Eclecticism as a stepping stone

Chef Napalm

Lost in the Supermarket
This and this, but especially Simon's assertions regarding eclecticism have got me thinking about harbingers of The Next Big Thing.

With all due respect to the blissbloggah and all of the haters of eclectic sets, I think you’ve missed the mark. It occurs to me that radically cross-genre sets have heralded the coming of disco, northern soul, house (both US and UK incarnations thereof), and techno to name a few. In each case, pioneering DJs assembled eclectic sets from a dizzying array of genres, each track interlocking into the next though one element of commonality. In the case of techno, May, Atkins and Saunderson constructed self-conciously convoluted sets revolving around the central axis of Kraftwerk. Prior to the coining of disco, Mancuso, Grasso, et. al. mixed up-tempo soul, funk and r&b records into an intentionally danceable soundscape. Knuckles and Hardy made and played vocal free disco dubs that eventually became house. The point is that maybe the element of commonality in the current crop of eclectic sets is not at all anti-scene, as Simon contends, but is, in fact, the early strains of The Next Big Thing.

Not that I have a sweet-jesus clue what The Next Big Thing is, but all the negativity floating around was bothering me. I for one embrace the diversity and will be very interested to see what rises to the top.
 

Tim F

Well-known member
My boringly consistent line with regard to this electicism/purism debate is that eclecticism is <i>only</i> interesting insofar as it manifests an underlying purity (however abstracted and/or amorphous) and, conversely, purism is only interesting if it helps you to recognise a relative diversity within the confined spectrum of allowed music - in other words these two concepts are strictly relational.

Consequenty the measure of an eclectic/purist DJing approach can never be simply where it falls on the scale between purist and eclectic but rather, <i>wherever it falls</i>, how successful it is in invoking its "other".

A necessary short detour: Good DJ sets are always about law and transgression: constructing a set of rules about what is to be expected while simultaneously somehow exceeding the listener's expectations (this is an accidentally-true paradox along the lines of George Bush saying "I've always found expectations will rise above that which is expected").

You could say that effective individual pieces of music work in the same way: simultaneously being generic (as in of a genre) and extra-generic (possessing some mysterious "more" which exceeds the requirement of genre). But I think the interesting difference here is that the "more than" quality in an individual piece of music is always with reference to some external reference point - some idea, benchmark or cliche of style. Whereas with the DJ set there is both this external relationship (this DJ set differs from/is better than other DJ sets in a similar style) and an immanent relationship (this DJ set somehow brilliantly breaks the rules that the set itself encodes).

The DJ set then is something like a game, a game wherein the DJ sets out and is seen to submit him or herself to a set of rules (ie. the sounds and stylistic manoeuvres that the crowd can expect), and yet must somehow ultimately "beat the system" if they hope to wow the crowd. Of course simply openly breaking the rules won't do - it undermines the game, the entire point of having any rules in the first place - but there still must be some <i>sense</i> of the DJ having cheated, of having outsmarted the system they've devised. It's a bit like Monopoly: is it possible to be good at this game, to win convincingly, without arousing suspicions in all the other players of foul play? The space between simply following the rules and leaving the outcome to chance, and openly discarding the rules, is <i>strategy</i>: the construction of a game plan that cannot be deduced by the other players simply by referring to the rule book. And this is precisely how good DJ sets work: the memorable ones are not those which simply conform to your expectations, but those which, while not openly disregarding your expectations, seem to do so much <i>else</i> and in such a way that you could not possibly have anticipated. The fascination and intrigue with an especially great set is something akin to paranoia: "what does the DJ know about this music that I don't?"

And to laboriously return to the point: what better way to do this than, in following your own rules, to imply the absolute reverse of your rules, to flip the perspective such that, eg., a limited beat pallete sensitises the dancer to a wide-open universe of texture, or a poly-stylistic romp somehow locks into an utterly consistent vibe and groove (having said that, there are a multitude of other axes along which rule-breaking can run: familiar/exotic, songful/tracky, emotive/autistic, hard/lush etc etc.)

Where purist <i>and</i> eclectic DJ sets (and a lot of those in the middle as well) can fall down is in their ignorance of this dialectical quality to the DJ set, their over-literalization of expectations - instead of undermining and so surpassing expectations, they consider the choice to be between simply following their own rules to the letter (bad purism) or ostentatiously throwing out the rulebook (bad eclecticism). The former move dooms the DJ set to always living <i>down</i> to expectations; the latter disallows the possibility of any game even being entered into by the listeners.
 
Eclecticism can be a dangerous tool in the hands of the wrong people, because it can be used as a an alibi for hiding the absence of a personal discourse. This happens when a DJ embraces the 'everything is good' rule, in this case the creator loses the plot and abandones him/herself to a cynical denial of the point from which he or she is creating his discourse or dj-set or music. On the other hand, eclecticism is used by some paradoxically to reinforce the standard, the dominant tradition. This happens when the artist does exotic tourism through the concept of otherness while at the same time asserting its own egocentric point of view, mainstream music usually does this, by appropriating subcultures and getting rid of the socio-cultural-political implications supporting it. An example of this would be Madonna's pseudo-mystic album 'Ray of Light'. Thirdly, we've got people who creatively appropriate something else (I should say here something 'other', where it not for this term being so ideologically charged) and knits it into his or her own discourse, thus modifying the point of view from which we establish a dialogue with society. If eclecticism doesn't modify the way we work/live/ think it is nonsense.
 

martin

----
I miss the days when eclecticism was frowned on and everyone was really partisan. People who'd stand in front of a tank to demonstrate Motley Crue's superiority over the Stone Roses, and the like. Bikers kicking mods along Brighton pier - you just don't get that anymore. You never have parties where everyone's listening to Girls Aloud, and then the needle's suddenly pulled across the record and some group of troublemakers who weren't even invited slam on "Carniverous Erection" by Regurgitate. This is why Motorhead are one of the greatest bands ever - they put the lie to all this jive about "musical progression" - all their records sound the same. If I want to listen to, god forbid, jazz, I'd buy a Byard Lancaster disc, not wait for Motorhead to incorporate elements of jazz into their sound. Is subcultural warfare really too much to ask for?
 

Chef Napalm

Lost in the Supermarket
Tim F said:
My boringly consistent line with regard to this electicism/purism debate is that eclecticism is <i>only</i> interesting insofar as it manifests an underlying purity (however abstracted and/or amorphous) and, conversely, purism is only interesting if it helps you to recognise a relative diversity within the confined spectrum of allowed music - in other words these two concepts are strictly relational.

Consequenty the measure of an eclectic/purist DJing approach can never be simply where it falls on the scale between purist and eclectic but rather, <i>wherever it falls</i>, how successful it is in invoking its "other".
Nail on head. There’s got to be some element of commonality, something that ties the whole works together, otherwise eclecticism degenerates to fanboy look-at-all-the-awesome-records-I-own wankery (is that a word?).

martin said:
You never have parties where everyone's listening to Girls Aloud, and then the needle's suddenly pulled across the record and some group of troublemakers who weren't even invited slam on "Carniverous Erection" by Regurgitate.
Not as extreme perhaps, but one of my favourite tricks is mixing KMFDM into Madonna or the like. That’s the joy of a diverse DJ set; it’s fun to shake them up.

Buick6 said:
It will return and eat you all! METAL!!!!!!
This is why computers in asylums are a bad idea. Honestly, certifiable.
 

zhao

there are no accidents
well I've mixed recordings of the Holy Koran with Pan Sonic... Morrocan flutes with Thomas Brinkmann... Shakuhachi with Frank Bretschneider... Britney Spears with the Boredoms... all in live situations. great fun. but a set like that can take too long to put together in the studio the night before.

but not this one - I highly recommend you try it sometime: take any Shakuhachi record and any Bretschneider record, and just play them at the same time. very very nice all the way through! I did it for an art opening, the easiest and most creative DJ set ever. and people loved it! :)
 

zhao

there are no accidents
and the entire time I was having cocktails and chatting up birds... life is not so bad sometimes :)
 
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