Tim F said:
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
Tim F said:
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 =
Ronan said:
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
Tim F said:
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!
Tim Finney said:
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
Tim Finney said:
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)
tim finney said:
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!!!
tim finney said:
<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!
tim finney said:
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
tim finney said:
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???
tim finney said:
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
tim finney said:
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?
tim finney said:
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?