A kung fu fighter in a disco

I don't get the negative reactions to the continuum concept itself. I'd speculate that it's the dressed-up terminology/over-intellectualisation* from critics of certain positions that makes people react to it like this. what else could be wrong with it?

*intellectualisation from WITHIN the continuum or at least the DJs, producers, promoters and devoted punters who don't write it but live it has, as far as i can tell, rarely occurred (and why would it?).

so to berate commentators for not being participants is problematic. most of the time you can only be one or the other. and it's often only from an outside position that you can make an effective criticism at all - it just depends on how well you do it (this is where i agree people tend to come unstuck esp. when arguing 'innovation' as both crucial and lacking).

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no, it's not about intellectualising music, over- or otherwise. that's something SR has accused people of but it's so offbase - I mean, read Melissa's article and you can't say she's anti-academic! she IS one! - if anything the anti-cuntinuum folks are against it because it's wrong overall, it's not academically rigorous enough at the same time as being too ivory-tower in its refusal to engage w/the music at street level. it does such an disservice to anyone who's ever tried to theorise about music.

i'm not the expert here but joe was great at the symposium in explaining how offbase the cuntinuum was wrt the 90s - the way it excluded certain things because they didn't "fit" what the continuum was supposed to be, b/c they were too aspirational or classy or uncool. The acid jazz, Gilles Peterson end of things. Which isn't objectionable as such but it just paints an incomplete picture - and it's worth unpacking why certain values (aggressive, dangerous, discordant, masculine) have been privileged over others (smooth, soulful, laidback, feminine). What's objectionable now is that the cuntinuum, this wrong-headed theory which DOESN'T EXIST, is being used as a stick to beat young, up-and-coming producers with, from k-spunk slagging Joker off as "nothing new" at the symposium (which is what prompted Melissa's murkage) to SR getting it totally wrong w/the whole ketamine fiasco to the dissing of UK funky. It's just casting a really long shadow.

Plus, there's what Cis mentions below, of SR being establishment enough that he can carry other people away with him.

Commentators should at least be open to the idea of participating, to engaging with the artists and the scene at street level. I'm afraid I wouldn't really consider anyone an expert if they didn't do this. (Which obv doesn't preclude them being interesting critics if they stick to writing about the music, which unfortunately doesn't happen.)

I didn't realise until the symposium how anti-artist their stance was, actually: k-punk actually said the actual mind-boggling sentence that Goldie the person, with his jazz clubs and inconvenient tastes, was irrelevant to - I am not kidding - "Goldie the agent of the continuum". At that point we laughed VERY LOUDLY AND OSTENTATIOUSLY because seriously what the fuck.

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i don't think i agree the continuum concept is wrong overall. but the only way i can explain this is to relate it to my personal history with dance music (tho i do also think that the ivory-tower scenario or perception is unavoidable under the circumstances).

when i first saw the term several years ago i felt i instantly knew what SR was getting at so i've always felt fairly comfortable with it as a thing. i had immersed myself in edgy (as well as charty) UK dance via magazines, radio and buying vinyl. i see it as little more than a recognition that a number of us (granted one problem is establishing how many) were able to use each previous production trend as a bridge to the next in terms of understanding and appreciating it's form and function - essentially "i like jungle because i liked ardkore" and a huge part of that being the sonic hallmarks they share (mainly the recurring samples, the "rude energy"). the appeal when each new sound or subgenre comes along is essentially "you've retained x but now you've introduced it with y to create z". 'Ardkore->Jungle/DnB->Speed Garage->2 Step->Grime&subsequent' remains for me a sequence in which a path based on appreciation of those hallmarks is reasonably clear - certainly up until 2 Step. I'm willing to concede things get a bit murkier thereafter (as decade-based fashion shifted, the palette of preferred recurring samples and sounds did change with Grime i think).

now i liked Acid Jazz and co. to some extent but i don't see why excluding it from that strand is remotely a problem! it really didn't have much at all to do with UK underground club culture as documented by Mixmag, Muzik and co. even tho there would be minor coverage. In crude terms, Acid Jazz felt more about a separate continuation of "real Soul" that felt in opposition to what the Rave->Garage chain was dealing with. I don't see this as a problem because I had some appreciation for both (tho clearly more for the latter) and the differences seemed stark enough. The HC picture is not meant to be 'complete' and encapsulate everything. I would expect artists like Goldie, 4Hero and even MJ Cole to have recognised this divide (without thinking of it as a good or useful thing, being as they were actual artists) even tho they could move from one side to the other with admirable ease over the years. so what kpunk said about these two sides of Goldie can make some sense (unless I'm mis-understanding your point). hear early Rufige Kru and hear 'Believe' from his second album and there's pretty much nothing connecting them - it's just the same artist exercising two very different ideas of equal importance to him. this doesn't render HC meaningless as a thing imo.

to criticise the perceived "masculine/feminine" or edgy/smooth values split is different really, but when it comes to understand what the HC is about (as I understand it), the clue is in the name!

that's why to me it's not wrong-headed as a theory. that's why it makes some sense from a critical pov, and jeez if nothing else joining the dots is supposed to be fun.

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freakytigger.livejournal.com

Isn't the problem that the HC as an explanatory thing slips over the line of describing a particular strand within club culture and becomes a stand in for a description of club culture in general? In which case exclusions are important.

I don't really mind it as a shorthand for "what Simon, Mark, etc. value within dance music" - it's kind of like the dance equivalent of "power pop" really.

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"Isn't the problem that the HC as an explanatory thing slips over the line of describing a particular strand within club culture and becomes a stand in for a description of club culture in general?"

I'm not sure who is taking it as a description of club culture in general tho. You'd only half to look at the charts from the time to realise it's only half the story.

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You'd only have to look at the charts, or go to clubs, or read interviews with the artists and producers...except I wouldn't assume that people did any of these things at the time, and certainly not now! I mean, that's the point of documenting these scenes, so that people who don't have the time/inclination/ability to go to the primary sources can still have an idea of what was going on. And this is where the idea of the HC falls down - as you say, it's more like several continua overlapping and influencing each other concurrently. But the ones which aren't "convenient" have been excluded.

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The exclusion of certain styles is understandable. I think of it as to identify the production trends and subsequent scenes in 90s dance which best represented the following things in roughly equal measures:

1) underground
2) innovation (relative to technology and dancing/rhythmic form, but also culturally i.e. attempts to develop dance genres unique/native to the UK)
3) ruffness in production terms - interpret this as rude energy, the appeal of someone creating so much with so little (ghetto/bedroom producer culture), amateurishness (punk ethos) probably

but chiefly (tho it's difficult to describe and obv a generalisation)

4) latest soundtrack by/for/of (many) black urban youths (fetishised by those who aren't all of those things)

The fourth condition is mainly what excludes IDM, Big Beat, Breaks, (Northern) Hard House and remaining dance genres seen as both British and white. And combined with the other three it also excludes the "tasteful" UK soul, jazz and funk movements of the 90s (which I think of as being as mixed race-wise as DnB), these probably owing too much to their original US counterparts (same goes for UK rap, ragga and dancehall to an extent, but these genres are always seen as separate from the Dance Music umbrella anyway).

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yes I know that's what it's meant to be - the point I've been making, and which Joe made far more eloquently and expertly at the symposium, is that 4) contains within it the opposites of 1) to 3) as well, and excluding the tastefulness and the smoothness and the aspiration is a dishonest misrepresentation of 4). Hopefully Joe will put his paper online at some point, and when he does I'll link to it.

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OK to put it better we're talking about 4 ONLY as it relates to 1-3. This is NOT a dishonest mispresentation, it is merely a selective preference or focus point and one that's been made by both producers and listeners alike.

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Well, then it's incomplete and exclusionary, and there's no reason to privilege or pedestalise this particular preference as the HC has been. Though it's worth asking a) why those preferences - what does it say that aggressive, masculine traits are deemed OK and smooth, feminine ones not? that's worth unpacking; and b) for a phrase which has been in use for a decade plus, how come it hasn't trickled down to being used by fans and producers? Surely if its validity was so obvious this would have happened? Maybe it's because for your average fan, it's not something which matches up with your quotidian experience of the music at all...

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If people are taking it as something that encapsulates a comprehensive representation of UK dance then they are obviously missing the point. I don't who is doing this or why. It's clear from the 'hardcore' qualifier that exclusivity is evident (and necessary).

I don't really like this "masculine/feminine" thing at all but it's fine to say you prefer rough to smooth and vice versa. Are we all supposed to appreciate both qualities equally? Anyone who does think HC material is so great BECAUSE it's anti-smoothness or somehow anti-feminine is stupid. It's great for what it is pro.

"for a phrase which has been in use for a decade plus, how come it hasn't trickled down to being used by fans and producers?"
- might you not ask the same about 'hauntology' or whatever other terms are applied by critics? there is no real need for fans or producers to use these terms - what would they gain from it? this is not a problem as far as i can see.

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'Hauntology' is an even more rubbish term than 'hardcore continuum'!

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both infinitely superior to 'electrodribble' as a term

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Well, the trouble is that they're the ones who are presenting it as an accurate history - they're writing the books and the articles, the secondary sources which people will (and do) take as gospel.

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Sort of related to M Bradshaw's thing-- I was thinking, recently, about what the core of my problem with S Reynolds is, and might have worked it out: it's that he so strongly believes in the idea of the music critic as intermediary&intercessory between musician and fan, and I so strongly believe in the relationship between music and fan. So, basically, catholic v protestant! Something like the SY/portals thing a while back, where his image of 'the portal' was 'the non-musical influence that you are guided to by reading Portrait of the Artist of the Consumer in the NME' (ie artist mediated through music critic), and mine was 'the thing you happen upon through over-attention to sleeve notes and b-sides' (ie artist's interests as hidden treasure in music-as-object). Obviously as a music critic it's all to the good that he considers himself to have an essential position in the act of music appreciation! I mean, otherwise-- what would be the point? How can you write music criticism unless you think you're fulfilling a necessary role? It's just, unfortunately, easy to slip into hubris.

We can overstress the dancing thing: yeah i think it's dumb to talk about a specific form of dance music w/out experience of the situation in which it is primarily experienced, but it'd be equally dumb to locate it only in that world and only in that instant, and to never try and see it in any wider context. S Reynolds has got carried away with one of his own ideas, and unfortunately he's establishment enough that he's carried away some others with him, and unfortunately that idea doesn't really hold any sort of water. But the act of making up a prism through which to view the world and marvelling at the funny shapes it makes is still essential.

i dunno why but while i find "hardcore cuntinuum" funny I'm uncomfortable w/ yr using "k-spunk": it seems, well, bullyish frankly although i'm sure it's not intended that way. If he's wrong, his wrongness can speak for itself.

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i preferred k-plunk myself. juvenile > sexual in my puritanical connotations book.

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yeah uh i have called him kerplunk before myself! so maybe I cannot talk. But I feel like sexualising someone's online pseudonym when you disagree with them crosses the line and becomes what we might call "a d1ck move".

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ha, it's a long-standing thing with various of us, we went through all the possible puns and this was def the best! though actually I was getting uncomfortable typing it repeatedly, but couldn't bring myself to actually type "k-punk".

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if it's a thing with a whole gang of you that kinda makes it worse!

(also surely more of a rhyme than a pun?)

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yeah but you can't really bully the establishment...

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haha ok i know k-punk seems to have nailed SR's colours to his mast but he's still nowhere near as establishment as Reynolds is!

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he's way more establishment than we are!

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mcarratala.livejournal.com

Dude, you write for the Guardian! In what possible way could you be more establishment?

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freakytigger.livejournal.com

Is this "murkage"?

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Well no, failed murkage maybe but I fail to see how that makes me establishment given my age, the length of time I've been doing professional writing, the fact that everyone involved in this has pretty much written for the Grau at some point. Etc.

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...okay, i'll bite: how is k-punk way more establishment than we are?

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as I said above - he and SR are the ones writing the books and the articles which will (and do) get taken as gospel by people wanting to learn about the history of UK club music. Maybe in 10 years Melissa, Dan and I will be establishment but if nothing else we're all too young right now.

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I think you're overestimating K-punk's position. Writing for the Wire he gets an engaged but v specialised audience; writing for the NS he's reaching an audience of people who aren't necessarily engaged and are therefore more likely to repeat his arguments until they become received wisdom, but we could say the same for yr position in the Friday Graun. Age doesn't mean much unless it's backed up by a publishing/tastemaking history, which KP doesn't have in anything like the way that SR does.

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koganbot

Also, my impression of Reynolds is that he's not interested in having his ideas be taken as gospel. I think he thinks that ideas are to be put forth for the general conversation, and that many hands will be involved in their shaping. That said, I don't always trust his ability to listen and to take in surprising and contrary viewpoints. But that said, I don't see this thread - for instance - as being an example of people trying to discuss his or K-Punk's ideas. And as I said I'm pretty distant from the scene and its convo.

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koganbot

Just read Melissa's thing and this thread and haven't gone back to untangle who is saying what and so forth, and I'm so far out of this discussion, but...

(1) If anything, Simon's and K-Punk's problem isn't ego but underconfidence, which means that they're relying more on their theoretical tools than on themselves as the wielders of the tools. And as I said back at the time of poor K-Punk's "Choose Your Weapons" thing, I think the guy is in a lot of pain and that this distorts his vision. (But I've not read much K-Punk, really, and though I've read a lot of Simon, it's been a while so it's not fresh.)

(2) Simon once very kindly helped me with advice on a piece about Hardknox that I had no business writing since I didn't know what I was talking about, he probably assuming - correctly, I think! - that I'd have something interesting to contribute to the discussion despite my incompetence.

(3) There is no such thing as "the role of the critic," any more than there's "the role of the musician" and "the role of the DJ" and "the role of the dancer" and "the role of the fan." There are lots of potential roles for all of these - "the role of the person" - and the role is what various critics/musicians/DJs/dancers/fans create for themselves.

(4) Subtracting their underconfidence, I don't see how what I do is different in kind from what Reynolds and K-Punk do (incl. saying when I think a whole genre of music has gone sour).

(5) As for the question of how dare the critic think he's more important than the subject matter, horrors horrors, here's what I wrote in a letter to Geeta earlier this decade (you can look it up):

My principle is this: We can't convey the romance and the adventure of music unless we're willing to convey our own romance and adventure. And if we want to continue on with the so-long-ago ideals of the music ("Don’t follow leaders" someone once said) — if we want readers to be inspired by the music, not subordinate to it — then we must set the example and not be subordinate to it ourselves.

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freakytigger.livejournal.com

Yes, I think I am more important than the music I listen to. I would hope that most people who knew me would rather I remained in existence than, say, Men At Work's "Down Under" did.

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don't make me choose!

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Melissa's piece is brilliant even if you neither know nor care about the HC debate. Her theory of soca aerobics is incredible (as is her ego-themed Paul White interview) and hopefully I'll remember to submit one or both to that Da Capo thing.

I basically agree that the critic should think him/herself more important, BUT it's so so important to remember a) that the artist is the primary source, and b) that criticism is a form of journalism and documentation, not just personal response.

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koganbot

"Personal response" and "journalism and documentation" are not the only two choices. Writing is living a part of one's life on the page (even if you're only filling in columns as some temp at some agency), and music is source material for your life, and I don't see why your life (or my life) is any less a primary source than the music is, or any less art. But then, criticism can also be, you know, criticism, analyzing and questioning what's going on and saying what should be going on, or intervening in any way you think is good. I never had any interest in being a journalist or a documentarian.

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that the artist is the primary source

I don't agree with this at all!

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I don't see how you can get around it, or why you'd want to. I'm not particularly standing up for authorial authority and obv it depends what kind of writing you're doing, but if your thing is to be a journalist and cultural commentator, you need to report the music accurately and not misrepresent or dismiss the people making it. I feel v strongly about that!

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eg the whole "wonky"/ket fiasco - when none of the producers talk about ket or even take it, when no one at nights where it's played is on ket, you can't just write that it has a synergy with ket. BECAUSE THAT IS NOT ACTUALLY TRUE. except in your IMAGINATION, and - this is the point - I don't particularly care about what anyone imagines is the case, I would rather read about what's actually happening. this is especially true for a nascent not-even-a-genre which most people have never heard of, and young producers still on their first few singles.

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koganbot

Again, you insist on giving us only two choices: (1) The artist as source, or (2) making up any old shit you want. Whereas, think if you're a person at that aerobics class: you most certainly need to take account of the beat, and the room, and the other dancers, and conventions surrounding aerobics, etc. etc. etc. You're not free to do any old thing, and if you acted as if you were, what you were doing probably wouldn't be worth much. But that doesn't mean that the person or people who created the sounds coming out of the boombox (what if it's a remix? who counts as the artist, the source?) are the source of what's going on in that room. They're only one element.

And the page-screen-conversation is our room. And, again, the "artist" is not the source of our room, is only one element - is only one of the artists involved in the room. Now, am I going to be an interesting part of the room myself, if I simply dismiss and make no effort to understand anything else, the world going on around me, everything that contributes to the room? Not very likely. If I only project what's already in my head, I'm not going to take in any new information, get any new stimulus or inspiration. If you looked at any of my Kuhn threads, you'll see that I tried to insist that we let Kuhn lead the conversation, that we tried to work out what he was going on about rather than playing our own familiar riffs. But for me, that's merely where we start, with his ideas. We're no more obligated to stick with his ideas at the expense of our own than dancers are limited to depicting the music and depicting their fellow dancers. But that doesn't mean we want to misrepresent his ideas, unless they're so boring that they can only be improved by misrepresentation.

What I'm reacting to is the tendency to consider musicmakers and streets and dance floors and kids on the bus as real but writers and pages and message boards and magazines as not quite so real, and the idea that it's the job of the latter to convey the former, that the former are the sources of life and we're but the mere reflection.

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Well, I think we actually agree: by "primary source", what I mean is that the artist necessarily leads the conversation. And all of us can take it wherever we want, but if we start somewhere too removed from the primary source, I don't think anyone will get anywhere worthwhile.

I don't think writers and journalists are any less real than dancers and average fans, but they DO have...a historical responsibility, I guess, to be accurate to the empirical evidence. At least at a certain level. It's why we (technically) (bloody economy) get paid, but the dancers have to pay to get in the club.

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koganbot

No we do not agree. The "artist" doesn't necessarily lead the conversation, unless you define "artist" as "anyone in the room I think has something to teach me, or whom an attempt to understand may lead to surprises." And even there, how much they "lead" - how much I attempt to start with their terms rather than my own - depends a lot on who the are. As I said elsewhere on this thread, I think K-Punk's view is distorted. How much do I let his distortions lead the discussion? I don't notice, in your interpreting K-Punk or Reynolds or Asher Roth or 3OH!3, that you seem particularly eager to let them lead the conversation. There are some pathological liars I came across on ilX who may be worth the effort to understand, but I'd certainly want to take into account that they are pathological liars. In any event, being accurate and letting someone lead the conversation aren't the same thing, and I don't see how one class of people (the artist) gets to have accuracy bestowed on it and gets to be lauded as a primary source in priority over everybody else.

"Journalism" to me is a bunch of bigoted and unexamined prejudices about who is considered important and who gets to lead the conversation. Whereas what the best story I have to tell and who or what the subject of that story should be are something I discover, not something I know in advance.

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theastronomymod.livejournal.com

Melissa's piece is brilliant even if you neither know nor care about the HC debate. Her theory of soca aerobics is incredible (as is her ego-themed Paul White interview) and hopefully I'll remember to submit one or both to that Da Capo thing.

I can attest to this. I am still not entirely sure what the "hardcore continuum" even is (though the more I hear second hand about it, the more I'm sure that it's not for me) yet I thoroughly enjoyed Bradshaw's piece.

Because her invocation of a bunch of sweaty women getting down to music in order to try and improve themselves (their bodies, their moods, their enjoyment of the world around them etc.) has a hell of a lot more to do with my experience of music than a bunch of critics tossing about more and more exclusive re-definitions of what they think music is about or should be, and trying to rewrite art to conform to their interpretations of it.

If the artist isn't the primary source, then WHO THE HELL IS?!?!? One might argue that the fan is. But it certainly is not the critic - or their nightclub alter ego, the super-DJ.

Sorry, I'm only just starting to explore dance culture - almost by accident - and it's stranger than any indie world I ever inhabited, in oh so many ways I still don't entirely understand.

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theastronomymod.livejournal.com

She does, however, remind me quite a bit of Miss AMP before the baby ate her brain.

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Yeah - when your theorising has reached a state where it's completely unrecognisable from/to how the music is consumed in real life (whether in raves or at soca aerobics classes), this is surely a huge problem for you! And it's not to do with theory qua theory: Melissa's theory of soca aerobics, and the Kode9/Kodwo Eshun paper she mentioned, use theory in such a way that it's instantly recognisable to your own experiences. Which is what she said except not as eloquent I guess!

(It's so cool you're getting into ye newe dance musicke btw - I've very nearly been at some of the same nights as you, like the Bugged Out on Easter weekend - went to Paris at the last minute instead. I'm 90% going to be at the Sónar warmup on Fri though, I think you mentioned that somewhere? And that reminds me, I owe you mp3s...)

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theastronomymod.livejournal.com

Yup, I'm at Sonar Warmup on Friday (and the BBC Radiophonic Workshop workshop on Sunday but I doubt you'll be at that!)

Also - are you going to School of Seven Bells tomorrow?

Going to see Richard Norris DJ next Friday at some new place called Cable in Sarf London - he seems to be someone who's very attuned to exactly the things that dance music and psych/dronerock share in common and highlighting those things.

It's strange, the different ways in which dance music impacts upon one when experienced in different contexts. Lots of things I couldn't STAND if played in a club will seem amazing when I'm listening to them while programming (I think this is as bigger reason for getting into electronic/dance music as the Alkan obsession - if not more - really repetitive dance music is fantastic for programming work) and vice versa. Also the physicality of sound - what FEELS good played on a giant sound system feels very different on headphones. Different aspects of the music leap out, different things work.

So I think it's fairly idiotic to commentate on what millieus music should be experienced in, without experiencing those millieus. Sure, setting can change music and music can change with the setting - and things can surprise you about where/how they do and don't work. But priviliging one over the other is really dodgy ground.

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