Positive discrimination/affirmative action etc in music

[IdleRich]

ok fair enough, still had to fit the Erik Ten Packet Fags punchline in there.

I pretended not to see that. I guess cos I'm conflict averse.

 

[thirdform]

I pretended not to see that. I guess cos I'm conflict averse.

tbf bruv I dunno if I even want to go to a club again. A warehouse with 200-300 people I'm roughly acquainted with, sure. But a properly promoted and curated night? Seems a bit, i dunno. Passe. boring. Drugs don't make people interesting, much as Bill Hicks and Patty would like to claim. and as one of the younger posters on this forum I've had this conversation with people. Clubbing just isn't all that. Older gits burst their mellon at me, but who wants to pay £25+ when you can play a better dj set at home and aren't subject to these marketting gimmics?

 

[version]

It's hard to talk about this sort of thing without capitulating to liberal inanity, but generally I think the extroverted middle class whites in England and USA are ashamed of the way they carry themselves in public life.

It seems a labyrinth. They're aware of certain things, but anything they can do in response is still filtered through the things which are causing the issue, so you end up with this embarrassed flailing, e.g. people overcompensating and becoming incredibly neurotic and self-flagellating around black people.

 

[thirdform]

It seems a labyrinth. They're aware of certain things, but anything they can do in response is still filtered through the things which are causing the issue, so you end up with this embarrassed flailing, e.g. people overcompensating and become incredibly neurotic and self-flagellating around black people.

yeah I mean this is why I find it kinda hard to understand Wilde Greens perspective on this, by that logic people like LTJ Bukem, Colin Dale and Dave Angel should just suck it up cos their sounds aren't coded as 'black.' A coding moreover that white people are at the forefront of defining and redefining. This is the crux of the issue, dance music is all marketting and pr, as is all music. We all know why nostalgia has been in vogue for the past 15+ years, esp with detroit techno and jungle. It sells.

Sure, of course, more women at clubs is better for the promoters, no disagreement there. I just don't think one can draw a direct correlation between visibility on line ups and diversity of crowds. It might be the case but you'd have to be quite rigorous about it, rather than just relying on a hunch.

Now the devils advocate may say well these are just the trendy dance scenes, the good stuff is going on elsewhere, but that misses why @luka for instance decries all music today. The modernist impulse of the core london hardcore continuum crowd reached its pinnacle, and from then on its been atomisation and fragmentation.

Even deep tech will just continue being deep tech, ditto amapiano. That's no bad thing, like I said the stasis of house is its very strength.

Now when it comes to me personally I've long since realised that being an evangelist for a dance music scene as a strictly dancing activity will yield diminishing returns. I precisely don't get tired of jungle cos I've synthesised the ruffneck/intelligent opposition. For me the enemy is conceptronica, and that is an approach that in many ways knows no genre bounds. So my opposition, likewise, has to be cross genre. It's not that the antagonist is extinguished, it's just changed.

 

[wg-]

yeah I mean this is why I find it kinda hard to understand Wilde Greens perspective on this, by that logic people like LTJ Bukem, Colin Dale and Dave Angel should just suck it up cos their sounds aren't coded as 'black.' A coding moreover that white people are at the forefront of defining and redefining. This is the crux of the issue, dance music is all marketting and pr, as is all music. We all know why nostalgia has been in vogue for the past 15+ years, esp with detroit techno and jungle. It sells.

Yeah a large part of music has always been marketing and PR but regularly promoting parties and making money from it is about generating an experience where people want to return, otherwise you have short-term gains and no longevity. You need to thimk about retaining a crowd throughout the night and repeat visits through connection and experience. The current crowd wants diversity.

If someone comes to your rave and it's a big sausage fest with an all male line-up then it's going to please a very small subsection of potential audience but for the most part people are very tired of that, which is why there has been a sea change in last ten years.

I don't see why this is such a hard concept to grasp really

 

[Mr. Tea]

If someone comes to your rave and it's a big sausage fest with an all male line-up then it's going to please a very small subsection of potential audience but for the most part people are very tired of that, which is why there has been a sea change in last ten years.

I don't see why this is such a hard concept to grasp really

But surely you can see that this is a totally different thing from what Rich is talking about, i.e. club promoters who are straight themselves cancelling a booking on realising that a DJ they'd assumed was gay in fact wasn't gay, when it was for a night that wasn't specifically gay in a club that (notionally, at least) isn't specifically gay? That doesn't even make sense from a 'diversity' POV, since by the sound of it they go out of their way to book gay performers all the time.

 

[thirdform]

Yeah a large part of music has always been marketing and PR but regularly promoting parties and making money from it is about generating an experience where people want to return, otherwise you have short-term gains and no longevity. You need to thimk about retaining a crowd throughout the night and repeat visits through connection and experience. The current crowd wants diversity.

If someone comes to your rave and it's a big sausage fest with an all male line-up then it's going to please a very small subsection of potential audience but for the most part people are very tired of that, which is why there has been a sea change in last ten years.

I don't see why this is such a hard concept to grasp really

It's not a hard concept to grasp, ftr I really couldn't care any less about yet more boring old techno blokes, I'm just not convinced that diversity in line ups equates to diversity in the crowd. And in fact your london/essex male dominated line ups kinda go against what you're saying, no?

Actually I think the people who are really focused on this kind of stuff are critical dance music participants, like this forum could have once been considered of being. I don't think your average punter (the real lifeblood of the rave) is as fixated on this, which doesn't mean they're oblivious to it. But they don't have a vested financial interest in pushing their mates (story of dance music journalists today.)

Which is kind of the point I was making upthread, yeah the vocals/diva house london essex sound has a more diverse crowd, but that is precisely cos its not swarmed by the dregs of the intelligentsia. It is all about class, as much as you might hate that.

now I'm not enough of a music historian so I can't answer this for you, my area of expertise is 20th century bolshevism, but I have often wondered why say post-punk paging @blissblogger and @john eden managed to have this critical contingent whilst very much being mass culture. With dance music it's the opposite. As soon as people start critically talking about a scene, it's basically turned into a showpeace that people preserve, stripped mostly of nearly all of its formative contexts. I don't know why this is. I don't think it's cos form follows function, I think that's a reductive answer.

 

[Corpsey]

I feel this could easily be remedied through wearing an exciting hat.

 

[Mr. Tea]

You know, that image flashed across my mind as I wrote that post.

 

[maxi]

this happened to barty. he wrote an article about dancehall and resident advisor wanted to print it then thirdform told them he was a white man and they then turned round and said we're not putting this out we dont want any whites anymore. well, other than ourselves lol.

If I remember right a few years ago at Vice a white writer was commissioned to write an article about the Chicken Connoisseur kid /or maybe chicken shops in London generally, and there was uproar on twitter. People saying this is an article about chicken shops, you should've asked one of your black writers to cover it...... so imagine that conversation. "Hey we want to do this article on fried chicken, we thought you'd be best placed to use your expertise that you of course must have because..."

 

[Corpsey]

True... but half the time you can't even see who is playing. It's just a figure partly hidden from view putting records on. Once upon a time it was supposed to be kinda faceless, no star, just music playing and the crowd - which was in fact the star - dancing together. Now I get that a lot of the time that's changed and the dj is elevated putting on a performance with the crowd all facing them. That's not my favourite kind of party, but I can't pretend that it's not what happens a lot of the time.

I have wondered about the importance of social media in promoting DJs/club nights nowadays and how that might favour DJs who look cool/attractive and can post visually appealing videos of themselves dancing behind the decks etc.

Perhaps in the social media age the visual/"brand" identity (which might include sexuality) of a DJ is more important than it used to be. Like when I first was going to clubs to see Andy C et al I didn't know what Andy C looked like, or Mampi Swift etc. They had a 'brand' too, I suppose (and a background I was ignorant of, like Andy C running RAM for example) but the brand was more "they mix really fast and double drop tunes".

I think to some extent this is a generational and as thirdform says a class thing. Middle class RA-reading, NTS-listening yoof are into diversity and polyamory and all that jazz.

It doesn't really effect me since I don't go clubbing much anymore, although when I last did go clubbing Tash LC played a brilliant set at Corsica and my favourite set at a festival I went to last year was OK Williams. I think it's good that there are more female DJs.

Also, although I used to be mainly into 'sausage fest' genres and I wasn't that bothered about how many women were there cos I was hardcore into the music (there were women there, quite a lot sometimes), I became aware of the downsides of that when you'd get nothing but macho tunes in a set sometimes (although ofc women can be into these styles too and its patronising to suggest there are 'tunes for the ladies).

That Lisbon militant gay het couple thing sounds ridiculous though

 

[Mr. Tea]

If I remember right a few years ago at Vice a white writer was commissioned to write an article about the Chicken Connoisseur kid /or maybe chicken shops in London generally, and there was uproar on twitter. People saying this is an article about chicken shops, you should've asked one of your black writers to cover it...... so imagine that conversation. "Hey we want to do this article on fried chicken, we thought you'd be best placed to use your expertise that you of course must have because..."

I think an awful lot of accusations of racism (and other -isms) come from unexamined assumptions that are themselves racist. A common form these accusations take is something along the line of "I automatically associate the negative traits you're talking about with black people, therefore you are racist."

You can easily swap "working-class" for "black" and "a horrible snob" for "racist."

 

[Corpsey]

Again, don't have any skin in the game anymore but when I was writing about rap music for Fact/The Wire I was very conscious of being a white middle class English guy and an outsider to the music. I suppose I felt like I was (in a very very modest way) shining a light on black music and artists, effectively promoting it (I could be wrong but I think I tended to avoid writing negative reviews, and when I did they were about artists who were already massively successful so it didn't matter at all what I was writing about them).

The twisted contortions of white liberal guilt. Thirdform is going to kill me.

 

[maxi]

People are bored of looking at ageing white men all the time & who can blame them

this seems to suggest people are excited purely by the opportunity to look at someone who's not white, or not a man. like that alone makes the party more fun. that seems odd to me

so Kode9 comes on everyone's thinking 'white guy - boring'. Then Scratcha plays a set directly after with a similar sound and the crowd thinks 'now we're looking at a black guy what a thrill'

are these things really what define them as DJs?

 

[Mr. Tea]

The twisted contortions of white liberal guilt. Thirdform is going to kill me.

True, but he's going to kill all of us, remember. Don't think you're anything special.

 

[maxi]

I think an awful lot of accusations of racism (and other -isms) come from unexamined assumptions that are themselves racist. A common form these accusations take is something along the line of "I automatically associate the negative traits you're talking about with black people, therefore you are racist."

You can easily swap "working-class" for "black" and "a horrible snob" for "racist."

Yeah, it's like a few years ago when one of the corbyn-hating Labour MPs suggested on the radio that being anti-capitalist was anti-semitic. Which was an anti-semitic statement in itself way beyond anything Corbyn ever did

 

[Mr. Tea]

Yeah, it's like a few years ago when one of the corbyn-hating Labour MPs suggested on the radio that being anti-capitalist was anti-semitic. Which was an anti-semitic statement in itself way beyond anything Corbyn ever did

Not wishing to derail the thread, but OTOH you had Ken Livingstone around the same time saying "Well of course Jews vote Tory, they're all filthy rich, aren't they?"

 

[wg-]

this seems to suggest people are excited purely by the opportunity to look at someone who's not white, or not a man. like that alone makes the party more fun. that seems odd to me

so Kode9 comes on everyone's thinking 'white guy - boring'. Then Scratcha plays a set directly after with a similar sound and the crowd thinks 'now we're looking at a black guy what a thrill'

are these things really what define them as DJs?

No, not really. But it is quite clear in terms of successful London clubnights and places that actually make money over the last 7-8 years that diversity is selling and all-white male hegemony isn't really

This isnt about "Kode 9" or LTJ Bukem not being "coded as black" @thirdform , it's about paying crowds flocking towards line-ups that reflect a more diverse society

Loads of discussion about this seems weirdly misplaced, music journos, "class", NTS (!)

If increased diversity in line-ups wasn't making money it wouldn't be happening

 

[shakahislop]

i think we've talked on here before about the emergence of sexy girl techno, which feels like quite a powerful thread running through the techno world now. that's absolutely because of youtube and so on as someone else said, the presence of cameras, the importance of the image as a complement to the sound.

 

[shakahislop]

specifically the approach that emerged in the late 2010s of recording DJ sets with a static camera directly, unflinchingly on the DJ's face and body, has made the dj's physicality (the way they move, dance, smile, as well as their gender and appearance) a lot more important for getting those streams