Hank Shocklee in Tape Op (and hip-hop and indie and individuality and forward thinking).

genre has been less a question for the listener for many years now -- buy whatever records you like, and be edified. but an aloof discussion of 'genre' still matters to the musician, who can't casually switch his mode of production quite as easily -- Tape Op is a magazine for engineers and musicians, not listeners as much, and the discussion is geared towards that audience

Hank's interview is cool but I'm already sick of the whole "music made w/sequencers=BAD NEWS" polemic.

Is there a factual difference between the older hip-hop guy who says "it's all gotten boring" and the older rock guy who says "it's all gotten boring?" Insofar as there's an ILM party line, it seems to be that hip-hop guy would be wrong about that, but rock guy would be right. Is there real evidence of that? Or does ILM just have more in common with the bored rock guy?

(xpost sorry for not explaining Tape Op more -- yes, it's a recording magazine. There's a definite indie slant to it, but an interviewee would probably think of it first as a recording mag, not an indie-rock mag.)

I've been sick of it for decades now, it seems.

But to actually answer the question, yes, I think people often look toward other genres for that forward-looking spirit, and often find it there precisely because they don't yet know the parameters: if it's new to you, then it looks new to you, to be tautological about it.

xpost I dunno nabisco, I think the exciting explosive-growth periods happen when people are figuring out what their values are as they work!

Yes but there are tons of happy accidents you can engender with sequencers! Anyone who doesn't think sequencers have soul has not tried to switch from a sequencer they've been using for years to a whole new one. They have quirks, and they're engineered to mimic human abilities in most ways, it's just that those quirks and the things they're mimicking are different from other things.

Thomas: yeah, that's just what I'm talking about -- the way the other genre offers a chance to figure out new, foreign values, and seem necessarily fresher. And I agree about working values out as you go along -- exactly. Part of my question is this: music is very self-conscious now. It's easy to saturate yourself in every going-on, to follow everything, and we do just that; we're constantly clocking it. Doesn't that make it slightly harder for a genre to work out its values as it goes along? And could this be why we increasingly look across genres -- or toward cross-genre fusion -- for new things? Is it possible that hardly anyone gets the long-term privacy it takes to have that explosion of newness? (Relative privacy seems important, no?)

This is a super-OTM question, and is the sort of thing that can lead a person to denounce modern times etc.: Blanchot says that "work takes place in solitude" - he's ultra-theoretical & it's hard to understand exactly what he means by "solitude" but part of it is the isolation that is/may be necessary for new work to occur. But information travels so quickly, and the cultural imperative to be informed is so intense in creative communities, that you almost have to elect to stay uninformed about some things in order to get creative. I would actually attribute the long amount of time we've gone without a new genre to exactly this - lack of privacy; too much available information - but I hate to sound/feel that conservative about things, since shouldn't art be dialogue? Still, Blanchot was no dummy.

At the very least, I worry now when some artist does something interesting, and then another artist tries something similar, and we all cry "rip-off" or "bandwagon-jumping" -- because isn't that the process that brings us new styles? Surely a "genre" is just a bandwagon that lots of people have jumped onto, each bringing enough of their own ideas with them to load up the wagon with something really rich and complicated.

I wondered if this was going on. in the past people isolated themselves and i think its so they could take part in the dialogue...as opposed to watching reactions to each other go back and forth and getting overwhelmed by that and having it dirty up your own ideas. i mean dirt is part of the dialogue, true, but at some time you gotta be able to filter stuff out/process and it depends on the person what level of distance they need. I think artist come in and out of privacy based on where they're at in the processing process...and we may cycle that differently now.

But denouncing "modern times" I think is pointless. People and scenes, above a certain threshhold of exposure (which is almost ridiculously low) are going to be "contaminated". In fact, the "most interesting* thing about "modern times" is the cross-pollenization of genres and styles. No, it doesn't mean I want to listen to all of it, but ye gods, imagine what will happen *after* this!

And I will totally agree that most musicians (at least the ones I know) are mostly rockist, in practice if not in spirit. It would take a lot to force me not to value theory and playing things live and even occasionally writing things out, and trying to go for a live performance over a sequenced one, etc etc. Does this damn sequenced music and modern times? I don't think it does. In fact, I think it feeds the fire.

As for the other half, yes, that's the funny part -- it's not necessarily that the creators are isolated from the mainstream. It's that the mainstream isn't paying attention to the creators -- and by the time it does, the creators have diverged far enough into new territory that they have something really rich to offer. Somewhere out of the limelight, people can be casually and unselfconsciously exciting their own smaller circuit, advancing ideas for that small audience, adding bits here and there to the central new thing -- such that when the mainstream really takes note, the thing itself has legs and flexibility and maturity. This was kind of the case with hip-hop, no? It got lots of exposure as a "fad" or a passing style, but I think by and large the mainstream just observed, and a non-mainstream community got lots of space to get it running. (Current-day hip-hop looks like it works this way -- new developments coming from a core community -- but I think we all know how the mainstream market undercuts that.)

I'm not in favor of damning the modern age, but I do think it's interesting: now, when someone advances a new technique, we tend to turn that into auteurism. It's "their" technique, and we're wary of anyone who imitates it. And we can catch that very early on in the process -- we can put attention on things before they have flexibility or maturity. We think of that as encouraging creativity, but sometimes I think it has a little of the opposite effect -- it could maybe squelch certain wobbly steps that might actually be leading somewhere interesting.

Actually maybe this is the core of it: that kind of thing involves people being willing to put themselves in the service of an idea. They have to sign on to helping "build" something -- together with others. Current thinking can kind of discourage that, I think, because it suggests that you should be able to build something that's all your own.

Genre-less/compositional music allows the opportunity to think beyond the notion that there is no more music left to make.

x post - how come a lot of outsider art isn't looked at because it's not 'inside'?!

Besides post-Straight Outta Compton NWA, Ice Cube solo and Son Of Bazerk, what music out there is really indebted (read: INFLUENCE boogeyman) to Hank Shocklee/Bomb Squad's sound?

Why did that sound end all of the sudden? Did Dre kill that sound dead?

I agree with this, tho I wonder what aspect of popular culture isn't "caught" early on. I think the issue is not in putting attention on it, but in the speed in which judgements and biases are formed. Unfortunately, I don't think peoples' ability to adjust to the speed of info has changed as quickly as the info flow has. If anything, first impressions are much too important now; so more than squelching baby steps, we might simply turn a deaf ear to them.

And of course, should a hermetic musician decide to notice what is happening outside, it's hard (possibly unnaturally difficult?) not to get caught up somehow. Why not try to participate in this or that? Why not try to have fun the way these other people are having fun?

De La Soul and the Biz getting sued?

Yeah, that's exactly why musicians need to have at least some core of hardened "rockist" in them! I mean, there are certainly musicians who can separate their listening from their playing -- they can appreciate all genres but just play (say) rock because, well, that's just what they personally do -- but still, it helps to believe in some aesthetic thing strongly enough to dedicate yourself to it. That's what'll give your music its character -- a set of your own hard-line preferences about what you think music should be like. (I certainly know I had a much easier time making music when I believed more exclusively in the stuff I was doing.)

Why did that sound end all of the sudden?

As said above, it was the lawsuits. And I like to think it was only the lawsuits -- In hindsight people now describe the PE records as a cul-de-sac that had gone as far as it could go, but I think it could have and would have been taken much further in the mainstream if it hadn't become financially impossible to budget for the work method -- but when PE suddenly found themselves spending $20,000 to pre-license one single James Brown sample, and the release of De La Soul's second (best) album was held up a full year just to negotiate the contracts -- commercial artists had to abandon the aesthetic, leaving it to the fringe, giving it the impression that it's been exhausted.

Most people doing patchwork samplepop these days either re-record their samples, or simply sample obscure things from people without the resources to sue.

Sorry.

Yeah, you can hear the Bomb Squad sound in stuff like X Clan from the same era, and it's not just the samples - the beats are generally more stomping and less P-Funky than the Dre-inspired stuff that took over, they reach back into earlier Black music (more James Brown and more Jazz, yeah?) but they're also deliberately Futurist. I don't know if that aesthetic died. I reckon you can hear ripples from it thru Gang Starr and the Geto Boys and even, somehow, in Timbaland (willingness to cast the rhythmic net wider whilst staying committed to the dancefloor unlike the turntablists?)

they sort of got back to trying density with self-created samples on muse sick, which has some great things on it, but it wasn't the same.

drop me an email shaster

anyway, shocklee's shit sounds like garbage to me now. other than white kids who are into anarchist politics and the whole punk/hiphop marriage, who listens to PE anymore?