Indie-Dance / Punk-Funk - What Went Wrong The First Time?

This question could surely be posed about any fashionable sound that isn't entirely new?

(I am really hoping someone will have something brilliant to say, as I always flouder with this question).

Having said that, I do like that Junior Senior hit song that's been playing on MTV, but that's exactly because it has little to do with indie or even rock.

and yet your favourite band of all time are the Happy Mondays

(Actually Dr C, Hopkins etc to thread ha ha)

but then i dont really hear any dance music in dfa et al, it is more a rehash of an established and rediscovered hybrid than anything else, ie, its not a hybrid at all

I've never heard Gang of Four, incidentally, and am going entirely on received wisdom here, but surely the difference between 80s punk funk and 90s punk funk is that we've had 15 odd years of post acid house dance music in between whose influence is naturally going to permeate?

I agree with Gareth, incidentally, it is a weak genre because any type of fusion of house and rock generally involves putting a curb on the best aspects of house and rock.

I don't know if this is the case, to believe that you have to believe that this fusion isn't possible because putting a curb on the best aspects of both renders it not a fusion at all. if you listen to something like the dfa remix of dance to the underground I think there's a clear rock vibe to the whole track despite it fitting the house mould in terms of being instrumental, centred around a repetetive beat and drums.

Even the drums are totally, undeniably like real rock drums but it isn't a rock track. It's the old ILM description of rock ideas done with house instruments or vice versa.

ah but the Chromeo remix...

With something like House of Jealous Lovers (which is one of the few examples I can think of where this sort of thing is done well), you always get the feeling that the house people are digging it for the house aspects of it and the rock fans are attracted by the raucuous guitars and shouty vocals. Maybe I'm wrong, but a lot of the indie webzine articles I've read on the Rapture don't even seem to acknowledge the house influence.

This is all good stuff. Steve otm about the ahem, "fusion" process. I bet this will just end up like my favourite arg. abt infinity by people saying "well how do you define dance" and we all giving up as PROVED BY SCIENCE dance music = the sisters of mercy.

x-post, Sarah the beat is about as housey and loud as you can get a real drum kit to sound like, and the breakdown fits the house structure, even if it is all rock. I remember reading alot of interviews with the DFA where they stressed how long it took them to make it so it would sound really good in a club, and also how many arguments they had with the Rapture about it.

I would say though, HoJL is less dancey than loads of other DFA stuff, it's big because it happens to be the best, regardless of genre.

(xpost, or what Ronan said, and he is right about the lines blurring of course)

Or I might just go for the Rapture now you've reminded me how much I loved em at Glasto.

I don't think the pernicious influence of Morrisey on UK indie music in the mid-Eighties can be understated.

You're wrong. Every fule knows that that was the Byrds 'What's Happening'. ;o)

It is better, but I think history should look more fondly on the Lo-Fis than it almost certainly will... fuck knows they're a better example of what we're talking about here than Radio 4.

i think The Ratpure are certainly better live than the Lo-Fis were but i also think the difference between the two isn't as wide as most here would probably assume.

ILM's idea of a great punk-funk band is Duran Duran anyway (fair enuff)

But the question is - what happened in between and why? If indie/punk bands playing disco/dance music is such a great idea then why did
it go out of favour?

i'm wondering what you mean by out of favor. if you follow that mutant disco that you speak of:Ze Records, Factory bands, Gang Of Four type new wave, liquid liquid, esg, etc.. it will lead from new wave dance mixes:the cure(let's go to bed, etc), new order and loads more to industrial a la wax trax and antler and on-u sound like tackhead on to more modern forms like ebm, metropolis, goth metal and rock right on up to indie electroclash and dfa-style allovertheplaceness(and this line excludes big beat and any and all rap or straight pop that has used dance music styles in their music for the last fifteen years or longer in a rocking manner)but i'm probably misunderstanding the question. you probably are just wondering why boring indie rock bands haven't been interested in dance music until now and not rock as a whole. but just because hipsters weren't looking doesn't mean that something wasn't there.

Dancing was a stupid thing to do in the nineties. It had to do with indie rock and the faux(?) self-importance of the genre, the loser gesture, the anti-fun, the post-mosh, the chin stroke-Thrill Jockey buffalo stance. Plus, the 'punk' bands that were funky were pretty terrible in the '90s. Does anyone remember 5ive Style?

-- TomB (b3acki...), December 11th, 2003.
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not too well

-- stevem (bluesk...), December 11th, 2003.

B-b-but, I've seriously convinced myself 'U Got The Look' would go on any punk/indie/rock-dance compilation I might yet make!

-- stevem (bluesk...), December 11th, 2003.
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Is it?

-- DJ Mencap (lackofinteres...), December 11th, 2003.
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If you're Erol Alkan, yeah.

see Tico, the answer to this question is yes! just not the indie-dance underground you want, i suppose.

Also, better realise that having a dance beat does limit the music in several ways, since the ability to vary dynamics and tempo throughout the song decreases considerably. There needn't be a conflict between beat and melody/harmony, but there certainly is one between beat and dynamics/musical complexity.
So it would be sad if you could dance to all music, really.

Geir, answer Steve's question.

"Also, better realise that having a dance beat does limit the music in several ways"

People in not buying dance music CDs and listening to them at home/in your cars/at work/in bars etc shocker.

Good popular music often has a lot in common with classical music.

I did read is the answer to the question bill laswell? ..
Funny, because I was also going to mention The Golden Palominos (This is How it Feels, specifically.)

Easy. The Blue Aeroplanes. John Stapleton still DJs as Dope On Plastic.

large x-post, like

Why didn't Liquid Liquid become famous and why do so many indie-rockers want to sound like them now?

We have a winner!

Sad to say I enjoyed it immensely when Buddyhead would say "The Faint sound like Orgy" a while back. Are Orgy still going?

Liquid Liquid question - sample credits didn't pay their bills either, did they.

But things come in and out of favor. I ate cheese and melon w/ Nick from Computer Couger at Simon Reynold's party last week and had this discussion. You don't get anything for being before the curve, they were trendy and hyped...and influential, but in the end nobody cared.

And yes, almost the entire punk/funk scene of today grew out of the 90s hardcore underground, they all know each other because they all slept on each other's couches 10 years ago and drew XXX's on their arms. And they were hardcore and a few of them discovered the Fall and No New York and formed bands like the Metamatics and some followed the punk into post-punk path but yes, this time instead of drawing on James Brown, they also drew on Frankie Knuckles.

But the punk/funk of the early 80s was a niche thing, like a NYC thing, and america's anti-dance trend deepened as music stratified into it's little niches. Even the rappers stopped dancing(from Ego Trip...why did rappers stop dancing...their guns and beepers kept falling out of their pants...) hell you couldn't even dance to techno anymore, and it got boring then in 1997 I moved to NYC and single-handedly taught the punk rockers how to dance again by playing them New Order mixed into Adonis. It's that simple. And electroclash happened at the same time as the punk-funk revival. That's not a coincedence.

The closest the Aeroplanes come to this is a track which was basically a Stapleton collage piece w/ scratching etc. Here's a nice quote by Pat Jazz Butcher re: the mid-80s indie dead-end:

I wanted to start to mess with the pretty traditional song structures we were using. We were all aware that music was changing, and, more out of interest than out of any spurious "career" concern, we wanted to see where we could take our pop songs using things like breakdowns, the mixing in of "found" voices (which we first heard NOT from Steinski or the Bryne/Brian Eno collaboration, but from John Stapleton, a DJ who scratched things in at early The Blue Aeroplanes, radical and unexpected changes of sounds - a series of sonic events rather than plain old verse/chorus structure.

my literal answer: because most of the people involved in lcd soundsystem were busy making indie/hardcore records at that time, silly.

They were, and they were called Ui.

i wasn't really asking the question. i was just clarifying the original question.

also, a run of cowbells at area thrift shops.

I haven't time to read the thread but I saw the question earlier and have been thinking about this.

I'm not sure i have a neat answer, but i'm not sure that punk-funk is *one thing*. I don't really see much in common between say Ze/Mutant Disco artists and A Certain Ratio/Gangof4/Pop Group. I think the first lot were essentially mainstream disco/latin/jazz musicians who were kind of steered into a trendy niche. The last (british) lot were ex-punks who wouldn't have been making records if it hadn't been for punk. They looked to 'underground stuff' like Can/Beefheart/Ornette et al as much as funk and disco. (I guess ACR might be more oriented to pure funk, but coudn't play it at the start.)

This new punk-funk seems to be more like the British 'grimy' variety than Ze. At least Radio 4 and The Rapture seem to be. I'll think about why on my way home.

street is like a jungle
so call the police
following the herd
down to greece
on holiday
love in the 90´s
is paranoid
on sunny beaches
take your chances looking for

girls who are boys
who like boys to be girls
who do boys like they´re girls
who do girls like they´re boys
always should be someone you really love

oveiding all work
because there´s none available
like battery thinkers
count their thoughts on 1 2 3 4 5 fingers
nothing is wasted
only reproduced
get nasty blisters
du bist sehr schön
but we have´nt been introduced

Speedking.

oh jeez, please, let's not recall them.

Yeah, the "20 years gone" theory seems to make sense -- presumably there were indie kids who liked it but feared playing it because it was still freshly-minted in the minds of indie purists as "mainstream" ergo "a sellout move", and now that New Wave/synthpop/post-punk is in (American) media-saturation remission it's safe territory again.

Folk Implosion (Lou Barlow) - "Nothings Gonna Stop The Flow" - KIDS OST 1995
Dub Narcotic Sound System (Calvin Johnson) - "Fuck Shit Up" 1994
Pavement (Stephen Malkmus) - "Jackals, False Grails: The Lonesome Era" - Slanted And Enchanted 1991-1992

(Honey Bubble)

as far as chicken or the egg scenario for reissues, I vote egg. When Grand Royal reissued Liquid Liquid, I don't know if they had any idea that it was worth reissuing other then SFJ and co simply knowing it was good. I don't think there was an insurgent movement of punk-funkers waiting expectently. And it went out of print I believe before Grand Royal even went out of business, and to remind everyone what the scene was like then, the Mo Wax remixes were, well Mo Wax remixes. I think people saw it in the context of Hip Hop more then punk at the time.

And speaking of SFJ, as prescient as Ui were, I think it was more in a post-rock context, like the analog equivelent of early IDM. Not exactly slamming dancefloor material, but I haven't listened in a long time. Like those Tortoise tracks DJd and Gamara, completely informed by DJ culture and dance music, but not something "to get the party started, right?"

for the indie rockers out there, that's not a question, but a quote...

I presume that's an American take on things, in Europe people are now ceasing to like house music, if anything.

...and a massive chunk of European youth!

xpost

Hah! yeah, the entire country of Sweden to thread!

and me, i thought it was cool! but i don't make music.

Yes. I saw them open for Tortoise, actually.

And speaking of SFJ, as prescient as Ui were, I think it was more in a post-rock context, like the analog equivelent of early IDM. Not exactly slamming dancefloor material, but I haven't listened in a long time.

I saw them numerous times in the 1990s, and although the recorded output may not be "slamming dancefloor material", they were able to get the (punk/indie) crowds dancing like crazy live.

As for the question at hand, I don't think anything went wrong the first time, music just changed, both specifically (Go4, PiL and ACR changed drastically from their early recordings that are regarded as seminal as their careers progressed) and in general (disco falls out of fashion, no one is going to go out of their way to take ideas from it).

in athens:

WUOG
Top Ten:
1 DRESSY BESSY-DRESSY BESSY
2 ENON-HOCUS POCUS
3 BEULAH-YOKO
4 BLACK BOX RECORDER-PASSIONOIA
5 DAGONS-TEETH FOR PEARLS
6 WEEN-QUEBEC
7 SUPERCHUNK-CUP OF SAND
8 GUIDED BY VOICES-EARTHQUAKE GLUE
9 BEAT HAPPENING-MUSIC TO CLIMB THE APPLE TREE BY
10 SLUMBER PARTY-3

(while I don't envy Blount given his college radio situation, Radio K just played Broken Social Scene, and whoever it is they're playing now, it's pseudo-funky breakbeats and vague electronic noodlings and violin riffs and the occasional three-second burst of NOISY GEETAR RIFFIN' under the nasal monotone singing voice of some Elliott Smith wannabe.)

http://www.cybernetic-broadcasting.net/

Most of the punk-funk bands of today are still getting educated and to find a band that knows the music, and knows how to play, and can come up with hooks, it's always gonna be rare, but will be less rare as more bands get exposed to more influences, which is why some people like to reissue old records instead of put out new ones.

In any case, when you go dancing in NYC these days, you will more likely hear the Talking Heads then Gang of Four, but that's just been a shift in taste I think.

I'd say the opposite, if anything. It sounds guitary and novel to house fans and absolves indie kids of anti-dance music guilt.

not exactly a giant leap there. everyone knows they're connected and everyone knows that it's cool to like them both.

And it may not be a leap, sure it's cool to like them both, but if that's what it takes to make a kid dance for the first time, then good work! What I'm talking about here is hordes of people who have never danced! They did not grow up clubbing or raving. Dancing was lame. So when the Rapture get kids dancing, and get them dancing to Underground Resistance at that, I think it's wonderful. It's making dance parties more fun.

And I used to be obsessed with the video for Crucified, which came up on the Box(the 1-900 phone number controlled Video Jukebox) all the time, mostly because of the large-chested member, not the gay members. I will also admit to ordering a Consolidated video once, but we'll keep that a secret.

I'm gonna page Spencer Chow to thread (although he may have been up here at the time) because in LA, there were all these clubs in the 94-96 era that would have "cheezy" "ironic" disco coverbands play all the time with names like "boogie nights". there was this bar is Santa Monica called The End (I think) that I remember in particular that always appealed to the UCLA safe middle of the road crowd.

these bands still exist and play company parties and weddings and such. this goes to say that disco was not under the radar or burbling underground in the section of the usa that i was living in during the mid-90s. lastly, a kind reminder "jungle boogie" while not strict disco, was featured very prominently in the pulp fiction film and sdtk and entered the consciousness of nearly every teen/20 something at the time (even in the French countryside where I saw Pulp Fiction).

Latin freestyle fans. Technotronic fans. Belgian newbeat fans. Miami hip-hop fans. Techno fans and industrial rock fans and dark metal fans, a lot of the time, without knowing it. Leann Rimes fans. Europop fans out the ying-yang: not just Army of Lovers fans, but Rednex/Los Umbrellos/Modo/Jordy/Aqua/Toy Box fans. Midi Maxi and Efti fans. Kylie Minogue fans. Madonna fans. Bananarama fans. Britney Spears fans. Taylor Dayne fans. Stacey Q fans. Mariah Carey fans. Gloria Estefan fans. Yvonne Chaka Chaka and Brenda Fassie fans in Africa. Natacha Atlas and Ofra Haza fans in the middle east. Xuxa fans and Lisa M fans in Latin America. Everybody who danced to "Macarena." Everybody who danced to "Lambada." Ace of Base fans. Gilette fans. Pretty much everybody but stupid indie rockers (and okay, stupid metallers and stupid rappers and stupid ravers and stupid ???s) with their heads stuck in the sand, in other words. Which was pretty much Scott's point. The. Stuff. Never. Died. Get it?

:(

Um is it too much to imagine some people liking disco throughout the 90s AND being quite keen on the idea of indie-disco too? I think people are totally misinterpreting "making do" here.

Also I had to balance multisyllabic post with STOOPID post in order to keep the universe spinning.

(I mean, Appetite for Destruction had as much punk and as much funk in it as Entertainment! or Solid Gold ever did. But I don't wanna get into that again.)(Actually, I forget if they had strings, though. Probably in "November Rain" or somewhere, who knows.)

Guns N Roses did "Down on the Farm" in the '90s! That was GREAT!!

(Warrant and Faster Pussycat and Kix and Cinderella were still making excellent dance music a few years later, though, it should be noted.)

Jon Spencer Blues Explosion, "Bell Bottoms" to thread.

I'm not happy with the scene thing either really, I think my qn has been taken as an expression of fandom for all these bands cos I called LCD's singles "great" (which they are, except "Give It Up"). I don't think that the Liars and R4 and most of the Rapture album are making any great steps forward for rock or indie. But I do think that "Beat Connection", "Yeah", and "HOJL" are records that don't sound like American indie rock has sounded for a long time and I was curious as to why.

And Chuck, c'mon! I'm looking for DISCO! Okay, the Crunch by the Nightingales is kind of funky, but the Rapture and their ilk, in addition to channelling Gang of Four, are channelling deep house and disco influences in their own ways, in ways that make their records rock a dance party in ways I imagine the Afghan Wigs or say, Big Black ever would. And I wasn't looking to indie rock for dance grooves in the early/mid 90s, because I really don't think they existed, I would put away the Sonic Youth and Swans records and listen to Renegade Soundwave and Meat Beat Manifesto. I don't think any serious dance music fan would take that argument seriously. The Rapture mix punk/indie-rock songwriting and energy with a dance music producer/DJs sense of the dancefloor. Sometimes it's more one then the other. I think House of Jealous lovers falls flat on these TV shows because it's not a very compelling pop song, sure it has the hooks, but it's structured as a dance song.

aren't the rapture channeling the cure and dfa channeling deep house on their behalf?

(btw, I LIKE Gang of Four. For going on a quarter-century now!!!)

And "Get Low" by Lil Jon and the Eastside Boyz is about a thousand times more punk funk (or punk disco) than "House of Jealous
Lovers".

see, i wasn't even gonna bring up rap/r&b/funk on this thread within the context of the new new punk funk revival cuz then it wouldn't even be fair.

i think heaven 17 might have more hipster cread than g04 this month actually

i'm not hip enuff to know these things. are you sure it isn't the samba house new wave of modern romance?

I think that the internet has helped a lot, at least in terms of audience. P2P has allowed a lot of people to listen to/try a lot of different music which they may not have gone for if they were spending their money on records. I think most people tend to stay very conservative with their music choices when they every record purchase is a major commitment of limited funds.

Hmmm...but isn't "Ray Of Light" all electronic (with little miniscule bits of guitar) with a sequenced beat, whereas "House of Jealous Lovers" is 90% live instrumentation (guitar, bass, drums, cowbell....instruments du rock)?

What does this mean, anyway?

But how do we really know "House of Jealous Lovers" doesn't use beats on auto-repeat as well? Sure, The Rapture say it's all played live, but one cannot really know unless you actually see them play the song live (which I haven't). I can only judge the songs as they appear on disc, and the two songs have a very similar 'template' to my ears as I said above. In the end, to me it doesn't matter how the music has been produced (live or sequenced, etc), but only the actual qualities of the final song itself.

Man, she's had everyone

You think? I've always considered the guitars on that song to be fairly prominent - I'm remembering the song right now in my head, and the first thing that comes to mind is that opening guitar part.

Corpses can do that to your voice? Oh man....

x-post

different tempos, SOUNDS even

it doesn't.

(And ps: lots of disco was played on alleged "rock" instruments too, obviously.)

Haha, I was in the bay area that whole decade and there were tons of the same kinds of bands playing in SF every night!

Here's the best place to start:

http://www.allmusic.com/cg/amg.dll?p=amg&uid=UIDCASS80311061622542118&sql=A09dyylkoxp9b

But I have four other albums on vinyl, and like every one of them.

Yes, Modern Romance's Can You Move (Everybody Salsa) is the hip song of the moment, but of course, the house edit has been in the bootleg racks of Rock -N- Soul for years. So I have to be contrary and play the flipside, Queen of the Rapping Scene. Why did it come back? Within 3 months it was somehow in the soundtrack of Shrek, Morgan Geist played me a bootleg, I got my own copy, Trevor Jackson was playing it, there was some sort of zeitgeist thing going on, where did it start? I don't know. I first heard it on a Mickey Mixing Oliver 1987 DJ set that I-F used to have archived on Hotmix that people were burning and trading.

House of Jealous lovers is disco listen to the drum break and listen to the the disco of Spank and Brooklyn Express and Dreaming a Dream and Delerium and Powerline. The Rapture as UK Jazz Funk? That's where Level 42 fits in. But not really.

Olio and I Need Your Love however are pure Frankie Knuckles-style. If Luke wasn't a married white man, I'd swear he was a gay black man. No go listen to It's A Cold, Cold World and well, a song called I Need Your Love. This is sparse, dark, melancholy gay black chicago house, and that's as much an influence on the Rapture as Alex Chilton or Robert Smith or Robet Plant or Gang of Four, maybe even PiL.

I want to know who is coming up with the rankings of hipster cred. How and why did Heaven 17 peak? Things like this are frustrating. There have been people who have always played Modern Romance and Heaven 17. Whatever, I'm not going there. It's all about context anyway. Good DJs can and will play the most obvious played out songs and if it works it works. I will never say, I can't play "white horse" right now because it's not cool anymore.

2 things regarding hipster cred, first, we're not necessarily talking about the same hipsters. And I didn't mean just "hipsters" didn't think disco was cool. Pretty much anyone who even processed the thought "is music cool" didn't think disco was cool. So that excludes your mother doing the chicken dance at a wedding and Chuck's hordes of Maraih Carey's Macarenists.

And so I guess by the time this is posted, Modern Romance won't be cool. What's next? OK, I'll let you guys in...

"As the Time Goes By" by Funkapolitan.

and don't tell me "oh so and so played that last year." That's not the point. Nobody was paying attention then. Maybe they will now.

and stay tuned for my new party....NRG

Oh my god!!! you are fucking kidding, right? that was totally off the top of my head. wow. well, that's cool. although i prefer ay yi moosey or however you spell it.

The irony is that the diversity of Mo' Wax's output got ignored because of their '93-'96 patch of narcolepsy music, a fair bit of which I still own and love, mind. When Lavelle put out house records 4 years after the Liquid Liquid thing and the Cornelius remix, 3 years after hooking up with Ian Brown, Badly Drawn Boy (alright, these 2 are considered eclectic) and Richard Ashcroft (which reflected back as some sorta 'seal of approval' for some fans) and 2 years after the Psychonauts' debut 'punk funk' 12", some Mo'Waxers actually freaked!

Anyway...

if ex-punks are so sold on trying to make people dance, why are they on stage tryiing to get people to watch them?

p.s. others ahead of the curve? Bleep and Booster, an obscure ABC spinoff making techno with vocoder vocals circa 1993? I heard the song twice and have never been able to find it since. Anyone remember this?

Maybe not, but it's certainly closer to 'rock' than the technoey aspects of "Ray of Light." That's my point.

my god! this song brings me out in hives. glasgow hipsters have been playing this for years along with levan's imagination rerubs, but i'm sorry, they give me the dry boke.

i've got that bleep and booster - it's decidedly so so as far as i recall (unless it was just so far ahead of the loop that it made no sense at the time). dan, yr welcome to the record if i can dig it out.

i think the reason for the punk funk interest in my neck of the woods is probably down to house music being the dominant sound since 1986. no matter how great the record, eventually you start to feel like you've had your brains bludgeoned out by hearing so many kik drums. that's also another reason why electro and early house are so in vogue here - the kiks are softer.

just prior to house, things were really interesting here in clubs - you would go out and hear troublefunk, public enemy, world domination enterprises, renegade soundwave, funk, the odd 242 record, a bit of soft cell, some hi nrg etc. etc. in clubs. house took all that away and i'm as guilty as anyone. i was so infatuated with house and techno that i almost forgot anything else existed for ten years.

so, after ten years the djs started digging again and when myself and others started playing the likes of esg, liquid liquid etc but mixing it up using our dj skills aquired through the rave days, it just sounded incredibly refreshing. 18 and 19 year olds would be going as wild for 'dance' by esg as they would for whatever the massive techno record of the day was. it was that organic warmth (but still with 4/4 energy) that did it. now, going to a club and hearing house music all night long just sounds so old and hackneyed. there will ALWAYS be room for house but it has to be mixed up a bit more now.

this has nothing to do with indie, it's all just about new grooves freaking the dancefloor and refreshing the heads of a jaded generation. the current generation want something they can call their own - house music is their older brothers and sisters' music. at the moment punk funk (although none of them call it that) is one of many things that fits the bill. these kids neither know nor care about the history - history is for sad fucks (like me) who post on ILM.

The thing is, in most of america, and yes, specifically with the post-hardcore indie-hipsters, who while making up a small fragment of our population, have a decidedly large impact on the music we are paying attention to these days, there is nothing old and hackneyed by "house music all night long." When HMANL(house music all night long) was at it's peak, the rock/indie/hip/hardcore/etc kids hated it, the journalists mostly hated it etc and the idea of HMANL is totally new to them. When I DJ, I mix it up, but sometimes totally enjoy HMANL. So while I agree that too much of anything is a bad thing and the narrow minded/singlemindedness of house and techno types during the mid 90s lead to incredibly boring music, for so many of us going dancing to HMANL is a unique and refreshing experiance. The young punk-funkers see house music as another alien hipster reference point to conquer, now that they have their ACR and ESG comps. I also think its not just a question of how boring it can be to play house and techno all night long, but the newer house and techno records themselves were just not as good. Call me a luddite but...I'd say it's not just that the kiks are softer in early house/techno, but the songs are better! More warmth, more pop, more interesting.

anyway, I have to go dj a birthday party now where I'm gonna play Tommy Roe's Dizzy, Cherry Cherry by Neil Diamond, and Windy by the Association, as well as New Edition, Chaka Khan, the Pointer Sisters and Madonna, so I don't really see where I get off talking about this...

then yeah it did turn out to be a band.

but I'm gonna use that question as a great put down one day.

Yeah, that actual song was first written as a hippy-rock tune called 'Sepheryn' by two blokes in the 70s, Clive Muldoon and Dave Curtis. That's why it's got that basic rock structure to it underneath Wm Orbit's techno puppetry.

Well it's a bit of a stretch to call any of those acts late 80s... I mean the 3 Johns (a Mekon & 2 Meeks acolytes) and the Nightingales were contemporaries of the Go4 who just carried on, the Membranes' high water mark was "Spike Milligan's Tape Recorder" which got into the Festive 50 in 85 (maybe?); Janitors / Whiplash / (the unbeatably brilliant) Big Flame were all done and dusted by 87 at the latest. The point being that those Ron Johnson bands (and the like) were engaged in a project of battering all of the funk or disco out of the post-punk sound. Think of those first couple of Stump records, which had odd references to funk (esp. in the slappy bass) but used in a way which was not even stiff-indie-funk-unfunky. This stuff wasn't so much a revival as a tail, I think.

I remember having a very earnest talk with one of the Wedding Present about the Gang of Four sometime in late '86, where we were both bemoaning how everyone had forgotten so soon, and him saying that he'd moved to Leeds because he thought he'd get to see the Go4 every night! They covered "I Found that Essence Rare", didn't they?

A lot of the indie fraternity's taste in funk was rooted heavily in 70s style heavy with-real-instruments funk, and that stuff wasn't being made in the 80s so much so the flow of ideas kind of dried up a bit (I remember friends of mine raving about Rick James LPs and that, but you know what I mean. People liked Prince but there was no point pretending to be him). Synthesisers were viewed with a certain suspicion.

I think the last proper indie-funk LP of the 80s was the first Happy Mondays LP, which I consider their finest work. It was only with the second that they started to use house(ish) beats and hit their hitmaking stride. (While we're here my nomination for the record which first hit on that baggy sound was the first Laugh LP, but that's another argument entirely).

Hm. Sorry, I appear to have made no substantive points.

I know, it works both ways doesn't it...

I just came into work and this thread has gone mental. It's the most interesting one I've read on here for weeks... good stuff all round. I've learnt a fair bit.

There was also a mini-one in the US - bands like Ten Tall Men etc, none of whom I particularly liked. Agitpop were great though, and lest we forget, they did a nice version of Lipps Inc's 'Funkytown' on Back At The Plain of Jars in 1986.

Stirmonster's post is interesting in that when I go out to some of the different new nights that have started here and hear old italo stuff or chicago house I can't help but wonder what the fuck happened to creative use of hi-hats in dance music?

I am a total house person I guess, and I like plenty of stuff which I'm fairly sure people on this thread consider total shit, and I still love the idea of house all night, even house from the last 2 or 3 years or last year or this year all night, if it's a good DJ.

But yeah I can totally see how the punk-funk thing is refreshing, it is for me too.

I do think though that to a great extent house/techno (or any other dance genre will always be the kids thing (er...right on) because for me at least growing up I wasn't old enough to get into clubs and it represented a discovery. That what I had known as "dance music" was actually a gigantic universe of tracks, easily big enough that you may never listen to anything else again. It doesn't feel like my older brother or older sisters music to me because well, I still had to discover it for myself.

This is well off topic and I've probably said it all before, I hate being so stereotypically passionate or whatever but it's interesting nonetheless.

Oh look! Here are the Ghost Orchids in Terrorizer of all things, talking about The Rapture:

"Much as I like House of Jealous Lovers [a vastly overrated 12" by The Rapture - this is the ed's comment]", what it did was to depoliticise Gang of Four in the service of a fun dance jam. All we can do is shake our ass to the things that move us, and perhaps try to develop some clue as to why they move us."

It must be National Point-Missing Month where they live or something.

Anyway, as you were.

x-post

which dovetails into personal remembrance as to "what went wrong the first time"

i ran such a club. dancing drinking club for indie kids (art students and their ilk) back in the day (very early 80's) and basically went from punk funk disc0 (ze, GoF, etc) to disco (cheap 7"s everyone loved when pissed) to US dance (cameo, madonna, street sounds comps etc) and found that i actually liked that stuff. as, you would think, did the disco punk bands.

and so nu-pop (human league, ABC) came too with shiny new "disco" production values. and the new romantics (spandau ballet etc). and disco punk was somewhat forgotten.
and then there was scritti of course.

Not only was much of your post otm, Ronan, but this effectively explains why the vast majority of my record purchases (if not my overall tastes) are dance!

Yes, here is one for example:

http://www.popscene-sf.com/
"A new year's day tribute to madchester"

also, Los Angeles residents may remember that the "Spaceland" started out as Sundays "hetero" night at Dreams Of LA... at first spinning indie then booking local bands and now it's the biggest indie club in SoCal.

Also, the flap about the Chemical Brothers sampling 23 Skidoo, which meant some dug it out, occurred around the same time hip hop went mad for old school hip hop and its sample sources - which meant that Liquid Liquid got wheeled out a bit to acknowledge 'White Lines' debt to it (even on Westwood, I think), which also neatly coincided with the retrospective comp and Weatherall's 9' 0 Clock Drop comp, which I only vaguely remember reading about. Some of the stuff on Mo' Wax's Major Force comp also sounded fairly punk-funky, especially as the Japanese rapping was removed and my primer for some of the 'weird disco' that is part of the equation of today's scene came with DJ Milo (of the Wild Bunch/Massive Attack and extra relevant since he'd contributed to the late 80s/early 90s Major Force stuff included in the comp) putting out his 2 Food mix CDs (only got the first, sadly).

Nice to remember some of this stuff.

Oh, and that sounds lame - I think I do actually enjoy dancing to indie evry so often.

i was at a house party about nine months ago, it was the night after a ghost orchids show at the local electroclash club night. there was the singer from the ghost orchids, and he was talking to my friend, and he was saying "LOOK i don't think the words JAZZY and HOUSE should ever be next to one another IT MAKES ME WANT TO PUKE". and i thought, here we go again, another hipster kid depoliticising lil louis and blaze and mr. fingers in the service of getting laid at a party. i wanted to put him in a headlock and make him listen to "U Don't Know Me" until he cried for mercy.

i'm sorry about that, dj.
more info i've remembered: this actual song was the last one, if i am right, off the "five songs ep", also found on the "repeater" cd. the lyrics said something like: "i am a ----- boy, oe oe oe oe"... oh well, sorry for the off-topic. i should send it now, before i feel too stupid...

maybe nic should disband !!! and reform the yah-mo's.

Is that fair?

I see your point in some respects, but you have to remember that dance music DOES get alot of hate, and this whole thread is quite interesting in that to me at least it seems to be about American reception of house music. I am anxious to see the US reviews of the LCD album when it comes out, just to see what language will be employed and what sense will be made of it all.

way, way, way off the mark.

It's not about hatred per se, simple ambivalence even could be to do with it.

backing up gygax! point a bit more directly: mountain goats don't sound like death metal + r. kelly

fair enough gygax but as I say, surely there are other musicians who do allow that passion to seep into the body of work? I mean isn't there a scale here of relativity where clearly some guys were so passionate that they couldn't stop it seeping into their work?

I mean without making it a diss, in the midst of this argument it's easy to forget my stance is that this is all a great thing, but people have been discussing why it took so long. that was the thread title.

I was there in December 2003, waiting for the next Carl Craig album to drop in 2004

Well with old punks and arch-hipsters yeah, but to further your point, apparently 'Entertainment' had rocketed up thousands of places to like, #291 on the Amazon chart recently.

But girls dance best to r'n'b! Probably me too.

1. As mentioned elsewhere, I think you can draw a clear line with Ze-type stuff, Pigbag (et al) and 23 Skidoo on one side, and Gang of Four, Slab!, Chakk, !!!, Ratpure and Radio 4 on the other. It's not all the same aesthetic!

2. My theory why punk-funk failed = EMO! (ergo, any explanation as to why it's back needs to consider why indiekids don't want 'intense' right now)

and by the time lcd releases an album, who is to say james' direction might sound as different as Echoes does from Mirror?

(xpost with blount, kinda similar sentiment).

xpost with several others

Joel, the point isn't that Sebadoh or whomever didn't listen to Go4, PiL, Joy Division etc, it's that I really don't think they were listened to/appreciated in the context of dance music. If you go back to these so called dark ages, I really don't remember seeing many people really dancing a lot, and certainly not going out, to a club, with the intention of dancing. The fact that dance music slowly became acceptable by enchroaching from the mainstream(chemical brothers + daft punk ....James Murphy) is why certain disco post-punk bands are now getting attention they wouldn't have before. Medium Medium, Pigbag, etc.

1. The definition of indie can run from a word the describes music made and released independantly, to a word describing the whole complex social organisation around it.

2. The latter definition usually involves a scene that defines itself quite negatively (ie "we are not mainstream" "we are not Pop", etc.), and can be quite parochial at its worst.

3. Many bands that were just indie in the first sense are loved by people who are indie in the second sense. The UK/US thing is a big part of this. Mary and I had a great discussion in DUMBO before I left NYC about whether Joy Division were an indie band or not. She argued that they weren't, and even though I disagreed somewhat at the time, I now know that she was right. Joy Division had charting singles in the UK, even as they could be held up as paragons of "non-pop indie, with intergrity", or whatever in the US. I get a sense that the first definition of indie is more common in the UK, wheras the in the US, indie means the second definition, a weird combination of diffidence, sanctimony and arrogance.

4. Without having been there at all, I would assume that both the UK post-punk scene and the US/NYC Disco-not-Disco scenes did not display the same attitudes that US indie kids do now.

5. Because electronic dance music did crossover in the UK, people have come to terms with its history, its ontology, its aesthetics much more than in the US.

Where am I going with all of this? I don't know. I don't know why people chose to get into dance, but the seeds have been sown for a while. Matador has been releasing electronic music for a while, reviews for electronic records have been in SPIN for at least 10 years, there was a crossover a few years ago with big beat, etc.

Another factor is the collector's mentality that does play a part in indie. Punk being a major influence on indie (obv), it was only inevitable that people would find these other records with funky basslines made during the same period. I'm willing to bet that alot of the "kids" right now got into punk through alternative, and have only started digging through the archives recently (I got out of indie in the mid-to-late 90s, and I wouldn't be surprised if others did too).

It would be hard to underestimate the impact that alternative seems to have had on the current US indie mindset, for instance, the idea that serious music couldn't be fun, unless it was ironic. These years also saw the "flowering" of a very protectionist attitude towards the music. It had to be walled off. For me, at 23, the peak year of indie wasn't 1991-1992 when Nirvana broke, but rather 1993-1994, when the indie world was filled with cautionary tales of major label reps invading small, holy towns like Chapel Hill and Olympia, looking to discover "the next Seattle". The fact that alternative was a mainstream, major-label "revoltuion" has a lot to do with why it is so hard to define US indie, as it can seem to be a real DIY, grassroots phenomenon, or, alternately, a marketing firm's dream of a DIY, grassroots phenomenon (especially in regards to clothing).

Since the mid-90s, when trad. indie guitar pop/rock started to lose its way (IMHO), indie has changed its being quite a bit. Instead of a having fortress mentality, it has become more like a horde of locusts (not positive or negative), and the relationship with music has become parasitical (I tend to think this is HEAVILY related to geography; the suburbs, and ESPECIALLY the new-urbanist rennaissance, both in Times Square, and Williamsburg, the alternate candyland for more "enlightened" suburban consumerist values). Indie now looks to other genres for vitality, but when it consumes those genres, it makes them indie's own. Roots music was the first thing (that I was aware of), and some indie kids still listen to that, but maybe others are turned off by the connection to fustye olde rockers. Hence punk-funk (?).

I still don't know how I feel about the music (punk-funk), seeing as I love electronic music, and on it's own terms. Some of the DFA stuff is pretty fun; good, sometimes great pop records. I tend to be someone, however, who is too sensitive to social context, and the social context of US indie is generally disagreeable to me. The fact that the Rapture claim to love house music but stil won't make house records strikes me as being either snobbery or fear (of their own indie community).

xpost
the last sentence will surely be under attack given recent posts, so let me just say that i think there has to be a reason why groups pick which of their influneces to sound more like. I am wrong to say that the Rapture has to make a house record, but I have the feeling (JUST a feeling), that the idea of making one never came up. My own (limited) experience playing drums recently has been that all of the music I listen to comes out in my playing, and it would take a conscious, reasoned act to deny any of those influences. Therefore, there would be material in that action that would answer the question "why?".

Also, what I have enumerated above is a generational story. I can only acount for what I think to be true for people in their early 20s like me.

And Aaron, what do you mean the Rapture won't make house records? I Need Your Love is a house record. Olio is a house record. House of Jealous Lovers is at least a disco/funk record. Killing is sorta old-school electro-jeep bass kind of thing. All these songs are getting remixed, all getting put out on 12"s. The members of the Rapture are doing dance mixes for other people.

Nobody like Disco proper during the 80s/90s is one idea I've talked about, even most of the techno/house/various forms of dance musit types.

Specifically, indie-rockers, which as Chuck implies, may be a small segment of the population, but seriously are the people who are making the music we are talking about, are most of the people who are on ILM and who are writing about music for most of the magazines etc, whether they admit it or not, did not like ANY kind of dance music during that period, except for hip-hop, which admittedly, was often very anti-dance at that time as well.

Acutally, wasn't it actually Rick James who first COINED the term "punk funk," around 1979 or so, around the time of *Bustin Out of L7*? Don't know how to verify this, but I swear there were magazine ads around then, calling him that. (Plus, L7 was later the name of a punk band, sort of!) So though apparently somebody upthread stupidly assumed I was just being perverse, I wasn't kidding when I called Lil Jon and the East Side Boyz (whose gang shouts sound very very oi!) punk-funk -- Lil Jon even wears his HAIR like Rick used to!

And soon after Rick I remember white suburban skinny-tie new wave friends of mine all getting into *Dirty Mind*, Teena Marie, Lakeside, Gap Band, Grace Jones's Sly and Robbie productions, even Linx(who LOOKED really new wave). Most of whom, yeah, seemed distinguished by "real instruments." Of course this was in Detroit, and we were all listening to Electrifyin Mojo on the Midnight Funk Association on WGPR, mixing in Billy Squier/Zep/Hendrix/Devo/Gary Numan/Gang of Four/Yellow Magic Orchestra/Kraftwerk/Was (Not Was)"Out Come the Freaks"/J. Geils "Flamethrower"/Police "Voices in My Head"/Kurtis Blow (many of which, you'll note, did NOT have real instruments, and those are the ones that Derek May and Kevin Sauderson and Juan Atkins seemed to like most). And then we all went out hunting for all those early Funkadelic albums, and etc etc etc.

aesthetically speaking, the DFA stuff is closer to house, certainly. its harder to say where the lines should be drawn. i tend to idealized a certain (usually futurist) attitude towards soundmaking in electronic dance and I dont think it is present in the Rapture. their sounds seem rather obvious to me, which is FINE for dance, for pop, for indie, whatever, but it still doesnt sound like house, or great house. i still do like some of those records. they are compelling, and maybe perhaps even innovative (in the context of indie).

xpost
dan. i was born 11/11/1980. i got "... i care because you do", "lifeforms", "second toughest amongst the infants", "logical progression", "torque", "decay product", etc. when they came out. I heard my first salsoul stuff in 1997. you do the math ;-) i may have listened to mostly indie, but i would have listened to more dance if i knew where to look.

back to hstencil's comment, i reckon PiL and Go4 weren't "lost" (you could know about them even if they weren't fashionable or even easy to find), but liquid liquid, ESG, lizzy... were "lost", since many people didn't even know they had existed until their records were reprinted.

This is definitely a US-UK difference then. Things aren't as ghettoised here. At least they haven't been since the late 80s (Morrissey's pernicious influence being important here, as stated somewhere upthread I think, or maybe on the baggy/shoegazer one). Madchester/baggy -. ambient -> triphop > bigbeat - there's been a constant succession of indiekid approved dance music through this time, and you'd often find more straight out dance stuff in people's collections too (even if it was album oriented and usually Orbital). It's only really with young kids in their first flush of rejecting all chart pop that I've found a militant 'anti-anything that isn't guitar rock' attitude very prevalent.

Hence all the "pah, you only like NME-approved whiteboy dance music" snobbery from dance hipsters who know all the 'proper' stuff, did their 80s/90s rave baptism, or wish they had.

I think maybe this has finally swung back again a bit with the whole 'rebirth of rock' thing, but again, I think that's mainly with younger kids straight out of suburbia.

But I will continue to take on your initial statement and mention that the DFA have very deliberately marketed the Rapture's music as CLUB music. House came out as a 12" with no art on the label featuring a Morgan Geist remix, and now they've got a Maurice Fulton remix, the guy who helped produce Gypsy Woman by Crystal Waters?!?!?

And if anyone paid as close attention to the charts as I did, they would've seen that months before the indie-rockers, including Rapture fans, picked up on the House 12", the Morgan Geist mix was getting tons of airplay and props from all corners of the club community.

But you are right, indie-djs are very carefully dipping their toes in the house waters, and of course since they haven't been mixing for long, they're not going to seamlessly beatmatch at first, if that is in fact the goal. Personally, I've always liked both, if there is a both, and actually am most excited by where the genres meet, which is why I used to bill my party as Transmission: post-punk funk, new wave disco. Which makes perfect sense to me. And as a long-time new waver, whose life was definately changed by New Order, I'd say are there many New Wave songs as good as Remember by Gino Soccio, Mr Flagio's Take a Chance or Check Out Five by the Naif Orchestra?

and regarding this thread...I've kept repeating that I'm talking about America, as that is where I've always lived and all I know!

And Chuck is hitting the nail on the head on this point. Sire released the Fuzz Dance EP in the US. The people who brought us Arthur Russell, Talking Heads, Tom Tom Club and Madonna knew damn well how good italo-disco was, but this is all for another thread probably...But the point is how rhetorical his question is, trainspotters sure, but the Fuzzdance EP is still a pretty obscure object these days, despite the countless Robotnik comp appearances.

stacey q urinates on slowdive from r kelly heights.
-- fiddo centington

---------------------------------

good for her
-- the surface noise

--------------------------------

toot toot
-- fiddo centington

Yeah, but part of my point was that a lot of house music (as in Chicago, and now that I think of it especially the Phuture-style acid trax stuff a couple years in) was ALSO house music trying to be new wave. I.e., new wave may have influenced Chicago as much as Detroit).

Plus, Knuckles was a Black Sabbath and Led Zeppelin fan too, right? (Topic for future research: the effect of long droney '70s prog rock on Eurodisco and later dance music. A whole lot, I bet. And not just because lots of disco people always covered "Inna Gadda Da Vida.")

I think what Reynolds was getting at was that some people have a romanticized notion of the importance of underground euro-synth to the young Detroit techno scene. He argued that it was rather more mainstram and disco-funk stuff like what was hitting more US clubs at the time.

I think it is was actually both as well as everything in between. In the 80's, Detroit and Chicago embraced anything that worked on a dance floor- the dance music Industry was a lot smaller, especially inependent label output, so they were picking up from all styles- yes there was Cabaret Voltaire, Italo, etc, as well as P-Funk, Prince, etc, etc...

Chicago melded all of this into the post-disco - house sound; divided into two major subgroups- the harder jackin/acid stuff, and the deeper, disco based stuff. But in the beginning - like chuck said above, they were on to all the punk-funk, italo stuff too. I was in Chicago last year and did some video work with Chip E and got to rummage around his record collection and play his (heavily scratched up) vinyl on his bedroom set-up :) - there was plenty of West-End, Klein&MBO, ESG kinda stuff as well as typical disco and house stuff..

But I think Detroit always stayed varied, there are so many different styles within Detroit techno, and a lot of the DJ's still play stuff all over the place - look at Rob Hood, he puts out anything from techno, trip hop, jazz, I've seen him dj all hip hop reggae and r&b sets in smaller venues... and the labels in detroit range from electro to deep house to jazz to minimal techno, etc, etc.. It's not all Strings of Life clones.

not sure what any of this has to do with the Rapture though- they're pretty good I guess..

Actually I think it's great -- for all the various one-liners and all this has been a detailed and involved thread.

1) I bought a cassette of G04's "Entertainment" when I was in high school (1990) because ROLLING STONE had listed it in their "best albums of the 80s" thing. When that cassette died, I bought a copy of it for $1 about two years ago.

2) what a musician likes, or even loves, is by no means fated to be apparent in the music they produce. Personally, there's all sorts of music I love (funk in particular, but a lot of metal as well) that is nowhere in the stuff I personally create, for a wide variety of reasons.

as usual, gygax OTM.

the point was that people werent dancing to it.

or dancing at all.

or emulating it's sounds in a distinctly aimed at the dancefloor manner.

I'd disagree, if only because of the sheer number of hiphop songs that sampled Liquid Liquid and ESG. I didn't hear about Lizzy Mercier Descloux until way later, but I knew about Liquid Liquid and ESG before the reissues came out.

Hey Dan, you should know that I play "Dizzy" by Tommy Roe every time I DJ, too. Some other people on this board have read this list so often they're sick of it, and are therefore welcome to skip over it, but as DJ Edwelweiss I usually advertise my mix of music as "Latin freestyle, Belgian newbeat, fuzzdance Italodisco, Flashdance goth, early '80s German neu deutsche welle, industrial bubblegum, hi-NRG electro-punk, Baader-Meinhof Kraut-rock, psychedelic rai, proto-Eurodisco bongo-rock, danceable prog, girl-group-wannabe hair-extension metal, Gregorian death-garage, art-fag stoner glam, weirdassed pre-1988 Chicago house (acid and otherwise), Cybotron-era Detroit techno, old-school mid-American dub-rap, high school science-fair synthcore, teenybop no wave, popping-and-locking Zulu wildstyle space-cowboy western-gangster-town hip hop bommi bop, Radio Disney cult hits, and drunken frat-soul with parties going on in the background." (Though, to be honest, I can't say I always *stick* to those genres...)

I'd say you should DJ more often then, Chuck, but I'd also suggest, and it's probably not my place, that it's really hard to make a dance party work when it's THAT eclectic! I don't know, I try to work a flow from genre to genre that makes sense, or play things from different genres that work well together, or cheese out alltogether and play Early To Rise by Nice and Smooth into or out of Dizzy. Playing the sample and the sample source is always a fun and easy way to switch genres.

btw, I imagine people not from America reading this and thinking it's really absurd, but you really don't know what it's like here, it's like pulling teeth. The people that are not inhibited about dancing tend to be stuck very firmly in their niche, like the deep house fans or whatever. You play one song that people don't recognize, and the party's over. So I strike a balance and if you reach the witching hour of "it's late enough, they're drunk enough, they'll dance to anything" you're safe. But I threw a party for 2 and half years every monday night. The Rapture were there and !!! were there and Simon Reynolds was there and maybe about 3 other people. Like Lauren Podis. Then some guy would come up to me and say, in a thick, drunken accent..."oh my god, if you were doing this in europe people would be going insane. By the way, there's this party called Optimo..." but I'd consider myself lucky if 5 of my friends were there dancing. Spin, the Village Voice, New York Magazine, etc were all impressed, but the kids just didn't care.

Well, I DO do that; I don't see how eclecticism would necessarily prevent it. And yeah, I do the samples into sampled thing, too. But "keeping people dancing" is not really all that important to me all the time, to be honest. "Dizzy" might come after "Strictly Business" or "Western Gangster Town" by Trickeration or "Saturday Night" by Schoolly D, then go into "Let it All Hang Out" (John Cougar Mellencamp version!) or "Judy in Disguise With Glasses" or whatever. And it's really not HARD to get to electronic stuff or reggae stuff or '80s r&b stuff or Babe Ruth or "Chip Away at the Stone" or "Moscow Diskow" or "Din Daa Daa" or "Electric Salsa" or Alexander Robotnik or the Skatt Brothers or Kid Creole and the Coconuts or "Lips to Find You" by Teena Marie or Jorge Ben or whatever from there. It'll take a few songs, but what the hell; the challenge is fun. And lots of the time, people WILL keep dancing. I could give fuck for BPMs or any of that, though. DJs who DON'T do that just seem gutless to me, frankly.

As for Jay-Z vs. Delta 5, maybe people prefer Jay-Z because he's BETTER TO DANCE TO! (I always WANT to play, say the Bush Tetras or Au Pairs. But it usually PALES next to most of the other stuff above!)

What killed the party was the next DJ who opened with The United States of America.

I liked it though.

Wow, I wish you would. Maybe they like it 'cause it's quite often the most interesting music out there right now? Nah, that couldn't be it.

dan, you don't like modern most hip-hop. a lot of other people do. just because you can't understand it does not mean there's a sinister reason for this. i know it was unintentional, but the above quote makes you sound like a concerned citizen from the 50s inveighing against the "race" music.

no, you don't. you really don't - trust me on this one.

Lauren chides me for not liking most modern hip-hop, from my dear friend who 2 years ago repeatedly called all house and techno "headache music!"

any further discussion about this should be taken off-list, or repressed and expressed in our co-dj set tomorrow night at the Young People show.

And Colin, that what I'm saying. It's not any different, but to anyone with the attitude of, to quote mr. murphy, "I was there," it takes a while to get used to, and I spent the better part of 1995 to 2000 getting laughed at for playing electro-funk and disco, it can be a little disconcerting when everyone, especially the people who did the laughing, fall in line, but in the end I'm satisfied because it just means more people like good music! I was never hording the stuff, saying this is cool and I'm cooler then you, I was like, hey, isn't this fun to dance to? And many agreed. God bless them. And before someone gives me any kind of lip about being a bitter record dork, this is I Love Music, right?

Worrying about how other people enjoy music = DUD

er, actually i said totally the opposite, Dan! that opinion you attributed to me is Kirk DeGiorgio's, which i rather brutally critiqued at the very dawn of my blog. one of the wonders of detroit is how much those techno forefathers were into New Wave and Euro sounds. there's some cybotron song that's a dead ringer for ultravox's 'mr x' apparently.

very itneresting thread highlighting the expected US/UK differences

i got to know Luke Rapture a bit at Dan's club transmission, where luke was the barman, and the sense i got was that his generation of nyc hipsters had totally bypassed rave and its sequels like drum''nbass, that they saw that all that kind of music as a bit naff (people wearing daft clothes, music for drug damaged teens) and passe but that now they were getting slightly curious about all that 90s dance music from overseas. such that i got into a thing with luke where i would bring in tapes of jungle, Shut Up and dance, big beat and so forth in exchange for beer. so if there's a Skint Records vibe on Rapture album #2, blame me.

re. girl against boys being ahead of the current loop, plus there wsa six finger satellite going on about chrome this heat ATV etc in 95 -- and aren't half the DFA roster ex-Six Finger Satellite?

martian, by the time my bk comes out the punkfunk revival will be dead and hipsters'll have moved on to mid-eighties -- williamsburg will be rife with bands trying to sound like Kitchenware or Bogshed

PS dan -- modern romance were considered laughable in their own time by all rightthinking folk, as kid creole/Ze-diluters. i recall the queen of the rapping scene as being particularly execrable. amazed to hear that they are hip! what a wonderful world we live in

back to the p-punk coalface...

Being on the dancefloor is a community experiance, if I'm really having fun enjoying myself and dancing with my friends and somebody next to me is "having a great time" and joke dancing, the very act of how they approach it is basically making fun of people who actually like to dance and will admit so, and I take offense. I guess that's just me, dan = DUD

Simon, sorry I got that whole argument thread confused. I mixed it up with discussions we've had about detroit techno purists and I somehow thought Kirk had been the one to say Derrick May sat aound listening to Drinking Electricity and Thomas Leer 7"s.

And remember, Luke may be in NYC, but he's not a NYC hipster, he represents a sizable portion of the american music underground of the last 10 years, all of whom, except for the Ravers, looked down on dance music, which I think is the only point I've tried to make in this thread...

The trend I saw was that dance music had to be suitably "smartened" up to be made hip, and I've often discussed my slide from IDM->techno->house->disco. As belonging to Luke's age group, I will say you are on the money, we did not think rave was cool, or we did for a brief moment, then quickly denied it.

(so where are Vice Versa then in the current cool index?)

the other one Dan mentioned was Funkapolitan -- again a bit incredulous that is deemed hip now -- although i did actually buy that album at the time -- decent-enough Brit funk imitation. they got no cred from the press unlike other Britfunksters of the day because they were all incredibly upper class, one of them may even have had a title!

one thing that emerges from all this is the pathos of those in the cycles of fashion who are ahead of the curve or slightly behind it-- eg. Big Flame punk-funking a couple of years too late, all the secondwave Cabs-like bands like chakk, portion control, hula. my nomination for punk-funk-redux way WAY of the curve would be Yargo, manchester band who were doing ACR/ESG/Liquid Liquid type stuff circa 87-90 and doing it really well -- but with enough of a gap for it to be a return rather than mere straggling on from the original punkfunk

a lot of those original punkfunk bands came a cropper cos they wanted to sound like proper well produced black music, and worse, succeeded e.g ACR becoming level 42

re current resurgence i think the transction is pretty simple -- club kids wanting something more edgy and attitude-y and spiky; indie kids wanting to dance

And how come nobody has mentioned the Pet Shop Boys until now?

With that, I am turning off my computer for the weekend. Have fun.

(OK, now I'm REALLY gone. I promise.)

Guess I'm just upset that a)I'm not reaching the right crowds, i.e. the ones who were socialized to enjoy dancing, and b)I'm not having the effect on the people I do spin to that I would like.

Well, I'm probably just playing the wrong songs, in the wrong order.

And I go out a lot.

(I did post a thread last year compalining about people dancing ironically to "Dancing Queen," but as usual more or less everyone here denied that such ironic dancing was even possible, or anyway, that it was possible to detect.)

And I'm clearly upset that most people just don't share the same taste as me. Seeing Nicky Siano DJ to 10 people etc, like I said before, or what that the LCD thread? I don't remember. It just get's depressing, a recent low being having the pleasure of DJing on a great soundsystem with Pal Joey and James Duncan, to exactly 6 of my friends.

i keep getting scared that i'm gonna read that people are dancing ironically to my beloved wide boy awake in brooklyn and it would be too much for me to bear. the rapture WISH they had a song as good as slang teacher.

NYC is very different then most other cities, read the LCD Soundsystem thread. For every electro party in philly, there's several dozen competing in NYC, and an audience too jaded to still dance to electro.

x-post: "i don't know if people in philly even know how to dance ironically yet."

I believe I saw that here as early as the 80's.

fiddo, did you ever hang out there?

(I am not on ILX all the time. I am going to a party tomorrow night. Really.)

i already tried to bring up the fact-and chuck did too-that millions of people around the globe have been happily dancing to disco and everything else related to this thread forever and ever, but nobody was biting.

we moved to martha's vinyard island in august. and here we shall stay.

that's cool rockist. sometimes i get a little homesick for that smelly burg.

2nd, I totally give up making the argument about comparing this venue to that venue, not only am I suprised you didn't get my point, I'm suprised you'd bother to point out that Voigt/Mayer is not a relevant comparison because they don't play often.

Let's make this simple.

2 parties. 1 DJ plays your very favorite kind of music. Another plays music that's just OK. The first party, nobody's there and nobody's dancing. The second party everyone is dancing. I'm not arguing that the second party isn't fun or that it's wrong to want to go to the second party, but people need to support that first party if it deserves it, and often it's a shame when people don't.

Some things you step on the offbeat, some things on the onbeat, somethings in circles, somethings one on one, somethings everyone does their own freakout, somethings swing and others hit solid and you move between them. Some things are about swaying arms, and others about fixed arms and there's a whole *dynamic* there which I'd think more DJs on this thread know more about than they're addressing.

I don't think this is just like sociocultural aesthetic choices at work here -- there's also music people know how to fit their bodies to, and music they don't. Like I learned to dance to hip-hop and I dance to other things too, but it feels *informed* by that and I have a friend who *skanks* to like anything, and if he can't skank right to it he stops and gets confused.

I knew this one guy who only did crazy ballroom meets dirty dancing shit to anything except jungle, where he just goes into spazz-overload.

Learning to feel different types of music takes prolonged exposure, or deliberate effort, or a broad arsenal of exposure to other things and a meta-sense of beatscience going into the dancefloor in the first place.

I mean the irony isn't there as a personality trait, i don't think, but more as a partial response and a way of coping with something that's physically alien.

Sterling, I can't put it into words because sometimes I feel to dumb to, but I've been drragged to rock-n-roll parties where there's a great vibe and energy and 150 people dancing and the DJ throws on My Generation, and I turned to the girls I was with and said, "hey, I freaking love the Who as much as anyone else, but I really don't know how to dance to this!"

There's more subtle differences as well, even within any genre. I owe so much of my education in disco and dance music by following Morgan Geist and Danny Wang around, and both of them express a large interest in the slower tempos of early 80s roller boogie kinds of sounds. Likewise, many of my favorite electro and italo-disco songs from that period are relatively slower then more typical house and techno of the late 80s and MUCH slower then much of what's popular today. I bring this up because when I play things like Gina X or Gaz Nevada people tell me it's way to slow. Likewise, the first time I heard House of Jealous Lovers on a big system, Tommie Sunshine was playing it prior to Felix da Housecat at Centro-fly, and he must've had the record at +8 to be able to match it to what he was playing. I do remember the vocals getting pretty mickey moused out, and not in that fun Ron Mael way.

Sterling - getting into socio-anthropological aspects of dance is a whole new can of worms. I think there are many factors that play into dance behavior that there are still no definite answers, but plenty of ideas. One book I would recommend on the subject is Discographies: Dance Music, Culture, and the Politics of Sound by Ewan Pearson (who also produces tech-house as Maas for the Soma label).. He gets into some of the philosophical/anthropological questions surrounding dance culture.

Aaron - I've seen a few of your posts now on ILM about dj culture that I completely agree with - no exception here. I will say again though, this really does seem to be primarily an American phenomenon - the wall-flowers/ironic dancing syndrome.

I began djing in college around '95 (still do occasionally) in Ann Arbor, MI. From a dj's perspective, there were 2 main crowds to cater to - the club people who go to clubs and dance to shit music every week anyways, they will dance to anything, and their willingness to dance is based more on the atmosphere and if their friends & favorite objects of sexual desire are present. And secondly (what I, and I imagine ILMers fall into) is the art/music crowd - primarily indie kids, but not entirely.. I usually dj'ed for the latter crowd at house parties & artsy/gallery type venues where I often experienced the same frustrations that many have already mentioned.. People dig the deeper stuff but they don't dance, or they never dance regardless of whether they like it or not. Or they seem to ignore the music and dance, only dancing to Madonna, AC/DC, and Prince, etc.. But there were occasional exceptions to the rule. Sometimes everyone would end up dancing to serious techno (even though they didn't even care for it that much), and for some reason, lots more people danced to Ghetto-tech and Booty :)

But I think it really comes down to local American music scenes being comprised of mostly "headz" who are generally very socially self-conscious (myself included) and usually pretty uptight - it takes a long time for them to forget about other people and really loosen up and let the music control their body...

However, I don't think this is completely related to why indie-dance cross-overs disappeared largely in the 90's, I think that has to do more with mainstream trends, marketing trends, and the generall ebb & flow of changing styles... there was still a place for dance music, but it was just more focused on the purely electronic stuff that was pushing boundaries with computer composition tools and pushing the limits of club sound systems with clear compressed drum and bass programming...

It is close to 100 percent of the appeal for me, I wouldn't have bothered with the rest of the album if they didn't have a house element, I'm not ashamed of that though because how common is a rock/dance crossover which takes place on equal terms?

Why the hell would I need to know my American Indie to like the Rapture when it's flagrantly obvious the most interesting thing about them and what has got them talked about all over the world, booked at Tribal Gathering Warehouse Party, remixed by Geist/Tiefschwarz/Middleton/Black Strobe, is the fact that they are a rock band with a good understanding of electronic music.

If they didn't have the house element perhaps you'd still like them, how nice for you, what's the point here? That I am not a real fan of the Rapture or something? This is all vaguely amusing, yes I fully admit I would be listening to some other band in 5 minutes if the Rapture made a hardcore record (unless it was a happy hardcore record), my indie fan credentials must be awful! What should I do!

Do you think they know I'm such a slut????!!!???

Christ, grow up.

What a mercenary bunch we dance fans are, perhaps we'd be more loyal if only a handful acts ever made a decent record anyway! Of course no genre is that bad is it?

I remember going out dancing at a generic club several years back. (I'm not sure how to describe it: just kind of a very large place in the suburbs with a main dance floor and a separate bar area that had kind of a sports bar feel--one of my friends who goes to this type of place took me there.) I had been taking samba classes and found myself using a samba like step to some of the house/techno they were playing, but I thought it worked reasonably well. This wasn't a serious rave type crowd or anything, so I didn't get the sense that most other people really had a well-developed style of grooving to this music.

Trying to get the feel of a relatively unfamiliar music, in public, can be pretty uncomfortable, definitely. I think when I used to do more freestyle dancing (not that that is all one thing--which is one of the points you are making), I used to spend a fair amount of time just dancing in my room. (I wish I could see some of what I used to do, since I remember doing what seemed like some great things at the time, but they may have looked like crap.)

ha ha! so true, except skinny puppy could never be considered cool, even with the chep nunez edits.

as for liquid liquid / esg records being 'lost' - they were here (except for the esg factory 7"). man, these records NEVER reached scotland. i first heard both 'optimo' and 'moody' when derrick may played my club in 1991. i became obsessed with 'optimo' but had no way to track it down. i nearly persuaded carl craig to send me a copy of but alas it wasn't to be. so, over the years, 99 records reached mythical status in my head until finally around '94 i had to go to nyc and the first thing i did was seek out copies of these records. of course, now with ebay it's all so easy.

but, at the same time, every second hand shop here was overflowing with go4 lps. different worlds....

regurgitating the modern romance thing, i think growing up seeing them on top of the pops probably put 99.9% of brits off them. i can't help but lump them in with black lace or liquid gold - wedding music. it's that great usa / euro divide again. before we know it, blue rondo a la turk will be big in nyc!

this thread has rocked by the way and now i really want to hear chuck spin next time i'm in nyc.

good description. doesn't that sound yummy to you?

The america/UK divide is huge. When I started collecting Rough Trade type records they were impossible to find in america. When found they weren't necessarily expensive, because people didn't know they were collectible, they were just gathering dust in the back of people's collections and I couldn't find them anywhere. Around the same time my sister did her semester away in enlgand(this is sometime in the early/mid 90s, definately pre eBay/GEMM/internet) and she'd go to intoxica or wherever and buy Delta 5, Kleenex, Swell Maps, Cab Voltaire, Monochrome Set, Au Pairs etc records for 2 bucks or whatever. I guess this shouldn't be stated as some sort of revalation. Duh, it's easier to find records where they were produced and popular! I'm not going to say NYC streets were paved with original copies of Liquid Liquid records but a good pal of mine did find one in the garbage. If there are any other NYC things that people are looking for, let us know...I'm drowning in Bobby O and Todd Terry records over here...

And Keith, except for that one night at Last Exit where I just just playing a few 7"s I had, you've never heard me spin either...

No, but I'll quit with the negative comments about them.

Connections abound. Nothing ever really dies, and I'm kind of thinking that the entire idea of a disco/punk hybrid that magically existed in NY in the 1979-1981 period that disappeared without a trace, only to be revitalized in the here and now is bullshit perpetuated by a Williamsburg hipster-loving media.

Now, for my own contirbution: I've seen The Rapture perform twice in the central US on their recent tour (Minneapolis and Omaha). Interestingly, some friends who had listened to The Rapture pre-DFA are just turned off by their new influences and don't care for Echoes.

These are fun, the first flyer has Madonna opening up for A Certain Ratio

http://lundissimo.info/imgs/danceteria/index.html

This saturday ESG is playing with TV on the Radio and Tracy and the Plastics, with Tim Sweeney(who used to work for DFA) myself and TBD guests DJing in Red Hook.

I have no doubt that New York's music scene is working in different ways now as opposed to the mid 80s to late 90s, and that is indeed news. However, it both belittles that scene and excludes a lot of outside influence when we get a lot of these articles about how some band is picking up where NY left off in the early 1980s.

That's what we were talking about. INDIE rockers dancing, PUNKS funking. That's it. So why do people keep taking me to task for focusing on how indie rockers felt about dance music in the 90s?!?!?

And Chuck, I meant DISCO specifically, I don't think New Beat kids and Latin Freestyle kids and Ravers all respected disco like you say. On the contrary. By 1993 I was a raver. Disco was not cool. But all the popular kids in my high school who danced to hip-hop, freestyle, "whoomp there it is" and other popular club sounds of the early 90s definately thought the indie-rockers and ravers alike were nerds. But THERE WERE NO DISCO KIDS. Disco was a joke to everyone I knew.

To answer your question, in 1986 I hated all hip-hop because I was 11 years old and was obsessed with Syd Barrett and Jim Morrison. And I don't like Led Zeppelin for treating the blues the way they did, because I find it boring, but I do like the Zombies for doing "Summertime" the way they did, so make of that what you will.

Except Freestyle and "Whoomp" WERE disco, whether the kids called it disco or not. That was my point, Dan -- It just changed its name! The freestyle and whoomp and newbeat kids WERE disco kids, whether they knew it or not. (I never said ravers were. Though some WERE, since lots of rave/techno music was just differently named disco, too!)

it was this that got us going. cuz we thought it was cool and we were hardly the only ones.

As for the first half, I'm not sure why it went away, but then again, most of you seem convinced it never did, but every person who tells me how fun Danceteria was in the early 80s and how NY hasn't been the same since and how it's recently become interesting again, well they convince me it did.

I sympathize with Dan. NY clubs were a lot less fun/mixed after the early 80s, at least the ones I went to. I wish that Friday night at the Roxy had never ended. Thank God I worked in a gay club. But even that turned a little too all-house-all-the-time for my tastes.

Scott, what are the non-"Slang Teacher" Wide Boy Awake songs like? Are they as good? Kevin Mooney was so beautiful.

where does this word come from? I've only seen it once before and it was in a fairly obscure mid-80s comic (Nexus).

to confuse matters more, I have a tendancy to use Punk in the complete opposite manner, i.e. NOT referring to a specific sound/style but more to the attitude, so if I'm at a club and we hear Lil Louis' War Games or Francine Mghee's Delerium, I've been known to exclaim "how fucking punk rock is that!"

And Chuck, yes, because the Rapture are so adamant in their appreciation of disco, it is slowly helping young indie-rockers, many of whom DID hate all forms of disco, to come around. I see it every day. Many of them ARE buying Donna Summer albums the same way they were buying Neu! albums when they were into Stereolab or Fall albums when they were into Pavement etc etc.

Wrong; where do you get that? We would use "disco" to describe music that SOUNDS LIKE '70S DISCO -- i.e., music that, had it come out in 1978, would have been CALLED disco. At least I would. Lots of dance music *obviously* isn't disco. And not just polkas, either.

Also, I think disco was more accessible to a lot of indie kids than techno. When I was djing, I played alot of different stuff from techno to house to electro- and a lot of my indie friends preferred the house and disco style stuff (assume because it was more musical). However, a lot of the more extreme cutting edge/artsy kids preferred stuff like squarepusher and experimental techno stuff..

Again though- not sure if this was a midwestern-specific link to disco.?..

I also think of all the Bee Gees-produced records from the early 80s. The ones that were bought by all kinds of people that professed to hate disco.

I think italo-disco is disco in the same sense that house music is. But read any history of either form and they both discuss how they pick up on a thread that had gotten lost in mainstream music culture. I wrote an essay in 1999 about how "disco" never died, it just went underground for a long time and came back with different names. Maybe I was young at the time, but I've read a bit about a "disco backlash." That happened, right?

My point is while you think those styles of music are in fact Disco, I reckon many of their fans for good parts of the 80s and 90s would've been loathe to admit it.

Chuck, I swear to god, to every single person of may age group that I knew at the time, Disco meant Leisure Suits and Saturday Night Fever, and this includes Rico who used to make me WKTU mix tapes in 1990.

And you're making my point in regards to not calling Shannon disco but pop.

Uh, yeah -- I referred to it a couple posts up, when I talked about the word "disco" becoming a pejorative. The backlash, again (NOT the music, again), is the REASON that Shannon was called pop but not disco, and maybe the reason that Frankie Knuckles and Daryl Pandy and later Crystal Waters and Cece Peniston were called house but not disco. But (again again again) that doesn't mean they WEREN'T disco. (And "Let the Music Play," among other songs, proves that the house music people were somewhat full of shit when they said that disco had completely gone underground. I mean, it had gone underground when it wasn't going to the top of the pop charts, maybe. Then again, if the Ramones needed an excuse for existence a year after "Ballroom Blitz," house music people are welcome to their myths and delusions as well.)

The people who this thread is talking about, i.e., the current punk-funk/indie-dance bands, did not like any kind of disco or it's offsprings during this time.

And in the ghettoization of musical styles, I think you can say that Let the Music Play is disco and so is Donna Summer, but in NYC, freestyle fans wanted to hear Lil Suzy, they didn't want to hear Crown Heights Affair, and when you go to House clubs in NYC, there is a very specific style and sound that one expects to hear and you better stick to it, with only slight variations to the expected "oddball" tracks. So while you say it's all the same, it's all disco, I think many people within these scenes would beg to differ.

And all this stuff that's happened in the last few years, from hipster williamsburg parties to electroclash to optimo in scotland to the DFA to Trevor Jackson to punk-funk, to the Rapture and !!!, to Environ and Balihu, have changed the climate a bit making a certain kind of eclectism allowed and certain types of previously maligned(by the press, and yes, by the hipsters) genres cool again. Love or hate the specific music, the releases, the DJs, they are having an impact and that's why we're talking about them here and noticing that yes, it's different now. You give me crap because I say it's important that a small segment of the indie-hipsters are suddenly into certain types of dance music(the question of this thread) but these people are tastemakers and trendsetters and like it or not, they are creating music you will be talking about, and eventually, perhaps, even listening to. You can say you hate it but watch as the people you do like and respect feel the influence. Of course dance music has always been here, it's been here since the freaking cavemen, but certain styles come in and out of fashion and why discuss them if we're just gonna respond to every question by saying "dance music is dance music is disco is dance music and everyone at least most people have always liked it."

of course there is in my house...

So while on any given night in NYC there may be 20 people sitting around a post-punk funk night or 200 people at a goth/industrial event, and they're both DJing the same songs, only one of those is going to get written up in the Village Voice or Spin.

How to tell the difference? While both parties will play Gary Numan, New Order, Adult., etc, one will play Bigod 20, the other will play Thomas Leer. But it gets confusing when ex-goths co-mingle with ex-punks in the scenester scenes of NYC. Which is why I'll find myself at a supposedly "cool" even and have to listen to "Send Me an Angel" by Real Life every time. C'mon, really, that song's terrible! It was on the soundtrack to Rad though...

but I think most of the hipsters who are suddenly dancing to The Normal and the Severed Heads will not give credit to the goth/darkwave crowd for being there first, due only to a basic disagreement on how eyeliner should be applied.

But one aspect I noticed (as a non-insider of the NY scene): how much some of the DFA material sounds like a merely edgier, more playful version of progressive house a la Polekat/Futureshock/Freeland/etc. Drawn out tracks, repetitive, percussive, 4/4. Instrumentation aside, the structure and feel seem eerily close. Mentioning progressive house as an influence is of course a complete faux pas these days when Sasha is the embodiment of all evil, but it can't be a total coincidence.

Ha ha Siegbran you're forgetting the most important link: Planet Funk!

feel free to insert these comments as many hundred posts back as you like :

° re : beats, indie singing, guitar - haha UNDERWORLD (also MEZZANINE!!)

° i worked at popscene when I was in sf! cashing in on my almost-englishness! total mad anglophilia, but everyone DID dance, & they generally played the danciest tracks by their respective artists (more on this a little in the next post).
° frequent kiss & make up club, vague hipster indiedisco thing here. when they started up about five months ago, it was awful - their idea of djing was playing one track they liked, then putting on something else when it finished. nobody fucking danced! they'd be playing the 12" of "HOJL" & the 12" of "bizarre love triangle" & there'd be three other people on the dancefloor, going NUTS (maybe important thing for indiekids on dancefloor, btw - screaming/singing along?), while thirty other ppl would have paid the admission to sit around drinking & watching the dancefloor. they'd only get up for "last nite" & "william, it was really nothing" (which is one of the least danceable smiths tracks! idiots!). it's gotten a bit better now. haha I'm usually the only dancing kid @ most gigs, too.

° related - when I first moved up here, I'd go & dance w/out friends @ fu bar, WBC, & the other hip-hop/house/booty clubs; but I ended up meeting artskool kids & hipsters, & thus ended up inexorably sucked into just going to indie gigs due to socialising, making friends, etc. bah.

° thanks for the pearson book link, pete! also useful - ben malbon's clubbing : dancing, ecstasy and vitality.

(heh has indykid dancing used their hips, ever? "angular" dancing!)

Hey has anyone got/listened to that Rapture DJ comp that's just been released? The one with the red cover? Surely this would explain a lot about the "indie-dance" mindset?

on the Modern Romance revival:

http://www.deepdisco.com:8080/disco/jsp/trow.jsp?id=80

and their very own website:

http://www.modern-romance.com/

totally OTM (Dan as well). what a great thread.

like scott says, goth/industrial stuff did continue to bring the punk-funk up through the 80s and 90s. if punk-funk and its descendents did 'disappear' from US indie some time before the current revival, could IDM have been the answer?

judging from my conversations with slightly older folk involved in US college radio before I was (99-03), it seems that US indie embraced industrial etc up until the late 90s when IDM came around. the Music Directors i knew who were around in the 90s always talked about Wax Trax, Ministry, Skinny Puppy etc. which lost favor when White Zombie and Marylin Manson seemed to be picking up certain goth/industrial threads and having big chart hits. most of those MDs got off the bus with Autechre and Aphex Twin, which is where the rest of us got on.

it's a theory, at least.

Absolutely otm! I was just saying this to Jess last week, and as Vahid says Beat Connection is extremely proggy/techy. Also the DFA mix of Dance To The Underground practically is tech-house. It's an interesting comparison which I guess people are loathe to make. Give Me Every Little Thing sounds incredibly like Xpander. "What's an Xpander!!"

But like I said way before, a lot of wax trax kids dropped it for techno during the 90s and couldn't have been happier when the lords of "taste" smiled from above and said it's okay to play Front 242's Headhunter and especially Nitzer goddamn Ebb in the clubs. I wasn't happy about that because i wanted Sylvester and Menergy, but I allowed it when they'd play Cabaret Voltaire or "Hot on the Heels of Love." In all honesty this goes back to my being one of those industrial purists. I used to have arguments much like this one back on alt.music.industrial or whatever where I'd tell people Skinny Puppy wasn't industrial, but a crappy 3rd generation watered down Cabaret Voltaire. You know what? I still believe that!

anyway...obviously the chicago house originators weren't just playing classic early 80s new wave, but contemporary stuff and it went both ways. Die Warzau were producing house white labels, Mickey Mixin Oliver and the Hotmix Five were playing Anne Clark's industrial spoken word classics, and Cabaret Voltaire was being remixed by Marshall Jefferson as early as 89 or whenever?

See Anne Clark's Our Darkness, most easily availble on the recent Felix da Housecat mix cd.

Now I'm distinctly remembering an MD at WPRB reviewing the Scorn remix album - "Ellipsis", which had remixes by Meat Beat Manifesto and Coil as well as Autechre. Several of my predecessors went straight from industrial into IDM without getting into house or techno until much later. That's how I figure it worked in one little corner of the indie world, sounds like yours was a little different though. Regardless, I think we've proved that the groundwork for The Rapture didn't come out of nowhere...

Mick Harris' progression from Napalm Death into Scorn is a fairly accurate parallel from all the San Diego/screamo kids making the dance stuff they're making now, which all serves to suggest to me that it's a logical progression per se.

(I spent a bit of time at the w/e trying to think of a reverse example, ie dance producers who have gone [back] into punk rock, and with the peculiar exception of Moby couldn't think of any.)

I just spent 45 mins reading this thread, having been away from it for three days, and it just keeps getting better...

the die warzau / early house connection is also pretty important and mostly forgotten. it was their studio where lots of house classics were recorded (indeed, they engineered loads of the early trax and hot mix 5 12"s) and their programming knowledge was passed on to loads of chi-town kids. likewise, over in detroit mad mike and jeff mills were already well ahead of the loop before starting ur as their electrobeat band - final cut - had been on the go for several years pre techno.

oh, and ambient isolationism is still popular in this neck of the woods. i sometimes start off optimo with a good dose of zoviet france. yummy!

But how much of this can be attributed to Wax Trax licensing/distributing Polygon Window, Autechre, etc. in North America?

ESG
TV on the Radio
Tracy and the Plastics
Mommy and Daddy

w/ DJs:

Tim Sweeney (DFA/Beats in Space)
Dan Selzer (Acute Records/Transmission)
Gabe and Mattie (The Rapture)
Nic Nic Nic (!!!/Outhud)

Downstairs lounge/dance party

This saturday, Dec 20th

18 dollars.

at the Hook http://www.thehookmusic.com

Shuttle service may be offered from the Carrol St. F/G stop, otherwise check the hook's website for directions.

and the night before is James Blood Ulmer...

Phew, I'm glad you said that. I thought all the hipsters dudes here must be talking about a different Modern Romance - you know, one that was good.

They were terrible, people!!! Plastic faux-salsa. At least Blue Rondo A La Turk had some Soho hipster cred.

Didin't the lead singer of Modern Romance used to write for the NME?

Pearson a shameless hack like the rest of us, I was wondering if his book was any good. Tim F would be over the moon! His remixes this year have been fab, think he's ditched the Maas tag.

I will by this on sight if I stumble across it, I think.

Perhaps, but at least he does have some credentials to back him up - he finished a masters and got part way through a PHD in philosophy, he was also lecturing at University of East London for a while... I remember liking his book when I read it about 4 years ago, philosophical approach, but not overly academic or dry..

"Ewan Pearson has been a visiting lecturer in Cultural Studies at the University of East London. He is now a full-time musician and has recorded for several UK dance labels including Glasgow's Soma Recordings."

(haha the preface is split into "Why this book is rubbish" & "Why this book is brilliant")