Since the electronic /dance revolution of 1988 there has been no excuse for anyone with any creativity to be involved in the sad world of (electric-guitar orientated) rock. Discuss

DISCUSS, DAMN YOU!

Try listening to a contemporary piece of dance music, broseph.

The statement is pretty dumb. Though it is somewhere near having a point. For a variety of reasons the continuing ubiquity of 4 or 5 casually dressed white guys with tousled hair and guitars is a bit vexing.

And I'd say the faceless likes of Britney Spears are a good bit more ubiquitous, and (somehow) a good bit more continuing, than most things that could be classified as "rock".

Fuck appearances, the sound of electronic music is a bit vexing. And, anyway, what's so much better about a bald white guy or some "urban"-looking douche with a trendy hat?

http://www.bbc.co.uk/music/profiles/images/rem_main.jpg

right up there with dj harry.

and jibba, if you think that effete well-dressed german men are urban then i envy your urban areas.

now if that'd read "1972" ...

Ah, fuck it. I'm going to go eat some soup.

A) The closer you look at the so-called revolution (like most cultural events) the less it truly was a watershed. Electronic music of that kind stretches back before then and in '88 it wasn't clear that this was the future, more another reinvention of 80s club culture. If it isn't a revolution, why the need to take sides? I'd also agree with Reynold's argument in Blissed Out, that the late 80s saw a very vibrant crop of artists using rock.

What's more I'd argue that in the late 90s, dance music's belief in its own progressiveness weighed it down just as rock once had, leading to a lack of innovation. In the 90s you didn't get new records every year. You got new genres (and I think it's too redunctionist to simply say these were media inventions). This had to stop and indeed did (for a while).

I do remember during the time when dance seemed to flounder (generally - there's always shoots of life but there were, I would argue less around) buying the Sonic Mook Experiment Volume 2 and being so refreshed by the simple dumb fun of the music, which had been lacking from much of electronic music increasingly.

B) The same technological changes that affected electronic music also influenced guitar music - it is possible to make guitar music that is new and innovative because new technologies made it possible. At the same time, dance music's aesthetic gave new paths to creativity in guitar music. Post-rock is a good example, as is Radiohead.

C) The guitar as an instrument simply still hasn't been exhausted. Every time I tend to think so, I'm generally proved wrong. Your argument is like saying there's no point dealing with acoustic guitars one the electric one has been invented.

someone think of another one!

fuck custard!

XP

a technical innovation /= a real musical innovation. the medium is not the message, not any more.

can we plz compare recent dance 12"es with rock 12"es now?

that's not what i'm interested in doing fez (you seem to think i'm on the dance=innovative side of this which i'm not).

i hear lots of good stuff which excites me but as far as innovation goes i'm having to go back in time (and into areas other than rock and dance mostly) to find that.

"Stay Fly" is great; so is "Poppin' My Collar". But after six months, I still haven't gotten through that fucking album. That's my big problem with hip-hop these days -- Trudging through those 20-song monstrosities is *work*, not fun, especially when, half the time, you have to dig under vocals and lyrics that just get in the way to find the potential future-of-pop beats underneath (not saying that's the case with those particular 3-6 songs, though.) I always figure that there will be a handful of songs I'll like a lot on the Juvenile album, or the Dem Franchize Boyz album, or the E-40 album, or the T.I. album, or the Cam'ron album, or (okay, I'm gonna be toally blasphemous now) the Ghostface album, but it takes me so long to dig through all the useless shit I just give up. (And right, that's partly *my* problem, but it's also a problem with the 20-song monstrosities.) (Mix "tapes" are better and worse because, sure, they often have a few songs that jump out and sound good, but often the songs have nothing to do with each other, and the rest usually sounds inconsequential. So does that means it's a good mixtape or a bad one?) (And all that said, I put Lil Wayne and Mannie Fresh in my top ten last year. I LIKE hip-hop now, just don't love it. Same goes with electronica -- I have nothing *against* the stuff. It's fine.)

what i mean to say is that 10-15 years ago it was kind of a given that people working in the electronic genre (medium) were being more innovative that rock musicians (or so it seemed to me at the time). now though, vocodering a guitar is no more interesting to me (in itself) than using a computer or playing a harp. no medium has the upper hand in terms of innovation now.

i've heard so much good music recently but the innovative stuff i have heard has been by Robert Ashley and Dave Behrman and James Tenney (and some of that is over 30 years old).

oh yes me too. i forgot about alva.noto and especially alva.noto with Ryichi Sakamoto. that was another thing that made my jaw drop. also The Necks' "Mosquito".

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v438/Pawlie/Music%20Equipment/Ovationpreacher.jpg

Wolfmother riled me up, or maybe rather the meme that is Wolfmother riled me up. But I wasn't confused and I could dance to "Love Train."

As for the Ovation Preacher, we also have to mention it's Josh Homme's favorite guitar.

Which means I have listened to a lot more guitar oriented music after the hip-hop revolution than I did during most of the 80s.

I think you missed the joke in the post you're replying to, and I'm not sure what you mean. There are plenty of people making melodic pop music that makes heavy use of electronic or other non-guitar accompaniments.

I know that one debut major label CD by A Guy Called Gerald did that, and after ripping it, this was the case.

This was AudioGrabber though. Other software may act differently.

lol wrong norwegian

Today, yes. In 1990 they weren't a lot. At least not in the charts. Depeche Mode, Erasure and Pet Shop Boys. And that was it, basically.

If some different sound comes catches on like software granular synththesis or using found sounds, within a few months there are scads of bedroom producers doing the exact same thing. I think all of these copy cats are why some producers just end up fading away and never putting anything else out or have to completely drop their sound and start over to keep going.

yay for happy endings!!

This phrase is deserving of its own thread. I think this phrase has, in certain ways, stilted music creativity across all genres, whether in a retro context, or in a bleeding-edge context.

Jesus Jones, OK. And to some extent EMF (except their songs had bad and repetitive melodies). Utah Saints were not at all melodic, other than sampling, which doesn't count.

The problem is the stupid bands out there like WOLFMOTHER that have no creativity whatsoever and do not use the guitar to its full potential, or to any potential. They mimick the sounds of led zep with their les pauls but the sad reality is that led zep sounded better than that anyway.. the rawness of the guitar is lost in todays mixes by todays mix engineers and it all sounds fuzzy and the same. so yes, i agree with this thread topic, all that 'retro rock' is nonsense, boring and for some reason loved by the plebs. but let them be plebs, im not complaining. holdsworth, metheny, even van halen.... their recordings still exist and make ME happy and i'm happy with that.

these are barely touched.

*ok, this hase been somewhat charted, but it's still a newborn baby/

flirt with new language! build a lego palace

-- QuantumNoise (heavy_music2000@

They would fit quite nicely into a deep dark pit, as far away from me as possible.

But what about Jesus Jones?