Listen to this part 3: Intensity

[thirdform]

Not gonna lie, that did make me a bit moist.

oh rly?


how about some of this then. ❌

 

[luka]

I think what I would be interested in is an attempt to identify the sonic and structural features which make it life accepting rather than life affiriming. Or the sonic and structural features which make it conservative. Outside of any lyrical content.

 

[thirdform]

This is interesting. And that is how Barty sometimes frames it but I don't know if we need to agree with him there necessarily. I also wonder how much of this is to do with context.

If I played the narcos riddim to most of my peers who like dancehall they would hate it and complain about slackness. In fact I did this, just to wind them up, and that's what happened.

But the slackness of the eighties and early nineties gets a free pass from them. Why? Partly nostalgia for youth but also because it's the past and music which might once have been understood as having a political and cultural dimension is finally allowed to be purely musical and understood and enjoyed as music.

Dancehall about guns and murder and sex are fine so long as it is 30 years old. It no longer exists as a symptom of moral decay.

maybe, but I don't have a problem with guns, violence and murder, and in my listening in a (strictly) personal capacity (peter tatchell hold your drink) battybwoy bashing either. am I cancelled to you now, not allowed in the tory queers club? well i never wanted to be in it to begin with.

im talking here more about the production and how it is all vapourised into ambient trance/edm with clave rhythm beats. back in the day steelie and clevey beats would not sound like anything out of America, only faintly in some tool kits but as a whole it had its own language. just like jungle wasn't straight out of compton speeded up - there were some tunes like that but they were never that good (imo.)

Play the narcos rhythm faster and it really isn't different to much else.

So to answer your question. airy pastoral textures, a dispensing of friction and let us say (metafunk) or post-funk textures. the almost complete disappearance of early 80s electro as a collective sonic memory here to be replaced with simon remainmania eurodance. bass only acting as an adjunct, no longer used as something with sustained pulses to be played over a sound system.


compare with:


with:



no sex un-till home. no thrust. no spunk.


just pure stratospheric cosmic mysticism for those unwilling to take the long and arduous path. and hence they end up being disappointed.

 

[sadmanbarty]

Not life affirming! It made luke cry yesterday!

Best song ever made imo makes me cry.

Literally every one on this thread is talking about it as transendental. Of lifting you to a higher plane.

It’s a music that fills you with god. With the spirits. It’s a hoard of angels swooshing off of your feet and propelling you through the spacetime continuum!

That’s not life affirming?

 

[luka]

I didn't say it's not life affirming.third did.

 

[luka]

I was saying that with contemporary music it can be hard to hear that sometimes. It can be lost in projections about its intent and use, the purely musical and affirmative heart of it is obscured in fears and resentments about the state of society.

 

[luka]

You say to yourself, this music is an enemy partisan. It is bolstering social trends I am fiercely opposed to.

 

[sadmanbarty]

It sounds like the opening track of a love supreme. Transports you to a similar dimension.

 

[sadmanbarty]

The comments about oceanic and meditative and so forth are interesting actually. I think where dissensus generally actualkybten to get stuck with music is that they don’t pick up on or foreground the bits of the music that have velocity or are violent or have a physical urgency or whatever. So for example whenever we broach the subject of modern rap people focus on how ambient it is whereas I’m obsessed with its Todd Edwards-sequel vocals.

This intense track for example is very arresting. Completely grabs me. It’s absolutely rough and tumble and fierce. It shakes you. Growls at you.

I think this misreading/misattribution of my aesthetic sensibilities comes from people foregrounding a totally different component of the music than I am.

 

[thirdform]

Not life affirming! It made luke cry yesterday!



Literally every one on this thread is talking about it as transendental. Of lifting you to a higher plane.

It’s a music that fills you with god. With the spirits. It’s a hoard of angels swooshing off of your feet and propelling you through the spacetime continuum!

That’s not life affirming?

nah, because in islam, the angels are in a pretty mundane position. bound to God with no free will, created to obey him. whereas iblis, as a chponic spirit is the source of all the passions and furies in man. I.E: the devil is thhat part of our personalities which we struggle against, but at the same time, without that part of our personality, we are mere drones. we are no longer human. overfetishisation of angels must be resisted.

Transliteration: Koh diye inkaar se toone maqamaat-e-buland // Chashm-e yazdaan mein ferishton ki rahi kya aabroo!
Jibreel: “You’ve lost such high stations [with God] through your rejection [of Him]. In the eyes of God, what dignity is left for the angels [because of what you did]!?”
In this couplet, Jibreel finally responds in the form of a complaint. In the Islamic tradition, Iblees is technically not an angel, but rather a jinn who was such a dedicated believer (Arabic: mu’min) that he occupied the same station as the angels, who have no free will and were created for the sole purpose of glorifying God. Iblees had free will and chose to exercise it in worship (initially), which made him better than the angels who had no choice in the matter at all. Though technically he was not an angel, he was also no different from an angel. Thus, once he was cast out of God’s grace, he humiliated even the angels. It is clear that Jibreel, as the Archangel, feels that Iblees inflicted harm not just upon himself, but upon the reputation of all the angels as well. In order to convince Iblees to return, Jibreel reminds him of the high stations (“maqamaat-e buland”) that he once occupied.

https://themaydan.com/2019/07/a-tra...mmentary-on-muhammad-iqbals-jibreel-o-iblees/

 

[thirdform]

The comments about oceanic and meditative and so forth are interesting actually. I think where dissensus generally actualkybten to get stuck with music is that they don’t pick up on or foreground the bits of the music that have velocity or are violent or have a physical urgency or whatever. So for example whenever we broach the subject of modern rap people focus on how ambient it is whereas I’m obsessed with its Todd Edwards-sequel vocals.

This intense track for example is very arresting. Completely grabs me. It’s absolutely rough and tumble and fierce. It shakes you. Growls at you.

I think this misreading/misattribution of my aesthetic sensibilities comes from people foregrounding a totally different component of the music than I am.

that's interesting. But Tod went far out, far further than contemporary rap could do, otherwise it would be totally unintelligible.


you see this jerky approach to vocal fragmentation surface in later minimal house from Germany. hard to underestimate how prescient Todd was.

 

[sadmanbarty]

to be honest, i'm just over the moon that third identified it as a clave rhythm.

 

[droid]

This is interesting. And that is how Barty sometimes frames it but I don't know if we need to agree with him there necessarily. I also wonder how much of this is to do with context.

If I played the narcos riddim to most of my peers who like dancehall they would hate it and complain about slackness. In fact I did this, just to wind them up, and that's what happened.

But the slackness of the eighties and early nineties gets a free pass from them. Why? Partly nostalgia for youth but also because it's the past and music which might once have been understood as having a political and cultural dimension is finally allowed to be purely musical and understood and enjoyed as music.

Dancehall about guns and murder and sex are fine so long as it is 30 years old. It no longer exists as a symptom of moral decay.

Hmm... not quite. Slackness today is late scarface territory. Grandiose, paranoid, insular, coked up alone in the mansion. Its a far more mannered and artificial construct. A veneer between the performer and the street. Its also, as I said, one note - gangsterism, sex and drugs. Go back to the roots of slackness - General Echo and Yellowman - fun, goofy, self deprecating, full of dirty jokes and innuendo. Slackness in the 90s was more explicitly violent and sexual, but also more deliberately outrageous, often featuring political and social commentary. The slackness of today is different in tone, far less varied and less immediate, and in many ways, less Jamaican and more US in themes, content and delivery.

 

[luka]

I don't agree. the humour and the outrageousness etc is all still there and will become apparent when reminiscing about this music in 15 years time. It's just the way time works. What's of the present always seems to share in the sins or imagined sins of the present. What is in the past is always seen as pure and innocent.

 

[sadmanbarty]

maybe, but I don't have a problem with guns, violence and murder, and in my listening in a (strictly) personal capacity (peter tatchell hold your drink) battybwoy bashing either. .

:crylarf::crylarf::crylarf:

there is no joy better in life than making a peter tatchall reference in the context of dancehall. it's a go to of mine and it makes me laugh every single time.

 

[sadmanbarty]

I don't agree. the humour and the outrageousness etc is all still there and will become apparent when reminiscing about this music in 15 years time. It's just the way time works. What's of the present always seems to share in the sins or imagined sins of the present. What is in the past is always seen as pure and innocent.

on the grime thread me and version were wondering if it was always that hilarious or if time dampened the sinister bit of it.

i wondered if in 15 years time the mary poppins bit of drill will come the forefront and we'll forget all about the horrible stabbing bits.

 

[droid]

Its objectively true! Im not saying that things were more innocent (though they were in some cases) Im saying that there's less variation in themes, more explicit content. The lack of restriction on the expressible = a flattening of delivery and race to a lyrical bottom.

 

[luka]

on the grime thread me and version were wondering if it was always that hilarious or if time dampened the sinister bit of it.

i wondered if in 15 years time the mary poppins bit of drill will come the forefront and we'll forget all about the horrible stabbing bits.

Yeah I saw that and I know, being old, that this is true. My friend I quoted in this thread 'autotune and slackness : (" was appalled when I first played him grime. He associated it with the toerags round the estates and urban violence. Now of course he pretends he always liked it.

 

[luka]

He thought grime was bad music which would just make the youth more violent. He thought it didn't inculcate upliftment and positivity. Now that opinion seems mad. Deranged. Hilariously wrong.

 

[luka]

Someone like kartel could still be cute and silly and sentimental. There's still range. In fact I get the sense that dancehall is slushier than ever. I keep looking for war tunes and there's not enough about!