pointing and laughing at dance music part 4912

In fact, I'm willing to walk down Oxford Street at lunchtime purely to test this.

when did i ever say this?

upthread i said im very interested in reading stuff abuot dance music, but i dont know why it matters about it being in bang or the independent or mojo. i'm not sure those publications are suited to dance music, unless it is of album/artist based stuff that can give outsiders a way in, or possibly from a cultural/sociological angle (though of course this is the angle that gives us lazy dance is dead pieces like the one linked in this thread). i dont think non-specialist press has ever successfully managed to engage with ground-up based musics.

what if some kinds of music progressively adapt themselves to favour the aspects which GET written about (well/at all) and other kinds of music adapt themselves to favour aspects which are hard to write about/elusive/rebarbatively jargonish?

the serious press should be the dance press should be the pop press, it's not getting wells to love dance, it's getting dance to love dance.

maybe these ideas like "canon" and "respect" (and "history"?) are intrinsically anti-dance?

tom's point is totally pertinent, even if his judgment is on its head (i don't know if it's on its head or not)

(eg one of the loose assumptions of ordinary political journalism is that a mass of "bad" writing can have good political effects => i am agnostic abt this, though i think you can point to eras when it's arguably the case, like the decades in the UK up to the first great reform bill)

Petridish in the Guardian is a different kettle of fish, I think.

dave- ok.

This suggests to me that a successful language for writing about rock has been found and is being used. I don't think an equally successful language has been found for most other genres (pop maybe if we're separating it out; hip-hop possibly but I don't read the hip-hop mags enough). My hunch is that the success of the rock language has had bad effects for rock (plus bad effects in forcing other genres to the side, as Ronan says) - in terms of helping to set up a bunch of rock values and expectations, defining 'what rock is' by how we talk about rock (I'm not just referring to paid print criticism).

(I'm NOT saying it's impossible for good writers to write well about other genres or that genres can't be written well about. Good writers can write well about loads of things. What I'm saying is that a mediocre rock writer is more convincing to a rock fan than a mediocre dance writer is to a dance fan.)

answer i don't accept: "it is a given that this cannot possibly be the case"

steve: the ride on time and rockerfeller skank are better tunes so yes it would be easier! right, i'm off for lunch!

julio plenty of musics - polka say - are way older than rock or dance andf not written about at all

dave you are confusing the potential effects of what could potentially be written (if the writing was "good" in a sense yet to be pinned down) with the actual effects of what has actually been written

clear effect of WRITING ABOUT MUSIC = the thousands of bands who based their sound on the velvet underground

w/o people writing abt them — esp. in the late 70s, ie long after they'd disbanded — they would have sunk, not w/o trace, but into a tiny tiny TINY cult of no consequence

the VU turned out to be GREAT to write about, and lots of little bands noted this and set sail in that direction

Yeah, but its a matter of knowing what the listener itself is listening FOR and adapting your writing to focus on these elements, isn't it? (Pitchfork Basement Jaxx review to thread!)

At the same time, I find it pretty difficult to accept that there is really much that can be written about, say, a functional breakbeat track that acts as trough/filler in the context of a DJ set. Actually, I feel the same about functional rock track that appears three quarters of the way through an album - both are far harder to write about than the big singles/anthems or the digressions/oddities.

x-post with Stelfox - in 8/10 cases, is it really WORTH writing about individual dance records, or widening to focus to talking about DJ sets or club nights or cultural movements etc? Surely this is much more what dance is really about? (I am throwing ideas around here, not really stating an opinion).

but did polka have the 'cultural impact' that rock or dance had/still have?

(And then there's the matter of of music for people who don't like to read.)

NOBODY deserves that much money for six hours work.

Nobody deserves that money for 1 months work.