How Soon Is Now?:

I mean, I really like it and all, but come on! It isn't even the best Smiths song. (My pick for that would be "This Night Has Opened My Eyes", but other contenders would include "Reel Around The Fountain", "There Is A Light That Never Goes Out", "London", "Rubber Ring", "Shoplifters Of The World Unite", "The Queen Is Dead", "I Know It's Over", "Asleep", "Hand In Glove", and "Bigmouth Strikes Again".)

But it does, silly.

It's not overrated at all. In fact, there's no doubt at all in my mind that it's *underrated*.

Which, thinking about it, is probably your point.

Going back to the question before this gets more boring that it already is, I like this song very much and the Smiths is one of my favourite bands ever, so the key word here is "subjective", which my opinion, and everything i post on this boards will be.

Are Piper Halliwell's powers really negligeable: discuss.

2. I'm sure ST must be right. I have said it before: why must artists always say 'It's better than our version'? When will an artist say a cover is dire and an insult to them?

3. Don't forget Love Spit Love's cover (c.1997). Unless you want to.

4. At last someone's mentioned 'Mona' in connection with 'HSIN?'!!!! I'm always playing it to people and saying, - What does this remind you of?, and they say - oh, I don't know, 'Can I Get A Witness?' or something.

Pinefox - think Elvis Costello begged Linda Ronstadt not to cover any more of his songs after he heard her version of 'Alison'.

stevie t wrote: "Actually, I think that Siobhan might be thinking of a new cover of HSIN? by the, ahem, American rock troupe Snake River Conspiracy. 'It's better than our version' quoth la Moz, apparently."

Hmm? Dear God, no. I plucked a 12" white label of Snake River Conspiracy's HSIN? "dance version" (is this the track in question, or a remix of it?) from the sale rack at the local dance record shop last autumn and... and... just no. That is all.

Burying HSIN? in sub-Moroder basslines, wailing diva vocals and trancebag cliché gated reso-sweeps in an attempt to sell it to the very mitsubishied-up club trendies that the original was about feeling so alienated from (or at least, the 90s/21st century equivalent of whatever was around at the time of the original) would either be an act of genius (I would call it irony but I've been scared of using that word ever since Alanis Morissette...) or a woeful, embarrassing, point-missing disaster. In this case the whole thing is so poorly put together, with such horrible vocal effects and every cliché of Euro-trance being thrown in kitchen-sink- style, that in my book it has to be the latter.

And yes, I should have known it was almost bound to be awful, but it was only 50p, and as I looked at it in the shop I thought of Schneider TM and KPT Michigan's swoonsomely gorgeous idm reworking of "There Is A Light..." and I hoped that this might work as well. Unsurprisingly, it didn't. (Should I be worried that a single cymbal hit on the Schneider TM track almost ruins it all for me? It just sounds so much like the horrible FM-synthesised General MIDI cymbal sound on my ancient Soundblaster. But every time I hear it and shudder I begin to think just how geeky it is to get put off a record just by a single drum sample which only happens once anyway, and the rest of the record more than makes up for it.)

If this is a remix and not the version Morrissey was describing as better as the original, then, uh, sorry to rant irrelevantly, but the remix is truly dreadful, even if you give it the benefit of the doubt on the irony/point-missing issue. I am in no great hurry to hear the other mix, either...

Is it actually intelligent? Well... hmm. Like post-rock, it's a genre which might once have encouraged experimentation and strange time signatures and so on, but has now developed its own trademark sounds (frantically recut and retriggered breakbeats, dubby glitchy noises, granular synthesis, drum sounds resampled to very low sample rates for that gritty underwater sound or ring modulated and phased into squelches) which most artists seem content to stick to. Still, I like it, and I dream of being able to get even those cliches right in my own tracks...

Artists of note: Autechre, Aphex Twin, Board of Canada, Black Dog, Plaid, kid606, Pole, Richard Devine, etc, etc. I had a huge long (and probably inaccurate) description of the different styles of idm that are currently fashionable, but then my computer crashed, so you're spared.

To get even further from the thread topic (sorry; perhaps this should be on the Simon Reynolds thread, except I thought of it here and it's probably not worth reviving a dead thread for it), was anyone else surprised to see so much IDM (or at least, so many records that I would class as IDM) in Simon Reynolds' last "best of" list? It seemed from Energy Flash that he didn't care at all for intelligent techno or any of its offshoots or any other style of dance music that declared itself to be smarter than music aimed at filling dancefloors. I realise there's been a fairly big ideological shift in IDM since drum&bass and drill&bass in that breakbeats and hardcore rave influences are now seen as a good thing, but the Matmos album in particular seems to me to sum up everything that outsiders might find distasteful or pretentious about the style: I can't get into it at all, all those chinstroking soundscapes and all the articles about the album focusing on the unorthodox sound sources rather than what it sounds like. I suppose, though, that it's a bit hard to describe what any album of that style actually sounds like that's different from any other similar album, and maybe it's just because I'm squeamish and don't particularly like the thought of sitting down to listen to fat squelching through tubes and scalpels rearranging people's noses for an hour. Even if I will happily sit down and listen to hi-hats put through fx units so that they sound exactly the same as fat squelching and scalpels clinking.

The other points in your post were also interesting, but I can't think of anything to say about them right now. I don't know about Energy Flash forcing a rethink about rave among musicians and critics in general (sounds plausible, although maybe it was more the evolution of drum and bass, or perhaps just that artists who used to play live and dj at raves on the same bill as other acts/djs from various other subgenres of dance before the split started questioning the feuding and pigeonholing), but it certainly made me stop seeing it as a "guilty pleasure". (I should point out that by the time I read it rave was already pretty much accepted by critics, etc, and oldskool 12"s were fetching ridiculous prices, but all the same, it made me realise that it was being seen as that now and that I needn't think of it as something I liked but was looked down on by everyone else.)

DJ Martian can probably work out this history lesson far better than I, with the right dates et al.

Stange how the discussion ended up here. Some footie talk then? ;)

I would never have guessed that 'IDM' meant 'intelligent dance music' or whatever. I imagined that it was some sort of funny button that dance-music producers pressed to make a certain sound on their records.

In jungle it became almost logical to ignite a rave-revival since there seemed no way forward anymore. Bad Company did a fairly good job (that bass on 'Nitrous'/'Son of Nitrous' is total ravetastic joy) and Total Science even started to bring back the breaks. What I gathered from S.R. unfave2000 there are now at Garage nights old- skool rooms which cane ye olde rave/jungle.

Now in IDM I'm not too up to date on any rave-revival, but what I really love at the moment is how leftfield labels like Forcetracks are putting out brilliant tracks somehow influenced by glitch but extremely danceable and sort of "healing" the bogus house/techno devide (although not as Tech House -sigh-). [one could in retrospect see it coming on Hawtin's 'Decks & FX & 909" set, after that Nitzer Ebb remix it spaces out into something like Lover's Techno] Also gathered that Mills is getting out of his minimal arsehole with Millsart even adding something like vocals. Stanton Warriors meanwhile remix Isolee...and I'm thinking: happy times are here again on the dancefloor. :)

Oh boy, bit of mess and don't feel like cleaning it up anymore than I already did, but there are some points in there ;)

Now who do we fancy for Wimbledon?

(Thread already in full swing here.)

I've just looked and Energy Flash appears to be copyright 1998, by which time the breaks style of idm was in full swing. Doesn't mean he didn't lead to more specifically ravey influences creeping into idm and other styles, and as I've said I think it did have some impact on the critical reassessment of rave (plus presumably Reynolds was evangelising on behalf of rave for quite some time before the book was published), but to my mind even without adding Juno Alpha hoover mentasms a lot of breakbeat idm, even (or do I mean especially?) the early stuff is already quite rave- esque thanks to the snare rushes and the sheer joyful, cheeky exuberance and freneticism of the beats. (Thinking of stuff like Girl/Boy from 1996, etc.)

On the other hand, I know that a lot of people who I know listen to a lot of the idm that I see as being rave-influenced don't see that connection, so perhaps if (like me) you like early 90s hardcore rave you'll see similarities (especially with the benefit of five years of hindsight...!) when other people won't necessarily see them and they may not have been there in the first place. For example, recently on a DSP music making IRC channel I'm on someone suggested that everyone should make idm/rave hybrid music under the genre name IRM, and a good many people there went, "Huh huh, oxymoron, no way, huh huh." On the other hand, a lot of these people didn't seem to differentiate between early 90s hardcore rave and happy hardcore and called it all rave (is the distinction only appreciated in Europe? I got the impression that it might be, which might make sense historically), so maybe that's why it seemed like a contradiction. I don't particularly want to diss happy hardcore, since I do listen to it and enjoy some of it, but I'd certainly be happier... well, I'd be happier dissing happy hardcore than rave, put it that way. :)

Omar wrote: In jungle it became almost logical to ignite a rave- revival since there seemed no way forward anymore.

Not sure if you're saying that the rave-revival in jungle kickstarted similar in IDM or that the IDM rave revival was caused by feeling as if there was no way forward with the genre. If you take the switch from drum machine beats to breakbeats as the start of the rave influence in idm, then as far as I see things with my limited knowledge of drum'n'bass history it predated that feeling in the dnb scene (I think it would probably be fair at this point to say that breakbeats were inspired by jungle rather than rave, but there's something wired and manically upbeat about that stuff that was missing from jungle since the ragga tracks went out of fashion, imho... well, maybe it was still there in jump-up... I get this feeling I'm going in circles and over-analysing too much, but I've started now so I want to see if I get anywhere). On the other hand, was IDM itself in a rut? I can see that, yes. There might have been hints of the modern glitch styles, but staying anti-breakbeat would have been pretty limiting. I guess, leaving all these circles behind, it was a reaction against drum and bass becoming less manic and breakbeat-driven, intelligent techno getting stuck in a bit of a spooky down-tempo rut, and wanting to capture that rave enthusiasm while trying to avoid the syrupy cliches of happycore. Something about the way I've written that makes me think that either it's blatantly obvious or entirely wrong. Hmm. (Plus I do still think that people like AFX had once djed at raves without the need to stand on one side or another of the "intelligence" line and picked up on that again, and others followed where they led. But why did it take so long? And does it fit with a man who described his music as ambient?)

On the other hand, if you don't accept that using breakbeats is tantamount to rave influence and you maintain that outright rave influences are a fairly recent phenomenon, then I don't particularly see that idm is stuck in a rut. I mean, my post above implies - intentionally - that I think it does fall a bit short of the name and the original intentions and that there is a lot of formulaic stuff going on, but there are different strains, there are innovative artists still out there, there are a lot of people listening enthusiastically to those artists and picking up on their styles, I think there's enough going on that idm didn't need to look for new ways to grow, or old styles to fall back on. Maybe they picked up on the rave influence increasing in other genres and thought, "Oh yeah, sounds good," but given that idm seems healthy to me and dnb really doesn't I don't imagine it was a conscious decision to copy what jungle was doing. Again, all my rather suspect and naive opinion.

All this made sense in my head when I started this post but I have the feeling right now I'm stating the obvious where I know what the obvious is and then being horribly out of my depth elsewhere and that I've forgotten to include the main point I really wanted to make. More than that, I get the feeling I'm just missing the point. Maybe that's just because it's midnight and I'm knackered. Maybe it's because I'm trying to find single reasons for things happening when they were caused by a whole variety of things.

I should point out that I'm too young to have experienced much of this stuff first-hand, that I don't own that many records in the relevant genres, and that both of you sound like you know your stuff in this area far more than I do. I'll also repeat that I'm probably overanalysing things. So, uh, I'm probably way out. What I need is Simon Reynolds to write Energy Flash II and set me straight on this area...

Please be gentle, I am but a naive and clueless kid who has been suckered into a fascinating thread with interesting and clueful people and has decided to inflict her ill- founded, semi-formed and stupidly long-winded views on it and them in the hope of further debate and illumination. And it's late, thus depriving me of the little judgement and restraint I might usually show.

PS Am a short, pudgy and malcoordinated indie kid and thus do not understand sport enough to talk about it. (Nobody who saw me last year after absorbing my housemates' opinions on the England team, which I'd frequently spout when drunk as if they were my own, is here to disagree, are they? Good.)

I listened to the Rolling Stones' "Mona" again this week-end, and that's indeed the "How Soon Is Now" riff you hear right as the song starts. I mean EXACTLY, and a good 20 years before "How Soon Is Now" too. Kinda puts a new twist on Sundar's notion that the Smiths rock harder than the Stones.

Just a some short observations:

- Aphex Twin is a bit of rare case, sure he released all these ambient albums, but all these years much of his music released under other names have been pure rave tracks, semi-gabber, distorted breakbeats. Plus: I never actually heard his stuff but what I've read someone like Neotropic (?) has been making retro-rave/intelligent happy hardcore tracks since '96. Again DJ Martian is much better in listing these things.

----- On the other hand, if you don't accept that using breakbeats is tantamount to rave influence -----

One of the influences IMHO. What I remember there were plenty of 4-to- the-floor hard kickdrum/hard acid-sounds tracks like Underground Resistance's 'Seawolf' that got played next to say...'Mentasm', 'Dominator', 'Everybody in the Place'.

- I'm still not sure IDM is getting more ravey, do you mean Kid606 et al? [i must admit I still haven't heard his stuff/ I'm very suspicious of the guy in a one-Squarepusher-is-quite-enough-thank-you- very-much kinda way] The thing I find so fascinating is that the whole Force Inc/Mille Plateaux axis seems to be un-glitching, almost looking towards the dancefloor again. Maybe using rave-elements makes the experiments just a bit more user-friendly? In a way I think that specific German part of IDM seems to be taking lessons from Basic Channel/Maurizio & co. who always were fundamentaly geared towards the dancefloor. But again I'm just making up these connections. ;)

Now poor Luis who started this thread is getting great discussion on dancemusic instead of The Sm*ths :)

Some catch-up points:

1) I don't think the influence of Alec Empire should be underrated in terms of joining the dots between rave (see his tracks on Riot Beats), IDM (ditto Mille Plateux) and the whole rock-dance commercial explosion (The Destroyer, ATR). Furthermore, there must have been a realisation on the part of IDM producers that, due to their taste for making albums, their audience intersected prominently with the more commercial audience coalescing around big beat - itself indirectly but obviously inspired by rave. Toughening up their sound through the addition of breakbeats and other ravey sounds was a logical and successful step (if Aphex Twin hadn't gone into hiding he'd possibly be dance music's biggest star by now), especially if they were interested in success in America - which had yet to succumb to trance and was still hooked on the big beat-inspired 'funky breaks' sound.

2) The comparative "intelligence" of IDM vs rave circa 92-93 seems somewhat arbitrary now. While it seemed obvious then that believing complex melodies and spacey atmospherics were more "intelligent" than hyperactive breakbeats and mutating samples, once "artcore" bridged the gap between the two the binary dichotomy fell apart, opening up opportunities for IDM producers to explore the other end of jungle not represented by the intelligent end of it (note for example how after "Girl/Boy" drill & bass got progressively darker/wackier, with more hints of ragga and rave coming through).

3) I reckon jungle's turn back towards rave sounds has had very limited influence on other musical scenes (in most cases artists like Aphex, Jega, mU-Ziq, Squarepusher etc. actually beat jungle producers to the punch), regardless of how fun the Total Science sound has been. Jungle's getting more critical support now than it has since '97 though, so maybe it will become more influential.

4) Apparently Luke Vibert's releasing a new single that does to hardcore rave what Squarepusher's "My Red Hot Car" did to 2-step, although I'm sure such an explicit move has been done before.

This is pretty good!
http://www.latenightwithjimmyfallon.com/blogs/2013/05/johnny-marr-how-soon-is-now/

I'm always amazed when a band or act has worked arduously on something in the studio, overdubbing guitars, arranging effects, cutting and pasting here and there, and then four guys 30 years later can just stand on the stage on do the song justice with scant effort.

yeah, funny to watch the clips of the smiths playing it in the 80s -- the only trick used is marr triggering a loop of the slide guitar part.

lol @ his Morrissey impersonation

Does it strike anyone else that he seems to be singing these old songs out of spite?

Pretty badass detuning/retuning during the solo, though.

I saw Johnny Marr play last month in Vegas. In addition to "How Soon is Now?" he played "There is a Light That Never Goes Out." I was amazed at how dead-on he and his band sounded. Apart from the vocals, where he sung much more in his own voice, and still did the songs justice.

I was kind of disappointed that he was opening for New Order, and played "Getting Away With It," but it never seemed to occur to anybody to have Bernard come out and sing on it.

Shockingly good, and I mean all parts - the rhythm section nails it too.

Marr here a few weeks ago did "There is a Light," "Bigmouth," "How Soon is Now?" "London" and "Stop Me If You"ve Heard This One Before." And "Getting Away With It" and "Forbidden City." And his whole new album.

Well, he has to play something people want to hear!

The last time I saw him, touring with the Healers, he did no Smiths or non-Healers stuff!

Interesting above - back in 2001 - about this using the intro from the Rolling Stones' Mona. I haven't heard that before, but it's an exact fit. Makes sense - he's often said himself he copied their Hitch Hike intro for There is a Light (which the Velvet Underground also nicked for There She Goes Again). Wonder if there are any other Stones lifts.

Surely they got it from the Marvin Gaye original.

it's pretty soon ftr

Surely they got it from the Marvin Gaye original.

Yeah, you would think, but here's what Marr said:

"There's a little in-joke in there just to illustrate how intellectual I was getting. At the time everyone was into The Velvet Underground and they stole the intro to 'There She Goes Again' - 'da da-da-da, da-da!' - from The Rolling Stones' version of 'Hitch Hike,' the Marvin Gaye song. I just wanted to put that in to see whether the press would say, 'Oh it's the Velvet Underground!' Cos I knew that I was smarter than that. I was listening to what The Velvet Underground was listening to."

Always sounded funny to me - like "just to illustrate how intellectual I was getting, I nicked a bit from this obscure group called the Rolling Stones" - but there you go.

I'd always heard him cite this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M3tuJ4qFmxY

also this
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mc7Ua3W9GkM

and then the little melody at the end of each verse is apparently lifted from here
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HfeP9yN0gs8

I just listened to Marr doing How Soon Is Now again - it's really a killer rendition. Then I looked up Morrissey doing it recently: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zTOHFMuFkoo

I think Marr's version wipes the floor with Moz's.

There are two versions being peddled at the moment. One has substandard vocals, the other has substandard backing. I can't think of a solution...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uiHtWnQdnAg

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zTOHFMuFkoo

Wait, is Johnny playing behind the flippin' the capo in that clip?!

It's truly a joy to watch him play.