Overwhelmingly joyful tunes
- Thread starter baboon2004
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Your sense of humour is an absolute joy padraig (u.s.)
Mr. Tea
Let's Talk About Ceps
Josh White, 'Jesus Gonna Make Up My Dying Bed'.
Actually the lyrics could be considered very uplifting, in a death-y sort of way.
Also, the version I've got on a CD is much more upbeat-sounding than that version.
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hamarplazt
100% No Soul Guaranteed
But we're not really discussing anything anymore are we? The youtube clips are not jumping off points for anything, they're just endless recommendations of cool stuff without any critical insights or further thoughts. Not that that is necessarily a bad thing in itself, it's just a shame if that's going to be the only ambition left on dissensus.
IdleRich
IdleRich
Fair point - one that I was kind of anticipating by including the jumping off point. It's not the youtubing that's bad though, it's the lack of debate right?
Still, I think that every now and again there is a time and a place for "this is cool, look at it" but I agree that if that's all that's left it's a shame.
nomadthethird
more issues than Time mag
I appreciate the funniness of this statement, and it's not that I could give a shit, but I find this discourse of "feminine pressure" regarding dance scenes versus rock kind of silly. Jimmy Page used to rent out castles and then have really ridiculously long S&M sessions with teenaged girls, 24 hour jam sessions notwithstanding. I doubt any of those German dudes had trouble getting laid, as all of those youtube videos of them playing to rooms full of tripping hippy women attest to.
It sort of seems "feminine pressure" is just another way of saying "there might have been females around to show off for"...not really something that's going to inflect the music womanly, imo. This sort of thing only factors in cases where so little female-involvement exists that to argue over who has more of it is kinda...
hucks
Your Message Here
OK, well I'll try, then. I find the Kraftwerk thing joyous as what was a pretty melody allied to a rigid rhythm and robotic vocal breaks loose and, yes, becomes utterly joyous. It also means that the next time you listen to it, you know what's coming, and it infuses the first part with joy, too.
Sometimes this works within a song, too, like (nuumolgical correctness very much coming up) in Versus by Burial, which contains an incredibly euphoric vocal sample, but uses it very sparingly. When it disappears after the first time it's used, the listener just wants to hear it again, and this longing adds to the joy when it finally comes back in.
In fact, maybe a lot of those nuum tunes (esp the jungle/ ardcore stuff) are about little snatches of joy, rather than 5 solid minutes of it. Although Gabriel by Roy Davis Jr just makes me smile from end to end, so garage might have been different?
Mr. Tea
Let's Talk About Ceps
Talk of Jimmy Page reminds me of a thought I had last night:
Jimmy Page played his guitar with a violin bow.
Nigel Tufnel played his guitar with a violin.
Someone should play a guitar with Jimmy Page (who could be playing his guitar - with a violin bow of course - at the same time).
The logical conclusion of prog rock.
Jimmy Page played his guitar with a violin bow.
Nigel Tufnel played his guitar with a violin.
Someone should play a guitar with Jimmy Page (who could be playing his guitar - with a violin bow of course - at the same time).
The logical conclusion of prog rock.
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four_five_one
Infinition
"Hang out at a Garage shop like Rhythm Division in East London, and chances are you’ll hear one of the blokes behind the counter say “the girls love that one” in reference to certain tracks – like Doolally’s Top 20 hit “Straight From The Heart” or the duo’s pirate smash/UK number one “Sweet Like Chocolate,” released as Shanks & Bigfoot. In most dance scenes, this comment would be a diss. Take the unwritten boy’s own constitutions of Techno and drum ’n’ bass, where overt melody, explicit emotion, and recognisably human feelings are regarded as ‘cheesy’, conventionally poppy – in a word, girly. For the UK Garage scene, though, “the girls love that tune” is a recommendation. There’s a striking deference to female taste. Pirate DJs dedicate tunes “to the ladies massive”. And most DJ/producers share Ramsey & Fen’s opinion: “When the girls start singing along to a tune like our own ‘Love Bug’, it gets the guys hyper! If the ladies love it, they all love it.”
Feminine Pressure is the name of an all-female Garage DJ crew. In a very real sense, UK Garage is organised around the pressure of feminine desire; a key factor in the scene’s emergence was when women defected en masse from the junglist dancefloor, fed up with the melody-and-vocal-devoid bombast of techstep. Two-step Garage bears the same relation to Jungle that lover’s rock did to dub reggae: it’s the feminised counterpart of a “serious” male genre."
-- Simon Reynolds (origins of "feminine pressure")
four_five_one
Infinition
I always find this overwhelmingly joyful -- Leonard Cohen:
hamarplazt
100% No Soul Guaranteed
See, this is much more interesting than just knowing that you like it and then either approve or disagree.
With jungle/ardcore/rave there is a point worth noticing: it's all about chemical, synthetic joy. Which is a great thing, as far as I'm concerned. But it also makes it much more manic and disturbing, and not as much a "celebration of life"-kinda thing, but rather a celebration of celebration, the joy of being madly joyous. Whereas extremely joyful new age hippie-stuff like Deuter is simply utterly high on life. There's a calm in it too, it's like its beaming with a gentle inner happiness. Which is all the kind of clichés you'd expect to see in a new age press release, but amazingly, some of those Deuter records totally, convincingly, sounds like it.
Perhaps the relation between joy and stimulants is worth taking up here, like: to what degree is the old thing about music being the drug possible?
padraig (u.s.)
a monkey that will go ape
it's not about dance vs. rock at all, that's a total misreading. & I know it's not what you're doing but I find the idea of you defending the prowess of Krautrock dudes to be amusing in the extreme.
Feminine Pressure has a specific meaning to me. I came across it the term, like pretty much everyone (excepting the actual Feminine Pressure crew I guess) in that SR article on the rise/peak of UK Garage. it is about "showing off for the girls" to an extent but it's very much reflected in the music. the real trouble - & this point has been made countless times by numerous people - with the concept Feminine Pressure is coding certain musical elements/tropes as "masculine" or "feminine", as well as the constricting binary m/f construct. but I also think, like a lot of nuum-related ideas, it works very well in a narrow, defined context, i.e. that fantastic article on UKG (which incidentally is almost single-handedly responsible for getting me into "dance music"), the problem arises when people try to extrapolate the concept & try to apply it in ways which don't make sense.
also - I don't care how many underage groupies Jimmy Page bonked. he's still a wanker. I hate Led Zeppelin & I hated them (& all the BS they stand for) way way before I got into jungle & techno & all that. give me Bob Mould any day; I'm sure he was pulling mad tail at all those shirtless, sweatily homoerotic 80s hardcore shows. yo or Gary Floyd or Randy Biscuit Turner (RIP) or...speaking of which...
I Wanna Be a Homosexual
I Love Hardcore Boys/I Love Boys Hardcore - what a goddam great band
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nomadthethird
more issues than Time mag
haha
I don't particularly like Led Zeppelin, either, I'm just saying, I think the idea that electronic music makers and listeners get laid more than rock makers and listeners did--or that the former scene is somehow more gender diverse than the latter--to be dubious at best.
I know "feminine pressure" is supposed to mean something about the technical presence of female vocals in UK dance music, but I don't really care about that, I think that sort of encoding is borderline sex-essentialist and lame. The "auteurs" of UK electronic music were still male, even if they were pulling samples of female vocals.
I don't particularly like Led Zeppelin, either, I'm just saying, I think the idea that electronic music makers and listeners get laid more than rock makers and listeners did--or that the former scene is somehow more gender diverse than the latter--to be dubious at best.
I know "feminine pressure" is supposed to mean something about the technical presence of female vocals in UK dance music, but I don't really care about that, I think that sort of encoding is borderline sex-essentialist and lame. The "auteurs" of UK electronic music were still male, even if they were pulling samples of female vocals.
nomadthethird
more issues than Time mag
This is condescending in the extreme. Which "girls" are these? I'm sorry, but to me this sounds like another excuse to essentialize women as the less "machinic", less "rational", more "emotional", and less "intellectual" subspecies.
Lame.
nomadthethird
more issues than Time mag
Uh-huh.
padraig (u.s.)
a monkey that will go ape
firstly, come off it. there are "serious discussions" on Dissensus all the time. you can hardly step out the front door w/o tripping over one of them. most of them are over in Politics & Thought but they even pop up in Music pretty frequently. if you're not paying attention that's on you.
secondly I think you're reading of jungle etc as purely drug music is ludicrously reductive. you're telling me that Omni Trio & 4 Hero & Danny Breaks, among countless others, are solely about "the joy of being madly joyous"? seriously?
I wouldn't care tho if you didn't privilege the joy of Deuter & Co. as being somehow more legitimate. "high on life". right. you tell me that "Dolphin Tune" or "The Angels Fell" or "Mainline" isn't filled with an inner happiness...
drug people come for the drugs, music people come for the music. not that there isn't overlap but if you're serious into it you know which side of the fence you're on.