no i was saying that your final statement, regarding what you want from music and a club, is a long way from the original, more extreme claims. but its a bit by the by i suppose
more to the point, what music precisely are you talking about? are you saying that futurism is inherently tied to these attributes you identify? can you explain in more detail how you get to the conclusions that you do (repression etc), and from where, and what precisely they mean?
what i said i want from music is exactly why I'm sick of dubstep at the moment - because it doesn't have any of those things: sex, communication, sense of bringing people together -- and instead my experience at dubstep parties is that it keeps people apart.
and not just dubstep. also techno. and futuristic breaks and drum'n'bass and all that shit.
for the good part of the last 10 years of life i have, just like most people here, been immersed in this "cold", "dark", "futuristic", "machine" thing. as a listener, as a dj, as a promoter -- i tirelessly advocated this stuff as "the way forward", because it is "challenging", and promises "new forms". but now i realize that none of those are the real reasons why i felt an affinity with this aesthetic.
the real reason is that in my frustration i found a sadistic comfort in having my head slammed into a wall repeatedly by brutal inhuman sounds. the real reason is in my loneliness i found some kind of sick vindication in burying myself in isolation, in bleak, dark music. which instills a sense of dysfunctional solace.
there is a difference between kraftwerk and Skream. kraftwerk's songs are very human. emotional. they express the aching inability of expression, the awkwardness of human interaction in this modern age, and the frustrated desire to communicate, to connect -- at the heart of the kraftwerkian project there is tenderness and frail, fragile humanity; a sense of loss and longing, and sadness in response to our alienated condition.
whereas dubstep (at least the boring kind, maybe not the good Burial kind) and many modern forms of techno and related musics, embodies the alienation itself without any other layer of meaning. it becomes a
celebration of loneliness; a cold, inhuman celebration of conditioning, subjugation, brainwashing, and slavery. and it becomes not a critique of power, the industrial-milliatary complex, and the state apparatus, but a mirror image of it.
endlessly fetishizing pollution, cruelty, quasi-fascist conformity and alienation.
Pauline Oliveros said something about rigid machine syncopation is not about opening the mind to other possibilities but it's about locking your mind inside of itself. i don't completely agree because i believe that computer music CAN have soul -- but i think there is truth in what she says. i think it's a matter of degrees, and balance. I'm not turning into one of these ignorant and ridiculous "drum-machines-have-no-soul" type of idiots. but at the same time, i can not ignore very real feelings that i get from "dark, cold, and futuristic machine music".
maybe i've simply had too much of a good thing and it's turned bad on me, maybe I'm just simply growing up/getting older, how ever you wanna put it. but these days i would MUCH rather dance all night to reggae or soul or cumbia or salsa or bhangra or rai or african music, and have a GOOD time and feel LIBERATED by the groove rather than being PUNISHED by dungeonesque alienated machine music, which just endlessly reinforce the same solipsistic, closed-system repressive patterns that i know all too well.
damn am i ever spending too much time on this forum...