Dance music/race/revolution (essay)

[glasshand]

this was an interesting read.

i feel like it goes alongside this

Negrophilia in club culture - Technomaterialism

Author: Mathys Rennela Abstract: Reflecting on the recent social reckoning around the dance music industry’s anti-Blackness problem, this essay outlines the pitfalls of an industry which only seeks to tame social progress and profit from Black artistry. Illustration: Detail of Hackney Peace...

technomaterialism.com

and this

One House: The Baddest Of Them All

worksofintent.com

pretty solid analyses of how dance music adjusted itself after 2020. which was kinda just to say a quick sorry and then double down on the tokenisation that was already going on due to identity politics. back to a slightly altered form of business as usual (with business as usual being the process of continuing to slide downhill as the viability of any paid music journalism at all slowly collapses).

i think it's good to have another nail in the coffin of the idea of dance music as inherently utopian. i feel like most artists who might have tried to frame their music with that message in the past have completely given up on it over the last few years.

it's nice to see things like this plainly stated:

In all this talk about the power of techno and house to liberate and educate, rarely does anyone talk about the music itself.

Critics realize that they don’t know how to judge music on its merits and have given that up entirely.

Part of the reason music writers attempt to engage with this music through the lens of Blackness is that it’s much easier to make claims about racial inequity than describe abstract music.

i guess it's not just a problem of critics' abilities though, it's about what type of writing the music press incentivizes or is prepared to publish, as the promotional arm of an industry that's still deeply embedded with communications and PR companies, technology companies, advertising and just consumer capitalism in general. all those behind the scenes links have been left completely unreconstructed after 2020 so this is bound to come back up.

as a sorta side note, i feel like it's telling the way RA and music media are ignoring amapiano almost entirely. it reminds me of what happened to deep tech in the 2010s but on the scale of a whole country this time. RA best tracks of 2023 features three tunes on Hessle Audio (must be parodical now) and a token throw to the mainstream in the form of peggy gou, but no Mnike with its 50 million plays on Spotify.

however, i did think that gotcha swipe at deforrest brown jr was a bit harsh. was this whole article a reaction of to his book about detroit techno? it looks like deforrest has actually deleted his twitter as i was writing this... (!) but the context of him doing a doc about the detroit community underground music academy with his 50k dorito money seems important. and the article leaves him in this category where he seems like a grifter willing to be tokenised. makes me reconsider some of the motivations, ideas and maybe simplifications in the article as a whole.

 

[thirdform]

this was an interesting read.

i feel like it goes alongside this

Negrophilia in club culture - Technomaterialism

Author: Mathys Rennela Abstract: Reflecting on the recent social reckoning around the dance music industry’s anti-Blackness problem, this essay outlines the pitfalls of an industry which only seeks to tame social progress and profit from Black artistry. Illustration: Detail of Hackney Peace...

technomaterialism.com

and this

One House: The Baddest Of Them All

worksofintent.com

pretty solid analyses of how dance music adjusted itself after 2020. which was kinda just to say a quick sorry and then double down on the tokenisation that was already going on due to identity politics. back to a slightly altered form of business as usual (with business as usual being the process of continuing to slide downhill as the viability of any paid music journalism at all slowly collapses).

i think it's good to have another nail in the coffin of the idea of dance music as inherently utopian. i feel like most artists who might have tried to frame their music with that message in the past have completely given up on it over the last few years.

it's nice to see things like this plainly stated:



i guess it's not just a problem of critics' abilities though, it's about what type of writing the music press incentivizes or is prepared to publish, as the promotional arm of an industry that's still deeply embedded with communications and PR companies, technology companies, advertising and just consumer capitalism in general. all those behind the scenes links have been left completely unreconstructed after 2020 so this is bound to come back up.

as a sorta side note, i feel like it's telling the way RA and music media are ignoring amapiano almost entirely. it reminds me of what happened to deep tech in the 2010s but on the scale of a whole country this time. RA best tracks of 2023 features three tunes on Hessle Audio (must be parodical now) and a token throw to the mainstream in the form of peggy gou, but no Mnike with its 50 million plays on Spotify.

however, i did think that gotcha swipe at deforrest brown jr was a bit harsh. was this whole article a reaction of to his book about detroit techno? it looks like deforrest has actually deleted his twitter as i was writing this... (!) but the context of him doing a doc about the detroit community underground music academy with his 50k dorito money seems important. and the article leaves him in this category where he seems like a grifter willing to be tokenised. makes me reconsider some of the motivations, ideas and maybe simplifications in the article as a whole.

He (deforrest did a thread on it) before he deactivated his twitter I think. what I got from it was that the author of the baffler piece, Hubert Adjei-Kontoh, is a zionist sympathiser or at least traverses in zionist-adjacent circles, tablet mag etc. I don't give a shit enough to track down anything he's said and roast him, noone cares about the inconsequential opinions of art ponces apart from lamentable goldsmiths alumni and mentally unhinged petit-bourgeois ilx poptimists. Needless to say, that doesn't invalidate everything he says, obvs, but it does put a bit of a taint on the obsessive moralism and the need to persistently flog the dead horse of wokeism over and over again. Speaks more to the milieus of these people. It's about time that club music discourse (strictly speaking) is left to the gnawing criticism of the mice and people just move on.

I don't really care to argue about this though. as people like @other_life well know by now I find these analyses are stuck in trying to rewind the clock back to a (recuperated it must be said) left that they would never have the discipline to be a part of. So you get the likes of Sprinkles disavowing the critique by arms. just opinions, nothing but positivism. It's analogous to those people in academia who become imigration experts and then politically campaign for the parties which enable the state to manage the fractionation of the population. Just boring and insipid. There's nothing to get outraged about here.