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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."]
no subject
Okie Dokie and Talk Normal are artsy noise-core bands, by the way. It would be way beyond annoying to endure to an entire album by either, but somehow 5 songs in 10 minutes or whatever seems novel enough. Ditto Cross-Stitched Eyes' crusty early '80s (as in Void or early Die Kreuzen say)-style thrash-core. Meercaz and Frozen Bears are really noisy too, and their albums are short ones, but there's something more personable about them I haven't quite pinpointed yet.
Gene Dante is glam revisionism, Aggrolietes are ska revisionism, the Answer are classic rock revisionism, Crocodiles are Jesus and Mary Chain revisionism, Tim Carrol is Velvety Stoogey country singer-songwriting, the Pinx and Fires of Rome are hard rock bands disguised as indie bands. And so on and so forth.