what elevates pop music over dance music?

DannyL

Wild Horses
I agree with you about the passion thing. I'm not even that passionate anymore. Music and youth culture - it isn't linked into this total transformation of social life anymore, in the way that it was - or rather in a way that seemed possible.

I think this is the Capitalism Realism discourse right? Another world isn't possible anymore. Raving seemed the last hurrah of this to me.
 

luka

Well-known member
The problem with collapsing music into ideology and becoming partisan and 'passionate' is that conversation descends into student politics everything is oversimplified no ambiguity is permitted no dynamism no change just rigid party lines and yelling bourgeois at one another.
 

thirdform

pass the sick bucket
What I fail to see is what has really changed in contemporary culture. people talk about surveillance capitalism, CCTV, invasion of social services into daily life, the xanax zone etc. I must say many of these changes were very apparent in the 90s and 00s, if not outright established. Like I said in the lost futures thread the future has always been an imaginary, and most times, even in overtly capital F 'futurist' music, been actually behind the changes taking place in society. our consciousness is always playing catch up, in that sense god is quite the antiques collector.

It's quite obvious why why there is no Nas in the 2010s. the razorblade ghetto doesn't sell man. the american ideal is for people to slash their wrists privately in the domain of their own homes.
 

thirdform

pass the sick bucket
The problem with collapsing music into ideology and becoming partisan and 'passionate' is that conversation descends into student politics everything is oversimplified no ambiguity is permitted no dynamism no change just rigid party lines and yelling bourgeois at one another.

Im not arguing that though. you are doing exactly what you accuse me of. making music the domain of *reviews.* That's exactly liberal partisan ideology. I don't literally believe my music is more proletarian than another or more revolutionary or anything like that. I just try to use it as a sonic device to illustrate my thoughts. what are the sounds doing here which reflect our current condition, rather than what are the semiotics around the music that compell us to talk about it?
 

luka

Well-known member
Ok everything is obvious to you but the rest of us quite like getting together and talking and speculating vacuously pretentiously ineffectually about stuff and trying to make up our own minds and it seems to me to be a fairly harmless pursuit.

I enjoy it. It's not like we're molesting children or something.
 

thirdform

pass the sick bucket
there was a night slugs UK funky night with bok bok and all em that lot a few weeks ago and I wanted to go to see mak10 but then i thought, I'm going to have speculative conversations in the smoking area for most of it and shrugged despairingly staying in.
 

luka

Well-known member
Yeah but we like it and it's not really hurting you it's just more people doing something you don't approve of.
 

luka

Well-known member
What I like doing is logging in to the cosy virtual living room and talking about things that interest me with my weirdo internet friends. It's the only time I get to talk about this stuff in this manner and I value it very highly. If it's stupid conversation that's because I personally am stupid and that's something I have no control over. I can only do the best with what I have which is a fairly mediocre and wayward brain.
 

thirdform

pass the sick bucket
now living rooms are truly bourgeois, far more bourgeois than future or travis scott could ever hope to ever ever ever be. Even Eden would agree with me on this. houses must be obliterated. :D

Nah I don't mind the conversations i just feel like you think i dislike a lot of the music that certain posters post and I don't, I'm actually quite indifferent to it, I do listen to capital xtra in the mornings sometimes when i wanna check what's cooking on mans commutes to work.

I'm just so tired of the 'oh what have we lost' undertones in all conversations we have in here, it's why i have been trying to formulate the idea that for instance dubstep could have played a dual role of being conservative and progressive simultaneously, but the conservative tendancy won out. but with you it's an all or nothing, there is no room for ambiguity, music is cancelled as you say and that just makes you come across as bitter. Personally I don't like reading music writers who don't listen to music so why would I come here to have the lumpen version of fact magazine? If anything it's what i try to escape from. More fire lucius, more fire!
 

thirdform

pass the sick bucket
am even quite indifferent about D Double E's conscious grime effort. i mean, yeah, I was hugely cringing inside esp with the UK hip hop monologue but he has more legs to stand on for that stuff than many.
 

luka

Well-known member
When I say music is cancelled I'm not actually serious I'm having a laugh adopting an extreme position for fun. If people are saying, as they do quite often here, music's not what it used to be, then I'll take the more e theme version. One up them. Cancel music it's over throw it in the bin
 

thirdform

pass the sick bucket
That Bashmore tune's like someone drained the blood out of Ripgroove.

It's funny because I heard that tune in mainstream shite funky house bars. so the idea that post-dubstep house was a middle class underground authenticity phenomenon was a bit off the mark. it did have some success of proliferating as a surrogate adjunct to EDM. if it was just recycling youngsta 2007 like the actual dubstep scene (which is still going strong btw) it would have easily been ignored. thats the true contradiction here. you got the semi-pop music you wanted from dubstep and then couldn't take it. That's not what I wanted from dubstep though, i wanted the vex'd end of it to go even more extreme. so far the only people who have done it are dead fader/cloakes (the 3 by 3 label.)

And actually one could contend that post-dubsteps champions are write with this attitude, their pop music is closer to UK dance music than grime artists with pop hits. But like I say I think these people valourised the most conservative aspects of the hardcore continuum. there was always a dual dialectic here.
 
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