Electroclash - commercial flop or not?

Soviet were on the Tee Electroclash comp, proper, even. It always feels as if bits of electro really did bubble up into the sound of a lot of dance-type chart hits -- I mean, hey, didn't Diddy hijack Felix da Housecat last year? -- but I find it a little complicated to say that influence came from the "electroclash" scene itself: those sounds took on a certain life sort of all around in dance music, in a way that wasn't really traceable in any simple way. Whether or not electroclash was a commercial success on its own, well: that depends on what we consider electroclash and what kind of standard we're setting for its success. I doubt Larry Tee is complaining about how things turned out, but that's a low bar.

Here in Norway we have had several excellent electro influenced pop releases during the past couple years btw. Annie may be well-known to a lot of ILM regulars, but Bertine Zetlitz also released a great Richard X produced album in 2003, and Erlend Øye's "Unrest" album, where he had several hot names producing him (including the aforementioned Soviet) was absolutely brilliant.

What awful, awful people. Imagine that.

Another unacknowledged source: 1000 Homo DJs - 'Supernaught', and other Al Jourgenson side projects. Which brings us to the following vexed issue: why are goths going glam and getting into this music?

Electroclash was what it started as - vapid gay club culture that straight people enjoyed for one fad season. it is now dead.

Soviet, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Interpol - all these people rode the electrocash wave but they weren't really electroclash bands. W.I.T and Fischer-Spooner are electroclash bands, compare and contrast those two with the other three and you'll see the difference. The above three bands are retro bands doing more of the what the Strokes are famous for doing rather than adhering to whatever electroclash was supposed to be. Just because Larry Tee always plays "Blue Monday" doesn't make retro new wave = electroclash.

Full disclosure: Soviet was/is? innocuous and bland; Yeah Yeah Yeahs were/are a fun band to watch and have some catchy songs with good riffs - plus they popularised the female death disco stuff that bands like Glass Candy do; Interpol turned from flat faux goth new wave to louder faux goth radio-EMO new wave, no comment from me on that one.

hope this helps, Todd "I was there when Beliniamsburg died" Patrick

at first, (after only hearing selected records, mostly instrumental), i though it was more about bringing back the cold futurism and fetish for the streets of european cities at night, and i liked that. ever since basic channel/chain reaction, the production values of records had really gone up, and by the late 90s, most of the records i was hearing were very clean, so it was refreshing to me to hear music that really seemed to be from the bedroom again. of course, at that point, i really knew nothing about the scene. i first heard "frank sinatra" on danny tenaglia's athens global underground mix, and it just sounded like a hot, dark monster of a club record.

the scene was really different though then most of the records i had heard at that point. i imagine that what was played at berliniamsburg was less of the brooding stuff and more of the amateurish (on purpose) vocalizing and rock-y nastiness of some of the other records. though i liked some of those records, i felt a little put off by what i was told the scene was like. there was a certain amount of agression to it. i was talking with jess about a picture of some electroclash dude and i said that his attitude was "I am not going to die from cocaine, UNLIKE YOU!"

whereas to me personally, that whole side of it, the fashioncokesnobrawker (and the simultaneous revulsion and jealousy), was sort of worthless, i cant help feeling that, at least in terms of sonics, it was nice to see everyone get their asses kicked for a moment, and that is still happening, and i am glad.

there really is that euro/usa divide to it though, and i think someone more involved than i should probably discuss it. obv I-F, DJ Hell and Tee are about different things.

The audience for the rock side of electroclash seems to be largely the same as the audience for the garage rock bands and punk-funk bands - certainly people who attend gigs for all three sorts of bands tend to wear similar clothes and do similar amounts of coke, at least in Melbourne.

As for Electroclash, it was definitely big in the clubs, spawning many "stars" such as the aforementioned Miss Kittin, Peaches, Adult., Tok Tok, Felix Da Housecat, Tiga, Ladytron, and Fischerspooner amongst others.
I'm surprised they never crossed over to the mainstream audience, as a lot of it had great pop sensibilities and what with the 80's revival and everything. I'm not surprised, however, that music critics dismissed the whole movement as being all style with no substance since they did the same with the 80's new wavers and were never able to see past the make up and the haircuts (and also it being associated with the "vapid" gay community...).
So even though Electroclash never really made it commercially I wouldn't say it was a total flop, as it's influence has infiltrated a lot of the mainstream now. Big stars are getting remixed by Felix, Mount Sims or Black Strobe, Pink and Britney are courting Peaches, and electro is being heard in recent singles by Kylie, Rachel Stevens, Benny Benassi, No Doubt, Kelis, Janet Jackson, etc, as well as most house music.

"Electro. Mediocrity has become the norm, the passion has been killed. Pretentious wannabe rockstars with inflated egos rule the mediawaves, cheap imitation clones with clown make-up on their faces rape the style, hyped up labels capitalize on it through slick A&R fistpuppets and mainstream culture - that two-faced hydra - tries to assimilate it. Meanwhile white middle-class consumerist kids with mohawks run around like lost chickens, eagerly lapping up the stale cum the corporate moloch spurts onto their spotty faces as their role models down another valium with a dirty brown sherry and drag themselves through the twilight of their miserable lives in front of a tv set where a video of Liquid Sky runs on repeat. "NO MORE. We don't need the hollow catchphrases, the carefully created eighties retro fad, the empty music, the jaded cynicism or the poser attitude of the fake Gigolos who only sell their asses to the masses. You can all follow your leader into the electroclash HELL!"

Anyway, I'd say the majority of people weren't even aware of the "rise of Electroclash". I find it kind of funny that some people consider Electroclash to be a sell-out corporate cash-in on a purer kind of electro because most people (who aren't music geeks or fashion hipsters) don't even know it exists. Ask any of my co-workers and they have no idea what we are talking about or who any of those bands and artists are.

phil "never got laid at berliniamsburg, despite all efforts" two.

Don't be so sure Phil!

anyhow, i saw soviet during 2003 CMJ open for two bands i'd never heard of. oh how sad it was. they ditched most of the synths and stuff, performing their old electroclash songs with guitars and drums. and i remember the lead singer being a lot cuter. most of the crowd left on an extended smoking-break, i felt bad for them.

Working on an academic article about this, actually, although not sure when it'll be completed. Probably too late to be relevant.

Do you have any working draft or thesis? I've been thinking about this alot, but I'm not at all comfortable about making any points yet.

Then, explain hip-hop and most post-1988 dance. :)

Of course one point here is that it may be easier for those acts to score with Electro singles, because they all were around in the 80s, and thus the 80s generation (some of which may be likely to buy electro because it sounds like music from their youth) are likely to check it out. But as most 30-somethings aren't really into checking out new names it is more likely for a 30-something to discover something he or she likes if it has a familiar artist name such as Madonna, Kylie Minogue or George Michael on it.

-- Geir Hongro

But seriously Geir, the structure of any pop hip-hop hit or 'trance' hit or 'junglist' hit and tell me it doesn't have a verse, a chorus 40 secs later, another verse, a catchy bit or middle eight perhaps, and then another verse or chorus. Pop is pop, based on age old folk, it will never change, and it eats whatever genre is fashionable in the clubs at the time. This is a time honoured ritual, and not a good or a bad thing. Neil Tennant, Peter Waterman and Bill Drummond have had a fair bit to say about this. I reckon, well, we can grant that they probably know what they're talking about.

To come back to electro and electroclash: the beats have been used for pop, as have the trashiness and materialism, and production ideas - but always, always, in the traditional pop structure. This is why the raw form in the clubs has never been commercially successful to the extent of being in the pop charts. Pop, and only pop, gets into the pop charts. It might masquerade as a particular genre, but this is just pop in this year's apparel.

it takes away the pretension in almost every other form of music through it's unabashed irony and hyper self-awareness to the point that all you have left is what you're being given and thankfully it's F-U-N, kids. it's bratty, DIY, cynical, and (perhaps) secretly saddened. some may complain of a shallow pool, but to those i would say really look around you. if you open your mind a bit you'll begin to recognize a lot of the witty, clever innovation in the music. if not, you suck. electroclash is nudity and i love being nude. is that so wrong? fuck no!

so with that, i'll say electroclash is what it is and was what it was. and it doesn't want to be anything more than that.

like, totally.

peace out bitchezzz !

Not that disco-punk (is this still the sticking label?) wasn't/isn't good in parts too, but "punk"? Not very.

There are plenty of distinctions to be made between those things, but the fact is that if you bought an new-electro comp in 2002, you might get any one of those things -- we could talk about any of them as part of the overarching electro(clash) scene. So you say "vapid NYC hipsters listening to WIT," but at the time I sitting home in Chicago listening to Ersatz, Gigolos, Ghostly, Creme/Bunker.

ie:

I was the first guy playing Daft Punk to the rock kids.

I played it at CBGB's.

Everybody thought I was crazy.

We all know.

I was there.

I was there.

I've never been wrong.

maybe i'm coming from too personal of a perspective, but didn't larry tee/ fischerspooner get people on the dancefloor who are still there now, after the "fall" of electroclash? people who kept dancing and are now digging on carl craig and moodyman- when there would be no way they would have "danced" to "dj music" previously?

With the proviso that most forms of dance music are also gateways to dance music for a certain section of the population at the time when they are big.

The difference with electroclash is possibly that the audience for whom it was a gateway probably included more music-and-media-literate-types - ie. people who read music press and care.

Anyway most moments in dance music are transitory and momentary in terms of being a defining force outside of the devoted inner core of the scene.

You had the basic tropes of an entire pre-existing underground electronic scene strip-mined, diluted, and then repackaged for magazines because it was the "it" thing to do in NYC at that time. If it had happened anywhere else it would have died on the vine like romo.

There is a long standing electro tradition that had nothing to do with Electroclash. It is like saying that everything that happened with a synth between 1996-1999 was eletronica. Yeah, it all has drum machines and synths, but it isn't all the same.

The only thing electroclash succeeded in was making the worst aspects of electronic music part of the lingua franca of shitty hipster kids in the cultural backwaters of the US. I live in Austin and people still play electroclash, hell, I saw a guy bill his set as having "old school" electroclash jams.

Calling Fischer garbage is a stretch. WIT and ARE on the other hand...

There is a long standing electro tradition that had nothing to do with Electroclash

Early groups doing that electroclash sound such as Le Car/Adult., Kitbuilders, etc. were all appreciated in my Electro circles before the mags and hipsters got a hold of it (I still think Kitbuilders are one of the greatest late 90's/early 00's pieces of music I own).

Long before Larry T33's promo campagins in '01/'02/'03, there was a division growing between poroper Electro and new wave influenced Electro. DJ Hell & Chicks on Speed both covered Warm Leatherette in 1997 and I believe the Champagne EP came out in 1998.

While that was the 'new sound' (I remember Germna kids online calling it the Gigolo sound at the time), there was still Electro at the time such as BolzBolz, Anothny Rother, Aux 88, etc. that was no where near the new wavey synth pop aspects.

The marketing got overwhelming. The newer acts were passing off non-music as musical perfromance art. That equals shitty music.

But those acts were not electroclash because the marketing and packaging was not in place yet. These were underground electro acts that were doing their thing before it became hip and fashionable. They were part of a whole new wave/electro/italio revival that was going on long before Larry got his mug in the papers.

The whole point of my arguement is that electroclash was nothing but NYC people hijacking something that previously existed and then they amplifed the worst parts of it, and then force fed it to the rest of the planet via NYC's strangle hold on western publishing. The same thing happened 5 years before when corporate media tried to jack underground electronic music with electronica.

Unless you were one of those shitty NYC acts that rode the bandwagon you cannot be electroclash.

Yes, Disco, you could say that, and everything you've said since is just proving my point. "At that time," I wasn't getting into W.I.T. or Larry Tee or reading fashion magazines -- I was getting into Adult. and Le Car, Legowelt and Tok Tok, Gigolos and Italo.

And I understand its in lots of peoples' interests to divorce that stuff from the electroclash that hit the fashion magazines -- "no, no, this is proper electro, that was already around" -- but the fact is that the comps and mixes I bought via "electroclash" were full of exactly these acts, not just A.R.E. Weapons.

I dunno, maybe my way into this stuff was off-kilter, because I didn't live in New York, and was finding most of this stuff at a Chicago record store owned by an Ersatz artist. But my sense is that you can't separate these things -- there's no limited little world of fashion-magazine electroclash that didn't include and bridge over to, say, Ghostly/Spectral's Tangents 2000 disc. You're acting like "electroclash" only existed as people going to parties, and not also people listening to music. Whereas the electro mix that really won me over to this stuff included all of the above: Tiga's "Sunglasses at Night," Ladytron, Peaches, Fischerspooner and Miss Kittin on one hand, and then also Green Velvet, Tok Tok, David Carretta, Adult., even Ellen Allien.

(The only exception would be American indie kids who just bought full-lengths by, like, Tracy and the Plastics and stuff.)

xpost with Steve -- everything that called "electroclash" was just "electro pop" -- I have no idea what distinction you're drawing there!

Unless you were one of those shitty NYC acts that rode the bandwagon you cannot be electroclash.

This sounds like the classic "it can't be alternative when it crashes the top 40 charts" arguemnt.

Taxonomy, for those who aren't afraid of it, will always be debated because for some it's about sound and for some it's about marketing and the truth is probably somewhere in between.

If the listener ignores the marketing, then they tend to lump what sounds alike together, which is what I did and continue to do.

Miami style electro is anything but bouncy thesse days. It's all pretty much hard, pounding, ripoffs of Jackal + Hyde...and before that it was still trancey soundscapes over break-not-breakbeats, complete with the aged 16 note snare buildups.

So you are telling me that I-F or Drexciya sounds like Avenue D?

The main thing I'm building off of is my first statement: Electro, and New wave inspired Electro.

Call it what you want; the magazine thing never menat anything to me.

I wouldn't say that you came into this stuff in an off-kilter way. You had a midwest perspective and a decent record store to help clue you in. You weren't coming to this music from electroclash. Your purchases were not being directly influenced by the media coverage of electroclash. You might have generated an interest because of that coverage, but what you actually got was Marlon Magas (I assume you are talking about him) selling you good records.

Come to Texas, I can show you people who consumed and built a scene around discopunk and the ass end of electroclash. You will understand the difference real quick. That bullshit cancelled out an entire decade of the real shit from Detroit and the Netherlands.

But my sense is that you can't separate these things -- there's no limited little world of fashion-magazine electroclash that didn't include and bridge over to, say, Ghostly/Spectral's Tangents 2000 disc. You're acting like "electroclash" only existed as people going to parties, and not also people listening to music. Whereas the electro mix that really won me over to this stuff included all of the above: Tiga's "Sunglasses at Night," Ladytron, Peaches, Fischerspooner and Miss Kittin on one hand, and then also Green Velvet, Tok Tok, David Carretta, Adult., even Ellen Allien.

And everything listed above kinda fell into post-idm indie cross over dance stuff. The first part of that list seems like the people who came up in that wave, and the second set are the earlier people who were looking for an easy paycheck from wack comps. It all reeks of either a quick check from Nettwerk for their crappy comp or a quick check from Sam Valenti's Dad for that shitty Ghostly comp.

Again, It is the difference between UR-003 and Peaches.

Are we talking about Tom in Austin?

x-post

i had thought electroclash was going to be what i heard on those ladomat2000 comps, which suggested this entire other world of electronic music that was whimsical, live, unpredictable and still capable of churning your head into bits. i was a little disappointed with what people agreed "electroclash" actually was.

don't forget many of those acts that previously existed weren't so quick to turn down Larry T33's royalty checks!

What's the point of complaining that electroclash was this creatively bankrupt media invention when the definition of "electroclash" being used is so ridiculously limited to the most short-lived, creatively bankrupt thin end of the wedge? Sure, no one knows who the hell Larry Tee is - but that doesn't mean they don't know and like "electroclash" in the sense that it's actually used by non-pedants.

You might as well say something like "house died a long time ago - and by "house" I mean only records released on Trax and DJ International during the 1980s" - if you accept the definition of terms then the statement is of course correct, but it also verges on tautological and doesn't say anything about "house" in the sense that it's used by the broader population of listeners.

Actually Dog Latin was doing something similar in the "What Is The Sound Of Now" thread when he complained that minimal wasn't anthemic or banging enough, and then kept on defending his argument by further restricting his definition of "minimal" to only the most absolutely reduced, spare productions. Of course tracks comprised solely of clicks, snaps and whispers is unlikely to be banging - but the real world of music scenes don't tend to abide by our strategic definitions.

So flop.