DJing is a right wing abomination
anyway crowl can probably explain why in 2019 i don't buy djing as having the potential to bring together people from clashing social upbringings. i mean he doesn't write about but hes more familiar with the 2010s discourse than sadam and luka (in fact i envy this about luke...) i've had a nasty cold for most of the week and im just gonna observe this thread and minimal typing. laptop in bed vibes. don't worry ayatollah i will be listening to drill in ur honour, not on bandcamp though!
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blissblogger
Well-known member
i've barely risen and am not yet ready to shine, but i will offer the small thought that there is something intrinsically authoritarian about showbiz - it is one way transmission
the extent to which deejaying becomes a show - with the deejay visible on stage, the Panopticon in reverse, all eyes pointed in one direction - is a relapse into showbiz
and the ultimate logic of that actually took EDM deejays into residencies in Las Vegas, world capital of showbiz
you can see the same dynamic repeating through rock history - bands in small clubs, on the same level as their audience, inhaling the same air and sweat, the same pheromone exusions... moving into big halls... and then into arenas... that move almost demands more showbiz elements (stage sets, better lights, props, choreographed routines, more razzle, more dazzle), and the audience stops being a community and becomes the proverbial "bums on seats", gawping at the spectacle
then the counter reaction - first pub rock (you can smell the Watneys on the singer's breath), where there isn't even a stage, just the floor - then punk
and so on - an endless dialectic (grunge is another anti-showbiz, back to the people shift - a rebellion against stage lighting, even)
youth popular music self-defines as the opposite of showbiz, of light entertainment / variety / cabaret - the stuff grown-ups are into (cos they need to be distracted, relaxed)
but then it gets bigger and starts to itself as just a new form of showbiz with a kind of formalized informality and slightly more explicit sexuality than Vegas / Broadway / the West End
Queen are a good example of this - rock become schlock, but also having an authoritarian subtext
it's no accident that they gave themselves a regal name, played with opera (music of the ruling classes), happily performed in South American countries with dictatorships, played Sun City
the extent to which deejaying becomes a show - with the deejay visible on stage, the Panopticon in reverse, all eyes pointed in one direction - is a relapse into showbiz
and the ultimate logic of that actually took EDM deejays into residencies in Las Vegas, world capital of showbiz
you can see the same dynamic repeating through rock history - bands in small clubs, on the same level as their audience, inhaling the same air and sweat, the same pheromone exusions... moving into big halls... and then into arenas... that move almost demands more showbiz elements (stage sets, better lights, props, choreographed routines, more razzle, more dazzle), and the audience stops being a community and becomes the proverbial "bums on seats", gawping at the spectacle
then the counter reaction - first pub rock (you can smell the Watneys on the singer's breath), where there isn't even a stage, just the floor - then punk
and so on - an endless dialectic (grunge is another anti-showbiz, back to the people shift - a rebellion against stage lighting, even)
youth popular music self-defines as the opposite of showbiz, of light entertainment / variety / cabaret - the stuff grown-ups are into (cos they need to be distracted, relaxed)
but then it gets bigger and starts to itself as just a new form of showbiz with a kind of formalized informality and slightly more explicit sexuality than Vegas / Broadway / the West End
Queen are a good example of this - rock become schlock, but also having an authoritarian subtext
it's no accident that they gave themselves a regal name, played with opera (music of the ruling classes), happily performed in South American countries with dictatorships, played Sun City
blissblogger
Well-known member
specifically re. deejaying
most of my favorite club experiences were in clubs with residents and not visiting star deejays, and where the dj booth was tucked away out of sight.
like the Labrynth, where there was a stage - a residue of some former incarnation of the venue - but it had this teetering row of ravers on it, facing the rest of the crowd -
i'm not sure i ever once clapped eyes on the DJs at Labrynth in all the times I went there
and more generally, a lot of my fave djs are no-name or just locally known deejays who did the job well, and the focus of the night was not staring at them but at the people you'd come with or the rest of the crowd
and most of my best memories of clubbing or raving, often I can't recall - or never even knew - who the deejays were
most of my favorite club experiences were in clubs with residents and not visiting star deejays, and where the dj booth was tucked away out of sight.
like the Labrynth, where there was a stage - a residue of some former incarnation of the venue - but it had this teetering row of ravers on it, facing the rest of the crowd -
i'm not sure i ever once clapped eyes on the DJs at Labrynth in all the times I went there
and more generally, a lot of my fave djs are no-name or just locally known deejays who did the job well, and the focus of the night was not staring at them but at the people you'd come with or the rest of the crowd
and most of my best memories of clubbing or raving, often I can't recall - or never even knew - who the deejays were
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blissblogger
Well-known member
it's a pretty basic idea - the star structure emerging in any field is an inherently conservative tendency - it's agitating against ideas of the collective, it supports a Great Man theory of history.
i wonder if that contributes to why Hollywood skews so left-wing... it is a sort of compensation, a penance for the fact of having made it and been so disproportionately rewarded, while behind trail all these colleagues or fellow performing arts students who didn't make it but were probably just as deserving
not to mention an awareness of the actual global proletariat
i suppose you could dismiss it as noblesse oblige, but i think there's something particularly tortured about it - and genuinely admirable too
i wonder if that contributes to why Hollywood skews so left-wing... it is a sort of compensation, a penance for the fact of having made it and been so disproportionately rewarded, while behind trail all these colleagues or fellow performing arts students who didn't make it but were probably just as deserving
not to mention an awareness of the actual global proletariat
i suppose you could dismiss it as noblesse oblige, but i think there's something particularly tortured about it - and genuinely admirable too
luka
Well-known member
Im the same. Im in the funny position of beingA Great Man but wanting to abolish the star system. It doesn't even work for the stars. I always think of Dizzee, who was a great man in as much as he was profoundly precocious, who clearly stood out amongst his peers, but only by a few degrees, and once put on that pedestal, cut off, found himself unable to make music.
luka
Well-known member
Who cares about him. Reynolds is a bigger celebrity anyway and he's willing to skip his breakfast to make a series of long posts on the dj as mussolini.
what i am talking is less about the dj as super star but the dj as a selective critic. a critic who has no ideology of his own and is totally reactive to subsets of values and crowd responses.
djs killed jungle, not jump up. not the method man samples. no. it was all the djs fault. they made the producers treat them as a master in a sufi lodge, but the problem is these djs hadn't undergone strenuous training from a shaikh. The only sense in which sasha and digweed were progressive in 93 was in the sense that they embodied the future archetypical dj. that's it. if you tried to produce something a bit weird in 96 the response would be 'it's good but i can't play it in the rave.' yet in 93 people were playing music as otherworldly and strange as post-punk and musique concrete. again i blame djs for this. i remember fabio talking about how carl cox quit hardcore-jungle-rave in 94 as he couldn't get the music he wanted to play in 94 because of dj exclusives. making music for djs. the disease that is djs.
djs killed jungle, not jump up. not the method man samples. no. it was all the djs fault. they made the producers treat them as a master in a sufi lodge, but the problem is these djs hadn't undergone strenuous training from a shaikh. The only sense in which sasha and digweed were progressive in 93 was in the sense that they embodied the future archetypical dj. that's it. if you tried to produce something a bit weird in 96 the response would be 'it's good but i can't play it in the rave.' yet in 93 people were playing music as otherworldly and strange as post-punk and musique concrete. again i blame djs for this. i remember fabio talking about how carl cox quit hardcore-jungle-rave in 94 as he couldn't get the music he wanted to play in 94 because of dj exclusives. making music for djs. the disease that is djs.
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droid
Well-known member
Not quite. It was the producers who killed jungle because the only way they could get paid for gigs was to DJ and with the exception of a few people like Bukem and Hype they didnt have the skills.
So the choice they had was to either learn to play like Kenny Ken or Randall. Spend years navigating the twisted tributaries of jungle production OR just make the music more DJ friendly.
They chose the latter.
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