thirdform

pass the sick bucket
not really mate I'd rather go to a free improv show and see some blokes torture their guitars than listen to the horrific candyfloss that is mozart.
 

CrowleyHead

Well-known member
I'm off to work but no EDM is Pop by the standards of rockism which is what you're using to venerate disco. And I'm not saying that as a dismissal of disco but you've basically turned it into the more 'authentic' medium because you can quantify the exhibition of labor in it's creation.

Tom Moulton is less capable of the writing and formulation of the music he's responsible for than Calvin Harris as an instrumentalist. By that right Calvin Harris is actually superior to he, and then EDM in his hands trumps disco.

I'm not solely dismissing you, I'm just baffled at how you've taken what was considered a massive bugbear of inauthentic music in popular culture (at least by US standards) and made it The Real. I'm almost impressed, but I'm also staggered. Take it for what you will.
 

Agent

dgaf ngaf cgaf
I'm off to work but no EDM is Pop by the standards of rockism which is what you're using to venerate disco. And I'm not saying that as a dismissal of disco but you've basically turned it into the more 'authentic' medium because you can quantify the exhibition of labor in it's creation.

Tom Moulton is less capable of the writing and formulation of the music he's responsible for than Calvin Harris as an instrumentalist. By that right Calvin Harris is actually superior to he, and then EDM in his hands trumps disco.

I'm not solely dismissing you, I'm just baffled at how you've taken what was considered a massive bugbear of inauthentic music in popular culture (at least by US standards) and made it The Real. I'm almost impressed, but I'm also staggered. Take it for what you will.

It's...... yeah. Interpret it however you want :crylarf:
 

Agent

dgaf ngaf cgaf
EDM and its offshoots, and hip hop and its offshoots, simply would not exist without disco. There I said it. And Bootsy Collins is the greatest bassist of all time.
 

thirdform

pass the sick bucket
edm isn't even dance music in the UK, well it is but not as pop music. you're far more likely to hear jersey house imitations with pianos and divas here in the charts when dance music does chart.
 

Agent

dgaf ngaf cgaf
Wait I never said EDM was pop music. But come to think of it all pop music is electronic now. Can you name the best guitarist, or pianist, or drummer to emerge in the past decade? Neither can I, probably some obscure associate professor at a liberal arts college. And don't call me rockist just because I respect people that can play an instrument, and respect their craft, and spend hours honing it to become experts (nts: never use word "master" again). Anyway, speaking of liberal arts colleges I'm off to teach some freshmen English. Fucking terrifying huh? :crylarf:
 

luka

Well-known member
I want to engage with this thread but where do you want to go with it? It's a non controversial statement. Everybody here likes disco. Nobody here likes EDM. Everyone here would acknowledge the debt dance music owes to disco. It's a truism. Why do you think this would be controversial? Perhaps this is not the board you thought it was? Perhaps you are talking past us and not to us? Who do you think we are? Nobody here likes Pink Floyd. What is going on? Help me out a little.

Disco is itself purely functional club music, sometimes played on instruments, sometimes not. How the way the sounds are produced is linked to the value of the sounds you haven't made clear. It's not obvious. Why would anyone care?

This

"Popular media feeds a machine, classical "high art" or whatever you want to call it, provides a inimitable experience that cannot be replicated."

Is.... I don't get it? Why? How? Similarly in what world is a CD experienced in the same way by everyone, or in the same way by ourselves at various different times? What can this possibly mean? How could it possibly be true?

You're right that none of us are intellectuals. We chased them Away years and years ago, quite deliberately.

Give us something with more meat on the bone, something we can chew on.
 

CrowleyHead

Well-known member
I actually dabble in EDM. Corpse is a Calvin Harris appreciator (albeit begrudgingly).

Maybe we should reinvestigate the muck.
 

thirdform

pass the sick bucket
i don't even know what edm is in 2019 outside skrillex. is it that swedish crossover disco electro house?? avicii, ingrosso, axwell, stuff like that? because that's more faithful to disco than a lot of the post-acid musics we like here.
 

thirdform

pass the sick bucket
but then my mate also plays this white emo pop vocal trance, armin van buuren and tat. that was also called edm in 2010. but does it still fall under that remit?

what about caspa and rusco. did they become accepted into the edm canon after 2011?

It seems like edm was something that dance music fans used to hate on dance music going stadium rock. which i have loads of sympathy for but then it can just mean an approach to production, i believe blissblogger spoke about this in the 2013 chapter to E flash.

I should probably find a zed's dead mix now though I had to listen to electro house in 2007 on radio 1 when i didn't have a working computer. I couldn't have it evolve much further. brostep could of, i was actually quite enthusiastic about that development but the people who seem to be taking it on weird tangents are IDM bedroom boffins, funnily enough.
 

Agent

dgaf ngaf cgaf
"Popular media feeds a machine, classical "high art" or whatever you want to call it, provides an inimitable experience that cannot be replicated."

Is.... I don't get it? Why? How? Similarly in what world is a CD experienced in the same way by everyone, or in the same way by ourselves at various different times? What can this possibly mean? How could it possibly be true?

You're right that none of us are intellectuals. We chased them Away years and years ago, quite deliberately.

I'll give you that. Experiencing, say, Stockhausen on the headphones while on acid versus in the car on coffee, on the same CD, will provide different experiences. So I'll disavow that statement about pre-mass produced music versus mass produced music. Doesn't really apply to the conversation and I'm not sure how we ended up there. But still, a pretty simple and self-explanatory concept.

So you don't like dance music? You chase off intellectuals? What exactly are you then? Why are all your threads about theory and dance music? In this thread alone you have references to Adorno, Maoism, rockism and by extension popism, etc. I don't get it. You hate EDM but isn't dubstep EDM? All I know is it is really, really, really, fun coming here and I'm just going to keep doing it. Thinking of adopting a college-professor-who-fucks-his-students persona ;)
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
I think EDM has converged with pop music to an extent. I would guess that the modern analogue to commercial disco is yer ariana grande/Calvin Harris et al bombastic pop, dancehall meets disco meets some sort of trance/techno. Not soulful, but glossily emotive. And I think it is more palpably "soulless" insofar as the music is clearly computerised and airbrushed to within an inch of its life.

Saying that, Daft Punks attempt at resurrecting disco with "Get Lucky" was somehow even more soulless than the EDM they were vocally patronising, probably because it was mannerist, like a Waxwork dummy of disco. They used "real" instruments, they used Nile Rogers, and it was catchy, but it hasn't survived (outside of the Limmy tweet). What will survive from today's radio playlists?

I wonder if part of the reason the biggest disco anthems survive is that they sound very 70s or 80s, so they have an additional cachet of nostalgia, whereas Get Lucky doesn't sound like 2017, or whenever it came out?

This all leaves aside the simple fact that Get Lucky is a rather lame song, sung by a weak vocalist, that is basically paltry when set aside Good Times.
 

Agent

dgaf ngaf cgaf
I wonder if part of the reason the biggest disco anthems survive is that they sound very 70s or 80s, so they have an additional cachet of nostalgia, whereas Get Lucky doesn't sound like 2017, or whenever it came out?

I'm worried nostalgia might be dead as a fundamental human experience or emotion. It's just hard to get nostalgic about the 90's, and it will only get harder when you get into the 21st century. Figure that one out.
 
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