Creatures of the night

[koganbot]

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 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."]

Comments

[chuckeddy.livejournal.com]

Also, oh yeah, rockish singles I like this year, most of which you know about already. Pretty slim pickings, though I suspect some of the other albums listed above also have good singles on them that I just don't know are (or hear as) singles. The Cage The Elephant song is actually a radio hit, and has an outside shot at my year-end top ten (though not as good a one as White Wizzard).

White Wizzard – “High Speed GTO”
Cage The Elephant – “Ain’t No Rest For The Wicked”
The Love Willows – “Falling Faster”
Meercaz – “Unlust”
Florence and the Machine – “Rabbit Heart (Raise It Up)” (assuming this counts as "rock"; I'm not sure how I'd classify it.)
Slaraffenland – “Meet And Greet” (ditto)
Cauldron – “Chained Up In Chains”
Sarah Borges And The Broken Singles – “Do It For Free”
Kal – “Ding Deng Dong” (ditto as above)
Weird Al Yankovic – “Craigslist”
Nickelback – “Burn It To The Ground”
Yeah Yeah Yeahs – “Heads Will Roll”