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Creatures of the night
Over at the Jukebox the subject of funky house somehow came up on a Jay Reatard thread, and so here's my addition to a conversation between ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
martinskidmore and chuckeddy:
Martin, I'm nowhere near being someone who creates or consumes the codes surrounding "funky house," but it sure seems to be coding something more than just "fun dance music" – I hear stylishness, and the adventure and mystery of the night, and not just anyone's night (no mere boshing Cascadas here), but a discerning listener's poignant and risky night.
Not that it shouldn't, since something that's "just fun" usually isn't all that fun, but I don't know of much that's trying to be nothing more than fun anyway.
I read you more as being fed up with rock's tired and stodgy results, but that's not a knock on rock's ambitions, is it? I do see where one can argue that rock's old ambitions have now become a cover for what's actually defensive and unimaginative, but that's not a result that's written into either the ambitions or drawing on the not-so-recent past for one's vocabulary.
(The adventure and mystery of the night is a role that rock once laid claim to - the electric excitement of the electric guitar! - and rock's night-time adventure is something that Marshall Jefferson in Chicago and the techno guys in Detroit were consciously emulating, right?)
[Also, check Chuck's comparison between electronic dance and metal: "there is a kind of rock these days that's as obsessed with new strange innovative sounds as the most extreme kinds of electronic dance music or whatever, and it's called metal. But just like in dance music, supposed metal innovations now seem to happen in almost indiscernible increments, within a more and more conscribed perimeter, so you need to be an expert with a microscope to even notice them."]
[I suspect "conscribed" is a hybrid of "prescribed" and "constricted."]
martinskidmore and chuckeddy:Martin, I'm nowhere near being someone who creates or consumes the codes surrounding "funky house," but it sure seems to be coding something more than just "fun dance music" – I hear stylishness, and the adventure and mystery of the night, and not just anyone's night (no mere boshing Cascadas here), but a discerning listener's poignant and risky night.
Not that it shouldn't, since something that's "just fun" usually isn't all that fun, but I don't know of much that's trying to be nothing more than fun anyway.
I read you more as being fed up with rock's tired and stodgy results, but that's not a knock on rock's ambitions, is it? I do see where one can argue that rock's old ambitions have now become a cover for what's actually defensive and unimaginative, but that's not a result that's written into either the ambitions or drawing on the not-so-recent past for one's vocabulary.
(The adventure and mystery of the night is a role that rock once laid claim to - the electric excitement of the electric guitar! - and rock's night-time adventure is something that Marshall Jefferson in Chicago and the techno guys in Detroit were consciously emulating, right?)
[Also, check Chuck's comparison between electronic dance and metal: "there is a kind of rock these days that's as obsessed with new strange innovative sounds as the most extreme kinds of electronic dance music or whatever, and it's called metal. But just like in dance music, supposed metal innovations now seem to happen in almost indiscernible increments, within a more and more conscribed perimeter, so you need to be an expert with a microscope to even notice them."]
[I suspect "conscribed" is a hybrid of "prescribed" and "constricted."]
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Er...Yeah, good point. I guess I'd forgotten about hair-metal in general (the last popular guitar-rock genre I really cared about) when I wrote that "20 years ago" stuff above. But still, I don't think hair-metal in general was as good or important as early Chicago/Detroit house/techo, or early '80s hip-hop or r&b (okay, that's going back a few more years -- but I love plenty of late '80s hip-hop, too), and I suppose I'd rate hair metal and Latin freestyle about equally. And there's lots of other dance pop from the late '80s that falls outside of those genres. (Stacey Q, Company B, Taylor Dayne, Pebbles, Lisa Lisa, Madonna, etc., etc,( So I still think late '80s dance genres beat late '80s rock genres; maybe it's possible I used one "totally" too many when I wrote "I probably would have totally agreed that rock had been totally outshined as entertainment and interesting music by hip-hop and r&b and dance music," though.
Bottom line; let's see here (and I know a lot of this makes me weird.)
I prefer '80s hip-hop to '90s or '00s hip-hop
I prefer '80s house to '90s or '00s house
I prefer '80s techno to '90s or '00s techno
I prefer '80s reggae dancehall to '90s or '00s reggae dancehall
I prefer '80s dance-pop (Latin freestyle etc) to '90s or '00s dance-pop
I vastly prefer '80s r&b to '90s or '00s r&b
BUT...
I also vactly prefer '80s commercial rock (hair metal etc) to '90s or '00s commercial rock AND
I vastly prefer '80s underground/indie rock (new wave, post-punk, pigfuck, etc) to '90s or '00s underground/indie rock
THOUGH ON THE OTHER HAND
I actually prefer '00s commercial country to '80s or '90s commercial country (and I'd probably take '90s over '80s. Which is to say it's the only genre I can think of at the moment that actually seems to be getting better. Or it was; I'd say it peaked a few years ago. Or maybe I'm just souring on it.)
I also prefered '90s Mexican rock to '00s Mexican rock, fwiw. (Don't know enough about '80s Mexican rock to compare. Though actually, by "'90s" here I really mean EARLY '90s, which may well have meant late '80s in Mexico given release dates.) (And there are other musics from all over the world that I'm mostly clueless about whenever they came out.)
On the other other hand....
If the year ended right now, I'd probably have three hip-hop albums (K'Naan, New Boyz, DJ Quick and Kurupt though them just by the skin of their teeth) in my 2009 top ten, the most hip-hop albums I would have listed for several years. And only two country albums (Collin Raye and Brad Paisley) would make my list (with Mac MacAnally and Miranda Lambert on the cusp), which I believe is the fewest country albums I would have listed in several years.
So I have no idea what all that adds up to. Won't ask you to do the math, if i can't do it myself.
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With metal I'm hopelessly out of it. And with current rock there's something self-fulfilling in my dislike, since if I dislike I don't listen much, if I don't listen much I don't get to hear what I will like or come to appreciate the stuff I was disliking etc. But in the first half of the '00s you and various publicists kept me aware of a lot of rock anyway, and while I was hardly a completist in my listening through Paper Thin Walls in '06-'08, I had a sense of what was out there on the more avant labels that went well beyond "indie," and the best stuff had trouble getting well beyond "interesting," and "not bad."
But then my favorite albums of the '00s - Autobiography, Marshall Mathers LP, Carrying On, Horse Of A Different Color, Blackout - to my mind fit with all the rock I grew up with. And I get the sense that electronic dance (at least of the less Europop type) plays more of a rock role in Europe (and in many U.S. clubs) than current rock does, though by "rock role" I mean the role that rock used to play in my wee years.
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I will concede that this has largely been my experience with the '90s and '00s rock I've liked, too -- Even the Gore Gore Girls (probably my favorite rock band this decade) seem really marginal to me compared to Montgomery Gentry or Ashlee or Eminem. (And to be honest, I've actually had even more problems with metal, where discrete songs tend to be really hard to come by. Though "High Speed GTO" by White Wizzard has an excellent shot at making my top ten singles list this year, fwiw.) Still, I guess I'm just not ready to write off the genre; there's just to much interesting stuff happening. And while I guess my very favorite albums and singles this decade aren't rock (at least if you don't count country or Ashlee type pop as rock), I'd still say I heard as much rock I liked this decade as music from lots of other genres. I guess it depends on how important it is to you that all music be great. For you, I gather that's important. For me, I just want stuff to sustain me, sometimes. Even my favorite albums, I dont't really return to all that much. And this isn't a new phenomenon -- my listening has always been that way. I'd much rather listen to 20 good albums than 1 great one, anyday.
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