Discuss - 20 years of disco revivalism

explanation required

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

you mean kylie minogue?

x-post x 10

xpost - who's talking about shep petitbone? i'm talking EARLY madonna

But that's nothing to do with 'revivalism', which as I understand it is directly imitating/sampling earlier musics. And as Andy K says is rarer than people think.

"Disco" in this sort of discussion doesn't seem to function as any kind of useful term in the slightest, it seems so broad as to indicate any kind of music aimed at a dancefloor. If we're including deep house in this continuum why don't we just go the whole hog and include acid techno and drum and bass as well?

no way.

And while the it has led to interesting music, I dislike the racial undertones of the indie version, and mistrust its intentions.

"interesting music"

jacob, are you white?

ditto to 'no way' re: house ---> "creative stagnation"

Other than the Sugarhill Gang and Grandmaster Flash using Chic samples I'd say that hip-hop didn't have anything to do with Disco, it was something completely new, at least that's how it felt at the time. All I meant is that House brought back that 4/4 beat.

planet rock???

Nice unintentional (?) pun!

let's not overlook kraftwerk...

- MCing
- records with breaks or long funky instrumental sections to MC over.
- big sound systems with turntables and a mixer.

None of these things are dependent on disco also existing except arguably the third, I reckon.

Scott: really? OK, in that case I'm wrong.

Re: I dislike the racial undertones of the indie version, and mistrust its intentions.
Q: explanation required

Or rather: what the fuck you on about?

first person to say 'steal my sunshine' gets their cards made - human league weren't no disco! (possible topic: 'human league: disco?')

Where does the mutant disco and the first 80s dance punk fit into this, because that was right during the epic of disco hate.

is the answer neither? both? something else?

Okay. So creative stagnation = deep house continuum disappearing up its own arse a la Lil Louis + endless san francisco gimps trying to remake "Que tal america" ad infinitum...

I didn't mean "all house after 1995 is crap".

I mean specifically deep house played out all the possible reinterpretations of a limited set of latin-influenced disco records a looooong time ago.

And I totally buy that there is a strong disco continuum. BUT having said that, disco (and house for that matter) has enjoyed long periods of critical vilification, and uniquely has been deliberately "revived" in terms of people overtly celebrating their disco influences, many times over.

BECAUSE as tico says disco has something essential in it that has a very broad appeal i.e. fun functional club music.

HOWEVER there is a very different tone (to me) about the current disco revivalism, from previous episodes.

If I was going to push it, I'd say that previous disco revivals tried to recreate and update the spirit of disco, in some degree, whereas the current one seems to me much more about the signifiers and certain stylistic twists that are acceptable to a certain demographic.

-- Vasquesz (reconstruc...), March 3rd, 2004.

I agree. I love the idea that a band like !!! or The Rapture is pulling at the curled mustaches and laughing maniacally while running away with sheet music they stole from black people. Choosing which style of music you want to play simply cannot be racist.

which demographic exactly?

i think the presumption that deep house is all about "possible reinterpretations of a limited set of latin-influenced disco records" is incorrect. yes, that influence is there, but there are also others. like severed heads records for example.

Well I do hate them, mostly because their music isn't very good, and to be honest, any real disco band would hear shit like "House of the jealous lovers" and laugh. But I don't fault them for trying to play the music they like. I actually don't like any of the new punk funk crowd, but still criticising a white band for playing black music is what's racist, not them choosing to do so.

Hip Hop has always tried to deny any connection with disco because of its gay associations. I've never quite understood where those fast Afrika Bambaata style 808 beats came from but the essence of a 'hip hop beat' from the mid '80s until now is a recreation of '70s funk. In the late '70s there were funk groups (eg Slave, Brass Construction) who would mix in more than a little disco. I'm surprised that hasn't been explored more in hip hop programming..perhaps it's starting to happen at last as (hip hop) tempos go up.

But not the beat.

This page seems to verify that it didn't start till 85 or so, so I don't know what kind of house people mean was influencing early Madonna.

And that Jacob was right to pick S'Express/Deee-Lite as the next identifiable revivalist strain, especially identifiable for me by the fashions that those acts wore and bathed their videos in.

(xpost)

Well I explained what I mean pretty thoroughly in my first post. OK Rapper's Delight uses Chic's 'Good Times' rhythm. That was 1979 wasn't it. And 'Good Times' is MUCH more towards the funk end of disco anyway. When hip hop started to really break through (1982-83) it wasn't using overtly disco patterns I don't think (admittedly I haven't heard that Kurtis Blow LP).

the dfa are masters of marketing (as well as production) in a way that the idjut boys and dj harvey and jay tripwire just aren't.

But the more I think about, the more the S'Express / Deee-Lite thing seems like the first true revival, because of the fashions showed it was consciously retro (more of a general funk/disco general 70s revival, I guess).

i think up until nycs recent cultural cachet (which was missing from large parts of dance discourse through the 90s) there was this theory of house as an explosion, but since the nyc focus of the last few years, in which nyc has got its due for its role in house history, there has been a large swing to the idea of disco-house continuum. to a point rightly so, but then it seems to have been overplayed to such a degree now that you would almost imagine that acid house appeared and people just thought it was some more disco, totally overlooking the cultural schism that acid house actually was. (this seems strange now when it is not so long ago that post-disco pre-house were some very unknown waters indeed, in comparison)

i actually don't really believe house belongs on this thread as an example of disco revivalism at all, i think all the other examples posited here have more merit, because i think there is a conscious desire and knowingness about them, which i don't think can be applied to acid/house in general.

or, perhaps another question would be, "at what point did house music (in europe - its mass market) come to terms with disco?"

Has anyone got Classic Disco Mastercuts Vol.1? The Mastercuts series always had sleevenotes by the compilers, they were an interesting barometer of what dance music curators/tastemakers were into, and they'd done three volumes of House tunes before the Disco - I remember the Disco sleevenotes as being really apologetic, a pre-emptive "yeah, i know, us doing disco, who'd have thought it?" thing.

True, at least not until it got more "handbaggy" later on.

Edit: What Dave said, by "handbaggy" I meant the whole Blaze/Joey Negro end of things.

As you say, the view has changed..and disco currently seems to be right at the centre (v. fashionable). It will change again though when large numbers of people start fetishising primitive early Chicago house again.

I shouldn't have thought so, because the reasons would prob. be that it was old-fashioned and naff, not that it wasn't 'real music' or anything.

Yeah, I guess the kneejerk dismissal of older music would make it more of an anti-rockist judgement.

Those Madonna records were not house music at all. If anything, they came out of the Arthur Baker/Jellybean continuum. those were new york records, and they have that production aesthetic, it was geared towards a completely different regional audience.

I tell you what house music is: It is two black dudes standing around an 808 in their mom's basement during a shitty midwest winter. It isn't cool musicianly art, it was just some banging raw dog shit that got the crowd moving. House music is what happens when the technology finally gets cheap enough to hit the streets. House music happened because it was cheaper to get crap "groovebox" japanese gear than it was to hire an entire band to play sessions. It was an continuation of italio, which was a continuation of disco. It is all about the gear, the house continuum is all about people doing the most they can with the cheapest gear possible.

i actually don't really believe house belongs on this thread as an example of disco revivalism at all, i think all the other examples posited here have more merit, because i think there is a conscious desire and knowingness about them, which i don't think can be applied to acid/house in general.

Gareth is super otm on this. Dance music is not art, it is just a functionalist tool to make people move. Techno and house were just the regional adaptations to the idea of dance music. NYC doesn't have the market cornered any more than other region, their marketing has just gotten alot better in the last few years. ;)

This stuff never dies because the market for the kind of activity it services never goes away. This is just the incidental noise that keeps the club industry going.

(xpost) Former Supposed... otm re: dance music as art. Except i dont share the same dislike for microhouse production style.

re the 808:

It was not retro though, I dont think Ron Trent put 909 on altered states because he thought 909 shuffle was historic. He did it because he wanted it to be easily mixable with all the other records that were out at the time. Post-house DJ records are not music, they are fragments of a mosaic. If you used an 808 you could mix your track into Klein and MBO's record because you had the same drum sound on your record. A house record was a lo-fi grime version of Italio-disco and Midwest funk. The chassis for the entire genre was the 808 and 909. The music evolved from there, Deep House is when Larry Heard mixed a 909 with a 101 and jx8p playing jazz chords, Acid was Phture with 50$ 707 and a 303 that was given to pierre because Marshall Jefferson was bored with it, jack trax were Adonis or Virgo banging an 808 raw dog with maybe a 101 bassline. Techno was just the Detroit guys hearing the Chicago records and playing up the Parliment and electro influence. Same gear, different vibe. It all fit together though because the drum machines had the same sound and feel.

The goal posts of house music are very narrow, that is the whole point. You want your record to fit into the pack, but still be new at the same time. Folks used the 808 and 909 because they were easy and they defined the feel of the music. People have said I am nuts on other threads for saying this, but if you really want that Detroit/Chicago feel you have to get the real boxes. Those boxes sound and feel a certain way, and that is why all those old records feel like they do. The people who argue the loudest have never actually been in the studio with the real thing.

I don't think it was a retro decision for the basic reason that they were in fact grabbing samples and laying them over an 808. House's ability to gobble everything in sight is what makes it house. If they were really going back to basics they would have had session guys and live instrumentation. They were referencing past dance music in a house context. They were throwing yet another layer of sound over that Roland drum chassis. Those sounds might have had signifers of an eariler era, but they were secondary to the modular rhythm bed of house music.

For me late nineties deep house and punk-funk feel like flipsides of the same coin: a stylistic reproduction of (certain strains of) disco which venerates process (live musicianship in particular) over - or as much as - product. There's a refinement and lushness to a lot of deep house (and conversely an almost muddy dense randomness to punk-funk) that is enjoyable as a sonic end in itself, but nonetheless such affectations seem designed to evoke a sense of the circumstances in which the music was made, and a self-consciousness about dance music as a mode of production (electroclash does much the same thing but wrt electro/synth-pop).

Conversely, styles like French house, italo-house and electro-house seem to regard disco as a field to be plundered for sonic signifiers, and so while all three of these in many ways steal the most *obvious* parts of disco, they're also the ones which sound the least retro-fetishist because the mode of production is modern and maybe even unselfconscious to some degree (though I'd be prepared to accept that producers would be aware of what they were doing by eg. framing Chic riffs in pummelling house beats). Maybe the best way to differentiate the two approaches is to look at the fault-lines between them: Adult vs Ewan Pearson; Faze Action vs Isolee. At issue is whether disco is being venerated or merely instrumentalised.

I don't think one approach is intrinsically better than the other, as both produce great music and both have downsides: veneration seems to lead to a pointless quest for barely differentiated models of perfection or obscurantism; instrumentalisation --> the more typical descent into banal familiarity as the once novel fusion of old and new stagnates or ossifies.

I agree with alot of what you say, in fact I think stuff like House's ability to gobble everything in sight is what makes it house is a perfect description, but I think the statement above is a bit of a totalitarian stance, or a very techno-centric way of looking at dance music.

Not every DJ is Jeff Mills, not by a long long shot.

I guess there is something wrong with me when I think the ideal dance record should be a dry punchy 808 kick and some subtle AM radio static run through a bit of reverb and delay with *maybe* a fizzy synth noise every 16 bars.

Look up Dan Seltzer that guy is like the Italio Samurai of ILM.

:: V.A.
I-ROBOTS
Cat. No. 515186-2 (CD) 515186-1 (2LP)
Irmagroup ---------------->
The sound of the 80’s, Electro in particular, in recent times has been influencing the world of dance music. Italian Electro Dance and Italo Disco are among the strongest inspiration sources. The first volume of I-Robot (Italian Robot) selected by Gianluca Pandullo want to be a precious retrospective on that musical period. The compiler is a deejay and record collector. He deliberately chose the most rare and influential tracks rather than the most famous ones, already featured in other international compilations.
:: 1. PETER RICHARD Walking In The Neon
:: 2. CHARLIE Spacer Woman
:: 3. KLEIN & MBO Wonderful
:: 4. SCOTCH Pinguins’ Invasion
:: 5. STEEL MIND Bad Passion
:: 6. 'LECTRIC WORKERS Robot Is Systematic
:: 7. SUN-LA-SHAN Catch
:: 8. CAPRICORN I Need Love
:: 9. DHARMA Plastic Doll
:: 10. SPHINX Collision
:: 11. KANO Ikeya-Seki
:: 12. ALEXANDER ROBOTNICK Dance Boy Dance
:: 13. N.O.I.A. Stranger in a strange land

Just say it!

Hey, did you guys know that the Beegee's invented disco?

Also, did you guys know that acid house was invented by Genesis P. Orridge in LA in 1992?

And finally, did you know that Stock, Atkin, and Watermann invented techno with the second Banarama album?

WTF

"house music is a feeling"

a body thing

whenever purity of intention is ascribed to a musical form i am immediately suspicious...

I don't know if you understand this or not, but the entire reason black american popular music is so good is because folks was trying to get real paid. It was good because it had to be, it was the only way you were going to turn a buck with a record. If anything artisticality is what is screwing up music right now.

yes, but mike is also right, in that if you want to get paid, you better be able to judge how its going to be received, if you want to survive.

functionalism is good. bump up against the parameters, dont kick them down.

Larry Sherman was a business man who happened to own a pressing plant, he did not even give a shit about the music, plain and simple. The fact that Marshall Jefferson was pulling strings behind the scenes and acting as Trax records secret weapon does not change the fact that is was a business that existed to make money. There were some great records to come out of Chi, but there were even more bunk ass ones that were put out to cash in. And Trax was the good label, I don't even want to go into DJ International.

The whole thing that people are missing is that awesome records still came out of this soup of dirty business and cut rate music technology. That is the miracle, that through this gritty functional music some warmth and soul still managed to glimmer through the murk.

Also, this is the single greatest post on ILM ever.

I do know that the above is entirely irrelevent to a whole load of people listening to all sorts of house music today, classic or otherwise.

I actually amn't certain we disagree greatly, I'm not saying house is innately more spiritual, just that musically it became such a global success that it's very difficult to still say that it is simply functional club music, house ideas have permeated the mainstream in a way techno ones don't seem to have, and I don't even mean that as any value judgement.

We're speaking from TOTALLY different perspectives obviously but all I'm saying is that I think the view that house is a purely functionalist club thing has been made dated by charts and listening habits, if not in the US then in Europe.

The idea of the house record as a classic single is fairly well established over here.

Yeah I mean I don't see a massive disagreement in our positions, perhaps I misunderstood where you were coming from initially, I do not doubt for a second house is full of all those bad things you discuss, far from it, anyone who's had any dealings with any dance scene in the world would need to be deaf/blind to do that, whatever era they took place in.

In fairness dude I think you were the one who appeared to miss this point first! The people disagreeing with you, as far as I can tell, are the ones trying to argue that the way people recieve or enjoy those records makes irrelevent the process in which they are made, or the reasons for which they were made. The enjoyment of the records wins the day. Hooray etc!

Siegbran what stuff are you talking about specifically? I'm working on the assumption that I like it or would like it whatever it is!

essential 00s italo singles:
Magic Box - If You
Gigi D'Agostino - Super (Un Deux Trois)