The realisation that you don't really like house music much any more...

[thowed]

With absolutely no disrespect, I was going to say you're too old, or you're going to the wrong clubs. But by the sixth of page of this, as a reply to most people posting on the subject, I'd say you're too old AND you're going to the wrong clubs.

Granted, there is an absolute ton of Terrible house music around these days, however anyone who's experienced one of Erol Alkan's 'house' (which feels like a horribly unfair description but it is mostly 4/4) sets in the 2nd room of The End at Bugged Out would laugh at the idea of not liking house music. Wonderful music, wonderful atmosphere, no over-analysing...

And there have been some fantastic tracks played at Inside Out in the past few months too.

As I said, no disrespect, it's easy to hear a lot of horrific house music, but I promise you that there's some great stuff around, and also, I suppose part of it depends on how much you include in your appraisal the atmosphere of the club you're at.

After all that, I believe it's polite to say hello on one's first post on a forum - so, hello.

 

[kingofcars]

i think people are still trying to pick up on that

off the top of my head --

(1) superstars of love (st louis rave maestro and "polymorphous pervert" gone electro-rock)

(2) g. rizo on codek records

just noticed these were links...
the g. rizo stuff is pretty cool...reminds me of sylvester...

 

[dominic]

the g. rizo stuff is pretty cool

you can see g rizo live every monday at 6's and 8's

and you can see sasa dj every thursday at nublu

 

[Ronan]

I've never posted here before, it's odd how so many really intelligent posts are interspersed with ones which wouldn't stand up on their own legs for 10 seconds on ILX.

that is to say this thread was a bit like reading discogs forums, in places, and that's not good! As ever I wonder are certain people really anti-house or in actuality just sticking to the same boring old anti-fashion, anti-pop, anti-image schtick which would kill dance music quicker than a thousand bad "funky house" records.

 

[dominic]

I've never posted here before, it's odd how so many really intelligent posts are interspersed with ones which wouldn't stand up on their own legs for 10 seconds on ILX.

you'll have to do better than that, mate

take a position, go out on a limb, let us know who you agree with, who you disagree with, and why

As ever I wonder are certain people really anti-house or in actuality just sticking to the same boring old anti-fashion, anti-pop, anti-image schtick which would kill dance music quicker than a thousand bad "funky house" records.

don't think the lines of debate were drawn on these terms

(the debate, rather, was electicism vs genre-expectations -- see blissblog, see tim f's remarks on the electicism thread for further treatment of the issue)

(and a secondary question was cold electro/italo sounds vs. warm groovy/cali/breakbeat-y sounds, though i moderated my rhetoric upon being reminded of how little i know about the "hippy bongos" end of italo disco)

in arguing for a kind of electicism, i may have been taking a pro-underground, anti-commercialism position -- but i'm certainly not anti-fashion, anti-pop, anti-image -- i.e., i think in the best moments, the two facets go together = the parallel pop universe that 2-step constituted not so long ago, and rave before that (though rave was of course anti-image) -- and moreover, if you couldn't tell, i endorsed both in flagranti (g rizo) and superstars of love, who are both pretty savvy about "image"

and i know for a fact that my main antagonist on this thread, tim finney, wouldn't take an anti-image, anti-pop position in a thousand years

of course there were many other participants in this thread -- but your remarks provide no indication of your actual position or who you disagree with

 

[dominic]

errr, just noticed that i spelled "eclecticism" as electicism throughout the entry above

thought i'd ward off any cheap points against me!

 

[DJL]

I think there are great house records out there but the house scene has fragmented into different styles like everything else so the music getting played at most nights is too similar and consequently boring imo. There are exceptions to this but they are few and far between generally.

The good thing about house music, especially from the middle to late nineties, is that EVERYONE knows it and, when a bit wasted, will go crazy for it in my experience. My current technique when DJ-ing is to get everyone comfortable that they are going to like the music getting played by playing this stuff and when people have relaxed and are having fun you can start dropping in things in the right places that are upfront and really exciting.

We put on nights in pub back rooms and do house parties and often we have 4-5 DJs who switch about between themselves as and when it feels rights mixing whatever style of music from Hip Hop/House/Grime/UK Garage/DnB/Ragga depending on which DJ is currently on the decks. We also do nights of one style of music and both ways of doing it go down well as long as you read the crowd and the feeling inside the place.

 

[Ronan]

Well to be fair dominic I thought my post would clearly show with whom I agree and disagree, and set my stall out quite well.

And you could be as rigorous in questioning a dozen or so posts here as my own, not least thowed's which pretty much says what I'm saying even in more direct terms!

as regards electroclash I think the great irony is that most of the discussions here are examining everything but the music! ironically it's then dismissed as a scene and not a source of good music etc, how does it ever stand a chance in the first place when it's not even being discussed as an actual music genre from minute one.

the fact electroclash was only based in 2 or 3 cities hammers this point home even further, most people hearing it were buying cds or downloading stuff, not going out to clubs etc.

 

[kingofcars]

if my comments on electroclash earlier came accross as pejorative and dismissive (or, even worse, of discogs forum-caliber!), my apologies.
a lot of music i like (adult, bunker records, new romantic, etc) is associated, at least in part, with the electroclash
movement. i think that whole aesthetic could still have some potential.

my harsher judgments were directed more at the electroclash *scene* than the surrounding music.
i went to club luxx a handful of times, and thought it was pretty dull (though i'm impressed by very little nyc nightlife). things actually weren't and image conscious ENOUGH, i think! it was populated more with boring shirtless guys than liquid sky extras. the way larry tee and associates promoted the bourgening music and the scene attracted a lot of bad attention. it also, unfortunately, coincided with the growing fixation on williamsburg as the new *hip-youth hotspot*. the whole idea was commodified, packaged, and then rejected before the music and scene could really develop and mature properly.

i dont' think music has to be utterly hermetic for a good scene to develop, but i do feel you have to have a solid core, a good base of support, before garnering much attention. otherwise things tend to evaporate very quickly.

 

[dominic]

as regards electroclash I think the great irony is that most of the discussions here are examining everything but the music!

this thread is devoted to a general question, and so invites general statements

ironically it's then dismissed as a scene and not a source of good music etc

except that nobody dismissed electroclash out of hand

in fact, i said that electroclash was "in bad taste, in both good and bad ways" -- of course, if you're new to these parts, that kind of lingo may be lost on you!

also, it should be clear from the context that both king of cars and i are endorsing the "polymorphous perversity" associated with electroclash

the fact electroclash was only based in 2 or 3 cities hammers this point home even further, most people hearing it were buying cds or downloading stuff, not going out to clubs etc.

have you noted which cities most of the participants on this thread live in?

 

[dominic]

moreover, house music in general is anti-image and anti-pop -- and it's long since ceased to be fashionable (though it might be said that nothing is particularly fashionable these days!)

so again, i believe you've mistaken the fundamental lines of disagreement on this thread

 

[dominic]

the fact electroclash was only based in 2 or 3 cities hammers this point home even further, most people hearing it were buying cds or downloading stuff, not going out to clubs etc.

in the case of electroclash, i kinda caught it both in the midwest before i moved to new york in 2001, and then also kinda caught it in new york during subsequent years

don't forget that tommy sunshine was a midwest rave scene fixture before he hit the big time

so electroclash, for a young phenomenon, had quite a few centers in north america -- not just nyc and detroit

or perhaps more accurately, the electroclash "impulse" could be found in many places -- and it's an impulse that continues to inform techno and house music at large

 

[Tim F]

Dominic you said earlier you've mostly been appalled by the cheesiness of the house scene so I don't think that Ronan is totally misconstruing what is being discussed here (it would also perhaps be preferable if we didn't resort to unnecessarily patronising new posters - Ronan doesn't deserve to be treated as a prima facie simpleton just because he hasn't posted here before!)

"moreover, house music in general is anti-image and anti-pop -- and it's long since ceased to be fashionable (though it might be said that nothing is particularly fashionable these days!)"

Really? It would seem to me that one of the most obvious rationales for kneejerk house hate is its very pop-ubiquity: the fact that so much pop music uses a house undercarriage (see Kylie, Madonna etc. not to mention all the blatantly populist house like covers/remixes of 80s hits) - in terms of providing structural sonic support to pop songs, house is currently second only to R&B/hip hop. Simultaneously, the spectrum of electro-house to microhouse (which I tend to just put under the umbrella of "German") is by far the most fashionable club sound and, at least at the electro end, is still very image conscious - why else would Tiefschwarz draft in the guy from The Rapture to sing on their album? And yet these two aspects of house's current position in popular consciousness cannot be simply opposed to one another: electro-house for example is simultaneously underground/experimental (Robag Wruhme, Luciano, the list goes on) and totally chart-topping utilitarian (see tracks like "Midas Touch", "I Want You", "I See Girls", etc. etc.). Moreover as much as e.g. Tiefschwarz may be "image-conscious", they are simultaneously faceless - they're much more famous for their remixes than for their own tracks, and in either case they are the silent technicians behind more palatable guest frontpeople plucked from rock and pop music.

A lot of the negative discourse surrounding house seems to be descended from (or at least in line with) the <i>Generation Ecstacy</i> polemic: the setting up of 'ardkore's pop-modernism against the pallid traditionalism of US garage, deep house, tech-house etc. This binary has the advantage of being easy to apply and, in many contexts, correct. But it's increasingly difficult to explain the current status of house vis a vis other dance music genres in these terms (<i>Generation Ecstacy</i> came out over 7 years ago!).

One difficulty is that when we get down to it "house" is a largely empty structural device: the very basic simplicity of its formula (the four-four beat within a certain tempo range) allows it to be married to any number of other freefloating sonic, thematic, conceptual etc. signifiers - and this correspondingly allows for a limitless diversity of audiences, settings, atmospheres, philosophies. We can contrast this with, say, UK garage, where an expanded number of sonic/thematic/conceptual components appeared to be covalently bonded to one another (you cannot reduce 2-step garage to just the 2-step beat itself), and the music as a whole was tied to a particular audience or scene (in your terms, "population", yeah?).

Talking about house in general terms causes us to run into problems because it invites us to ignore this diversity and allow some specific concepts of how house operates (both as a music and as a "scene" - to pretend for a moment that this scene is singular) to stand in for the various (and often mutually contradictory) ways that house actually does operate. In fact different house scenes often operate in a manner more fundamentally similar to scenes from outside the house spectrum than to eachother.

But of course, if we start from the assumption that house's fragmentation is false, its apparent diversity merely a strategic smokescreen, it's easy to simply assume that it is characterised by a grey consistency - the same thing happens on a more focused level when we assume, for example, that electro-house is by definition cold and ironic (this ignores the wealth of deeply emotional stuff this scene has produced, and the warmth of many of its sonic textures). I do this sort of thing too for lots of styles and sub-styles of music that I haven't bothered to investigate so I'm not saying this is a crime, but I think it's important to acknowledge how this assumption is actually supported by my lack of engagement. When it comes to house as a whole, where there is readily available empirical evidence of a diversity and plurality of scenes and approaches, this attitude strikes me as necessarily requiring at least an element of wilful blindness.

 

[Tim F]

"in the case of electroclash, i kinda caught it both in the midwest before i moved to new york in 2001, and then also kinda caught it in new york during subsequent years

don't forget that tommy sunshine was a midwest rave scene fixture before he hit the big time"

Ah but surely this is Ronan's point - there is a difference between tommy sunshine playing at midwest raves and going to see Chicks on Speed (or whoever) at a club at Williamsburg: this is the difference between engaging with electroclash in its expanded form and engaging with it in its limited "strict definition" form.

The common practice is to assume that the the latter stands in metonymically for the former. Whereas the very things which characterise the latter (exclusivity, art-phags, high fashion and media attention) are absent or even reversed in the former. In Australia the electroclash/post-electroclash scene mirrors this split quite well: there are the special parties deliberately aimed at recreating (or at least imagining) a "Williamsburg" vibe, and then there are all the other clubs which play this stuff - where, if anything, there is a strong anti-image impulse, almost a beery boshing feel. At a lot of commercial clubs the more chart-focused stuff is simply mixed in with current commercial R&B and hip hop.

 

[kingofcars]

i think that's why, as was discussed earlier, 'electroclash' refers not so much to a style of music as a very specific scene (possibly entirely wiliamsburg-centric). and, not only a specific scene, but (as tim f implied) a largely imagined scene.

to engage with 'expanded form' electroclash would really be to engage with just the sounds and genres that were (temporarily) subsumed by the electroclash blanket (milennial electro, synthpop, some house and techno, some electronic-savvy rock bands, etc. remember, electroclash was a very pro-eclecticism scene. beatmatching and 'consistent vibe' were often eschewed for spontaneity, genre-hopping, and rock-friendly attitudes.)
i'd almost assert that the only way to engage w/ "electroclash" would be to listen to larry tee play records in 01/02....'electroclash' is possibly a term that can only apply to events in specific regions during specific years...

not sure why but this thread is bringing out some ridiculous purist streak in me.

 

[huffafc]

Zola seven!

Following on Tim F's point about the diversity of styles in house:

I think it is easy to forget that house music is extraordinarily international, and extends not only throughout many many subcultures within the US, Europe, and other "first world" countries but into many other places often forgotten by those of us who live in cities like London and NYC. Moreover many of these scenes, in China, India and South Africa are much more than simply groups of DJ's playing records they ordered from London, or producing slightly altered copies of whatever is going in more globally recognized scenes.

Perhaps the prime example of this, and certainly the one I know the best, is the house/kwaito scene in South Africa. Kwaito, while still recognizable as house music, or a close relation to it, is slower, and more aggressive. You can hear influences as diverse as hip-hop, deep house, township jive, and zulu accapella in the most popular kwaito tracks, and there is almost always a lyricist rhyming over the beats. The lyrics, usually in a combination of Xhosa, Zulu, and Tsotsital, are oftentimes about being young, black, and poor in SA. Finally, kwaito is much less often heard in clubs than at huge "bashes" that are more like concerts than raves, with live performers usually being the main attraction.

Surely any broad statement about the value of house music based solely on even the most diverse experience of house in the US and Europe does not take account of the cultural and musical developments going on in places like Durbin and Johannesburg. Places where house not only sounds different occupies a very different place in the world around it. I agree with Tim F that attempting to dimiss house in its entirety is almost impossible, not only because of the marked differences between genres like electro-house and micro-house, but because there are places where house music exists in an entirely different artistic, political and cultural space.

 

[dominic]

Dominic you said earlier you've mostly been appalled by the cheesiness of the house scene

in line with your remarks, there's many varieties of cheese in the house scene -- some of the cheese i like (as w/ electroclash), and other varieties i detest (as with hard house, the trancier end of house) -- so kill me for being honest

so I don't think that Ronan is totally misconstruing what is being discussed here (it would also perhaps be preferable if we didn't resort to unnecessarily patronising new posters - Ronan doesn't deserve to be treated as a prima facie simpleton just because he hasn't posted here before!)

perhaps i was being petty or defensive or harsh or merely irritable yesterday -- but Ronan did introduce his comment with these remarks =

I've never posted here before, it's odd how so many really intelligent posts are interspersed with ones which wouldn't stand up on their own legs for 10 seconds on ILX. that is to say this thread was a bit like reading discogs forums, in places, and that's not good!

so i'm inclined to believe that i gave him what he deserved

It would seem to me that one of the most obvious rationales for kneejerk house hate is its very pop-ubiquity: the fact that so much pop music uses a house undercarriage (see Kylie, Madonna etc. not to mention all the blatantly populist house like covers/remixes of 80s hits) - in terms of providing structural sonic support to pop songs, house is currently second only to R&B/hip hop.

now you've introduced a degrees of complexity and variation that thus far have not informed the discussion

i think stelfox, who started this thread, had in mind archetypal shelter-style house and its main descendants, which are indeed anti-pop -- and, moreover, you invoked this very model upthread in describing gay clubs suffused with amyl nitrate and heavy on the love vibe -- so we've been discussing house with reference to shifiting notions of what house is -- therefore, it's pretty to easy to say i've missed the target!

Simultaneously, the spectrum of electro-house to microhouse (which I tend to just put under the umbrella of "German") is by far the most fashionable club sound

most fashionable, yes

not necessarily the most common, however

and, at least at the electro end, is still very image conscious - why else would Tiefschwarz draft in the guy from The Rapture to sing on their album?

yes, but where upthread have i staked out a position opposed to "image"?!?!?

i'm all for image, the word, style, charisma -- the "not disco" part of the "disco not disco" equation

therefore, i'm entitled to express some frustration with my position being misrepresented

(at least in my mind)

A lot of the negative discourse surrounding house seems to be descended from (or at least in line with) the <i>Generation Ecstacy</i> polemic: the setting up of 'ardkore's pop-modernism against the pallid traditionalism of US garage, deep house, tech-house etc.

yes, i've yet to break free of bliss blogga's influence -- need to work on that one! -- i.e., even when his arguments don't chime with my experience, i still find it hard to think outside of the terms he's set up!!!

<i>Generation Ecstacy</i> came out over 7 years ago!

solely to score any easy point against you tim -- let me say that when an argument was made has no necessary bearing on its ultimate truth or validity!

One difficulty is that when we get down to it "house" is a largely empty structural device: the very basic simplicity of its formula (the four-four beat within a certain tempo range) allows it to be married to any number of other freefloating sonic, thematic, conceptual etc. signifiers - and this correspondingly allows for a limitless diversity of audiences, settings, atmospheres, philosophies. We can contrast this with, say, UK garage, where an expanded number of sonic/thematic/conceptual components appeared to be covalently bonded to one another (you cannot reduce 2-step garage to just the 2-step beat itself), and the music as a whole was tied to a particular audience or scene (in your terms, "population", yeah?).

this i an interesting claim that deserves its own thread

not sure what to say in response

Talking about house in general terms causes us to run into problems because it invites us to ignore this diversity and allow some specific concepts of how house operates (both as a music and as a "scene" - to pretend for a moment that this scene is singular) to stand in for the various (and often mutually contradictory) ways that house actually does operate. In fact different house scenes often operate in a manner more fundamentally similar to scenes from outside the house spectrum than to eachother.

i think your remarks are true -- but it'd definitely be worth addressing both why and how -- perhaps the future purpose of this thread???

when we assume, for example, that electro-house is by definition cold and ironic (this ignores the wealth of deeply emotional stuff this scene has produced, and the warmth of many of its sonic textures)

again, i did concede upthread my ignorance of the full range of italo disco (not that that past range has any bearing on today's sounds)

however, that said, i do think electro sounds are "cold" -- profitable generalization! -- which is why i think we're in store after some five years for a move back toward "warm" sounds, "hippy" sounds, etc

I do this sort of thing too for lots of styles and sub-styles of music that I haven't bothered to investigate so I'm not saying this is a crime, but I think it's important to acknowledge how this assumption is actually supported by my lack of engagement.

i'm much lazier than you, yes

but really, why shoudl other people bother to undertake the same degree of investigaton and display the same diligence as you?

When it comes to house as a whole, where there is readily available empirical evidence of a diversity and plurality of scenes and approaches, this attitude strikes me as necessarily requiring at least an element of wilful blindness.

yes, but who on this thread has spoken of "house" in such monolithic terms?

 

[stelfox]

i think stelfox, who started this thread, had in mind archetypal shelter-style house and its main descendants, which are indeed anti-pop -- and, moreover, you invoked this very model upthread in describing gay clubs suffused with amyl nitrate and heavy on the love vibe -- so we've been discussing house with reference to shifiting notions of what house is -- therefore, it's pretty to easy to say i've missed the target!

absolutely and completely off-base. i was the one who brought up tiefschwarz, the pallidity of electrohouse, the whole sense of antisocial coke hauteur this music seems to inspire/emphasise, the way all, for want of a better word, "blackness" has been eradicated from house music in this particular incarnation (as i said, it's interesting how even breakbeats make michael mayer's skin crawl) and how *in general* (profound apologies for not posting 1,000 words on this but i have a job to do, too), although undoubtedly much of it is highly proficient from the perspective of production skill, it still seems perfunctory, workmanlike to me.
right now i'm bored with endless microshifts that don't do very much really, bored with the attendant drug culture of house music, just bored. i am fullly aware that there is more to house music than this particular strand, but it is the one that's dominating clubs and critical discourse at the moment and therefore carries more weight than others.
albums like isolee's wearemonster and artists like luciano (at his best) are exceptions to this rule because of their unpredictability, the way they make rhythms move and confound all your expectations of sonic texture and depth. the vast majority of this music just doesn't do that any more.
as a former serious lover of house music, this all saddens me. i really do think that unless house music becomes more expansive and embracing of other influences, then its days are numbered. tim asked me what had changed since the days when i named MRI's all that glitters as my favourite album of the year and i'd have to say that album actually signalled and broadening of mri's aesthetic; the chromey germanic minimalism of rhythmogenesis shifting into a blissy discoball shimmer.
this is really what's missing for me now, the feeling of things opening up - now it feels like the whole template is constricting.

 

[ambrose]

as previosuly discussed, the lines of argument are very confused in this thread. or at least, im very confused. but:

im interested in this:

"i'm all for image, the word, style, charisma -- the "not disco" part of the "disco not disco" equation"

i would have thought the "disco" would be the image part of that phrase! if disco not disco means that sort of punk funk/rapture/post punk/NY/DFA stuff, then it would seem from that statement that the "rock" side of the equation represents the image, the style, the fashion, and the disco merely and slightly embarrassing rhythmic device to tack on to the more hip side of the equation. if this is what you meant, then i think theres a problem in discussing house in these terms becasue as i gather, the concepts of house/disco in the US and outside of the US are very different. there isnt the stigma that house and disco carry in the UK for example, and we never had the "disco sucks", and house/trance tunes have consistently appeared in the higher parts of the charts since the late 80s maybe? in a way that perhaps doesnt happen in the US. It feels problematic to discuss "image" when all parties will have really different ideas of what that image is. For instance, Tim F said that the "german" soud is by far the most fashionable sound in clubs, well would that it were up in Leeds where I am, as its very difficult to hear up here, and those that form the fashionable contingent in Leeds don't seem interested.

 

[Ronan]

I agree with Tim, in the sense that for me house is a completly popist genre, I mean isn't the way house music is consumed (and has been for as long as I can remember) completely popist? The rise and rapid fall of big records by one off artists, the complete focus on singles, the faddish magpie way in which house trends come and go??

But even going back to say early Chicago stuff, it always feels like a pop genre to me, and I say that word free from any negative associations. I mean there is so much pop character in house, from day one throughout, isn't it arguably present in most of houses greatest successes? I'd probably go further than that even.

The difference of course is that as house has cemented itself and got older, it's now a fairly steady industry and the production process is somewhat predictable , not the actual music, but you can be assured that a certain process is dominant.

And I mean, you can apply this to other dance genres but few have the same focus on a rotating merry-go round of certain all conquering records. I think, this is really at the heart of house music , and perhaps one of the things which may annoy some people here.

To expand on my position further, I believe there are 2 approaches to electronic dance music at work here, perhaps others exist elsewhere but these 2 are extremely common. I think those people who have time for the idea of crossover-house or pop-house, and house as pop, will always have fractious musical discussions with people who are staunchly in favour of house as an underground phenomenon first and foremost. It's odd because to make this distinction perhaps overly caricatures both groups, one group as pill eating fatboy slim fans and the other as weed smoking UR purists, but I do think it's the big divide in discussions of electronic dance music which you find REPEATEDLY, and more than ever post-electrohouse.

In a way, oddly, you now have people on the "underground" side of the aesthetic divide who actually like supremely "cheesey" US house and revile electrohouse.

Anyway I think alot of people on this thread fit this profile of "underground house fans", I think that's quite clear from reading the posts, I don't need to make a list or be confrontational. I really do have problems with this position though, I always do. I think it's judging music by factors external to how it sounds, and I think it's shown up more than ever nowadays, when the fashion/pop connection is actually producing more innovative house music than any other formula. For many people this occurrence is like a sort of mecca, but for others it's enough to persist with the same old them and us thing that probably meant something in 1989.

I think these people forget there's a whole generation of people who grew up in an era of dance magazines and big choons and safe sanitised clubbing, who are middle class and safe and white and all those things; but what's the crime in that, what's the crime in that when it's actually leading to non-political focuses dominating house music (presumably, THE middle class electronic genre by now), focuses on actual sonic innovation and style above everything else, on making house music which exists only for itself, for the sake of house music.

I hope this makes my position clearer, there are obvious criticisms of it (they spring into my head as I write this post) and of course being on one side of the divide is as valid as being on the other, but I do have a real belief in this 2 main schools of electronic music fan theory, after many arguments over the years!