catalog

Well-known member
The thing that annoys me about rockism is its very nomadism. granted poptimism has exactly the same problem.

Like, not that I want to defend 2010s dnb, or grime, or heaven forbid, dubstep, but you can't just exchange narritive identities for new clothes. it just doesn't work like that. What I had to do personally is leave the clubbing scene entirely. A lot of the big boys who castigate squarepusher (not you blissblogger) do exactly the same thing they accuse him of. not remaining dedicated to a scene when its surface level signifiers are exhausted. they are not interested in going into its deeper arts core. like there was ragga dnb, rnb dnb all through the 00s, and granted I thought most of it was fucking awful with that zomby pavlovian beat drop, but like, people moaning about how dnb had lost all of its black music influences, it just felt a bit like cultural tourism, like they were beholden to pop market trends more than anything.

like:


I can tell you why it's shit but not many can.

Can you tell me why this remix is good?

 

thirdform

pass the sick bucket
the drum track is very boring and the trance synths are old hat but really what makes this much better than the TC remix is that baroque contorted b-line. it riggles and undulates and simulates the semsation of a fuse blowing out and feeling queasy.

It's a block rocking kind of queasiness though, not that feeling you might feel like that you're gonna be shook if you step on the wrong persons toes on a night out. It's... sonically as far as you can go from heavy metal, it really has absolutely nothing in common with rock (if anything it's closer to noise and computer music) but there is that same kind of let the aggressive music roll and the good vibes roll also. it's a utopia. I can appreciate that. hard techno is also a utopia, just one I'm closer to for various cultural and ideological reasons.
 

kumar

Well-known member
well this universal appeal process has been invoked, trying to get at what has to be erased for the fiction of universal appeal to work.
you could say the idea of “Art”, if its a specific historical and social process, is one of the forms “generated within a specific context and then commodified, universalised and hollowed out”. invented by european aristocrats. sold around the world. in the 1500s how many different languages had a word for “Art” that were really congruent with each other. da vinci did paintings, flying machines, chess, board games. would he have seen the same difference between those activities, valued them according to the distinct categories used since. what is common to those activities, what part of the experience of playing chess in the 1490s is erased when a value system in aid of “Art” is developed that excludes it. you can say “Art” is a way to organise activity and assign high value to a particular preserve of “ruling class” activity. The effects reverberate for centuries and inform the method people talk about things like music, 20th century guys defending jazz as “Art” rather than as “jazz”. you end up with things like kenny loggins.

expanding the definition of “Art” to include infinitely different activities doesn't change the fact that the idea universalises values particular to a specific set of historical conditions, . so the invention of “Art’ is similar to the diagnosis of ‘pop’ in that respect. although just to continue this particular pontifiction, while someones called the pop process the voice of capitalism, “Art” in this story was a knee-jerk reaction to the threat of -captitalism- to lords and ladies of yore.

anyway, ok so both approaches are limited, you can then say that any theory of anything is pointless because it has to have emerged out of particular historical context. but we’re not acting as though we can step out of these processes of historifying things, that we can detach ourselves from them because its essential life. things being limited by their historical context isn’t something that happens to things in life, its the exact experience of those things being in the world.
 

kumar

Well-known member
i mean the motives for something like that adidas advert, well its creepy sure but yeah everyone kind of intuits whats going on. its an advantage for adidas to let other people in to the club isn't it, well intentioned white kids cant choose to be black but can participate in an idea of London Culture by deciding to move to peckham and wear ironic tracksuits and pink filas or something. everyone kind of gets that, a lot of comments on gun lean video are to do with that “here before white students 6000 likes” etc. that kind of grotesque thing will register as a threat if you feel its ripping the heart out of your lived experience.

as far as reconciling the anguish of seeing the soul being sucked out of music, i suppose when i first saw No Diet i probably thought of something like jesse lingard doing fortnite dances at the world cup.

ok maybe no diet or gun lean don’t feel so viscerally symptomatic to me of a culture that represented my personal lived experience being hollowed out, i dont have that relationship to drill. but i like no diet, maybe in a similar way to liking the premier league.

football is hilarious, i can experience a far greater range of emotional ecstasy from watching professional football on tv than by most other things. but i don't think that being excited by both the ridiculous bullshit of professional sports, the cheating, fakery and peripheral nonsense, as well as formally good game is a poptimist approach.

similarly, admiring the group dynamics of a well oiled or tragically flawed team, or the aleatory nature of the game, last minute drama, isn't rockist. i like this phrase psychedelic materialism i think i relate it to this kind of thing. it seems to describe the way you can keep a critical distance to the bloated, barefaced fuckery of something like sky sports and also get possessed by the collectively charged nuttiness of something so “impure” and corrupt as football without feeling a knot of contradiction, or at least not feeling that to be a problem.

Football experience has probably got less interference from hand me down ideas of “Art” than music so it seems relevant as a comparison for this kind of thing. no one really expects it to be real anymore, its like wrestling. maybe this having cake and eating it condition is just the same “stupified, hyperreal euphoria” that turbocharged advertising produces, but it seems counterintuitive to what you’d expect to be the aims of advertising, it doesn't seem to produce so much desire for an idea of “really living” that you can see producing a target audience. although obviously the “untargettable” target audience is a good target audience too. but the point being compromised in that way doesn't seem to feel like such a problem in the cake eating football crazy condition.

i dont know if that makes sense, its an “outsider” perspective, its maybe not something that you can “apply” if you feel your “lived experience” is at stake…
 

catalog

Well-known member
the drum track is very boring and the trance synths are old hat but really what makes this much better than the TC remix is that baroque contorted b-line. it riggles and undulates and simulates the semsation of a fuse blowing out and feeling queasy.

It's a block rocking kind of queasiness though, not that feeling you might feel like that you're gonna be shook if you step on the wrong persons toes on a night out. It's... sonically as far as you can go from heavy metal, it really has absolutely nothing in common with rock (if anything it's closer to noise and computer music) but there is that same kind of let the aggressive music roll and the good vibes roll also. it's a utopia. I can appreciate that. hard techno is also a utopia, just one I'm closer to for various cultural and ideological reasons.

I found it in a mark Stewart list of recommendations and played it to death for ages, around 2014. For some strange reason, I can't get a lot of joy from it now, but that's also true of quite a lot of other music I used to like
 

luka

Well-known member
somewhat broadly then a lot of rockist values can be traced back to an idea of “Art” , which we could say was invented as a distinct category, to confer specific value on particular activities like say painting, by aristocratic elites in the 18th century, faced with the prospect of having their power usurped by newly monied industrialists. a blatantly reactionary act of shameless self promotion if ever i saw one.

assumptions to do with “durability, seriousness, authenticity, significance” are the branding objectives of the class of people for whom absolute power was a hereditary right, and even if a rockist approach inverts the codes to venerate “the street” or “the improv group” etc i don't know if it can shake its undeniably rotten core of pre enlightenment toff thought.

so i reckon a new improved version would have to be defined beyond "Art". i mean music, like painting predates "Art", and capitalism… music is the best ...

Im still thinking about this. I've been visiting the National Gallery to assist my research. I'm wondering if the art has to do with effects. Button pushing. But I'm in the early stages of thinking this through.
 

mistersloane

heavy heavy monster sound
Im still thinking about this. I've been visiting the National Gallery to assist my research. I'm wondering if the art has to do with effects. Button pushing. But I'm in the early stages of thinking this through.

Chief Keef is fascinating with regard to this. He toys with a major then essentially gets a patron, in the old arts sense, and is just left to his own devices, which means his music has got progressively weirder - and better - his new stuff just sounds like Terry Riley, really - and meanwhile he still gets to beat up women / get shot at / do crimes without the recriminations that come with being “signed” or having “sponsorship”. Alki David (and his transformation into tattooed bleach gang gang thing) is just really old school, and is the first one to do this I think, on the music level. It’s been happening in fashion for a while - Alexander McQueen and Isabella Blow - but fashion has always been about society really.
 

CrowleyHead

Well-known member
To be fair most artists in rap at that grassroots level are 'sponsored' in some part by enterprises (often criminal backgrounds). There's that whole disambiguation of "Oh they're not Actual Criminals, they just know the criminals" and often serve as mascots for these people in a sense, but also as gestures of patronage because the investor respects the talent. Though obviously that's a 'patron' where the politics and economics of their life greatly effects you and has consequences... Look at say, everyone who's been on Rap-A-Lot records and have had their lives greatly altered (for better or worse) by J Prince's fortunes.
 

mistersloane

heavy heavy monster sound
To be fair most artists in rap at that grassroots level are 'sponsored' in some part by enterprises (often criminal backgrounds). There's that whole disambiguation of "Oh they're not Actual Criminals, they just know the criminals" and often serve as mascots for these people in a sense, but also as gestures of patronage because the investor respects the talent. Though obviously that's a 'patron' where the politics and economics of their life greatly effects you and has consequences... Look at say, everyone who's been on Rap-A-Lot records and have had their lives greatly altered (for better or worse) by J Prince's fortunes.

Yeah fair point. Keef really strikes me because he’s being allowed to experiment, as opposed to a lot of the more crime based enterprises (hi Jeezy) who seemed to be in it for gain and presumably laundering but also furthering money. I guess there is the pet rapper aspect though.
 

CrowleyHead

Well-known member
Its a complex thing because there's laundering money, there's the notion that these guys might be eccentrics. Certainly have known a few drug dealers who had great taste in music or weird little esoteric stuff because they obviously couldn't stack money. Hell it's not even limited to rap, often it manages to pervade in dance music or elsewhere. More than a few of these 'indie/experimental' labels that have appeared and disappeared over the years were people with surprising amounts of money that nobody ever really looked into floating musicians along.

I'm sure Third will bring up the very known ties between organized crime and rave culture that, while denied on the surface, was clearly There.
 

thirdform

pass the sick bucket
Only because it got played alongside dancehall though which of course could be geneologically linked to soca and then later afrohouse. otherwise it would only be successful in an anglo context. and of course the bollywood affectations were definitely a cynical pivot.

I approve of this cynical pivot btw. that's when timbo gets really good! but usually i disagree with Matt's capitalism sole driver of innovation but in this case i can sort of warm up to it. the question is what made bhangra elements not get dismissed in the mainstream? I would wager changing migration patterns.
 

thirdform

pass the sick bucket
maybe the dichotomy between 'rockism' and 'poptimism' is tired and we shouldn't let partisans of either set the terms of the conversation

This is a position ive been thinking about over the last week. i mostly agree in that i think rockism and poptimism should be used as analytical tools rather than prescriptive intervensions because the music always moves faster to initiates than it does the journalists. like i look at some of the coverage on dance music and it's like mate, that shit was on dub for a year. I'll get to other points later on.
 

thirdform

pass the sick bucket
the organised crime aspect pervaded all dance music culture. even more purist techno and house nights were run at clubs with crime syndicates from birmingham and the like running the door. rudeboys in the alcoves meticulously checking what was going in and what was going out. in fact most drug arrests were basically token pickings that the big dealers would let get caught by the (generally) etonian entrepreneurs who were the formal owners of the premises. I don't like to talk about this too much because its a damning indictment but the shift over the past 10 years of complying with the authorities has been a major factor in clubs becoming so deadened. they are not profitable currency. mans can moan about gentrification but most club closures generally have to do with posh cunts either too chickenshit to stand up to the councils or people who just don't see a business opportunity in it anymore. this is also why I tend to get a bit annoyed about the whole construct of capitalist realism, because it's like, any scene that wants to survive in this country has to be capitalist realist. the BBC is not coming back. rock music means absolutely nothing after 1984.

Jungle was no more or less criminal than hard house, but because of the strong amounts of anti-blackness in british music journalism - insider codes and collective consciousness is heavily discouraged. I mean think about it, the kool fm people weren't shouting out the names of the actual rudeboys selling pills at awol, were they now, get a grip.
 
Last edited:

thirdform

pass the sick bucket
"The report notes that:

'For the period June and July 2009, 166 crime reports were confirmed as relevant to this report, as being linked to a nightclub or a public house. The 166 reports consisted of 1 Murder, 1 Attempted Murder, 151 GBHs, 3 Threats to Kill, 6 Firearms related offences and 4 Affray or Violent Disorder. From the confirmed sample of 166 crimes, 85 were linked to a venue with a music event at the time...

All events were found to include a variety of music types. For example “Funk, House music, Indie, Pop” is given as a description of the music played on the night. The music types have been broken down by the number of times they appear in the sample:

48 events are described as including RnB.
32 events included House music.
31 events are described as including Commercial or Pop music.
26 events are described as including Funky House.
20 events included disco or dance music.
16 included Hip Hop.
10 events included Indie.
8 included Rock.
5 events included Soul.

Other music type combinations included any of the above and Bashment, SOCA, Afro Beat, Hip Hop, Garage, Jungle, Cheesy Classics, Clubs Classics, Funk, Electro, Old Skool, Drum & Bass, African Reggae, Lovers Rock, Bhangra, Grime, Dubstep, Arabic, Irish, Latin, Salsa, Oldies, Uplifting, Soulful, and Reggae.
From this the report somehow concludes that 'the likely profile of music events where a serious violent or weapon related crime has occurred' would include the music type being 'RandB, House, Funky House and similar'. But in the list above, commercial pop was ahead of funky, and grime and bashment barely feature. Can't recall a cop saying that the problem with a club was that is played chart music, despite by definition it being popular with a lot of people, some of whom must be criminals. Why don't they just come out with it and say that that the music they are targeting is the kind that it is likely to attract large number of young black people? Although the profile of victims and suspects also doesn't support this focus:

'Victim Ethnicity:
White European – 66
Dark European – 5
Black Afro/Caribbean – 39
Asian - 8
Oriental - 2
Arabic – 1 each

Suspect Ethnicity:
White European – 62
Dark European – 12
Black Afro/Caribbean – 54
Asian - 5'.

As discussed here previously, violence around clubs in London is a real phenomenon, but shooting and stabbing people is already against the law. The current position amounts not only to blanket discrimination against particular types of music, but to the deliberate prevention of whole parts of the community socialising on their own terms to their soundtrack of choice. The intent might not be racist, but the effect is. A similar 'preventative approach' is not taken in other contexts - how often is a football match cancelled because it might attract violence, even when everybody knows in advance that it's going to kick off.

Policies like this do actually impact on the evolution of music itself. Since a lot of dance music is produced specifically for clubs, the drying up of opportunities to play out particular sounds leads to people switching their energies elsewhere. It is certainly arguable that the reduction in grime nights in London at police instigation has led to a stalling of the genre, with funky filling the gap. Some grime DJs switched to funky when they couldn't get gigs - now funky too is coming in for attention."

Obvious stuff I'm sure but you know...

http://history-is-made-at-night.blogspot.com/2010/02/funky-bashment-in-police-firing-line.html
 

thirdform

pass the sick bucket
I suppose in simplified outline the story which repeats every generation or so goes

Start out exemplifying values and attributes and abilities prized within the community in which you are embedded, get raised up by that same community, hometown hero, then in the attempt to leverage that local fame, disavow those values and shoot for something more nebulous and universal. The problem being the universal is a fiction. It doesn't really exist.

Wanted to come back to this. I'm not sure. Coltrane tried and Xenakis tried. Granted they were consummate musicians but even that brief period between late 92 into mid 94 hc/jungle tried.

I think and tell me if I'm chatting out of my arse, but i think failed universalisms are eminently possible whereas successful ones are not. unless, perhaps, you are David Bowie or Kate Bush.
 
Top