Corpsey

bandz ahoy
Stop me if this idea is as boring as the thread title

The first dance music that I bought on vinyl and regularly mixed and raved to was drum n bass - which was structurally speaking extremely formulaic and predictable. It almost always went more or less like this:

INTRO (64 bars, say) / FIRST BLOCK OF DRUMS N BASS / BREAKDOWN (32 bars, let's say) / SECOND BLOCK OF DRUMS N BASS / OUTRO

Most dance music follows a formula like this, I'd guess - dubstep certainly did, UK garage similarly, and house... Even jungle, post say 93/94 was following this A / B / C / B / D formula.

I can see the appeal of this formula, ofc, from both a DJ's perspective and the crowd's - part of the fun is knowing what to expect, perhaps having that expectation slightly subverted or played with, but ultimately knowing you'll get about 2 solid blocks of proper drums/bassline with some quieter bits inbetween to give you a rest and/or build up some tension.

But ardkore didn't, or didn't so much - the average tune seemed to have more sections to it, more switch-ups, less resting on laurels.

So my interest is

1) Why WAS ardkore like this? (culture, context, technology, etc.)
2) Why hasn't anything else since (to my knowledge) been like this?
3) Examples of structurally less conservative dance choons from any era would be welcome
 

blissblogger

Well-known member
it's true what you say

there's certain hardcore tunes where it's just a sequence of different segments, that never return

or perhaps one of them returns but there are segments that just happens once and then it's gone

the one that always springs to mind is DJ Trax's "We Rock the Most" in terms of generosity of ideas but there's others

whereas with D&B it got very standard in terms of the structure you mention

i remember somebody pointing out to me that if you looked at a 12 inch you could often see by the pattern of the grooves where the - tediously extended, seldom interesting musically - intro would end

it did mean though in the record store you could skip through a tune very quickly and establish whether it was any cop at all, just had to dip into it in three places for about 10 seconds each

i wonder if with the hardcore bods it was something to do with not knowing whether this would be their only ever tune or something, just shoving everything they had into it

whereas later on people would ration out ideas over many more 12 inches, put out a greater number of mono-idea tracks

or just a more chaotic time, less career oriented, less professional, mad throw downs of ideas, neurons firing
 

droid

Well-known member
D'Cruze was one of the worst for the constant switch up but it's endemic across hardcore along with badly quantised breaks, out of key samples, badly played/out of time melody/basslines, extra bars and beats in weird places etc... the answer (or part of it at least) is fairly simple. A lot of people didn't know what they were doing an there was no established formula so producers just did whatever they felt like.

Still a fair amount of unpredictability through to '95 in jungle, but the linearity really kicked in from 96 with jump up probably the last nail in the coffin.
 

droid

Well-known member
There's a set of criteria you could probably apply to creeping conservatism in dance music.

Stage 1: Musical conservatism - elimination of clashing melodies based on ear, later moving on to 'musicality'.
Stage 2. Compositional conservatism - Simpler, more formulaic & linear structures, easier for DJ's, more predictable for audiences.
Stage 3. Aural conservatism - Shinier, better defined and produced sound, less variation between production styles and technology.
 

sadmanbarty

Well-known member
God bless you corpse.

a savant and a visionary.

you've touched on something profound. it has the potential to be as big as the dematerialisation thread.

i'm cleaning the kitchen so don't know quite what to make of it yet.



8 bar grime...
 

sadmanbarty

Well-known member
usually there's a correlation between populism and structural conformity.

classical music doesn't repeat much does it?

in jazz you have chin-strokey post-bop which is very loose with structure and then free jazz which eventually abandons it.


so why is hardcore an aberration? the nuum's most populist moment was it's least structured.
 

droid

Well-known member
Can you equate structure with predictably? Formula with marketability?

Barty, why dont you do an audit of top 40 rave tunes 89-92 and analyse them along a comparative formulaic axis with non-chart examples?
 

luka

Well-known member
Structure probably does collapse into predictability in some sense. You might not know exactly what comes next admittedly but you know the type of thing. The drop fetishiation of 1999 was regressive in the extreme
 

sadmanbarty

Well-known member
the notion of ‘temporal disorientation’- a distorted perception of time- which in turn leads us to notions of the suppression of structure and narrative.

a quote from my pitch to the psychedelic society.
 

luka

Well-known member
1999 There was a moron pavlovian aspect in d&b completely absent from house& garage
 

sadmanbarty

Well-known member
a rather endearing interpretation is that hardcore arrived at this culmination point of SO much new stimulation that arrived in the late 80's. it was just people so excited about so many different things that they just had to cram it all in.

there must've been this frothing-at-the-mouth excitement at all this new musical stimulation arriving at once; tons of different dance music genres as well as the innovations in dancehall and rap.
 

thirdform

pass the sick bucket
the answer is quite simple actually, it's that hardcore as a defined historical period didn't exist until late 94 into 95 when that split really happened and jungle became jungle proper.

Before that it was hardcore house, hardcore techno, jungle techno, ragga techno, breakbeat techno, deep hardcore, even have randall on one of his kiss fm shows saying something like this has been 3 hours of mature hardcore, this was early-mid 94 when it was all pretty much jungle for all intents and purposes!

on an awol tape i have GQ says something like who is feeling the house music over terminator, a far cry from Joe Smooth!

To use a Deleuzian term, hardcore later became reterritorialised when initially it was deterritorialised. this is not like 'deconstructed club' that is trying to grasp at deterritorialisation within already existing reterritorialisation, where deconstructed club is just another subgenre like house or techno. hardcore wasn't really like that really, hence when the splits happened so many people went so many different ways,including the very early 89-91 crowd splitting from 92.

Yep, wicked thread corpsey, been waiting for this for ages after old gits moaning about no new new music, well fine, just get old shit, we have 100 years of recorded music to dig through, maybe there is some weird amazonian stuff from 1930 tha sounds like ur in a k-hole who knows.
 
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thirdform

pass the sick bucket
like political revolutions can only be conceptualised as definitively revolutionary or counter-periods after things have dialectically succeeded into more a passive state. In certain respects (though don't stretcch the analogy too far) hardcore can be seen in that way.
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
Thanks for all responses! I'll read through them today at my desk instead of working for a living.

It's struck me that, although the structure is much simpler and more repetitive, perhaps the only music that (to my knowledge) breaks with the post HC structure found in most dance music (perhaps because it wasn't dance music, though it's since been used as such) is 8 bar grime.
 
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Corpsey

bandz ahoy
hardcore wasn't really like that really, hence when the splits happened so many people went so many different ways,including the very early 89-91 crowd splitting from 92.

.

Yeah, I guess what happens is that one group likes X bit of a tune more than another groups like Y bit, and ultimately new subgenres form dedicated to X and Y. Again, I sort of appreciate why this happens and sympathise - you sacrifice variety for intensity, although with HC variety is intensity.
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
A lot of people didn't know what they were doing an there was no established formula so producers just did whatever they felt like.

Reminds me of this Aphex quote from a Pitchfork interview

I used to love jungle. I still think it's the ultimate genre, really, because the people making it weren't musicians. The best artists are people who don't consider themselves artists, and the people who do are usually the most pretentious and annoying. [laughs] They've got their priorities wrong. They're just doing it to be artists rather than because they want to do it. And a lot of jungle people were actually car mechanics and painter-and-decorator types, like, pretty hardcore blokes. I wouldn't want to get into a fight with them. I know a few people who were like that, and I don't think that really exists any more. Maybe those sort of non-musician types do some dubstep stuff, or grime. But it didn't exist in jungle for long. There was only a couple of years where people didn't know what they were doing, and you got all these samples that are just totally not related in pitch. I really hunt down those records. They've got this ridiculous mishmash of things that totally don't go with each other at all. Obviously, after they've done it for a couple of years they learn how to make chords and stuff, and it's not so interesting now.

That's one of the reasons this tune was so influential and exciting - it was so amateurish, but only an amateur could have made something like it

 
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