Purge the girls and mosh to gabba. Wargasm!
You say that but proper deep house nights are a sausage fest.
@danny. American Lauras are wicked. less so English ones.
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Purge the girls and mosh to gabba. Wargasm!
I feel like you're in some kind of imagined dialogue with events of the early rave years. It's interesting but also jarring at moments. For instance, what you diss as "Claires and Lauras" I experienced as an opening up on the class front. Prior to '88 the club scene was pretty small, exclusive, fashionable, centred on West End clubs like the Wag - in the mid-late 80s they were beginning to open up to suburban working class boys (like me) into soul and jazz funk etc but this was nothing like the mass democratisation that took off with raving and free parties. There were thousands of people going to raves who wouldn't have dreamed of going to West End clubs. And it wasn't middle class/bourgeoise at all at least in my experience. And there's absolutely a cheesy mass market "soft" element associated with this, cue Italo piano. Why it was interesting for me musically was this diversity.
It's similar to the pills - part of the excitement at the time was that sense of emotional opening up. "Peace and love" might be a hackneyed slogan (it was even back then) but the experience of a mass shift from pints to pills was very different.
I feel like you're in some kind of imagined dialogue with events of the early rave years. It's interesting but also jarring at moments. For instance, what you diss as "Claires and Lauras" I experienced as an opening up on the class front. Prior to '88 the club scene was pretty small, exclusive, fashionable, centred on West End clubs like the Wag - in the mid-late 80s they were beginning to open up to suburban working class boys (like me) into soul and jazz funk etc but this was nothing like the mass democratisation that took off with raving and free parties. There were thousands of people going to raves who wouldn't have dreamed of going to West End clubs. And it wasn't middle class/bourgeoise at all at least in my experience. And there's absolutely a cheesy mass market "soft" element associated with this, cue Italo piano. Why it was interesting for me musically was this diversity.
It's similar to the pills - part of the excitement at the time was that sense of emotional opening up. "Peace and love" might be a hackneyed slogan (it was even back then) but the experience of a mass shift from pints to pills was very different.
Although Ex-El featured cameos from New Order’s Bernard Sumner and Björk, for the most part 808 State’s music was faceless, text-free, profoundly superficial. But belying their image as knob-twiddling technicians with nothing to say, 808 State in person were mouthy, vociferous, and in Martin Price’s case, almost pathologically opinionated. They had bags of personality – it just wasn’t a particularly agreeable personality. The first time I interviewed Price and Massey, circa 90, the duo were quick to define 808 State against the Cabaret Voltaire/A Certain Ratio/On U Sound tradition of avant-funk, despite Massey’s own background in that scene. Arguing that rave music had outflanked the egghead experimentalists, Massey declared: ‘Mainstream clubs are just so out there and futuristic in comparison. You get beer boys and Sharons ’n’ Tracies dancing to the weirdest crap going, at places like The Thunderdome, and they don’t know what’s hit ’em. Yer average Joe Bloggs is dancing to stuff that’s basically avant-garde.’
I don't especially like those tracks but am not sure about that characterisation of the Boys Own guys. Going from memory without double checking, Boys Own was a football related fanzine, inspired by a mag called The End which was put out I think by the guys from The Farm. West London so I assume all Chelsea fans but there is a working class thing in that fanzine DNA. I used to have a few issues and it was no NME, there were references in there to them being chippies and plumbers IIRC.
I'm sympathetic to anything that puts the boot into Norman Cook and his crimes against music but I don't think the good music/bad music associated with that time period breaks down along that simple class divide.
Not sure about that characterisation of 808 State's music either - New Build was a fucking brilliant album. I liked the later ones as well though I haven't listened to them in a thousand years.
I'm absolutely no expert on dance music. I know fuck all. It's not something I could say I'm actively engaged in.
One thing though - I'm from Essex and am old enough to remember the tail end of Essex soul and jazz funk. And there's always been an aspirational edge to the culture there. Working class people who want money and the trappings that go with that. And that can come out in the smoothness of some of that music, it's a more dialectical thing. I've always thought of guitar music including punk as being basically middle class with the rougher sounding stuff being an attempt at downwards mobility, just like wearing ripped jeans. I know that doesn't scan for *every guitar band ever* but it came to mind with your punk comparisions.