DJing is a right wing abomination

[luka]

Why things change, and particularly why things deteriorate, is an interesting question and worth asking but it's not usually simple and straightforward is it. There's usually a mystery at the heart of it.

It's always distressing when it happens. It's hard to see why something good shouldn't carry on for ever.

 

[blissblogger]

Why things change, and particularly why things deteriorate, is an interesting question and worth asking but it's not usually simple and straightforward is it. There's usually a mystery at the heart of it.

It's always distressing when it happens. It's hard to see why something good shouldn't carry on for ever.

yeah that applies to scenes, genres, political movements, friendship groups, heydays of magazines, hot artistic or writing streaks, love affairs, you name it

"it worked so well, why isn't it working anymore?"

 

[thirdform]

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.

but by that logic the jungle djs should have moved to garage. they didn't, if anything it was some of the old producers! they encouraged sea saw pendulumstep. they stamped their approval on it. they made bad company big! look at the producers that bukem was playing in 97. most of them not djs. sohostep! in fact there's a wire interview where bukem says that his crew of producers made tracks for him.

Are you seriously going to argue that someone like optical who (his merits or demerits aside) was an obsessive neurotic producer wasn't able to beat match two records? Jon B studied Stockhausen and that. would take him 14 hours to pick up beat juggling! with all their whiteboy uber spliff to gatwick fetish this should have been a walk in the park! Roni Size, Krust and Die were all accomplished djs even before 1999. people like remarc had already quit by then. Trace and Ed Rush were around in Don FM days.

ok droid ur my favourite dj. but you are the sole exception. a comrade on a lonely entryist mission through the institutions. we must stand behind you at all costs. in fact I will have to seriously reproach the ayatollah for this.

 

[thirdform]

bukem was one of the best hardcore djs no question. listen to yaman 04 or 06. unimpeachable. and yet by 95 (and we're still talking peak here) his sets had already settled into an all too familiar routine. fantazia 94 disc 2 was his last great dj moment. from then onwards it wasn't boring or bad, it was just static.

 

[luka]

I like quite a lot of right wing abominations. Left wing abominations are often more boring.

This, as well as being corpse expressing frustration with thirdform, is also a direction worth pursuing. How true is it? In what ways is it true (if it is true) I wonder if it takes its cue from John Eden's post at the start of the thread which doesn't seem to answer to any basic libidinal need. This is what I wonder sometimes about ambient, which is fundamentally boring music, by design. Is there a way in which all the 'problematic' aspects of being alive and human (two obvious ones being aggression and sexuality) have been purged from the music, leaving it safe and neutered? Is this a left wing impulse? Or is trying to glue all these different impulses onto a left-right axis fundamentally stupid and reductive?

 

[luka]

my impulse is always that, while it might be interesting to think about the political implications of any given work of art, essentially they are two different fields and you will only hobble art, make bad art, if you insist on simplifying it into reductive political terms. It's much more interesting and meaningful than politics, which is just tribal bickering.

 

[luka]

the first ten years of dissensus was just a handful of men wondering if they could justify their bone deep love for homophobic dancehall to themselves. But the love is primary and instinctual. Undeniable. The love is the atomic fact. And of course not one of them ever renounced dancehall. How could you.

 

[luka]

Endless neurotic fussing about dancehall for ten years.

 

[luka]

I don't think, actually, that the tendency to say, this feels good, this is an urge I want to act on, but I can't because it's problematic, is left wing or right wing. It can be either depending on context. The superego doesn't have a basic political orientation, all sides rely on it. But once you do start policing the id, once you introduce this self-suspicion on the one hand, and fear of social condemnation on the other, your total sum of available energy is radically diminished.

 

[luka]

Politics should stay well away from the unconscious. Once politics taps into the energy reservoir of the unconscious everyone finds themselves at a Nuremberg rally all of a sudden, not sure how they got there.
But art is all about the unconscious. The only logical consistent political approach to art is to ban it. Outlaw it. It's dangerous.

 

[thirdform]

I mean I'm not interested in banning art, that's a political solution you're right. I'm interested in killing it. why is it separate from life? death to art!

 

[thirdform]

Is there a way in which all the 'problematic' aspects of being alive and human (two obvious ones being aggression and sexuality) have been purged from the music, leaving it safe and neutered? Is this a left wing impulse?

It's a left wing impulse insofar as it is the middle class asserting its value set and diminishing the cross cultural and cross racial interactions of the pproletariat. I.E: all the antiracist discourse in techno is a self-fulfilling prophecy because it's university white people hanging out with university black and brown people. By right wing I meant something else though, as i responded to corpsey in the original reply.

 

[luka]

It's a left wing impulse insofar as it is the middle class asserting its value set and diminishing the cross cultural and cross racial interactions of the pproletariat. I.E: all the antiracist discourse in techno is a self-fulfilling prophecy because it's university white people hanging out with university black and brown people. By right wing I meant something else though, as i responded to corpsey in the original reply.

Yes, of course, they all speak the same language as they are products of the same machine. It's disgusting. That's why we have to abolish universities immediately

 

[luka]

The hour on the clock is ticking towards Saturnalia.

 

[luka]

For basic reasons of libidinal economics you can't be a good boy forever. Something has to give, and the more violent and long lasting the repression the more violent the subsequent explosion.

 

[thirdform]

I mean ironically enough for corpsey the right wing abomination that aestheticised art as a political lifestyle was.. futurism.

Whereas the real transcending of the left-right would be aestheticising life as art. jungle tried to do this briefly. and various factors contributed to it becoming yet another boring art form and not a life form.

Which brings us back to the idea very well expounded by corpse and si about structural conservatism in post-hardcore dance musics. bricolage is quite situation dependent. when those windows of opportunity are diminished, the regular clockwork routines reinstate themselves. this is why hardcore was the most songful but also most anti-musical form of dance music. it was, for a very brief while, a unification of the contradictory tendancies of the avant-garde, although the actual avant-garde never saw this because they dug themselves into art as a reified form.

Techstep is an interesting one here. here is a group that wants to accomplish one thing: to get to the future. and yet, it was a far cry from a Landian fantasy of things speeding up. it decelerated. the only way it sped up again was to escape that collapsing building feel and resort to something akin to trance.

 

[luka]

when those windows of opportunity are diminished, the regular clockwork routines reinstate themselves

Right, this is it. This is one of my basic points. That they are always there waiting for your return. We escape and we are recaptured, time and time again.

 

[luka]

The trap and the escape. And this is why wedding DJs are only acceptable within their proper context. Within that context they are joyful. Last wedding I went to was of a mate from primary school and when the DJ put on 'incredible' even Bartys heart would have melted to see the response from young and old in a temporary multicultural cockney utopia. There the learned familiar routines serve to bind across generational and cultural strata. We all know how to do the Hokey Cokey.

 

[thirdform]

i mean, this as aestheticisation of art as political form was more futuristic than terminator II. It is also why it will be the next alt right song. Terminator II was the aestheticisation of lived psychosis. It's not futuristic on a surface level, if by future we mean a identiket cosmopolitan europe with high speed railways and shimmering, glistening compplexes. terminator II was not pristine. it was grungey, it was ugly, it's futurism was not a futurism of art but the future of life in London.

 

[luka]

This notion of learning the new dance is fundamental to me and whether you call it nowist or futurist doesn't seem that important. I admit I can't get my head around the distinction. I want the regular clockwork routine broken. it does something very profound, it puts you in contact with reality, you engage more fully and completely. This is what I was talking about with computer games the other day. That there is an initialstage of hyper-alertness (that bleeds out into life outside the game) where you are trying to identify the cues. How this world operates. That later formalises into Pavlovian stimuli-rsponse conditioning at which point reality is flattened again.