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]

[I suspect "conscribed" is a hybrid of "prescribed" and "constricted."]

Maybe even "conscripted," too? Honestly, I have no idea where that word came from!

Anyway, here's how I followed Frank's post on that thread, though part of it will make much more sense if you read the entire thread (and there, I fucked up the html, as often happens):

Honestly, my biggest problem with rock music these days is that it isn’t (or doesn’t, take your pick) rock enough. Which I guess somewhat aligns with Frank’s “tired and stodgy results.” (And which, again, doesn’t mean I don’t find some other genres at least as tired these days.) (And again, if we’re talking “adventure and mystery of the night,” I don’t see how the Reatard “Lightning Bug” song I quoted above doesn’t aim for that, since that’s what the song’s about.)

[martinskidmore.livejournal.com]

Yes, I have nothing against rock's ambitions at all, nor its desire to be edgy and radical. As you know, these days I am far keener on hip hop and R&B, but my youth was all about punk (I was 17 when it started here, a perfect age), and a large proportion of my favourite records ever are rock of various kinds. Punk in '76/'77 clearly did reference some older acts (Dolls, Stooges etc) but it didn't merely recycle them, and what it was using was relatively obscure. Punk did seem radical and dangerous at the time, but now the acts doing exactly the same thing are about as fresh and exciting as swing was in 1977. The trouble is, rock still gets positioned as the most artistically interesting genre ("music" mags are primarily rock mags - anything centred on anything else labels itself by the genre), and acts making music that their parents might have seen as dated often think they are radical and exciting and dangerous. I do like the odd rock record, still, but the vast majority strikes me as incredibly tired and void of ideas or ambition, and it's still all over the place. I'd struggle to name three rock acts that started in the last 20 years that I really care about.

I can't talk about funky house with any expertise, but I guess to me it is fun dance music. Yes, more stylish and classy than Cascada, say, but then almost everything is. I guess i ma using 'fun' in a pretty broad sense here.

Actually, some more thoughts strike me about fun and rock's positioning. There were reunion shows some years ago by some acts I love, like the Velvets and Pistols - and I wanted nothing to do with them, because they felt of their time, and by the time of the reunions I felt I would just find it depressing, however well they recreated past glories. On the other hand, I did go to see the Stooges in 2005 or so - I guess coming to them late made a difference, took them out of their time-specific context. I suppose the Velvets' historic place was more present to me. I also went to see the Rezillos 25 years after their one great album - they were about fun and exciting tunes, not any kind of rebellion, so I had no trouble enjoying them enormously.