Joining The Dots

As regards electro and Fischerspooner I think it's sort of a reversal of the traditional notion of what "a hybrid of rock and dance" really is. In the past it would be something like Primal Scream, ie dance music with guitars. But the idea of rock music with electronic devices seemed a little hard to grasp. I'm sure it's been done but has it ever been as popular?

I find this all exciting in the sense that I like most of the things above, I've only heard the Rapture once at the end of a DJ set and it was great. Not heard LCD soundsystem but this all does seem exciting. Fischerspooners album and Futurism sounded like nothing on earth as far as I was concerned. Felix's album last year seemed so totally fresh, dance music with soul based on a conjunction of vocals and production as opposed to vocals just tacked on.

Obviously it's a long time back but I still connect the Strokes and all the arguments regarding them with nu-electro as per my Futurism article. Is this fair?

Ronan you can listen to LCD Soundsystem on the latest radio playback show on the Trash website - also included are tracks from Abba, The Rapture and Killing Joke !

The Young Gods.

"I'm sure it's been done but has it ever been as popular?"

The Prodigy circa 96?

What else is going on? I quite the bedroom beats, drone and strum type stuff coming out of Germany on Monika and Morr Music.

A point: can you keep up/ discover/ explore without the use of MP3? How did you keep up in the past?

And sorry to harp on about keeping up, it's my own blinkered thinking coming through.

Talk of rock with "electronic devices" misses the point, I think, especially since neither the Rapture nor bootleg culture are especially electronic-heavy. It's more electronic "ideas", as Ronan said. The only thematic link I can really think of is their deliberate trendiness, haha. I persnally don't expect any of these things to stick around, but they excite me nonetheless. I guess, really, I can't answer any of these questions except the second, to which I say IT IS EXCITING IT IS EXCITING IT IS EXCITING!

Kris: I mean I listen to a few things over and over and sometimes hear new mp3s that are provided to me but I'm not that impressed and mainly I just hear whatevers on the radio. Which is what you were like about a year ago.

It's "good times" music, but somewhat shorn of its typical cultural associations and replaced with unexpected ones. What electro and death-disco and avant-funk-post-punk represent is not necessarily the better/cooler (or uncooler) references than Beatles/Buzzcocks/whatever else has been included in status quo rock revivalism, it's merely that it hasn't been done *much*, or at least not in the mass-exposure pop music manner that this stuff aspires to (like, when everyone answered Tom's query for more stuff like The Rapture with "buy Gang of Four!", I was thinking, "yes, and....?").

As is obvious by the ease of grouping in The Rapture and LCD Soundsystem with 2 Many DJs and bootlegs, these artists aren't originators so much as reiterators of stifled heritages within pop music. That's not a novel tactic (see Stereolab reviving Neu! etc.) but the tartness of the combinations is the sort of thing that tends to *create* something new down the track. The pop-centric nature of these artists is important - it's hard to imagine them keeping their emulation of their influences under lock & key, immunised from the corrupting influences of the outside world.

That's why bootlegs are so urgent and key: beyond the (substantial) buzz of hearing bootlegs that work, a lot of the combinations seem to suggest to me an impatience with the musical combinations that are actually being cooked up in the music world. Like, if "A Stroke Of Genie-us" works so well, why aren't bands making music like that? This is why I persist in ascribing "importance" to Girls On Top as a project - the bootlegs are telling us something about what pop music is currently lacking, and these juxtapositions can sustain themselves without the need for recognition. That the Sugababes version of "Freak Like Me" can do so well - clearly on the backs of a lot of non-Numan fans - should tell us that.

Is it silly to drag art (ie the-visual-stuff-hanging-in-museums art (; ) into a discussion like this? I read a great article in the New Yorker that came out the first week of June, talking about how painters have to deal with a lot of "we're at the end of the road, there's nothing more to do" sort of crap after Rothko, etc. The main focus of the article was a painter in NY, but the beginning had a lot to say that could be lifted into this thread. A feeling that if you paint in 1 style (to continue this) all you can do is re-hash work done by people who originally mastered that style, and a general "everything has been done and all barriers destroyed" can be a nasty environment to work with. On the otherhand, it's sometimes liberating to realize that you have a basically all the tools of the previous styles available to you. And while some styles do very much belong to the past, it's also limiting to state that a school of thought has to be closed after the originating set of people are done with it.

Anyway, I'm wishing that newyorker.com archived older articles, because I left my copy of it on an airplane, and now I can't remember the author's name, or any good quotes. It was the issue with the NYC library's lions with the pigeon in one lion's mouth, if anyone has it lying around.

The '80s'...biggest recollected thrills come not from MTV coif bands but the era's not-ready-for-Drive-Time players: hip-hop when it hadn't yet conquered New York, much less the world; postpunk's nerve- wracked funk beats; the stripped-down post-disco of club records like Taana Gardner's "Heartbeat"; early electro; post-roots, pre-digital reggae. With hindsight, we know much of this music to be a stepping stone between one epoch and another (disco and house, disco and hip- hop, Marley and Barrington Levy). It feels fresh now in large part because these were styles in transition, not yet fixed. In them you can hear a world up for grabs, a sense of raw possibility whose tension feeds off its in-between-ness. Pit those sounds against each other, as the era's best DJs (Larry Levan, for instance) became legendary for doing, and the sparks fly even higher.

I think this is what's happening with a lot of the stuff under discussion here. Part of it is due to a conscious look-back at those 'tween-epochs as roots, but it's also because a lot of that stuff feels relevant right now.

Now let me think about this good-times theory: One of the most striking things about Gang of 4 & other post-punks is that they hijacked good-times musical styles to make very anti-good-times artistic statements and political messages. Good-times music actually suited their aims to some extent because it rejects history and is about nothing but NOW. However there was a tension, because hedonism and art/politics couldn't be easily reconciled.
Pavement, Beck, LCDSS, bootlegs & Daft Punk made statements addressing music and music history, a very anti-post-punk thing to do. The first two were so end-of-the-road that the music was sabotaged by their lack of confidence, and can't be given the good- times label. Seeing the last two as end-of-the-road statements is of course a very Simon Reynolds thing. (It's funny that Reynolds uses the traditional Vasari art history idea of progress (rave -> d&b) but sees the beginning as the best part, the Big Bang. Also funny that he sees rave as about so much more than good times) But they don't have to be. As Tim says they can open up new avenues of possibility.
Now the great thing about 'Losing My Edge' is that it addresses music but also addresses the address by satirising it. It's a powerful post-punk statement filtered through '90s irony filtered through something else again. So much tension! And in the last section of the song the first-order addresser loses it completely and the good- times music wins the day. Bootlegs and Daft Punk can be interpreted in light of this song. I'm wondering: does this mean that LCDSS will have to abandon statements and history completely in future? Isn't that what they really want?

Other things (?):
Puretone - "Addicted to Bass"
Playgroup's new DJ Kicks CD (not heard this, just read about it; perhaps we need a dedicated thread on this. In fact I may start one).

I think Death in Vegas the Contino Sessions in places was a genuine attempt at dance ideas with rock instrumentation, however I'm not sure it succeeded so well. I think it definitely fits in.

Nice review of Playgroup by the way.

A former contributor here came up with his own FT-related genre / theory pub pop, the details of which escape me now, but the name of which I shall hijack to say: it's music which makes itself available for discussion in the pub or here, now (surely the closest thing to the pub discussion online?).

All the music you mention has in common (for me) a feeling that you can sensibly come at it from many angles / musical backgrounds, and have something useful to say. So what's going on is this.

"Like Daft Punk's '70s-drenched Discovery, Playgroup feels less like nostalgia than a reclamation of something that didn't get finished the first time, a meta-version of the energies surging through the '80s air. Or, more to the point, an extrapolation of what those energies sound like today."

Obviously a lot of this stuff shares a sort of slipperiness I guess - from The Rapture to Daft Punk to The Streets, music that is really unwilling to be pigeonholed but nonetheless isn't really "eclectic". But it resists genre-labelling. Which is why it's hard to sum it up as a unified movement.

Tim H - yeah, you may well have a point, since I'm not trying to put the stuff I'm enjoying but not writing/thinking much about into this theory.