indie rock fans defecting to house and techno in the 90's

I'm not an "either/or" kind of person.

ok i dont mean 'either/or' i guess. there was def. a lot of indie rock fans who started listening to a lot of dance music around the late 90's (more rock orientated dance music like big beat, indie rock sucking at the time and drugs too i guess). im including a lot of american indie rockers too.

i always liked dance music but for about 3 years pretended I didn't for fear of being clomped by rockist dickheads in my "friendship" group at school. "Firestarter" changed a lot of that though.

There were an awful lot of indie bands who suddenly traded in their guitars for samplers and drum machines at the turn of the eighties/nineties but I'm inclined from experience to say that the audience for both was more fluid than is generally given credit, at least until Britpop closed it down.

I've listened to house/techno/dance ever since I was a preteen. That's the stuff I grew on, so I've never had to defect there.

I went the other way! Listened to house in the late 80s then got into indie in the early 90s.

what was yer gateway indie record?

I guess friends have a lot to do with it too. Back in the early 90s I had a couple of good friends who were also into electronic music (and rap), and we were all like, "Fuck rock, this is the future!". Later on I made friends who were much more into rock, but by that time I'd already formed my musical identitym so I didn't feel like I should try to listen to rock in order to bond with people.

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1 - yes
2 - never went back

i always liked dance music

-- the next grozart, Friday, 4 July 2008 11:23 (5 minutes ago)

wait aren't you mr 'house is for girls, slow techno doesn't make any sense'?

Why is it that for so many people electronic and dance music have only come years after rock? Is there something in dance that wasn't appealing to these people when they were kids? I wonder if this is a class issue too... I lived and did my elementary school in a working class area, and most of the kids there dug dance music, but at 15 when I went to a (Finnish equivalent of) high school with lots of upper class kids, most of them seemed to prefer metal and rock to dance, because it was more "intelligent" or something.

petridis.jpg

Why is it that for so many people electronic and dance music have only come years after rock? Is there something in dance that wasn't appealing to these people when they were kids? I wonder if this is a class issue too... I lived and did my elementary school in a working class area, and most of the kids there dug dance music, but at 15 when I went to a (Finnish equivalent of) high school with lots of upper class kids, most of them seemed to prefer metal and rock to dance, because it was more "intelligent" or something.

too much style and no 'substance' for middle class rockers?

what was yer gateway indie record?

i always liked dance music

-- the next grozart, Friday, 4 July 2008 11:23 (5 minutes ago)

wait aren't you mr 'house is for girls, slow techno doesn't make any sense'?

-- blueski, Friday, 4 July 2008 12:30 (9 minutes ago) Bookmark Link

What's your point?

oh wait... woops :-D

Hallo boys and girls, anyone seen that naughty crocodile who ran away with my sausages? /sp

Why is it that for so many people electronic and dance music have only come years after rock?

rock and roll invented ca. 1955
techno invented ca. 1987

When I was about 13 circa '93 all kinds of kids at my school listened to Dreamscape tapes and such a lot but a few years after that there didn't seem to be anyone at school who was big into drum'n'bass. Bear in mind this is Cornwall and grunge was still a monolith genre/fashion in like 1997

Don't think that was Tuomas' point Tracer?

The first time I noticed a sea change in music was around 2000 when all the trance kids at my school suddenly started going "Hey, have you heard of this Papa Roach band? That's shit's pretty cool"

Why is it that for so many people electronic and dance music have only come years after rock?

rock and roll invented ca. 1955
techno invented ca. 1987

Well, obviously I meant only people who weren't yet past their teens when electronic/dance music broke through. I know several such people who only got into dance music in the late 90s or 00s.

Why is it that for so many people electronic and dance music have only come years after rock?

i seriously think this is largely just down to how much exposure you had to parents or equivalent authoriative elders rubbishing the crazy new sounds they didn't understand at the time when you were growing up

I'm not an "either/or" kind of person.

I'm not either, but when I find something new it can take over my life, and for a while in the 90s techno and house did just that. It wasn't just the music, but the whole, eh, lifestyle that goes with it.

Great days man. When will they come back?

I did largely drift back to something approximating to indie rock, partly thanks to B&S. I reckon losing my connection to the eh dance music lifestyle was also significant here.

But I thought kids always prefer the stuff their parents hate! At least for me, my mum and dad not getting techno was only further proof that is was something new and cool.

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Aren't you meant to rebel against yr parents?

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My folks liked The Velvet Underground and derek Bailey. I got into punk then also jungle.

most people don't actually rebel against their parents do they?

Nah, that's just dumb sociological received wisdom

my prents were into pre-highway 61 bob dylan, and jimmy cliff. and don williams. and judy collins and charlie parker and miles davis and the russian army chorus.

I think if anything most people continue their parents' taste for music into a new generation, qf the kids of folkies or second gen Asians moving into nu-folk or desi beats.

xp

most people don't actually rebel against their parents do they?

Maybe not, but I've never known a teen who would've ignored some new type of music just because her parents didn't understand it.

i was talking about pre-teens really. even tho most people don't start buying music until adolescence they're still exposed to radio and chart music as a kid and ideas/feelings towards it are formed early on.

i have a very vivid memory of being six years old and someone asking me what kinds of music i liked, and answering that i liked rock, but "soft rock, like phil collins"

I don't think I 'defected' so much as just realised that my mates who shit-talked dance music were doing just that, talking shit, and hadn't ever actually listened to Orbital / Prodigy / Warp records / whatever.

and hadn't ever actually listened to Orbital / Prodigy / Warp records / whatever.

yeah if they had they'd have realised how indie rock these guys were anyway

There was a decent thread on here a few years ago called something like 'what would your parents listen to if they were kids now?' - I'll have a look

Based on what your parents listened to in their youth, what do you think they'd listen to if they were young right now?

Exactly, SteveM.

1 - yes (though mainly to ambient-dub-techno as opposed to house)
2 - went back for a few weeks a couple of years ago, realised it was not worth the effort, so left again.

The borders between the two seem quite fluid now, among the kids at least. When I was at school these borders were RIGID, no one at my school liked guitar music except myself and about six others - any divide evaporated pretty quickly past the age of 17 or so though.

Isn't the lag time w/r/t rock kids crossing over to dance music fairly simple to explain: at some point in their early to mid teens, lots of kids become uncomfortable with really commercial stuff of any genre - which rules out house-pop, trance-pop etc. But they haven't abandoned a commitment to songs, so they're not yet in a position to embrace instrumental dance music.

I started getting into both rock and dance music at roughly the same time - 14 yrs old.

i did this, more or less, in 2004

or really 2005

at age 19--my gateway, like tons of assholes my age, was daft punk

I was kind of the other way around, then back again multiple times.

Acid house came about when I was about 13, and that was the first music other than C64 music and pop (and the classical my parents played) I'd ever really listened to as a 'genre'. A couple of years later I got into metal through school friends, and then Nirvana gave me a good jumping out point from that ghetto into more indie territory, whilst simulataneously John Peel and drugs gave me a good jumping in point to ambient house like The Orb and Aphex Twin or Warp stuff - and then later onto hardcore and jungle. After that I was back more into the indie fold, albeit post-rock styled, for a few years but still listening to the odd bit of dance music here and there. Finally, moving to a city with a decent club scene got me right back into house and techno about 5 or 6 years ago - that and the emergence of "minimal".

Haven't "defected" back to indie/rock yet but not discounting the possibility. It just sounds so formulaic at the moment though (although to be honest house and techno probably are, but I'm only now getting the same depth of knowledge about them, and there's still lots of old stuff to explore.)

at some point in their early to mid teens, lots of kids become uncomfortable with really commercial stuff of any genre - which rules out house-pop, trance-pop etc. But they haven't abandoned a commitment to songs, so they're not yet in a position to embrace instrumental dance music.

makes sense but what keeps some kids from not doing this or from not being particularly biased in favour of the idea of 'songs' (and vocals)?

also to draw on personal experience, how come you were getting into both at 14? just because both dance music had 'gone overground' and alternative takes on rock had also become more mainstream by that point?

Well I don't think anything as vague as "kids become uncomfortable with commercial stuff" etc. is gonna apply across the board. What you're exposed to does play a role here too of course.

Case in point: for me and most of my friendship group commercial stuff was never anathema. I knew that lots of kids at school had hang-ups about listening to stuff outside a range of punk/grunge/metal, but I didn't listen to much of that, and the 80s/90s indie rock I did listen to was just unknown and uninteresting to anyone I knew. It was almost a case of listening to The Comsat Angels or Sonic Youth in private and talking about Spice Girls in public.

In terms of rock vs dance music, it was more that a lot of the music I started getting into at 13 (Bjork, Portishead, Garbage, Tricky, EBTG, Massive Attack) was already poised at an intersection between (among other things) rock and dance (albeit a songful version thereof) - so I just branched in both directions rather than starting from rock. But my early dance music purchases were terribly predictable - The Prodigy, The Chemical Bros, Aphex Twin, Moby, a very small assorted smattering of other big beat, house etc. Dance music effectively didn't exist outside of the stuff like that I would see the music videos for. There was no stigma against it but it didn't occur to me that my exposure to date had been the merest drop in the ocean.

And I basically stopped there for two years and then started delving further - Orbital, 808 State, The Orb, and then into drum & bass. Remedy was probably the tipping point after which the majority of my purchases became dance music. And of course at that point dance music had begun to seem like Mary Poppins' magic bag.

i looped around a lot, was always pretty into indie stuff like the pixies as a teen but at the same time loved to smoke up and listen to the orb. so uh... i dunno, i'm sure it's usually kind of messy despite the odd saul on the road to damascus conversion experience.

RHCP being my favourite band at the time xp

indie rock fans defecating to house and techno in the 90's

amazingly just thought this when looking at new answers, re-open thread and there it plops

Where are my electronic punks at?

http://www.djkookane.com/techno.gif

tru pioneer

http://www.cyberpunkreview.com/images_music/cyberpunk_idol1.jpg

if music was about being in the middle of the craziness - which it was for me in my late teens and early 20s - techno and house was the only way to go

i mean sure, other music was crazy, but going to see the boredoms you might as well be at the village vaguard - for me techno was about the crowd at least as much as about the music

"there it plops" i lol'ed

"Where are my electronic punks at?"

hi.

that time on 90210 where Brandon got slipped a hit of "Euphoria" at some rave convinced me that dance music was too dangerous for me

But what I'm more interested in is, why do so many middle-class/upper-class kids choose rock instead of dance music to begin with?

the way you ask the question implies that they've made the wrong decision...as if people went awry by listening to rock instead of dance. that's the same attitude the anti-dance arguments you had to face.

plus, it's based on a fallacy - it extrapolates a broad conclusion from a small study sample that isn't necessarily representative. when I was growing up, going to a comprehensive school attended by people from a range of social backgrounds for whom dance music was the default, dominant form, both in underground and mainstream varieties. rock and indie were very much minority, freak pursuits, and their followers came from all over the class spectrum too.

point being, based on my experience I could ask 'why do so many middle-class kids choose dance instead of rock?' - complete with pernicious implication of wrongness.

I just don't recognise the example you give at all. at least, it's certainly not universal.

I was a subversive by 16, a full out traitor by 18, and now at 20, I'm nearing the point of militant fanaticism.

" ...high school with lots of upper class kids,"

I didn't know they had an aristocracy in Finland.

I liked dance music from "Love can't turn around" and kind of kept in touch with it for a few years ( I somehow own the 12" of Human resources "Dominator" for instance) but crucially, being an anti social git with few friends I was never involved in the social side of it, and rarely got to dance to it.
Pre-internet days unless you were able to put the time and money into following it it was pretty much a closed shop, apart from the big album bands(Underworld, Orbital etc).

Haha, I was the other way around, house then indie. House I never really got ALL that into and I've since distanced myself from both, though I don't reject either.

Didn't a lot of this happen when you had lots of "serious" crossover dance acts such as Prodigy, Underworld, Orbital, Leftfield etc. appearing? I mean, you never found the typical indie fan digging out compilations with really obscure trance tracks. Indie fans would still prefer to stick to the "big" and "important" acts.

And of course it couldn't last anyway.

hey Geir why not display the strength of your convictions and actually call out each of the people on the thread who claimed it did last or had other gateway records and tell them that they're lying and explain why?

oh right, cos that would involved actually reading the thread

Actually, I think Geir's OTM. Maybe not for the people on this thread... but then again, those people aren't typical indie fans.

It's probably not fair to say the dance music was vapid and shallow, but the scene sure was. I remember going to 7th Street Entry in 1990 for their "Acid/House" nights on Thursdays, with neon ribbons and other fun neo-psychedelic decor. I easily accepted all types of music and it was fun, but over the years as that stuff got more and more popular, I realized it was getting sort of oppressive. Dates would want to go dancing 'til 3, 4 in the morning, and I felt like a monkey having to jump through flaming loops, repeatedly, for hours. I realized if I found girls who liked going to rock shows with me, bands were usually done not long after midnight, leaving much more time for sex. Yay rock 'n' roll!

I was a died in the wool underground guitar snob. Sampling, drum machines et al was for cheats.OK, there were exceptions but mainly mainstream stuff like Numan

Some local blokes I knew called Fila Brazillia released an album called Maim That Tune in , I think 95/96. I was hooked.Think I heard Leave Home by The Chemical Brothers too

That coupled with Underworld's Born Slippy got me digging beyongd the big three - Orbital, Underworld and Chemical Brothers. Oh and the Orb.

I was obsessed with Drum and Bass for a while and loved dancing to that. Oh dear. It reminded me of Hardcore Punk which I was obsessed with from mid eighties onwards

From that got into the much maligned ambient DnB like LTJ Bukem and Spring Heeled Jack. Still love that stuff

Around that time too was Shadow's 'Entroducing'

I probably listened to more techno, electronic - or whatever you want to call it than guitar music

A mate of mine dabbled hilariously and bought some real shit. He never listens to it now and is now exclusively back to punk rock.His loss.

If anybody cares, I have now definitely come back home to guitar but still search for decent other.
More soundscape bollocks like Fennesz, Tim Hecker, Eno. M83.
I still prefer GG Allin though

Got me celebrating Britishs too. Put paid to my USA
obsessions. Way better at it us tea drinkers

I was a C86 type indiekid, and I think it was latent loyalty to Primal Scream and Screamadelica and Transglobal Underground for me, together with a little interest in Underworld and Leftfield. Then a friend gave me Autechre's Cichli Suite and I drifted into more abstract idmish stuff.

i thought autechre were sellouts

Indie until my late teens. I started to develop an interest in artists like Underworld and labels like Warp, Mo' Wax etc because the first thing that made me notice them was their sleeve / promo art (was at art college at the time. They seemed to care about the whole package and have total independent creative control.

The whole indie thing started to feel more and more contrived to me (this I 'spose would have been around '98-'99) and I wasn't hearing any genuinely progressive music. Was too much of a pussy to dive headfirst into house and techno tho, had to have my hand held by stuff like Massive Attack, some Primal Scream, stuff that still had a conventional song-type structure.

I think my path is probably the same as many other people here; rock acts do the remix thing, and if you're curious enough you'll check out the producers own stuff, if its inspiring enough you just go further down that road.

I really only listen to electronic music now, which is mainly tech stuff and BC-type stuff; much more boundary-pushing and sexy. These scenes aren't so bothered by the vagaries of fashion either, which indie / rock / whatever seems more than a little preoccupied with.

I'm never going back.

I don't think I ever saw it as being an either/or type of thing. In 90/91 I would have probably self-identified as an 'indie kid' (rather than an 'indie rock fan') and virtually every record I bought (apart from 'Charly' by the Prodigy, for some reason) was indie/'alternative' (in a Ride/MBV/Pixies/Wedding Present kind of way) and I went to loads of gigs, but never to nightclubs.... but I don't think I ever saw house/techno as 'the opposition'. If I saw myself as against anything at that time it was the Bryan Adams / Jive Bunny / Sonia / Timmy Mallet hell that was going on in the charts at that time. I wasn't especially into indie music before 1990 and I'd bought the S-Express / M/A/R/R/S / Coldcut / Steve Silk Hurley stuff that had charted in the late 80s, so it's not like I was violently opposed to the acid house / rave scene, it just seemed to be taking place in a different world to mine.

By about mid-92 I was losing interest in the indie scene, but I didn't have any one record that made me change favoured genre overnight. I had friends that were into rave (as it was still just about called at that time) and I gradually started listening to that, but also to a lot of older guitar stuff. Like a lot of people that had been into the MBV-style experimental stuff I got into the ambient electronic stuff like Aphex Twin in 93 and there were ex-indie groups like Slowdive and Seefeel moving in that direction too. From there I kind of branched in two directions: on the one hand the downtempo ninja / mo' wax / Bristol 'trip hop' stuff (and on into drum n bass), and on the other into hard house / techno / acid trance (a lot of which I wouldn't dream of listening to today). By 1995 I was only buying this stuff and going clubbing, no gigs (apart from when the Stone Roses toured as I'd missed them first time around) and no guitar music (except Blur, oddly enough).

Nowadays I just listen to whatever I feel like.

I'm never going back.

"We're gonna keep on rocking forever... forever... forever"

These scenes aren't so bothered by the vagaries of fashion either, which indie / rock / whatever seems more than a little preoccupied with.

You could name different subsets of dance and indie respectively where the opposite would be true, though

You could name different subsets of dance and indie respectively where the opposite would be true, though

Yeah, that's a fair point. Bloodless electro house, Dubstep etc will probably fall out of favour at some point. Maybe it already has? I dunno. I wouldn't have a clue what's hip in the world of indie now, but from observing some of the stuff that gets on tv I'm better off out of it.

oddly enough, when I started getting into electronic stuff, it didn't mean I had to renounce other stuff I also liked

maybe this is because I take care of my religious-loyalty affiliations in church

These scenes aren't so bothered by the vagaries of fashion either, which indie / rock / whatever seems more than a little preoccupied with.

The avoidance of the star system and the relative facelessness of the acts is one thing I really liked about electronic music in the early 90s, and I guess I still do, though these days of course there are of electronic music stars too. I do realize that being anonymous can also be a stylistic choice, but I still think there's something interesting about not wanting to put your persona on the front. For example, a while ago I bought the new album by Pole, and it came with a set of press photos of him, and only when I looked at them did I realize that even though the guy had been one of my favourite artists for several years, I'd never tried to look for his photos on the net, nor had I even thought about what he might look like, because what does it matter? I know "music should speak for itself" is kind of a naive idea, and in many genres the image of the artist is a big part of the enjoyment, but I like the idea how in instrumental electronic music the artist can totally disappear behind the tunes.

"Where are my electronic punks at?

-- Display Name"

i guess i might be as close as it comes. my first musical love of my own (aside from what my parents liked) was hiphop in the mid to late 80s. then i started liking more pop dance into the early 90s. there was a radio station in pittsburgh at the time Mix Jamz that played a lot of dancey hiphop and dance music mixed together poorly that probably helped facilitate that. then in 91 Nirvana came out and i began to discover more underground rock which led me to punk, all while still largely listening to hiphop. more electronic rock oriented stuff like industrial music led me down the road of instrumentals (NIN's use of Coil and Aphex in 95 to do remixes for their album certainly helped out as well) then in 96 i heard jungle which combined the energy of punk with hiphop and reggae, and it all started to make sense. i have since then grown progressively tired with rock music of all sorts. i never liked "indie" of any sort really, unless you count Fugazi or some shit like that.

oddly enough, when I started getting into electronic stuff, it didn't mean I had to renounce other stuff I also liked

Not saying that I woke up one day, had a funny turn and took all my indie stuff down to the chazza. I still love early Verve, New Order, Echo & the Bunnymen and will do till the day I die. I just dont hear any new guitar stuff that makes me think "shit, must investigate". I downloaded that MGMT album the other day on the off chance tho and thought that was alright.

yeah I feel that, it's a question of where the innovation & creativity is no doubt, but when ppl talk like "and just like that this shit I had been repping real hard lost all interest" I'm like "oh, cool, I get it: you're a POSEUR"

"yeah I feel that, it's a question of where the innovation & creativity is no doubt, but when ppl talk like "and just like that this shit I had been repping real hard lost all interest" I'm like "oh, cool, I get it: you're a POSEUR""

This seems unfair. John have you never had the experience of a sudden and rather precipitous drop in interest in a particular type of music?

I think this often happens when your tastes are drifting in one direction and the style of music you like is drifting in the other. So it's like two trains pulling out of the one station but going in opposite directions - the space between the trains increases at twice the rate of their individual movement.

assuming they are going the same speed :D

Or twice the average of their individual movements :-P

The avoidance of the star system and the relative facelessness of the acts is one thing I really liked about electronic music in the early 90s

The facelessness itself may have been isolatedly a good idea as it kept the focus on music itself rather than a lot of outside stuff such as image.

The problem, however, was that you would have a jungle of different stuff that was more or less completely impossible to navigate in. You need sort of a canon to distinguish the most important stuff from less important stuff. Which was good when electronica "stars" such as Prodigy, Leftfield, Underworld etc started appearing. And of course most of these would still keep a rather faceless image in a way, at least apart from Prodigy (whose frontmen were not the ones who actually made the music). Still you need some big representative names to spearhead the genres.

None of those three were really 'representative' of much but themselves though - they got popular by doing something a bit different (and maybe also by playing live/using guitars, but still)

You need sort of a canon to distinguish the most important stuff from less important stuff.

Get one scenius Geir.

At the risk of massive over-simplification...

C86-style bands killed off my interest in indie at around the time that I started listening to house in the second half of 1986. (Nottingham clubs were early adopters for house music, so the 1988 Summer of Love didn't make much of an impact as we were already up and running.) As club music got less recognisably soul/funk/R&B influenced at the start of the 1990s, I then got pushed into a snotty soulboy ghetto for a while. Rock-wise, the whole late 1980s Pixies/Husker Du/Sonic Youth thing more or less passed me by. I started listening to guitar music again at the back end of 1991, thanks to Throwing Muses/Teenage Fanclub/Nirvana/Trompe Le Monde, followed by Sugar/PJ Harvey - but the joys of techno eluded me until a combination of Ultramarine, Volume magazine and the Orbital brown album showed me the way in early 1993. 1993 felt like my real turning point, in terms of fully re-engaging with both guitar music and electronic music. It felt like things were starting all over again.

"and just like that this shit I had been repping real hard lost all interest" I'm like "oh, cool, I get it: you're a POSEUR""

Yeah, because having a natural curiosity and hunger to hear something fresh makes you a proper try-hard.

C86-style bands killed off my interest in indie at around the time that I started listening to house in the second half of 1986.

ditt.o
as i suspect most will know, ironically, my own conversion away from indie rock was down to one of the so called c86 crew - age of chance.
their delving into dance culture (albeit with their love for guitar noise) via their 12" remixes mirrored my own needs, thus making me 'discover' chicago acid house, and detroit etc etc.
life was never the same again.
and in 2008 i cant deny it, but very little new indie rock comes anywhere near my playlist ..

I lived and did my elementary school in a working class area, and most of the kids there dug dance music, but at 15 when I went to a (Finnish equivalent of) high school with lots of upper class kids, most of them seemed to prefer metal and rock to dance, because it was more "intelligent" or something.

This was reversed where I live, and I think in most of America.

Yeah, I do realize that I was mostly speaking from a (continental) European point of view. Mayber I'm wrong, I assume the biggest reason why this is reverse in the US is that electronic music never made the charts in the same way as it did in Europe, so it remained more of underground thing, and therefore was more acceptable for elitist hipsters rather being condemned as brainless pastime for masses of raving idiots?

Also, is it true that, much more than in Europe, house in the US has been mocked by ignorants as mere "gay music"?

how could anyone actually answer that on a factual basis?

basically electronic music is a niche thing in the us and the whole social dynamic described above doesnt really apply - which isnt to say there arent people who stopped listening to rock and took up w/teh whoomp whoomp

its pretty lol to imagine techno as the dominant pop music here

I think there's a significant stratification among electronic music fans in Europe too - the more hipsterish and intellectual fans have usually tended to steer towards more cold and abstract and less dancey genres such as IDM/ambient/"minimal", whereas genres like gabba or trance are often disdained as brainless prole music.

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