Neon Screams!

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thirdform

pass the sick bucket
thirdform said:
I don't feel the acid house parallel works quite here. that review @luka linked yesterday criticised Ben Watson for severing the umbilical cord between house and disco. But, again, one has to ask which era of disco. Because embrionic disco as much as it was anti-rockist, was still about sophistication. So in a very crude sense Ben Watson has a point. It was in this sense acid was a breakthrough, because disco is about songcraft and melody, not discordant interplay.
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To come back to this, one could argue that whilst yes, Todd Terry style cut up sampledelic house hints at a break with disco, it is not completely anti-disco. It is disco taken to its absolute limit. Orchestras refracted and turned into particle showers of jouissance. Acid Traxx to me in a very real sense is anti-disco. There is no desire, pure electrical current. Disco is hypnotic, but it isn't trance-dance in this sense. Even the Night Moves track from 83 is still disco at the structural base.

Hence at least within the house continuum there is never really a vertical ascent upwards after around 92-93, but a horizontalist tension. Whereas techno, hardcore and jungle go up. The new takes time to emerge from the old, and never completely (far from in fact) renders it irrelevant. It is often a field of contestation.
N.B: when I say anti-disco I am not saying that a conscious rebellion against disco took place, but that acid intensified the machinic side of disco so far that disco was sublated into something new. I am unconvinced that autotune rather than the format itself can serve the same purpose.
 
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T

thirdform

pass the sick bucket
No music has ever pushed the processed voice to such impossible, ear-defying extremes before. Never has there been the kind of vocal morphosis like that heard in trap dancehall and its sonically desolate, Trinidadian sister-genre Trinibad. Listen, if you can even bear it, to Big Voice’s thermonuclear fire-breathing on Chedda
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I can easily dare and I don't hear it. What I here is the voice being refracted through a disembodied (impossibly big) cathedral, but not anything thermonuclear. Quite the contrary in fact.


Now I would call this thermonuclear:

 
craner

craner

Beast of Burden
I put relentless pressure on @CrowleyHead for at least five years to write a book, so none of this is my fault. Granted, I insisted it must have a detailed chapter of the history of Killah Priest and RZA’s feud, but I was still disheartened by eventual non-emergence of any book, not even a pamphlet.
 
luka

luka

Well-known member
we're deeply embittered people clearly, with very obvious and glaring personality defects and thats all part of the fun
CrowleyHead said:
I wouldn't lie and pretend I'm not envious, both in never actually getting my shit together to be in this position and the neurotic reflex of "It'd be better if you did it THIS way...". I just also think/wish it could be fleshed out more as it reads more like a pamphlet/decree made into a format for old people?

Look, I would gladly lob this book at dozens of others that I know are not initiates to the proposals Neon Screams is making. I've done so in fact personally and I won't be doing that in general because I want to support this book and it's author. But a lot of it echoes into a problem I know a lot of younger music enthusiasts have with this style of writing from Simon in that these sort of decrees of description and alliteration, while fun? Don't give the music weight if they do not produce the same result in the listener's mind. It becomes a self-rewarding act that people reject and ignore, when it should be in service of these subjects instead.

I'm also concerned because it doesn't do much for younger people who like Barty are already on board. Third's not wrong in saying Playboi Carti & Quavo and such are rapidly becoming elder figures as they have more and more stylistic children in various directions (though I wouldn't necessarily call them 'old news' or be as dismissive). To talk about them as having rewritten the paths based on this proposal is accurate but... it's also the equivalent of talking about jungle as an immediate force in 2000 or something. In the interview with Simon he's acknowledged that a lot of this is falling just a few years behind the zeitgeist by the nature of book creation but then how do you rectify current day music enthusiasts who might eyeroll at hearing about how Future did this or that a decade ago?

Also I gripe a bunch in that he just wants to qualify it as wholly broken away from rap as a genre. It reminds me of post-rap being used as a qualifier for cloud rap to justify why you couldn't compare Lil B to Rakim or whatever because maybe I'm the luddite? But I can contextualize everything he's insisting is wholly broken away from rap back into rap really easily. And that contradictory nature irks me slightly because well, I care a lot about the rap fields he's covering, and I guess I'm griping with how he's choosing to represent them.
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yeah but as you know perfectly well barty has never listened to rap. hes not a music historian. he hears 3 tunes he likes on the radio and calls it a new genre. thats the charm of it. he dont have a scholarly bone in his body lol
 
C

CrowleyHead

Well-known member
craner said:
I put relentless pressure on @CrowleyHead for at least five years to write a book, so none of this is my fault. Granted, I insisted it must have a detailed chapter of the history of Killah Priest and RZA’s feud, but I was still disheartened by eventual non-emergence of any book, not even a pamphlet.
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I didn't do that out of spite for constantly feeling pressed by Luka for not turning in A level grammar on posts.
 
T

thirdform

pass the sick bucket
luka said:
yeah but as you know perfectly well barty has never listened to rap. hes not a music historian. he hears 3 tunes he likes on the radio and calls it a new genre. thats the charm of it. he dont have a scholarly bone in his body lol
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So is he going to write another book or not? Cos you're right that for one book this is an absolute charm. But eventually the occupation of music writer will force him to pick up scholarly pursuits.

Bukhari discounted over 500000 weak hadith and yet his compilation is still full of mutually contradicting ahadith.
 
luka

luka

Well-known member
well, i assume if this book sells a few he might have the opportunity to write another and then he will have to decide what he wants to write about and how he wants to write about it. and that will throw up some new problems and how he solves them will be interesting to see. but first he has to sell a few.
 
T

thirdform

pass the sick bucket
luka said:
well, i assume if this book sells a few he might have the opportunity to write another and then he will have to decide what he wants to write about and how he wants to write about it. and that will throw up some new problems and how he solves them will be interesting to see. but first he has to sell a few.
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Well I bought the kindle copy off amazon.

i guess he'll have to do a presentation at Goldsmiths. then it should sell pretty well.
 
luka

luka

Well-known member
as i said this morning i would like to see him needle wind up annoy and tease established music writers via twitter. thats what would entertain me the most and that is what i think would serve to give him enough of a profile to sell a few books. but he wont do it lol
 
luka

luka

Well-known member
and repeater have a company policy of not promoting their authors so if yo dont do it yourself no one will know your book exists.
 
T

thirdform

pass the sick bucket
Giving it to the Wire to review was a colossal mistake. If he had consulted me first I would have dissuaded him from such a course. Whilst they don't know their shit over there, they know it enough to blag. the post-dubsteppers don't know it at all. Gushing praise and nothing else.
 
luka

luka

Well-known member
repeaters presumably. they go to the places where they have connections, which means the wire and owen hatherleys tribune
 
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