, really deaf to, is the presence of everyone else in a scene, and what THEY contribute (esp.when it isn't in lockstep with the "people like us" element; esp.,when their self-expression is not naturally writerly or otherwise conventionally articulate)

*not QUITE as reductive as white semi-middleclass rockwrite-reading college kids, but often not far off

[koganbot]

i think he's good at seeing such people, and characterising their utopias, favourably or otherwise

Strange, I think he rather sucks at this, unless "people like us" excludes me and Dave and Tom and Lex, for instance. But I enjoyed his "advice": "Whenever, as a producer, you feel yourself flinching a bit from using an idea or a sound or an effect, hesitating on the grounds that it's maybe a wee bit cheesy, then I would say just to push right past that feeling and go for it. Do it twice over, even. There can never be enough monster riffs or cheap tricks in dance music; there can definitely be a surfeit of just-so subtleties." It's like all along he was straining to become his distorted view of a poptimist, or he's cantankerously decided it's time to plump for Big Beat after all.

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

in fact on reflection i think "people like us" (in my formulation, but describing his) DOES actually exclude people like us -- in other words, "not including writers": it's a phantom he's discussing, but not merely a phantom in his own head (it's not unlike the phantom of "the readership" that any magazine editorial has: it DOESN'T mean the totality of the readers, and may well not even mean the plurality of the readers -- moire like "the typical read as we like to imagine him/her")

there's a straightforward get-out clause here, which he OR i could invoke: that is that writers mainly write about music they find conducive to discuss (inc. for some being paid to discuss), and that this distorts the "why" of their manifest taste

[alexmacpherson.livejournal.com]

ffs who the hell gives a shit whether simon reynolds "believes in beats" any more? HIS PROBLEM NOT OURS.

It's a good column as per all of P Sherburne's stuff but I have more of a problem with the endemic griping than with any of the music itself, I don't know why introspective hand-wringing seems to go hand in hand with niche club scenes, and why the nature of the hand-wringing seems to correlate so strongly with criticisms of dubstep or techno or grime from the outside. I really hate all those rules and manifestos at the end, completely pointless.

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

I thought it was a good column because - though maybe I'm over-crediting it - it diagnoses the griping, then says "OK you do better" and gives everyone enough rope to hang themselves. I thought the manifestos were fascinating mostly, not bcz they're right but because it's interesting that "how to improve things" has such a generic aspect: if I was to do a survey of whingers in the market research biz, or the comics industry or the toilet roll manufacturer industry for that matter I think there'd be the same broad breakdown - rediscover craft, respect, don't pander, innovate etc etc.

[alexmacpherson.livejournal.com]

I think what the column doesn't do enough of is separate the griping about how the music is made and where the scene is going (tiresome bullshit which shouldn't be given the time of day), and the real and new economic difficulties which the scene is running into (which have even more of an impact on niche genres like techno than on the industry as a whole). Though it's not as if I have any ideas on the latter anyway, dance has done such a stellar job of adapting to the internet that if it's still suffering, I'm not sure how it can reverse that.

[byebyepride.livejournal.com]

why introspective hand-wringing seems to go hand in hand with niche club scenes

Because scenes attract wankers and when they're not wanking they need something else to do with their hands?

[katstevens.livejournal.com]

I've just read through them all now (didn't bother before commenting above!) and you're right. I assume the non-respondants were actually busy trying to make good music instead of providing a set of rules for getting everyone else to be just like them.