Most hypes dumbfound me. A suspicion always nags: do they like the song because it massages their auditory nerves in a pleasing way (i.e. a sort of ‘objective’ elation)? Or is it because they unconsciously get excited by everyone else supposedly liking it, and thus like the song more than they would were they to hear it ‘on its own’ (if you catch my drift)? Or is it a combination of the two? I’m sure some of you have tried playing pre-recorded crowd noises while DJing (I’m listening to Moodymann’s ‘Answer Machine’ as I’m typing this—a great example). It’s a bit cheesy, but it always works brilliantly. The extra ‘cheers’ and ‘yeahs’ don’t really add anything to the songs, yet they somehow make people appreciate the songs hiding behind the cheers a lot more. A banal observation, perhaps, but this group behaviour must play a part in these blog-hypes as well. I think it’s so as I find it very hard to explain why everyone goes bananas specifically for the new Digitalism track, say, and not one of the hundreds of other songs like it.
One interesting aspect of this blog DJing phenomenon is that people are encouraged to listen in on the songs before they go to a gig. As Swears points out, traditionally, most club DJs have prided themselves on playing songs that few people on the dance floor have heard—that single song that will make the dance-floor dwellers go ‘WTF is this?’. Not so with these DJs, they deliberately play songs that have made the blog rounds. In doing so, they are much closer to hip-hop, r&b and indie-rock DJs than house and techno DJs in their approach.
Also:
Loads of crunk = rock-ey in places (if you ask me)
Loads of Baltimore = (often) rock-ey
Loads of Justice/Oizo/SebastiAn = rock-ey in the extreme
Loads of ‘nu-rave’ = rock-ey
...so arguably not a lot of house.
Now I’m off to se a real house DJ tear da roof off!