Posts by Tom Beard
Last ←Newer Page 1 2 3 4 5 Older→ First
-
As much as I'm loath to consider any model that's obviously designed to promote sprawl, I believe that every city could do with a few Multi-User Dungeons.
-
Hard News: Narcissists and bullies, in reply to Tom Semmens,
If there were a prize for Massively Not Getting The Point...
-
If only 7% of cats were known to attack people, and most people I know had been attacked or threatened by cats, then I'd be pretty damned wary of every cat I met. If even those I personally knew to be good kitties around me laughed at scratching jokes, then I'd still look at them sideways. If old grey cats got paid to write columns about how some people are just asking to be bitten, then that would affect my view of every cat I met.
Now extrapolate that to something vastly worse than a bit of a scratch, and you might get close to understanding how some people on this thread feel about men. It's horrifying for a man to realise that this is how we are viewed, but the humane reaction to that is not to split hairs and worry about our own feelings, but 1) STFU and listen, and 2) do something about it.
-
Comments?! Oh god, I'm not going there.
-
Hard News: Friday Music: The Story, in reply to Russell Brown,
But we are talking about contemporary dance music, and while it clearly had many influences (the Chicago house DJs were known to drop Kraftwerk and YMO), what we recognise as "dance music" came from those inner city scenes -- which, of course, had to be brought to Britain to become mainstream popular culture.
True, and I'll totally defer to your knowledge of house music genealogy. It's probably just that my own discovery of house and techno in the late 80s/early 90s was filtered through a distinctly less hip and "inner city marginalised" culture of 70s Euro synth noodling (Kraftwerk, Tangerine Dream, Jean-Michel Jarre) and 80s English synth pop (Eurythmics, Pet Shop Boys, anything that Vince Clarke ever touched). I had little awareness of the evolving house & techno scene in the US, so when I belatedly discovered techno I saw the similarities with other electronic music I'd been following rather than realising that it had gone through a different evolutionary track in Chicago and Detroit.
By that stage I was already more into the problematically-labelled IDM ("Intelligent" Dance Music) genre than dance music per se, and sitting at home listening to early Warp was more my thing than raves. And that track of electronic music has what seemed to me more European origins, despite their house & hip-hop influences (I only found out recently that Autechre, makers of fiercely difficult abstract digital glitchscapes, started out in the hip-hop scene).
As for EDM, in the David Guetta/Deadmau5/Calvin Harris sense, I really can't say how much of its origins lie in techno and house, and how much in pop, trance, Italo disco and over-produced 80s synth pop, all of which bring in as many elements from outside of the American house music tradition as from within it. Maybe.
-
Hard News: Friday Music: The Story, in reply to Russell Brown,
Arthur Baker was already working in the studio where New Order came and had the brilliant intuition of 'Blue Monday', and I think the context in which we see dance music was really created in the lofts and warehouses of American inner cities.
Yes, Arthur Baker/New Order was one collaboration that I was going to mention in that respect. But I think it's the phrase "the context in which we see dance music" that marks the difference between our two perspectives: I came to dance music via electronic music, but it seems like you came to electronic music via dance music. Would that be correct?
DJ Pierre discovering that a bass synthesiser didn't have to sound like a lame bass guitar but could instead be made to sound like nothing on earth was a pretty big moment.
Hell yeah, Acid Tracks! But I don't think that he was the first to see that a bass synthesiser didn't have to sound like a bass guitar: Giorgio and his modular Moog might have something to say about that :-)
-
Hard News: Friday Music: The Story, in reply to Rich of Observationz,
Basically, dance music has evolved along various paths from the initial prototypes of disco, early house and electronic music pioneers such as Kraftwerk and New Order.
Mentioning those last two is important (at least for the way I understand dance music history: others may have very different outlooks). While Russell wrote of "modern dance music -- a form created by the most marginalised Americans in tough, urban environments", I think that there a few geeky white guys in Düsseldorf, Manchester, Munich and Basildon who had a fair bit to do with it too.
But the cross-cultural linkages between black and white, Europe and America, streetwise and academic, dancefloor and headphones make the whole field ("genre" is too narrow a word) complex and interesting.
-
Hard News: Friday Music: The Story, in reply to Megan Wegan,
And yeah, the lyrics of some of her songs are really not doing much for young women.
They've been doing great things for the master race, though.
-
Hard News: Friday Music: The Story, in reply to bob daktari,
Not that dissimilar to the superclubs trance ruled in the UK and the mecca that is ibiza for the party crew.
That's kind of what I was thinking: it doesn't seem that much different from Ministry of Sound, Gatecrasher and Slinky compilations of the 90s/00s, just with less open hi-hat and more sidechain compression. But now that it's hit America, after the failed 90s bid to get mainstream US success for "electronica" (what I knew as "Big Beat": Prodigy, Chemical Brothers, Fatboy Slim, Crystal Method etc) it seems to have become a thing that's attracted MSM attention enough to have these snarky "destroy your faith in humanity" articles.
-
Given that the vast majority of the music I like is electronic, and much of it is intended for dancing, it took me a while to realise that "Electronic Dance Music" had become a Thing, a catch-all term for mainstream house/pop/brostep/electro/whatever. Hearing some of the music and seeing the culture around it, I can understand the hatred of the commercial side of it to some extent, but is it new? After all, in the 90s when I was geeking out to Orbital, Sven Väth and Autechre, the charts were full of Republica and 2 Unlimited, which were just as cheesy and commercial as Calvin Harris and Deadmau5. Or is this new to America?