Everything’s Gone Green…
So, have we really got something here? Something that’s got the proverbial zeitgeist by the short and curlies? We’re (being who, Jess? Music geeks basically, the people who support the fag end of the music industry, the 70-80% which sells 1/10th of what the other 20-30% does) cannibalizing the 80s left and right these days. From “electroclash” (urrrgh) to this semi-recent (although I remember The Face running a punk-funk revisionist article as early as 99) spate of punky-disco-party pastiche. I’d be lying if I said the whole affair didn’t make me happier than a pig in sparkly shit; both my blogs are named after post-punk songs, I spent equal amounts of money in 2001 on new stuff and records recorded 20 years ago. (That goes for downloading time as well.)
The combinations which make up this music – Chic bass & mangled guitar noise, Zion dub & the glitzy baubles of Babylon, maschine noise vs. muscle noise, black & white (& latino & asian & well, you get the idea…), gay & straight, punk & disco – continue to fuel me in ways not much else does these days. Because these are dyads and not oppositional forces (the way, well, most of them are now), they also suggest possibilities, most of them still unexplored by the decades end. Which, on the surface anyway, should save all this stuff from being mere crypt-robbing.
But still, there’s something which nags about the general theology of the “scene.” Something which makes me the consumer uneasy. Like I’m participating in a wake more than a celebration, like I’m running away from more than I’m embracing. After 17 odd years of electronic dance culture, after 7 years of Timbaland style electro-ping pong, I’m coming around to the idea that we might be missing something really good in the heft and sweat of people playing dance music on a stage. But these guys aren’t the ones to provide it for me. (Us?)