Danger! High Voltage: C/D?

the video is urgent and key as well

Aw shit I thought this was an AC/DC thread. Song's pretty sweet tho.

I like that vid - it kinda reminds me of After the Fire's video for their cover of "Der Kommissar." Except for the . . . uh . . . well, you know.

Isn't the guitar bit also kinda like "Twilight Zone" by Golden Earring?

SONG OF THE YEAR PLEASE SOMEONE GIVE ME BALLOTS FOR END OF YEAR POLLS SO I CAN VOTE FOR IT AGAIN AND AGAIN thank you.

Here you go.

Good god, that's one of the best videos I've ever seen.

The way they make out... it is scaring!

First heard this via the Soulwax mix, and am still loving it. It made me realize that I quite enjoy Jack in his crybaby puppydog voice.

note that the version on the soulwax mix is different from the "untainted" single version. you should listen to the orginal version because it is better.

Can someone in this BITCH, please tell me what the housey electro remix Jacques Lu Cont played is? I really want to know. Obviously it has a massive build up and then stops and goes "fire in the disco!".

I've been meaning to ask for ages: Who the hell are Electric Six wrt. The Wildbunch?

Same people. The song got released as a Wildbunch 7" in 2001, and XL then picked it up in the UK hoping for a hit this year. The bands name got changed cos there's already a UK Wild Bunch (Nellee Hooper's production team) and then they put the release back to January cos they dont want it to get lost in the Christmas rush. (disqualifying it from this focus group annoyingly).

I stand by my review:

http://www.netcomuk.co.uk/~tewing/2002_04_14_singlesa.html#75563401

I find it wearisomely knowing. Music with too much ironic distance makes me tired. It's like the audio equivalent of "Scream 3".

Do you think they don't really like disco then?

I heard it last year when released under the Wild Bunch name. Out of respect for one of the people whom I used to do a blog with who is friends with the band, I shall leave it at that.

I'm not sure they do like disco all that much, no. Plus this tune has more in common with that sort of disco-rock that was prevalent in early-80s film soundtracks. You know that bit in Xanadu where the young guy is talking to Gene Kelly and he says "give it some heavy percussion and some electric guitars" - it sounds like that music...

Yeah they had to change their name to Electric Six cuz the Wild Bunch was copywrited by the Massive Attack.

If I hadn't seen them for the last 5 years I might say that they're the best band in Detroit. Tis true.

But isn't disco-rock a good thing? It's snappy and it makes people dance - I'm not sure where the irony is (unless you mean "not taking it seriously", which judging by the other stuff I've heard could be applied to anything they do), or why a distance from the source material is a bad thing.

"You know that bit in Xanadu where the young guy is talking to Gene Kelly and he says "give it some heavy percussion and some electric guitars" - it sounds like that music..."

Jacob you have dug your own grave here.

He most certainly has not. Especially since I know EXACTLY what he is talking about thanks to my exceedingly strange taped-from-TV collection.

I still haven't heard this thing! It's buried on the iPod somewhere.

The irony matters to me because I love the source material and I enjoy the passion and belief inherent in the source material. I listen to this and I think 'witty' - it transfers all the attention from the music and onto the process of producing the music and of course on to the band. It's a fun cultural artefact in its way and I can see how lots of people would like it, but I far prefer the daft punk approach which takes dated music and makes it relevant in a humorous way without denigrating the original. This just leaves a nasty taste in my mouth.

Yeah Tracer, see - Xanadu is super-chouette.

yes disco-rock IS a good thing - have you HEARD the LCD Soundsystem mix of Le Tigre's 'Deceptacon' yet? butter my arse its good!

the only 'problem' with 'Danger! High Voltage! is I cannot hear it without automatically going into Bloodhound Gang's 'Bad Touch' in my head

I loved this song until I saw them live... It was all testosterone, and "Danger! High Voltage" was played as arena rock, not disco. I was disappointed.

I only heard this for the first time a couple of nights ago - remember something fantastic about the start of it, the guitar all post-punk and 'disco' bass sounding like 1979/1980.....it palled slightly as it went on, but I still really liked it - apart from that 'heu veultage!' poodlish accent: what's that all about?

Jacob I think you have made a dead good point, though it's not one I imagine will find much sympathy amongst the uber-sophisticates......
because, as is often said round these parts, 'you've always still got the original'.
(Your original response, of course, is by now maybe reduced to a memory that gets compromised by new input like this, but hey y'know best not get fossilised...)

but 'Discovery' proved to be something that operated more on the idea of timelss aspects of pop rather than just dated ones. if there hadnt been so much needless 80s guilt knocking around the last ten years would things have been different? its just a good thing that bands ranging from Daft Punk to Felix to Fischerpsooner to Ladytron to Electric 6, The Rapture and The Strokes want to make new music based on and deeply inspired by what they obviously love about the pop, dance and rock music of the 70s and 80s - maybe its a joke in the case of 'danger high voltage' but me being me and my age i dont find that offensive. have you heard their other tracks yet? 'Gay Bar' is alright, more punky though (if memory serves me right). perhaps this whole thing is indeed the rock equivalent of what Daft Punk, Felix, Ladytron and especially Jacques Lu Cont did with dance music (wearing their influences on their sleeve and unashamedly so, whilst seeking to bring about the rediscovery of dismissed/forgotten production AND songwriting ideas from the 70s/early 80s i.e. the time they were children) - i'm really glad its happened but its strange how it seems to be happening more now and not before/later - is there some sort of formula for this e.g. 5 year cycles?

another (albeit more tenuous) parallel - the whole 'nu metal' thing being the result of kids growing up listening to rap and heavy metal (Rick Rubin style) then spending their adolescene worshipping Kurt Cobain and/or Tom Morello whilst backtracking to Sabbath and Led Zep THEN rediscovering hip hop (Wu-Tang etc.) resulting in the ragtag assembly of Linkin Park, Limp Bizkit, Slipknot, Korn yadda yadda (i know there's enough to distinguish those bands but they seem to share many common influences as illustrated above) - only problem is they all get accusations of insincerity, and thats what Electric 6 are getting here as well (!)

I dunno, like I say, it just doesn't feel to me like electric 6 genuinely like that stuff in the same way those bands clearly do like the things they pay homage to. I've never heard this song without the video, so maybe that nature of the irony in the video has prejudiced me. I'm not old enough to remember disco either, but what I guess my point is that there doesn't seem to be any point to it except to take the piss. They've not added anything new to the template which makes it more Tenacious D than Daft Punk, which obviously isn't a good thing...

"Jacob I think you have made a dead good point, though it's not one I imagine will find much sympathy amongst the uber-sophisticates......"

Rescue us from the uber-sophisticates and their sophisticated thinking!!!

You should be so lucky.

When I first heard it - on the 2 Many DJs comp - I assumed it was some ultra-obscure lost track from the early 80s. Finding out that it's a pastiche of an ultra-obscure lost track from the early 80s didn't change my enjoyment much - and here we're back to that little dictum someone was sniping at last week. What matters is that the listener 'means it', not the creator. The inherent passion and love of music you're hearing in original disco is your inherent passion and love, I think - the actual music at the time would have been a mix of labours-of-love, labours-of-convenience, quick-buck cash-ins, and would have been vastly derided and adored for its inauthenticity in exactly the way pop is now.

For what it's worth I think the Electric 6 do like disco - maybe in a reactionary or comedic or tokenistic way, to be sure. I think practically if you don't like a music you'll find it difficult to rip it off accurately. But 'what it's worth' is nothing to me.

in the video the singer looks scarily like the moody one out of Sparks - this is a GOOD THING

And scarily enough, I think they really DO mean it.

Well, for what it's worth I hadn't hear it until I stumbled across this thread two days ago, and it has easily jumped into my top ten singles of the year -- I can't get the thing out of my head. I don't care if they're making snotty fun, 'cause it's so damn good. Of course, I probably wouldn't care anyway, since I think making snotty fun is always a good thing.

(Jacob and Ned: I meant that the Xanadu scene sounds like the best thing EVER, which didn't help J's argument much!)

I think making snotty fun can be a good thing or a bad thing from a punter's viewpoint, depending on how you feel about the original genre/work being made fun of - there are certain things I'd like to know were getting the pish ripped out of them, even if I didn't want to listen to the work that was doing so more than once (or even once fully). It can also be a thing which operates as a relevant, but not overriding, axis of determining your evaluation of the work or not - I can imagine liking material that sounded like old stuff, then getting different kinds of interpretation/dissonance when finding it was a modern loving pastiche (or modern witty ridicule) of it.

Tom - I think you're right to point out the misconceived overlap of original-reaction-in-beholder to original-motivation-of-producer, but I'm confused about whether you think that the latter is therefore just an irrelevance, whether you think the work should always be approached as a 'thing-in-itself-to-react-to', in a way that rules out such concerns as being part of what informs this reaction.
(I think this is called 'the intentional fallacy' in art criticism ? On an old thread, ArfArf had started to describe some very intriguing approach they personally adopted which sort of reminded me of this, but I never got round to asking them to expand on it...)

I don't think the latter is an irrelevance, I think it's part of the valid criteria for assessment: what a work means to me does include (but is not just determined by) producer-intentions (as well as all sorts of other things - eg the number/type of other beholders - and even, as you have noticed before, the social contexts in which the others behold/the work operates.)

Could you tell me/give me a search-keyword ref the thread this 'sniping' you refer to above was on?

It was in Sterling's "ILM Misconceptions" thread. I think it was Jack Cole but I'd need to check.

I think that intentionality as part of a personal criteria-set is fine and I use it myself sometimes, but I still think my beliefs about those intentions (disco is passionate; wildbunch is insincere) are part of my reaction to the work not something inherent in it. What I was saying with the listener meaning-it is that given the choice of a passionate reaction to a manufactured work and a blah reaction to a passionate work I'm much more interested in experiencing (or reading about) the former.

Tracer - that scene is, actually, the best thing ever. If I told you it all happened on rollerskates into the bargain it would place it beyond all argument.

Tom - passionate vs manufactured? Surely that's a mixed-up dichotomy. There is 'authentic' music which aims for a dispassionate reaction in the listener, just as there is 'manufactured' music which aims for a passionate reaction. Surely most people would agree that the passionate listener reaction is, however, more rewarding for both listener and musician, irrespective of any criteria of 'authenticity'?

Anyway, having examined my emotions on this one more thoroughly, am becoming convinced that the reason I dislike this song so much is primarily because it comes across as a white rock act taking the piss out of a black/hispanic dance genre. This is partly because of an identification with dance music rather than rock music, and an unease with the implied racial politics.

Whether or not this is a justifiable reaction is obv another matter...

CLASSIC