new/nu/neo-pop

k-punk

Spectres of Mark
scissors said:
I know, Mark, you have derided Kylie in the past for being a blank slate upon which any male fantasy can be projected, but isn't RS in some ways the distillation of this very blankness? So much so, that maybe indifference or even repulsion is the only "sensible" widespread response? I wonder if the problem is this very paradox of ineffectualness being the effect.

Think this is right about RS - part of the problem is that she has been so inappropriately marketed. Her appeal is GirlNextDoor not sex siren - she looked so uncomfortable in the LA Ex vid trying to vamp it up and she's never seemed happy since.

But I don't think Kylie is a 'blank slate' that anticipates and invites male het desire so much as a 'filled-out' slate simperingly subordinated to an already-existing model of what that desire is. Kylie's blankness lies behind the facade - what is the 'real' Kylie like, beyond the professional showgirl performance? We don't know or care. RS's blankness, by contrast, is all up front. With Kylie there is a near total identification with the performance (theatre-school/ sex worker professionalism); with RS it is beginning to look as if 'Rachel Stevens' exists only in the gap of discomfort/ disavowal lying between half-hearted performance and underdeveloped 'personality'.
 

Tim F

Well-known member
"If Rachel Stevens is 'even worse', infamously nebulous, I feel that all talk of restoring the semblance of presence to her (T. Ewing on 'nothing good about this goodbye', the Kylie wishes, etc) actually run counterpoint to what I like about her."

I think this might be right - upthread I'm trying to explain why I suspect she hasn't been successful, as I like her just fine (the second album was in my top ten last year).

Mark, as usual I feel that you're too hard on Kylie (I suspect that our prior conversations re pop were over-heated partly because we were using Kylie as the example!) but I do understand where you're coming from with your analysis below. I might try to write more on this a bit later.
 

owen

Well-known member
ah! glad this finally got noticed. excellent responses from mark, tim, scissors...

i suppose what makes me slightly uncomfortable in this stuff is a lack of consciousness (obv not in the political sense)- that so much of the greatness of this music is accidental, or the result of studio obsessives in lieu of an actual point, a kind of lack of megalomania, a sense of something being honed...the best record to come out of this (for me), 'some girls', pretty much admits this.

however there's also a lack of nudging and winking with much of this (though not, i would say, for kylie)- i've been listening to '...presents his x factor' a lot lately and what's noticeable is that for all the pop-geek cut & pasting there's a tremendous pathos in it, a hint of desperation- a kind of hopeless longing for pop to mean as much as it once did (or rather did to the producer when they were age --), combined with an admission that it can't. see also ' i wanna dance with numbers', possibly the most desolate record imaginable...
 
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blissblogger

Well-known member
owen said:
a tremendous pathos ..

the word you're looking for is "sad"

as in "that's just sad, man, reheating the SOS band/League/et al"

it is isn't it

there's no getting round it

just lame

and he seems like a nice bloke and all...
 

k-punk

Spectres of Mark
Yes, I suppose it is.

But reheating Tubeway Army/Adina Howard/Human League/SOS Band/Spandau Ballet

I'll take that 'sadness' over reheating The Smiths/The Jam/Oasis/the Libertines any day of the week.
 

blissblogger

Well-known member
k-punk said:
Yes, I suppose it is.

But reheating Tubeway Army/Adina Howard/Human League/SOS Band/Spandau Ballet

I'll take that 'sadness' over reheating The Smiths/The Jam/Oasis/the Libertines any day of the week.


i can understand this on the level of taste

but on the theoretical level: surely there's no difference, no distinction between the two things at all?

(except that the AMs actually write new songs rather than weld together two old ones -- with richard x you really are better off just digging out your old copy of 'the finest' or 'the things that dreams are made of' or 'are friends')
 

Tim F

Well-known member
It makes more sense to think of Richard X as a dance music producer who happens to dabble in pop at times than as a "songwriter" - most of his work recently has been remixes, and he's done some pretty awesome ones like his remix of Freeform Five's "No More Conversations".

Having said that, I think that the new songs he has written with pop performers, such as Annie's "Chewing Gum" and "Me Plus One" or Rachel's "Some Girls" and "Crazy Boys", are all pretty great in terms of lyrics/tunes/production.

I don't think he's actually done any bootlegs as such since his album, and even there it was more like cover versions with shiny new (post-electroclash) production, and that kinda thing is a dance music tradition.

Simon what do you think of the Sugababes cover of "I Bet You Look Good On The Dancefloor"??
 

shudder

Well-known member
blissblogger said:
i can understand this on the level of taste

but on the theoretical level: surely there's no difference, no distinction between the two things at all?

(except that the AMs actually write new songs rather than weld together two old ones -- with richard x you really are better off just digging out your old copy of 'the finest' or 'the things that dreams are made of' or 'are friends')

well, except also that there's a long lineage of insanely-hyped-as-essential/important "The Smiths/The Jam/Oasis/the Libertines" reheating that doesn't exist in the same way for "Tubeway Army/Adina Howard/Human League/SOS Band/Spandau Ballet"...
 

Tim F

Well-known member
"well, except also that there's a long lineage of insanely-hyped-as-essential/important "The Smiths/The Jam/Oasis/the Libertines" reheating that doesn't exist in the same way for "Tubeway Army/Adina Howard/Human League/SOS Band/Spandau Ballet"..."

Contrasting the lists like that also makes it clear how much broader a remit the second list is too. I mean, maybe it seems really obvious now (and a bit gimmicky then and now) but I've always thought that Richard X was trying to saying some very specific about a relationship he perceives between cold electro-pop/dance music and cold r&b (of both the late eighties and millenial variety). So I'm not sure if it <i>is</i> precisely the same "on a theoretical level", though nor would I suggest that the, erm, musicological self-consciousness of Richard X makes him automatically better either.
 

owen

Well-known member
blissblogger said:
the word you're looking for is "sad"

yeah but it works on both levels, no? ie musical sadness and 'lameness' of merely stitching together two 80s records. it's dialectical :p

re the AMs, there's also an Adorno-on-endgame point here that to write songs In The Old Way is entirely futile, always doomed to pastiche and general idiocy (cf k-punk upthread on GA's song structures)
 
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blissblogger

Well-known member
owen said:
yeah but it works on both levels, no? ie musical sadness and 'lameness' of merely stitching together two 80s records. it's dialectical :p

oh yeah, there's considerable poignancy -- desperately wanting to reignite the future-shock impact of the pop that first ravished you as an early 80s pre-teen by... by re-presenting it with your signature appended like that artist who did same to an Old Master and called it a new work

applauding RX for having fabulous taste in early 80s music is the equivalent of--in the actual early Eighties--praising Shakin' Stevens for having dusted off some real chestnuts from the early rock'n'roll days

Shakey did write a few of his own compositions, actually, and i recall there being a couple of nice-ish RX originals on that album but then again i can't actually recall anything about them, tune-wise, whereas the melodies of Numan/League/SOS are burned on my brain for ever

to only way to beat the past at its own game is to write songs as good as the past

which is where electroclash failed -- had all the right touches, production and sounds-wise, but no tunes, no stars

and after electro-clash, harking back to that period IS retro, there's no getting round it


owen said:
re the AMs, there's also an Adorno-on-endgame point here that to write songs In The Old Way is entirely futile, always doomed to pastiche and general idiocy (cf k-punk upthread on GA's song structures)

yeah but if that is true (and i'm not sure i agree with Adorno at all) that equally turns on all attempts to write in the Old Way, including 80s-style retro-futurism, or Franz wish-i-was-a-Postcardism, or dubsteppers with their echo chambers and babylon-shaking subwoofery, or all the breakcore folk trying to reignite the Amen-rush of yore...

they're either all equally sad, OR all equally defensible as people working within traditions and trying to beat the ever-mounting odds against coming up with something fresh within that established format
 

Tim F

Well-known member
"yeah but if that is true (and i'm not sure i agree with Adorno at all) that equally turns on all attempts to write in the Old Way, including 80s-style retro-futurism, or Franz wish-i-was-a-Postcardism, or dubsteppers with their echo chambers and babylon-shaking subwoofery, or all the breakcore folk trying to reignite the Amen-rush of yore...

they're either all equally sad, OR all equally defensible as people working within traditions and trying to beat the ever-mounting odds against coming up with something fresh within that established format"

Yes I agree with this - funny how this split makes me side more with Mark taste-wise and more with Simon in terms of reasoning.

This is what I meant when I was talking on that other thread about the difficulty of proving vanguardism. It's not so much that vanguardism doesn't exist, but that - at least today - its claim is always plausibly (but rarely finally) refutable. There is in all contemporary music a certain component of revivalism or repetition, and this becomes a sticking point for people (or not) depending on their willingness to accept the presence or echo of that which is being repeated - e.g. dub and reggae in dubstep.

Dance music provides some good examples of this. When I think of two of my favourite current producers - Ricardo Villalobos and Booka Shade - it's immediately clear that Villalobos is the one being lauded as vanguardist (to the point that I felt moved to complain on ILM that in critical terms he's becoming the Outkast of German dance music). But the argument could be made that Villalobos's <i>Achso</i> ep, as awesome as it is, is just reviving 80s Jon Hassell and early nineties "intelligent" techno (Black Dog and early Autechre are probably the key reference points).

Booka Shade, meanwhile, are arguably reviving disco, early UK (acid) house, early trance, early rave and detroit techno - so their reference points are maybe A Guy Called Gerald/808 State, Eye Q Records, early Warp/Ital Rockers etc, with a dash of Detroit and early Orbital in there too.

Both are providing a pretty clear "twist" on their influences in terms of recognisable production nuances and immediately recognisable sonic signatures. Neither tend to straightforwardly revive one sound in particular, but carefully combine their influences (Villalobos's "Ichso" is a Jon Hassell/Talk Talk collaboration with Black Dog on production; Booka Shade's "Manderine Girl" is, I dunno, Carl Craig gone trance through a white noise filter).

So how do we distinguish between the two?

The audacity of the translation of influences? Villalobos is drawing on stuff from further outside <i>house</I>'s legacy, but it's not really outside <i>techno's</i> legacy. His chosen sources may appear to come from more disparate genres, but they actually blend together quite easily and smoothly - whereas with Booka Shade the influences rub up against one another quite forcefully and delightfully ("Mandarine Girl" and esp. the new track "In White Rooms" do quite amazing and unexpected things with tearjerker trance riffs).

The freshness of the source material? Is Jon Hassell less played out than early A Guy Called Gerald? Hard to say...

The transition of the source material from a genius context to a scenius one? Maybe, but in doing so Villalobos is increasingly being distinguished as "genius" rather than "scenius" anyway.

The radicalism of the new production stamp? Villalobos is more openly, ostentatiously idiosyncratic and epic, but I think Booka Shade are just as impressive and interesting finally.

These aren't unanswerable questions, but they're complex ones, and every juncture I just see personal taste <i>bleeding</i> through.

Mark's definition of vanguardism - the creation of new populations, the redefinition of the very concept of music - avoids this trap, but it does so by skirting the entire field, equally rejecting both options as being mere product. Which is fine, but it leaves us with a vacuum as to what critical language we can use to talk about these rejected options. And there is music we all like which falls into this category - Junior Boys for example, or Ariel Pink, or...
 

k-punk

Spectres of Mark
blissblogger said:
applauding RX for having fabulous taste in early 80s music is the equivalent of--in the actual early Eighties--praising Shakin' Stevens for having dusted off some real chestnuts from the early rock'n'roll days

Shakey did write a few of his own compositions, actually, and i recall there being a couple of nice-ish RX originals on that album but then again i can't actually recall anything about them, tune-wise, whereas the melodies of Numan/League/SOS are burned on my brain for ever

But wouldn't the more compelling analogy with Shaky be the Arctic Monkeys? Except that Shaky at least revived music that was new once, whereas the AMs revive pop that was ITSELF not only revivalist, but which legitimated and normalised revivalism (Oasis and the Libertines). Occurred to me the other day that there's a difference between the anti-modernism of the Smiths, which at least conceded that there was a modern to be opposed to, and the post-modernism of the Stone Roses (the uber criminals as far as I'm concerned), which pretended that retro WAS modern (the whole pathetic pretence that their canonic indie rock was in some ways connected to rave rather than a reaction against it).

The Richard X covers struck me more as a More Brilliant than the Sun-type Pop Art theses - about, as Tim says, 'a relationship he perceives between cold electro-pop/dance music and cold r&b (of both the late eighties and millenial variety)' than as 'songs'. They were guilty pleasures, a reminder of pop's former modernism, a kind of postmodern mostmodernism, or modernist postmodernism. Not exactly something to be unequivocally celebrated, but for me at least, certainly preferable to 'new' songs written in the same old forms. At least RX highlights a temporal crisis; the likes of AM and fucking Franz Ferdinand paper it over.

Don't see the comparison with dubstep --- I couldn't be accused of being a fan of dubstep but what is it reviving? Even five years ago, there wasn't anything quite like dubstep is now. It's progress forward is plodding, I agree, but it isn't a retread of twenty years ago.

btw Some Girls is certainly burned into my brain. But then so are Biology and Wake Me Up.
 
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Tim F

Well-known member
I should note w/r/t my last post that I do actually like Mark's vanguardism definition - I just resent it because I can't use it in relation to most of the music I like.
 

Tim F

Well-known member
"Don't see the comparison with dubstep --- I couldn't be accused of being a fan of dubstep but what is it reviving? Even five years ago, there wasn't anything quite like dubstep is now. It's progress forward is plodding, I agree, but it isn't a retread of twenty years ago."

This is true of a lot of stuff though isn't it? Five years ago there wasn't anything quite like Dominik Eulberg/Gabriel Ananda/James Holden etc.
 

k-punk

Spectres of Mark
Tim F said:
"Don't see the comparison with dubstep --- I couldn't be accused of being a fan of dubstep but what is it reviving? Even five years ago, there wasn't anything quite like dubstep is now. It's progress forward is plodding, I agree, but it isn't a retread of twenty years ago."

This is true of a lot of stuff though isn't it? Five years ago there wasn't anything quite like Dominik Eulberg/Gabriel Ananda/James Holden etc.

But that's surely different to AMs and FF, which sound like they could have existed 25 years ago (except that, certainly in the case of Franzzzzz, they wouldn't have made it beyond 3rd on the billl in the Hull Adelphi then).
 

k-punk

Spectres of Mark
Tim F said:
I should note w/r/t my last post that I do actually like Mark's vanguardism definition - I just resent it because I can't use it in relation to most of the music I like.

Well, me too! But isn't the point that a CULTURE in which there is no vanguardism is moribund. Or retro....
 

Tim F

Well-known member
"But that's surely different to AMs and FF, which sound like they could have existed 25 years ago (except that, certainly in the case of Franzzzzz, they wouldn't have made it beyond 3rd on the billl in the Hull Adelphi then)."

A lot of the interest in Arctic Monkeys seems to be w/r/t the lyrics. How seriously should we take the alleged lyrical modernity (or at least contemporaneity) of the AMs? I dunno.

Re my resentment - I think the issue is that moribund culture is presumably all I've ever known, so what you call moribund feels like the natural state of affairs for me - this may actually only bolster your arguments in some ways. But yeah, I only got into rave etc retrospectively, was listening to all sorts of non-vanguardist stuff in the early-to-mid-nineties.

I was saying to Jon Dale recently that where I feel one big divide b/w myself and say you and Simon is that you both seem to have had impeccable tastes from day one - it appears that you've both always been into music that you could defend forever aesthetically/culturally/politically.

Whereas for me there's a lot of stuff that I know I only like or liked because of some quirk of chance or circumstance. Reading The War Against Silence even got me into Marillion at one point about ten years ago!

I think this is why I'm so keen to emphasise the foibles of individual taste, the difficulty of overcoming it, the challenge of actually seeing things clearly...
 

blissblogger

Well-known member
>Booka Shade, meanwhile, are arguably reviving disco, early UK (acid) house, early trance, early rave and >detroit techno - so their reference points are maybe A Guy Called Gerald/808 State, Eye Q Records, early >Warp/Ital Rockers etc, with a dash of Detroit and early Orbital in there too.

this sounds exactly like my cup of recombinant tea, what are the records/mix-Cds i should be checking out Tim?

(shame about their name though)


>Stone Roses

ah well you see this is where we part company Mark because if you don't think that the Stone Roses were a phenomenon , something to reckon with then... That was a Moment, there was definitely a vibe at their gigs that was special.... and they did some very Sixties-flavored things, true, but i can't actually think of anything that sounded like "I Wanna Be Adored" before it

very bright lads the Roses too... not, in fact, "lads" at all... much closer to the intellectual half of Manic Street Preachers than Oasis


Tim F said:
"I was saying to Jon Dale recently that where I feel one big divide b/w myself and say you and Simon is that you both seem to have had impeccable tastes from day one - it appears that you've both always been into music that you could defend forever aesthetically/culturally/politically.

...

actually not true, there's always been a lot of things i like that don't fit whatever theory it is i've been touting at the time

i could come up with critical defences of them , and often have, but they'd only have the most tangential and logically tortured relation to the Main Thrust of My Ideas

just a few examples -- costello, prefab sprout.... [pause as gathers strength to admit it] cough... lloyd cole... pavement (only the early stuff, mind)... the list goes on.... Nirvana, by Mark's argument, are "revivalist" but they were great, there's no getting round it .... too many to list really

again, i see the parallel with things like fiction or TV or cinema.... there's always good and great work being done in forms that are not cutting-edge or futurist ... i'm as happy to watch/read a brilliantly-acted and written but formally non-groundbreaking movie /TV drama/novel --

yet we don't seem to be as forgiving toward this notion in music .... certainly i don't tend to be even though practically speaking it's not the case that 100 % of my listening is at the cutting edge

and at a time when the cutting edge is hard to locate it seems to be particularly fruitless to make that the sole criteria

as you say tim, i don't think what Ariel P is doing either can, or needs, to be justified as 'cutting edge'.... a lot of what makes it magical is about its raiding the pop memory banks, playing with pop pasts....

likewise junior boys
(incidentally, how is what they do, with its very pointed and discernible evocations of some 80s strains of music, not devoid of the taint of revivo/retro?)
 

Tim F

Well-known member
"this sounds exactly like my cup of recombinant tea, what are the records/mix-Cds i should be checking out Tim?"

Simon I should add the proviso that it's all in four-to-the-floor! Somehow I don't think you'll like them as much as my list of reference points might reflect... I guess the most succinct way to put it is that, for all their rave sources, their stuff still sounds very "club" - very musical, very well-produced, more focused on producing a mixture of emotions like joy/nostalgia/sadness than provoking an extreme of one emotion in particular.

But you should listen to "Mandarine Girl" which is on the <i>Body Language</i> mix, which you already have I think.

Their first album <I>Memento</I> went for a real late-night noir vibe, great but only intermittently danceable. However I've heard bits of their forthcoming 2nd album <i>Movement</i> and what I've heard sounds fantastic - "In White Rooms" is the trancey track I was talking about above, and I've listened to it more than anything else for the past few weeks - it has that same almost manipulatively emotional vibe that Jacques Lu Cont goes for on his Thin White Duke Mix of The Killers' "Mr Brightside". Meanwhile "Pong Pang" is like the second 808 State album refitted for 2006 - ethnodelic electro-house. "Night Falls" is bittersweet Metro Area disco with a UK Garage bassline and a late-arriving Boards of Canada synth melody...

Another favourite recent Booka Shade effort of mine is DJ T's remix of Will Saul's "Animal Magic", which combines a "Voodoo Ray" bassline with surging Superpitcher-style techno-melancholy. Booka Shade do all the production for DJ T and M.A.N.D.Y. tracks and their aesthetic preoccupations are stamped all over them. When you take into account all their backroom work they're probably the most prolific, consistent and arguably important figures in house music at the moment.

"just a few examples -- costello, prefab sprout.... [pause as gathers strength to admit it] cough... lloyd cole... pavement (only the early stuff, mind)... the list goes on.... Nirvana, by Mark's argument, are "revivalist" but they were great, there's no getting round it .... too many to list really"

These are all pretty respectable choices though! Lloyd Cole fandom makes perfect sense in a post-Smiths environment... Will anyone on Dissensus join me in admitting to liking Ani DiFranco? Probably not.

"likewise junior boys
(incidentally, how is what they do, with its very pointed and discernible evocations of some 80s strains of music, not devoid of the taint of revivo/retro?)"

Again I think it comes back to questions like "is the source material they're reviving more <i>necessary</i> or <i>desirable</i> in today's environment?" - which is a more complicated and perhaps inescapably subjective question than the more functionalist "is this entirely unprecedented". We could point out that JBs use 2-step or R&B style percussion and thus their combination is novel, but again the question becomes, which sonic twists are significant from a vanguardist perspective, and which can be chalked up to the narcissism of small differences? I hear similar sonic twists in current continental dance music (seriously Simon have you checked out Dominik Eulberg's remixes at all? Some of them even have breakbeats!) but it's hard to say whether I'm hearing these more clearly because I'm so "close" to the music.
 
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