do you ever feel like Corona - The Rhythm of the Night is maybe actually best song ever?

do you ever feel like Corona - The Rhythm of the Night is maybe actually best song ever?


  • Total voters
    12
  • Poll closed .

padraig (u.s.)

a monkey that will go ape
Nakatomi - Children of the Night is better. Tyne & Wear National Anthem.

my impression of the North of England sometimes is that everyone has been subjugated to a relentless and brutal aural regime of happy hardcore and its various hyperspeed, completely grooveless descendants for every waking minute since about 1992
 

thirdform

pass the sick bucket
but this thread and the feeling that prompted it is about the odd magic the art can sometimes create, often unintentionally

why does The Rhythm of the Night speak so strongly to a couple of old hardcore punks like me and my buddy?

why did Clair Denis feel that of all 90s pop-house songs this one should capstone the elegiac quality of her take on masculinity and queerness?

idk? anglos/americans love overidentifying with trash. Almost like they can't enjoy trash as trash proper, and have to attach a hi-falutin subtext to it.

I really rate Rhythm of the Night. I'll wack it on when I'm hammered (preferably at +16 but that's for another debate.) But it is trash. Silly melodies, silly lyrics, boring un-funky 4x4 beats. I don't see why I can't aesthetically not value it at all even if I personally do enjoy it as a pleasure.

It's like, you could spend your summer holidays getting catatonically stoned, or you could read a few books. Maybe it is the best eurodance song, but best song ever? It's just not. Nothing dreary about that.

And of course on the surface it's ironic that a bunch of old hardcore punks champion something so ruthlessly dependent upon the pleasure principle, but when you think about punk rock as a movement to disavow its prog antecedents then it makes much more sense. Punk never truly subverted the titular prog band, it just exacted a rearguard petit-bourgeois attack to restore art proper, a tendancy anachronistic to disco in fact. It's no wonder that a lot of punk 77 types were and are discophobic!

Now you could say, isn't hardcore, of the '92 type trash? and I would say to an extent it is yes. It is trashy drug noise. But where I think it succeeds and eurodance doesn't is in its churning of contradicting social tendancies, and the ability to create an anti-social surreal sonic fiction. Like I say, something being trash is not inherently bad. But neither is something being genuine art inherently good.

But when we talk about songs making people happy, then we have to ask the questions as to which contexts enable people to derive these feelings from such songs. and taste, whilst not being totally objective (of course) is a lot less subjective than people want to give it credit for. Hence my quip that I've never been to a youth club. Part of this is indeed personal (I was a bit of an introverted teenager) and part of it was socially determined (Turkish people just didn't go to youth clubs en masse, especially in my area of London.) Now you could say well, my taste is impoverished because I prefered to read weird books and listen to strange electronic music in my bedroom, but then again so are most nuum producers and practitioners intoverted and not having the same kind of sociality of yer corpseys. in fact. That's not really for anyone to judge.
 
Last edited:

thirdform

pass the sick bucket
re happy hardcore, in some senses it could be seen as a standardisation of the unstructured mania of 92.

There are actually two distinctive streams here. the Southern English tradition and the Dutch/Scottish tradition.

Imo hhc loses something special when it gets excessively toytown, but this is precisely not because it gets too cheesy. The charm of the best happy hardcore is that it is essex nail bar soul on speed.


All the cliches of 92 rave dialed up to 11.
 

DLaurent

Well-known member
yes hardcore unlocks the true power of italo house divas and pianos. In their original form they are fairly inert. In nutty breakbeat mentalizm they become xenomorph.

And Chicago from Italo Disco. Annette - Dream 17... north of England does Chicago Acid, well Manchester anyway.
 

thirdform

pass the sick bucket
diabolical thread.

this is way better.


one for the gay blokes at heaven in charing cross road and the hyper masculine lads being wounded by a girls stiletto in some package holiday chalet simultaneously after getting way too drunk on jagerbombs.

el claasico, too British music.
 

luka

Well-known member
ive never once thought this. i always hated it. one of those songs that used to make me feel physically sick.
 

luka

Well-known member
there are similar songs that are great like the nightcrawlers one, even rozella is pretty good, the candi staton one is sublime etc
 

thirdform

pass the sick bucket
some punks and music critic types always tend to like the worst dance music for some bizarre reason. Actually it's the same reason why certain intellectuals and poptimists are attracted to irrationality, the idea that they can abolish the contradiction between intellectual and manual labour in their head.

See Youth from killing joke having a whole revitalised career in engineering psytrance in the 90s lol, and obviously the whole of our enemy, which is one big circle jerk of people who are too afraid to admit they're inverted snobs.

not even going to get into madchester and the chemical bros.
 

thirdform

pass the sick bucket
the great contradictions of modern life.

I like ritzie discos, just have to forget there is music playing at all and force yourself into a paralytic stupor.

Tell you what's worse is when the pub has some medieval folk band. I told you I came here cos there's no music!
 

padraig (u.s.)

a monkey that will go ape
ive never once thought this. i always hated it. one of those songs that used to make me feel physically sick.
That's a fine take too, art is subjective etc, that's why it was a question rather than a decree

For me, Nightcrawlers is whatever, Rozalla pretty good, Candi Staton ofc great altho it's hard to compare bc Young Hearts Run Free is of an entirely different era

The other pop house anthem for me is, ofc, What Is Love, a great, timeless song unfortunately turned into a one-time punchline for a terrible mid-90s SNL sketch that's in the long unfortunate tradition of turning dance music into a punchline and/or tourism for (mostly) straight white people
 
Top