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Last month Tom Ewing ran a World Cup Of 1990 on Twitter and nearing the end asked, "For voters here, I'm interested — has the relatively deep dive of this poll changed your opinion of 1990 at all? (assuming you had one!)" My basic response is too long for 280 characters, or even 2800, so I'm blogging it here, also referring to and embedding a YouTube playlist I created, " Dance Party 1990," made up mostly of tracks I heard (and in many cases discovered) through his tournament or that I found or recalled while seeing what 1990 tracks I myself wanted to nominate. Not exactly a best-of (my pool included another 8 or so tracks including Masta Ace and Happy Mondays that never quite fit the flow). I thought of the "Dance Party" moniker after finishing the playlist, so dance wasn't the intent but what I discovered I had: not all tracks in "dance" genres but all inspiringly danceable.



My answer to Tom's question:

I tend to be a More Is More kind of guy, but — in this poll at least, in the general super area of House-Rave-Dance (but not freestyle & hip hop & r&b & hair metal) — Joey Beltram and ilk clean everybody's clock. By "ilk" I don't mean "rave" or any particular genre or style but a tendency within any genre or style to HOLD YOUR OWN, to concentrate on a crucial sound or path or problem, some bone you're chewing, and there you stand your ground rather than synthesize or mash together or collide with or incorporate neighboring styles.*

And of course there's one towering exception, uncleaned and unclocked, Clivillés & Cole's remix of Denise Lopez's "Don't You Want To Be Mine," the only freestyle-house amalgam I've ever heard. Freestyle is basically dead by 1990, the poll's George Lamond track ("Bad Of The Heart") being touching but totally average, a snapshot of a genre that has no forward motion (though there's an unexpected glorious freestyle last gasp the next year from Lisette Melendez and Corina). But now there's an alternate universe in my mind where, instead of stopping dead, freestyle like an alien leaps atop of and claws its way into passing genres like house and techno and New Jack Swing and propagates from there. This kinda sorta DOES happen in 1992 and 1993 in Korea, and for all I know is happening throughout the late '80s and '90s in Japan, the Land Where Italo Lives, but anyway *I* don't find out about any of that for another 17 years.

Speaking of Korea — or Los Angeles — I say in passing, in my kind of in-passing "Legend Of The Glockeater," that the lesson that Drunken Tiger learned from the Wu-Tang Clan is that less is more and more is more, too. In another piece (mostly about rock) I call this Recombinant Dub, to give Jamaica pride of place: My basic attempt is to identify a kind of double direction of contrary motion, which can exist between genres or within a genre or within a person or even within a day: Like, you subdue the thoughts inside your head, taking everything down to a main thing, your breath, say, but then with the inner chatter stilled, sounds around you — crickets, passing cars, tinnitus, a distant jackhammer — come rushing in.

In mid-'70s Bronx you have hip-hop DJs clearing out the rest of a track — taking out the vocals, the flourishes — to bring everything down to the breakbeat, and with 2 turntables and 2 copies of a record you can potentially play that breakbeat forever; but being DJs they use the never-ending breakbeat as a frame for adding sounds and cuts and riffs and melodies and scrapes and flourishes from other records, a whole memory of funk but also Monkees and Kraftwerk, and then tags and shoutouts and rap battles from your crew — potentially anything — and hip-hop is born. And then closing in on the '90s maybe you can hear this within house, acid house being both this singular corrosive 303 sound but also the tendency to sample soundbites. Or think of the house beats added to Denise Lopez. For a related submerged and perhaps otherwise imaginary unknown continent, listen to the second half of Liz Torres's "I Hear Voices (Voices In My Head)" on my playlist; geysers of salsa suddenly emerging from beneath the house beats.

In New Jack Swing ex-boyband New Edition guys find their way into the adventure of hip-hop, in one sense it's all down to a rhythm that sweeps away everything in its path, but it also manages to sweep in a lot: harmonies, black vocal history (a year later: "Motown Philly"). There's a social depth, since New Jack Swing doesn't just put different musics together, it potentially throws different audiences and different musicians together, finds a way for different social streams to coalesce.** (But you can almost feel the need for a pushback, a fight, elements determined to resist.)

On my 1990 Pazz & Jop ballot I put both a Snap! and a Chill Rob G version of "The Power" near the top, behind "Justify My Love," but ahead of LL and Michel'le and "Vogue" and "Roam" and "Ice Ice Baby." Didn't include the New Jack Editions but mentioned Ralph Tresvant and Johnny Gill in my comments. Anyway by 1991 I decided "The Power" didn't hold up, the whole International House thing and its forced raps and diva samples now seeming tiresome and shallow and who cares. No reason in principle that this should be so, but it was.*** I'm glad the Denise Lopez remix showed up in this poll to remind me I don't have to hate C&C. Actually, as far as the sonic feel, Beltram and C&C-Lopez are hardly opposites. Each sounds as solid and obdurate as the other.**** In the Dance Party I've interspersed these blocks of thundering rave but I'll have one of 'em (e.g.) emerging naturally from a dance ditty that precedes it and leading logically to a hard rock song that follows, the raver seemingly giving birth to the rocker.

So, again, both impulses at once: push it altogether, but also, hey STOP, what's that sound, listen, take account of THIS! So, take account of Joey Beltram's pulsating boulders, V.I.M. taking the piss in "Maggie's Last Party," LFO's dark harm, Marina Van-Rooy's sly "Sly One" (okay, I don't have an adjective for this — who is she? — but I like it), Renegade Soundwave's "Thunder" which is a haunted house that they emptied of all its furniture! Rising High's "Magic Roundabout" is like a bunch of STOP moments strung together, a necklace of boulders, both impulses again. All this stuff I mostly missed in 1990, my not having an ongoing story for house, rave, techno. For all I knew, these tracks could've appeared anytime from '86 to '07, me saying "Hello, where are you from?" with no sense of chronological before or after and no feel of "1990" as they loomed into earshot.*****

Embeds and footnotes )

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Chuck Eddy on K-pop:

http://www.spin.com/articles/k-pop

Chuck wrote this over a year ago, told me he didn't think Spin had made it available online so I didn't look, but it turns out they had. Excerpts:

"horse-whinnying Cypress Hill–style nasal frat-hop" (Seo Taiji & Boys)

"hiring hotties as much for dancing as singing" (H.O.T.)

"tunes about shy boys, kissing, and snow" (S.E.S.)

"threw samples hard and soft — notably, traditional Asian gorgeousness — into the pot" (Drunken Tiger)

"unprecedented combination of talent, looks, ambition, healthy living, and multilingual studiousness" (BoA)

"Maybe somebody somewhere raps faster than E.via on 'Shake!' but no way as adorably." (E.via)

"G-Dragon and T.O.P. from long-standing boy bunch Big Bang begin by banging big" (GD&TOP)

"mega-delectable mega-hit 'Gee'" (SNSD)
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You know that uncut version of Stroheim's Greed that you somehow possess and that you finally managed to set time aside to watch this week, vowing that you would let nothing stand in the way? Well this is what stands in the way: Chuck Eddy talks to eight of his friends, it's on podcast, three podcasts, three hours, it's over on rockcritics.com, I'm one of the talking friends, the others are Phil Dellio, Ned Raggett, Alfred Soto, Edd Hurt, Amy Phillips, Kevin John Bozelka, and Christopher Weingarten. Scott Woods oversees it all. As for a preview of what was said, I don't know yet, I haven't listened, it was by phone and we didn't all talk to him at once*: but Randy Montana is good, this year's U.S. Top 40 isn't, and what's so new about mixing electro with r&b and hip-hop anyway?



The occasion for this gathering was the impending publication of Chuck's Rock And Roll Always Forgets by Duke University Press.

*Chuck and I tried to talk at once, however.
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"Here's Frank Kogan, here's Chuck Eddy, and here's this dude!"

Dave Moore has posted a transcript of his rockcritics.com interview - had originally been a podcast (Scott Woods the interviewer):

(When I saw there was a third vote for I Am Me, I said to myself, "Must be the father of a couple of pre-teen girls. What other critics listen to this stuff, outside our circle?")
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In two unrelated incidents, Chuck Eddy and I mention Metropolis Records within the same 24-hour period.

http://www.thesinglesjukebox.com/?p=2678

http://community.livejournal.com/poptimists/786913.html
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FK (You make me wanna reblog, in the kitchen on the floor):

My Dylan blurb for Paste. It only makes a passing reference to Ashlee, but she was saturating my mind when I wrote it, so I feel she inhabits every word, including the words I lifted from Mark Sinker.

Not to mention the words I lifted from Greil Marcus.

The ones from Mark were "Dylan pulled together worlds that want to remain separate but mustn't be allowed to," except in Mark's version it wasn't Dylan but the Village Voice music section under Chuck Eddy. I thought Mark had posted them on Tom's lj, but I haven't found it (was it Freaky Trigger?); it was right after the Voice fired Chuck. I used the words with Mark's permission.

The ones from Greil Marcus were the stuff about Elvis not knowing his place, which I lifted without asking, and it wasn't a direct lift, just the basic idea, which I gave my own twist to; it was from Lies About Elvis, Lies About Us, his commentary in the Voice Literary Supplement (December 1981) about Albert Goldman's Elvis. Greil: "[Elvis] wasn't willing to keep his place, and now he is being returned to it."

EDIT: The Mark quote was on [livejournal.com profile] poptimists:

it's not the end of the world, but it is the end of a project, and that's sad -- even tho projects do usually end (and final acts are usually bloody)

(no chuck in the voice in the 80s, no "my" wire)

(wire after me is a lesson in the possibilities and problems of a medium circulated among obsessives only: i think this "oddness" is the heart of said project actually -- an interface between two worlds that want to separate and mustn't be allowed to


So it wasn't only about the Voice under Chuck in the '00s, but also about Chuck in the Voice in the '80s, and Mark at The Wire in the early '90s.

http://poptimists.livejournal.com/140139.html
(April 19, 2006)
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Lotsa convos on Tumblr today somewhat inspired by Xhuxk's P&J essay, e.g., this one and this one and this one and this one. The problem that I'm having with them, and that Tom recognizes better than the other posters, is that the words "consensus" and "populist" and "contrarian" don't take care of themselves without elaboration. [EDIT: Chuck didn't write the headline that used that word, by the way.] One gripe I have in particular is the degradation of the word "consensus," which didn't used to mean "taste cluster" or "gets a plurality of votes" but rather "general agreement" or, more strongly (as in "the decision was reached by consensus"), "virtually everybody in the room signs off on it." So, there was no consensus in 2002 2000 that George W. Bush was the best man to be president or even that he won the election, but there was consensus that we should abide by the Supreme Court's decision as to who was to be president.

One reason I dislike the word's degradation is that if you're standing against a "consensus" that a whole bunch of other people don't actually consent to either, you're not being particularly contrarian. So if you communicate with a lot of rock critics you're not going to find consensus either that Animal Collective and ilk are good or that Taylor Swift et al. deserve to be dismissed out of hand, so in opposing those positions you're not really contrarian. In certain offline situations your ideas might put you genuinely alone among your friends, but still, you carry the rockcrit world in your mind so you're not alone in that world.

As for "populist," what's populist? Are you populist if you're for the cheer captain, who is popular, after all? Or do you have to be for the girl on the bleachers, or for the kid who snuck across the street to cop a cigarette?

But what interests me most is that people, despite trying to simultaneously stand with The People and stand against the crowd (good trick if you can pull it off; I'll give some examples in the comments), don't love and vote for particular songs for such reasons but rather vote for what they consider good music. "Sounds good" or "I like the way the music makes me feel" or "I like the mood" or "it's got a killer beat and I like dancing to it" or "I'm taken intellectually and emotionally by what's going on in the lyrics" or "I'm impressed by the philosophical and political questions the lyrics raise" or "I'm fascinated by the music's form" and so forth will trump "liking this makes me a populist" or "liking this makes me a contrarian" every time. So the fact that people's tastes do tend to cluster by social group and social class has to be explained, as does the fact that through their taste people get to differentiate themselves personally and socially from their fellows. I raised this issue in my very first Rules Of The Game column in mid 2007 and kept working at it in all the columns and followups through Rules Of The Game #9 (see links for all of them here) and then returned to the question throughout the series especially at nos. 12, 13, and 18. My point there was that social solidarity and social differentiation and personal differentiation all have an effect, but the effect is neither direct nor some mystical social pull but rather comes out of one's daily music listening and one's interaction with friends and acquaintances and with the broader culture that one gets through the media and participates in online. The words "consensus" and "populist" and "contrarian" wave vaguely at the world of such interaction without bringing us to it.
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Over on his own Pazz & Jop ballot, Josh Langhoff recommends that we list the "gatekeepers" who introduced us to our favorite music. Someone named "Chuck Eddy" recurs on his list. In any event, here's my P&J ballot again, this time with the added info of who or what first led me to the music. (I don't think "gatekeeper" is the right term, really.)

Singles 2009

1. Shystie ft. DJ Deekline "New Style" - Kat Stevens on [livejournal.com profile] poptimists
2. The Black Eyed Peas "Boom Boom Pow" - Lex Macpherson on his lj
3. Love And Theft "Runaway" - Chuck Eddy on the ilX Rolling Country 2009 thread
4. MC Lars ft. Brett Anderson & Gabe Saporta "Hey There Ophelia" - Moggy on her lj
5. Timberlee ft. Tosh "Heels" - Lex on his lj
6. The Lonely Island "I'm On A Boat" - Dave Moore, either on his Cure For Bedbugs blog or his Tumblr or his lj or by email
7. Das Racist "Combination Pizza Hut And Taco Bell (Wallpaper Remix)" - Kat Stevens, either on her lj or on [livejournal.com profile] poptimists
8. Rich Boy "Drop" - MySpace music front page (and my previous fandom of artist, whom I'd first heard back in '05 on Denver's reggaeton station when it was playing the shit out of the remix of "Get To Poppin'" featuring Pitbull)
9. Girls Aloud "Untouchable" - ?? I think it was through the Singles Jukebox
10. Röyksopp ft. Robyn "The Girl And The Robot" - Dave Moore by email, but I didn't start liking the song until it came up for review on the Jukebox and I revisited it

Albums 2009

1. Taylor Swift Fearless - My own vast insane fandom brought me to this one, with the help of Big Machine Records and various radio stations and other outlets (first heard Taylor on the radio in summer '06 but it was Jimmy Draper who insisted later in the year that I listen to her first album)
2. The-Dream Love Vs. Money - I think it was Lex who was talking this up first, but it might have been Dave. My interest already existed because of "Ditch That" (recommended by Luc Sante) and "Umbrella"
3. Ashley Monroe Satisfied - A Columbia publicist sent me the promo back in early 2006, probably at the instigation of Chuck Eddy, who was still music editor at the Voice (alb was shelved, finally released on iTunes this year)
4. Rihanna Rated R - The world at large
5. Scooter Under the Radar Over the Top (The Dark Side Edition) - Chuck Eddy, on my own lj (but I'd gotten him interested in Scooter in the first place, and I think it was Jeff Worrell who'd gotten me interested in Scooter)
6. Lily Allen It's Not Me, It's You - The world, again, with special input from Erika Villani; but it was Mitya who first talked up Lily to me in March '06 on Rolling Teenpop, with enthusiastic support from David Orton and William Bloody Swygart; Mitya'd heard about her from Popjustice
7. Martina McBride Shine - The Ross-Broadway branch of the Denver Public Library (but it was Chuck Eddy who got me interested in McBride back in '99 or so)
8. Electrik Red How To Be A Lady: Volume 1 - This must have been Lex, again, on lj, with Dave right on his heels
9. K'naan Troubadour - Heard "ABC's" by accident when the record company was promoting it as its single of the week on its YouTube site which I was visiting for some other artist's track; finally got back to the album because Chuck and Xgau had praised it
10. Brad Paisley American Saturday Night - Chuck Eddy on ilX's Rolling Country 2009 thread

Fresh meat

May. 15th, 2009 10:47 am
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Chuck Eddy and Matt Cibula and Andrew Unterberger join the Jukebox! I'm not actually sure who Andrew is, but I look forward to some haiku from Matt, and Chuck has already compared "Battlefield" to Battles and The Field. (They'd joined Jukebox one track earlier, but I like the writeups more on this one.)
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New link for Chuck Eddy's "Chuck It All In" column. (It's all still there, only the URL has changed.)
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Laura Branigan Self Control )

Raf Self Control )

Ricky Martin Que Dia Es Hoy )

Infernal Self Control )

Etc. )

(Laura's is the one that touches me most: she's a klutzy stomper who overenunciates lyrics, but with a song this good it makes her charming, an everywoman in the vortex of the night. Raf (the original version, came out several months before the Branigan) is good bread-and-butter Italodisco, Ricky's version's got the most flair and flexibility but he's a bit too easy with it, Infernal are forceful though far too cold.)
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Chuck Eddy's Best Albums Of The Year Countdown, Part 2: Numbers 51 - 100 (has eleven albums I've heard, including Veronicas and María Daniela Y Su Sonido Lasser)

Chuck Eddy's Best Albums Of The Year Countdown, Part 1: Numbers 101 - 150 (has five albums I've heard, including Black Kids and Demi Lovato)
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Chuck Eddy on Scooter:

Scooter Über Alles

The Slade comparison, it turns out, comes not only from their big-everywhere-but-the-U.S. status (see also Boney M, or soccer), but apparently also from the fact that their front-MC, a rectangular-headed drill sergeant named H.P. Baxxter given to doing onstage aerobics in outer space track suits, Shouts! All! Their! Lyrics! Like! This! That way, Slade-fan-like working class white kids ("chavs," according to certain Scooter dissenters writing youtube comments) can heroically punch the sky.
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Ashlee, Trashlee, We All Fall Down

...my favorite non-single is probably "Boys" (produced, like much of the album, by Kenna and the Neptunes' Chad Hugo) for its Chic bassline, for the way Ashlee switches between light and tough vocal modes, for the way she splits the title into four syllables, and for the punchline "use your head but not that one."

Also, for those of you who missed this late post by [livejournal.com profile] petronia on the poptimists' Bittersweet World thread, I'm reprinting it here:

Looking up week-old thread to say that I heard "Outta My Head" in the HMV the other day and thought "You know, all the indie peeps would love this song to pieces if they thought it was by Santogold," and then... I found out it was written by Santogold. HUZZAH FOR ME??

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