questions you are dying to ask but are too scared to b/c of music nerd cred?

[Canada J Soup]

As far as I can recall, the term 'Indie' came into use before 'Indie Rock' in the UK. Indie was widely used in the mid to late 80s to describe pretty much anything on an independent label. (Wasn't there an 'indie charts' on that ITV/C4 rival to ToTP? I remember it having everything from Fuzzbox to Aztec Camera on it...) The addition of the rock suffix seemed to come about in the early 90s and (I always felt) was more commonly applied to US guitar/bass/drum bands. I keep thinking of Sebadoh as an example, but that might just be because of 'Gimmie Indie Rock'.

Edit: Just remembered the name...The Chart Show! I'm pretty sure that's where the indie charts were first broadcast in the UK. Hadn't thought about it in years. Am I remembering this wrong or did they have segments where songs would be played over a photo of the record cover when no video was available?

 

[hucks]

Just remembered the name...The Chart Show! I'm pretty sure that's where the indie charts were first broadcast in the UK. Hadn't thought about it in years. Am I remembering this wrong or did they have segments where songs would be played over a photo of the record cover when no video was available?

Yeah, and the "dance" charts were almost all random fractally pictures with some sillhouetted girl dancing.....

 

[zhao]

no no, sebadoh def comes to my mind too when I think back to the time that I first started hearing the unappetizing combination of the words "indie" and "rock" together. but sebadoh I kind of liked at the time.

post punk I only started hearing recently. as in... maybe... 2002? 3?

here's one I've been wondering for some time: what do the letters E, S, and G stand for? and why would both a NYC girl-dance-punk outfit as well as O.G. Southern Rappers use the same initials? google gives me stuff like Earth System Grid, Enterprise Strategy Group, and Emergency Shelter Grants (like, for the homeless), but none of these seem likely to have been on these crazy chicks and gangsters' minds.

 

[aleksy]

Apparently it's their birth stones, Emerald, Sapphire and Gold (?) Which they probably chose when they were seven or something

 

[zhao]

so the rappers from... houston? have the same birth stones?

 

[Canada J Soup]

Nah, Houston's ESG is an 'Everyday Street Gangsta'.

 

[tate]

As far as I can recall, the term 'Indie' came into use before 'Indie Rock' in the UK. Indie was widely used in the mid to late 80s to describe pretty much anything on an independent label. (Wasn't there an 'indie charts' on that ITV/C4 rival to ToTP? I remember it having everything from Fuzzbox to Aztec Camera on it...) The addition of the rock suffix seemed to come about in the early 90s

Thank you for the response. But a further question for the UK contingent: when K-punk and his followers talk about "Indie" and the "War on Indy" (sic), to what time period and sonic aesthetic does this term apply, preciesly? You say that in the early 90s the word "indie" was in use in the UK? - so does the term "indie" apply to late 80s/early 90s guitar bands on labels such as Touch & Go, Dischord, Am Rep, Quarterstick, Skin Graft, Cargo, Revelation, and numerous others with a similar aesthetic? What about the Louisville-Chicago axis of bands, e.g., the Squirrel Bait, Slint, Bastro, Gastr Del Sol-affiliated types from the late 80s/early 90s? Would these bands be comprehended by the UK usage of "indie" (they were certainly on independent labels)? Was Slint "indie" from a UK perspective? Are they now? Does K-Punk's comments on "Indie" apply to this kind of music too? Have always been very curious about this.

 

[dubversion]

Juggling.

Is it...

playing non-reggae / dancehall on a reggae/ dancehall rig ("juggling" styles)?
Mixing / beat mixing?
playing tunes straight without an MC?

i suspect it's probably the middle option but the contexts I've heard it in could lead me to conclude any of the 3?

 

[straight]

in a djing sense you're usually talkin playing a bar of a tune on one deck and have the same part of the same tune lined up on the next, and to keep playing one bar, cutting to the next, rewinding and repeating to give the effect of a looped sample. that was how early hip hop guys used to create break beats for mcs, usually called this because they would be looped break section of drum heavy sections of james brown etc records
heres the scratch perevrts explaining a bit better

 

[dubversion]

ah, sorry, i was thinking of it specifically in a reggae sense, where i think it's more general than a particular dj-ing technique (should have been clearer)

 

[matt b]

juggling in reggae= playing various vocal cuts of the same rhythm inna beat-matched mega mix style. then doing again on another rhythm. the transition between rhythms doesn't have to be beatmatched- can be faded, FX added etc

i think i read somewhere that kilamanjaro started it, but it could well have been stone love, metro media or gemini:

"The re-emergence of sound systems to a central place within the dance space, [...] saw the rise of Stone Love, Metro Media, Killamanjaro, and Gemini. Their ampage being of great sonic, magnetic and kinetic proportion compared with the early sound systems, they swept Dancehall into a new era of performance where the famous ‘clash’ concretized the role and skill of the selector as the prominent figure in Dancehall. A highlight of these developments, according to Stolzoff, is that new performance modes emerged along with trends in the music toward materialism, hedonism, and gangsterism ushered in with the 1980’s, sidelining the spiritual and protest music of Reggae. For example, where rub-a-dub faded, ‘juggling’ took over as a key performance mode"
http://www.proudfleshjournal.com/issue3/niaah.htm

 

[dubversion]

ah perfect, that makes perfect sense..

cheers

 

[gabriel]

juggling is also used in opposition to clashing, i.e. a juggling sound is one that mixes and plays tunes for a party crowd, for people to dance to, as opposed to clash sound that cuts dubplates, participates in clashes and so on (where tunes are not mixed/juggled). obviously many sounds do both, in which case you can just refer to what they're doing on that occasion - e.g. 'download this mighty crown juggling session' or whatever

like many/most words in patois/jamaican , juggling has many different uses - i'd say that your (1) and (3) in the original post are definitely not what juggling means, but i can also imagine people using it in that way, or seeming to, so i guess in a way it does mean that, lol

 

[matt b]

confusingly, i've got a mighty crown dubplate juggling session

 

[owengriffiths]

I've seen people on the internet recently typing the word h*a*r*d*c*o*r*e. Is this to distinguish the sound of the early 90's from the hard house style 4 to the floor stuff that is popular now?

 

[noel emits]

I thought it was to avoid attracting nrop googlers. Is there a hard house style known as h******e?

 

[hint]

Yeah - I presume it's to get round word filters on forums that are set up to block pr0n links / spam.

 

[zhao]

this might be a really dumb question but i honestly don't know:

skinheads love ska and rocksteady and reggae in general, right? but it's music made by black people. how do they reconcile this contradiction to their racist philosophy?

EDIT:

i asked the above question because of the new Trojan box called "Skinhead Reggae" and it reminded me of skinheads i've known in the past and their total love of reggae.

after doing some research i may have atleast partially answered my own question... not sure if this is entirely accurate: when skins split from mods in the 60s they were not all racist. that it was more just a working class youth style, and happened to appropriate the music of the Jamaican immigrants. and that it wasn't until later, (not sure when?) that Skinhead culture became more and more associated with racism.

 

[shudder]

skinheads weren't always racist. In fact, previous generations of skins have been explicitly anti-racist, if you can believe that. Now, I don't know any skinheads (do you still have many in LA?... you're, in LA, right?), so I have no idea what contemporary racist-but-still-reggae-loving skins might think. I'm not expert though; check out the relevant wikipedia article for some context.

 

[zhao]

yes shutter, that is kind of the gist of what i gathered from some random articles. a friend is sending me a UCLA (yes I'm in LA) cultural anthropology department paper on this very subject called "Voices of Hate, Sounds of Hybridity: Black Music and the Complexities of Racism". sounds interesting.

i used to be friends with a skin in college. for a little while before he turned on me and we almost got into a fight. he was of the OC-punk scene, so listened to bands like Pennywise. but also was really into ska and rocksteady.