Bring The Noise

labrat

hot on the heels of love
Picked up a copy of Simon Reynold’s Bring The Noise yesterday - £10 in Fopp !!(Manchester)
Didn’t know it was even out!!
not really a thread just a tip for MCR bargain huntaz
 

swears

preppy-kei
Liked Rip it Up... (the chapters I read, anyway) Is this any good? Seems like it would cover more stuff I'd be into, like the emergence of genres like house in the late 80s/early 90s. I prefer to read articles on music written at the time rather than in retrospect, anyway. I suppose I'll have to get around to picking up Energy Flash as well.
 

francesco

Minerva Estassi
Got it in the mail from Amazon this morning. Reynolds is one of my all time favorite writers so really happy to begin to read this.
 

alo

Well-known member
I'm about half way through at the minute.
I am in two minds as to whether the black/white divide is a good thing to use to traverse this particular era in music or not. Is Reynolds gonna go back to the same source material and publish something else beginning with a different theme?
It makes sense in as much as it's a compilation tool, but also as a framework to make sense of the last 20 odd years also. i think in some instances/chapters though, I wanted to hear more, (In terms of his new notes at the end of each chapter possibly) Could have written a whole thesis on (Or come back to the strands of): Britpop, Pirate Radio, Nirvana. Really didn't need anything whatsoever on PJ Harvey, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Morrissey, Beastie boys. Interesting enough in themselves (and how they relate in some way to the appropriation of, or resistance to, Black Music) but because they are culled from old articles, the type of interview/piece dictates that the points go unrelated.
Still, loved the MTV piece, and it is highly addictive in its variety, you'll do well to not cherry pick pieces to begin with.
I think to be honest, I love it more when Reynolds zooms out and gets on about the Form of music; how it is consumed, how it is consumed changing, and therefore changing our relationship with it, changing our perception of it. How the future is shaping up compared to the past, sociological/ political conditions, cultural conditions; real overview stuff. Like a lot of the interviews linked from the Rip It... website, and the interview with K-Punk in Fact.
What's everyone elses verdict?
 

gek-opel

entered apprentice
Got this yesterday- speed read the entire thing like RIUASA... Reynolds' writing is as ever a total pleasure to read... only downside this time around are the interview pieces, which have a slightly less essential quality than the rest...

Somewhere in there he says that he was applying for a grant to write a whole book (ie in the style of RIUASA or Energy Flash) on the black/white US/JA/UK dialectic, but he never got the funding, which is a shame as its obviously deeply fertile territory (it's referred to as "white on black" in the footnote to "Roots 'n' Future".).. Loved the bit on the "One White Dude" in HipHop vids (vs "Solitary Black Guy" at indie gigs).. "green eyed soul" a nice neologism too... and good to get the contemporaneous viewpoints on genres from post rock to Grime, the feeling of not knowing how these things will turn out, how they are unfinished projects, ripe with potentiality is keenly felt...
 

francesco

Minerva Estassi
On only read the first chapters so far. yes Simon writing is always a pleasure, even when he was much younger, he is a natural born writer. As someone who like me is trying of reborn itself as a writer (of science mostly, but also tried and failing of write about metal recently), i'm in deep awe.

I'm only circa five years younger than Simon, but i remember, as a young hip (but also not really so hip, help me, i was also a young metal and prog lover, but in Italy was not uncommon to listen to Meat Puppets and Wire and My Bloody Valentine while listening to Yes or Darkthrone, is the foreigner uncool place thing, probably) rock lover, the difficulty, the shock of discovering through Rap the Black music. Rap was hated by rockers but i founded it awesome sonically (the lyrics at the time i couldn't understand). The black/white divide was real in those times, as other great divide of the '80: chart pop/underground rock, punk/metal, pre '77/post'77, goth/soul. Then in the '90 everything kind of melted....

A thing that is both great and a bit sad for me about the book so far: the book remind me of a time when music was really a fucking sonic mind/body blast for me. Why is not no more today is probably me becoming old and boring, i hope.
 

dHarry

Well-known member
A thing that is both great and a bit sad for me about the book so far: the book remind me of a time when music was really a fucking sonic mind/body blast for me. Why is not no more today is probably me becoming old and boring, i hope.
Yes, I remember reading Reynolds' pieces in Melody Maker 89-93-ish as well as that shock/thrill of discovering MBV, Public Enemy, rave/jungle etc. It was PE who opened the doors into "black" music history for me.

I mentioned around here once that growing older and encroaching cynicism/historical knowledge must have something to do with that waning of thrill, and the idea was completely rejected! But of course a 16-year-old isn't necessarily going to know that Razorlight's In The Morning is a sad imitation of the Talking Heads, or even care for that matter ("so what? you're just old"). But on the other hand, another huge thrill for me when younger was discovering that the Velvets came before the Jesus & Mary Chain, that the Stooges predated punk etc., and despite them being "old" they were still underground/unknown/to-be-discovered, which doesn't pertain so much in the age of cd/reissues/ipod/slsk total availability.

But it's not only due to growing old; pop/rock is also growing old, and may have run its course, as Lester Bangs suggested way back in the early 70's after the Stooges' Funhouse I think - despite niche sub-sections doing interesting stuff, it's mostly recombinations and po-mo whether with or without irony.
 

gumdrops

Well-known member
anyone go to the reynolds-don letts thing at borders the other week? i went along, missed a bit of it but thought it was interesting if a bit stilted. reynolds doesnt really come across in person (like many writers) like he does in print, so i felt his interviewing of don letts wasnt really as satisfying as it might have been. didnt really progress or build up to anything, was somewhat bitty. don letts, with all due respect, was interesting, but he seems a bit stuck in the 70s. and reynolds obv didnt agree with his theory about how the standards have dropped in JA music on the whole or how bass-loss in JA music is a terrible thing but he didnt really say why (although i did kinda agree with letts that the standards have dropped incredibly, due in no small part to hip hops influence). neither reynolds or letts really engaged the other fully. reynolds seemed almost a bit hesitant to, maybe out of respect, or maybe cultural reasons (ironic considering the premise of the book maybe), im not sure.

anyway, i like the book a lot. very stimulating stuff. not sure about the idea that there is no trading between black and white artists (which is a whole post in itself) going on right now as theres stuff happening underneath the surface but i suppose reynolds is pining for that to be happening on a more visible mainstream level, but as he knows, the mainstream isnt really where radical ideas are being aired right now. i find reynolds perspective on the black music he covers really interesting but its funny that throughout the book theres this slight distance between him and black music. hes quite resistant to ever getting on soulboy turf where you feel at one or 'identify' with black music, but at the same time, hes far from being a typical rock snob sneering at black music, although in the opening essay, he does kinda come off a bit like that as he hates the soul infested black and white pop of the day. that essay at the beginning is interesting compared to the one at the end which im thinking is purposely there to bookend the book - there, hes bemoaning the fact black and white forms have little to say to each other. but it seems like were basically in a very 80s type period all over again anyway arent we? white artists doing black music being incredibly succesful with it and often endorsed by black artists (winehouse, timberlake, joss stone etc), black artists barring a few not doing so well, so the tradeoff IS still there.
 

borderpolice

Well-known member
Winehouse and stone dont have big success by appropriating the latest black music (which still is hiphop i'm afraid), they use elder forms (motown,soul etc)

I think the reason is quite different: HH as a m usical form is less following the "nice melody, nice harmony, AABA" type song structure that sells to the masses (young males, the main HH audience). In other words, cloning Motown is more mainstream compatible, in t erms of musical structure.
 

swears

preppy-kei
I think it's all those ker-azy kids kids with their text speak.

"MEET U N LDN"

"WER N LDN?"

"BY THE SHOPS"
 

Gavin

booty bass intellectual
i don't think the tradeoff is still there. Winehouse and stone dont have big success by appropriating the latest black music (which still is hiphop i'm afraid), they use elder forms (motown,soul etc), because it's still anathema for white artists to blatantly use hiphop, only eminem and the beasties succeeded in that.
...And 3rd Bass, and Vanilla Ice (for a time), and Limp Bizkit, and Kid Rock, and Linkin Park... often whited up through distorted guitars, but that's sort of what the Clash did with reggae right? They didn't play straight up reggae, it was through a white filter. I think this still happens, but there's greater awareness of cultural appropriation in the larger consumer audience (probably tied less to greater understanding of pop history than a recognition of how dire racial problems STILL are without the optimism of a generation or two ago).


the success of black artists in keeping hiphop black might have been a pyrrian victory. the pattern always was that when white artists appropriated black forms and made money, black artists ran away from the no longer cool form, and invented something new, often with the use of unexpected white influences (kraftwerk for example)

Is this the dynamic at play? "Coolness"? I think you need to look at larger social and economic changes in driving change within black music and culture. For instance, urbanization to the north of rural/southern r&b makes rock n roll, not chasing coolness away from where white people take jazz.

With hip hop, you have the end of formal segregation in the US, the resulting flight of the black bourgeoisie away from the ghettos, decline of manufacturing jobs, the progressive repealing of the welfare state, along with the incredibly explosion of consumer culture -- in other words, a new generation of black underclass responding to extremely difficult post-industrial conditions. From what I can see, these conditions haven't changed substantially in 20 years, except for getting worse in some ways.

Furthermore, a lot of innovation is the result of different kinds of black music talking to each other, not with white music. Hip hop a result of Caribbean sounds making their way to NYC, house borne out of disco and cheap technology, jungle drawing from hip hop and dancehall...

In hiphop, for the first time in history, it was mainly black artists making the money. They had no need to run to a new form, hiphop stayed cool for an unbelievable time span of more than twenty years. Now its innovative quality really is gone. In the meantime, white music necassarily became whiter than white (trance, indie), because using hiphop and other contemporary black musics was off limits. Just look at the outrage on this board about hadouken "abusing" grime, or at the incriminating of people like diplo, and you understand what i mean. (interestingly this outrage is often most violently voiced by white people). Don't get me wrong, i dont like how these things go, i only think this is how it came about there is no longer a real tradeoff between contemporary white and black music.

You're right, it is mostly black people making money, but the class dynamics within that still aren't well understood. A lot of the people making the most money are the businessmen/gatekeepers who are part of that first generation of black middle class to really make it out of the slums -- Puff Daddy, Russell Simmons, Jermaine Dupri. These guys aren't really artists (although some have made records I enjoy), but they exercise huge control over the direction of hip hop, and they've been successful far longer than most of the people making the music. I suspect that part of the anemia is not the lack of conversation between white and black music, but an increased corporate stewardship of black music (which always means less risk-taking), a kind of class collusion among white and black managers exploiting vulnerable artists (mostly TEENAGERS for chrissakes, who are cycled through after churning out a couple albums), and an entrenched studio system where salaried professionals make many of the beats ('cept for those expensive auteur beats from Timbaland/Neptunes/etc). Increased corporate control has also meant the end of sampling (which I always thought was one of the most radical sonic inventions of hip hop -- so cheap and so powerful), a huge impediment to musical creativity among a generation with little formal musical training.

I'm not sure, but it seems like you're implying that people who raise a fuss about appropriation (carry-over from the Mark-Simon thread) are part of the problem, that our moral "outrage" is part of what keeps these supposed barriers between black and white music. I think that's less the case than the increased segregation of white and black, not through formal policy (since segregation is technically illegal) but through neglect, through a widespread de facto ban on the black underclass from the symbolic order except in highly controlled ways (Hurricane Katrina being the perfect illustration -- news anchors at a total loss for how to deal with suddenly visible black poverty). I sense a great deal of discomfort by whites in their reaction to black culture: whether it's distaste or ironized enjoyment, I rarely see genuine engagement except in "safe" older forms as you point out. You might blame this on people like me who raise a fuss over things like appropriation, but I think the guilt and anxiety is a product of crossing these invisible, internalized lines of segregation -- so much more difficult to transgress than clearly demarcated legal ones.
 
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