RetroActive Baggage - Issue 21

mobile phoney

Remember the old debates that used to go on when you were at school about music? It was great, townies against indie kids, with maybe the odd lonely goth hanging around on the peripheries, guitars vs dance no-holds-barred. Aaaah, those were the days, before the Prodigy had starting making dance music that rock fans liked, when men where men, metalheads were people with long greasy hair and leather jackets as opposed to Goldie’s mates and you could actually talk about ‘indie music’ or ‘dance music’ without being ludicrously simplistic about the whole affair. One was people with bad haircuts playing guitars, the other was people with mobile phones tinkering with computers and the twain never met.
Of course, pre-millenial music is so disparate that to try to generalise it is a complete nonsense, and any label that we long-suffering and horribly inadequate music writers attempt to pin on it will succeed in doing very little but confusing all and sundry. In a time when we have bands like Arab Strap and Mogwai remixing David Holmes, inconceivable that way around five years ago, Propellerheads are in the charts with Shirley Bassey and The Wu-Tang Clan are working with Texas, it seems obvious that music is opening up, people’s horizons are being broadened and finally the snobbery and one-upmanship that has always been part and parcel of any interesting music is on its way to becoming a thing of the past. The music buyer of the twenty-first century is far more discerning and open minded, isn’t (s)he?
Poncia phone You’d like to think so, but it really hasn’t worked like that. In fact, at times it’s more like the opposite is true. People have so much stuff to wade through within their chosen genre, that venturing outside it seems too much like hard work. When there are so many sub-styles that could be lumped together under umbrella terms like ‘jungle’ or ‘techno’ and just trying to keep up to date with them requires more hours in the day and more money in your bank balance, then it’s almost suicidal to try and look any further. So those playground arguments between grebs and ravers, or whatever they were called at your school, have developed into backbiting between speed garage and techstep. Couple this with the cooler-than-thou label-spotting fashion fascist mentality of the dance elite, who are a far more aggressively snobby crowd than any sad little obscurist indie clique, and we have a club culture where insularity and narrow-mindedness are as much of an entry requirement as the dress code and a DJ is considered eclectic if he plays techno AND house in the same set. All I can think is that it’s a territorial thing, protective clubbers pissing against lamp-posts to prevent the mongrelisation of their beloved music and culture.
But I hate to tell them, it’s been happening for years. You try telling DJ Shadow, or Rick Rubin, that you can’t like guitars and hip-hop and, after they’ve stopped laughing at you, they’ll point out a tradition that stretches back twenty years and has famously sampled Queen, The Smiths and AC/DC, amongst others. Complain to Andy Weatherall that too many crap indie acts are trying to cash in on the dance boom and he’ll play you a little album he produced in 1991 called ‘Screamadelica’. And if you dare tell Moby that ambient twiddling and thrash-punk noise are mutually exclusive then he’ll shout at you and play his guitar, which you wouldn’t like one bit.

As a wise man once said, “there’s only two kinds of music - good music and bad music”, and the sooner some people realise that it’s what you do, not the way that you do it that counts, the better for all of us.

Tim.

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Remember the old debates that used to go on when you were at school about music? It was great, townies against indie kids, with maybe the odd lonely goth hanging around on the peripheries, guitars vs dance no-holds-barred. Aaaah, those were the days, before the Prodigy had starting making dance music that rock fans liked, when men where men, metalheads were people with long greasy hair and leather jackets as opposed to Goldie’s mates and you could actually talk about ‘indie music’ or ‘dance music’ without being ludicrously simplistic about the whole affair. One was people with bad haircuts playing guitars, the other was people with mobile phones tinkering with computers and the twain never met. Of course, pre-millenial music is so disparate that to try to generalise it is a complete nonsense, and any label that we long-suffering and horribly inadequate music writers attempt to pin on it will succeed in doing very little but confusing all and sundry. In a time when we have bands like Arab Strap and Mogwai remixing David Holmes, inconceivable that way around five years ago, Propellerheads are in the charts with Shirley Bassey and The Wu-Tang Clan are working with Texas, it seems obvious that music is opening up, people’s horizons are being broadened and finally the snobbery and one-upmanship that has always been part and parcel of any interesting music is on its way to becoming a thing of the past. The music buyer of the twenty-first century is far more discerning and open minded, isn’t (s)he?		You’d like to think so, but it really hasn’t worked like that. In fact, at times it’s more like the opposite is true. People have so much stuff to wade through within their chosen genre, that venturing outside it seems too much like hard work. When there are so many sub-styles that could be lumped together under umbrella terms like ‘jungle’ or ‘techno’ and just trying to keep up to date with them requires more hours in the day and more money in your bank balance, then it’s almost suicidal to try and look any further. So those playground arguments between grebs and ravers, or whatever they were called at your school, have developed into backbiting between speed garage and techstep. Couple this with the cooler-than-thou label-spotting fashion fascist mentality of the dance elite, who are a far more aggressively snobby crowd than any sad little obscurist indie clique, and we have a club culture where insularity and narrow-mindedness are as much of an entry requirement as the dress code and a DJ is considered eclectic if he plays techno AND house in the same set. All I can think is that it’s a territorial thing, protective clubbers pissing against lamp-posts to prevent the mongrelisation of their beloved music and culture. But I hate to tell them, it’s been happening for years. You try telling DJ Shadow, or Rick Rubin, that you can’t like guitars and hip-hop and, after they’ve stopped laughing at you, they’ll point out a tradition that stretches back twenty years and has famously sampled Queen, The Smiths and AC/DC, amongst others. Complain to Andy Weatherall that too many crap indie acts are trying to cash in on the dance boom and he’ll play you a little album he produced in 1991 called ‘Screamadelica’. And if you dare tell Moby that ambient twiddling and thrash-punk noise are mutually exclusive then he’ll shout at you and play his guitar, which you wouldn’t like one bit.
As a wise man once said, “there’s only two kinds of music - good music and bad music”, and the sooner some people realise that it’s what you do, not the way that you do it that counts, the better for all of us.