How long until the term "electro" becomes a dirty word?

It could be argued that the electro revival - meaning a sound that is clearly inspired by '80s aesthetics, square wave synth lines, 808 rhythm patterns etc; along with further exploration and assimilation of that sound with other styles (such as indie, house etc) has been a dominating force in popular music since at least 2001.

In the preceding decade, electro was considered practically extinct; an outmoded aesthetic that died along with the male perm and the shell suit. The majority of dance, hip-hop and rock concentrated on a grungier or less obviously synthetic sound, with the proliferation of samples, scratching, loops, lo-fi production techniques or orchestral arrangements in order to distinguish the '90s from the plastic sound of the previous decade. With the exception of certain niche artists like DMX Krew and I-F, electro simply didn't register on the 90s musical map. In fact, as someone who only started listening to music in 1990, I don't even remember being aware of the term until about '98 or something.

I remember three pivotal albums being released in the early part of this decade, namely Two Lone Swordsmen's "Tiny Reminders", 2ManyDJs' "Radio Soulwax" and Fischerspooner's album of which I forget the name that managed to breathe new life into the electro genre in very different ways.

The 2LS album was the first of many (that I remember hearing) to reimagine electro as a style of pure dance music, and taking influence from records like Man Parrish's "Hip Hop Be Bop Don't Stop" setting a standard that would go on to be developed by many house and technno producers, possibly going on to inform future scenes like microhouse and minimal. The 2ManyDJs album mashed together an eclectic style of new and old tunes with a core vein of electro and retro rock running through it, hence bringing the elctro sound to the indie/alternative contingent. This would allow the proliferation of electro-inspired songwriters from the Knife to LCD Soundsystem to Crystal Castles to Attack Attack! to integrate electro sounds into their songs throughout the noughties.

Fischerspooner were one of many acts along with Miss Kittin, Golden Boy etc to be affiliated with the electroclash movement of the early 2000's. Seen at the time by the dance press as a cheap retroactive fad, the music revelled in its own disposability, casting itself as a hollow, plastic, neon world of bad taste - a concentration of eighties excess and high glam. While the term "electroclash" died out quickly along with most of the campy theatrics exhibited by the likes of Fischerspooner, the sound continued practically wholesale in commercial dance music throughout the decade. Terms like electrohouse, even hairdresser house were coined with huge hits to follow from the likes of David Guetta and the Egg, Freestylers etc.

So what now for electro? Now that it has saturated almost every pore of popular music in one shape or form, from Kanye West to the Passion Pit to Hot Chip to pretty much any style or artist you care to mention who isn't M. Ward; are our ears getting tired of this sound or is it here to stay? I know a number of people on this board are especially bored of what has been derided as "indie electrodribble", a sentiment I can only sympathise with. In dance music, the cheap mid-frequency bleeps of yesterday are now being pushed out by the lush ultra-low bass rumble of dubstep. House is also showing signs of breaking away from the 8-bit shackles of only a few years ago.

So is this electro's death knell? What can we expect from this new bright decade as an all encompassing sound? Are we going to go back to more '90s-inspired aesthetics, thus pursuing the 20-year continuum that many predict? Or what is what I am talking about just a load of bollocks?

i'm at work, so sorry for spelling errors/sentences that don't make sense etc.

i'm at work

evidently

yeah i should do some for that matter

It's not bad, not a huge amount of insight but an okay overview. Your writing style could be improved, perhaps, and I'm not sure your Pop Music Studies lecturer would approve of the word 'bollocks' in the conclusion. Still, you'd probably scrape a 2:1 with it.

Sorry to be an arse, but electro (at least the house, and indie varieties) became a dirty word in about 2005 for me.

Synths once again sound like synths, and it will stay that way. But maybe that will cause some to distance themselves from synth technology to a larger extent again.

xpost to chewshabadoo

but still, there's gobloads of electro-ish stuff being released every week. so even if we're bored of it/hate it, will it develop and thrive or get forgotten again like before?

Synths once again sound like synths

idk, they can sound like pianos, strings, brass (well, kind of).

The question kinda operates on a problematic number of levels... I dunno if this is what Chewshabadoo is getting at but anyone who stans for the 80s originals or arguably even the DMX/Drexciya type end of things will probably be four of five years ahead of you

The word 'electro' has become about as meaningless as 'indie' became in the 90s. It basically means anything made by white people with a synth in it.

yep

Which means it probably won't ever actually go away now.

OTOH if there are people getting butthurt about, like, crabcore dishonouring the spirit of 2005-vintage electrohouse that is kind of marvellous and also kind of http://www.theonion.com/content/node/38773

The word 'electro' has become about as meaningless as 'indie' became in the 90s. It basically means anything made by white people with a synth in it.

To all extents and purposes that's true. I started this thread because of the Big Pink thread where the PR blurb described them as an "electro-rock duo", which is probably the least inspiring thing to hear in 2009 and conjures up all sorts of ghastly images. Not having heard Big Pink's music, I don't know how warranted these are, but all the same, "electro-rock" shouldn't be used as a positive descriptive term in 2009.

It's a way for PR companies to reassure people that X Indie Buzz Band doesn't sound like The Pigeon Detectives.

extents and purposes?

Also there's a couple of slightly dubious arguments and suggestions here.

e.g. the populist dubstep that conceivably "competes" with electro-house shares a lot of the same synthetic mid-range sound design. The "lush" dubstep isn't that popular (yet).

e.g. the big 2 Many DJs mix was great but really didn't influence dance music production at all (though it helped to popularise the notion of electro and electro-house as being the centre of gravity for eclectic pan-genre dance music) - not electroclash, not electrohouse, and certainly not microhouse or minimal. You'd be better off referring to Felix Da Housecat and International Deejay Gigolo there.

I think if the populist dubstep is competing with anything at the moment it's competing with breaks - ie dnb nights at Fabric are now sticking Skream & Benga or Caspa in the side room in lieu of Plump DJs or Layo & Bushwacka. It's not a million miles away sonically and its got the same kind of particularly blokey vibe to it.

I think 2ManyDJs informed electro-rock more than dance music.

as for dubstep, of any kind, i think it's the unique manipulation of bass frequencies that makes it original and enticing for new audiences. of course the fact that it's gone from a specialist dance genre to this massive phenomenon in fairly recent times means that it's likely to go on and inform a lot more music in the coming decade. that ubiquitous la roux remix has been blasting out of cars all summer and that nneka remix by chase & status (who seem to be fast becoming the pendulum of dubstep these days) will be soundtracking the street corner of our road throughout the autumn it seems.

also the fact there are already different factions of dubstep, and that there are possibly(?) more white than black dubstep fans out there these days reflects how electro became a sort of all-pervading influence on subsets of rock, dance, etc.

i can see dubstep continuing as a "pure" style of dance music, but is it fair to predict that elements of dubstep could become a control norm throughout other styles, like what happened with electro in the 00's?

I actually don't understand what you're trying to say at all now.

yeah i don't either. maybe down to having had 4 hours sleep last night.

i think i'm just pondering whether dubstep, or something like it, will be the "electro" of the coming decade, i.e. going on to inform other styles of music, so you could have artists desperately trying to fit dubstep basslines into indie rock tracks (god help us). obviously dubstep doesn't really have the same root origin as electro, but i'm not really trying to dwell on that.

what i also want to get back to is whether the electro influence in music is going to fade away soon or if it's to carry on.

We can answer this question when someone comes up with a convincing definition of what "electro" is.

They have this argument every 6 months on the Erol forum. And the Justice fans sneer at the Boys Noize fans. The Soulwax fans sneer at the Justice fans. The Fischerspooner fans sneer at the Soulwax fans. The Felix Da Housecat fans sneer at the Fischerspooner fans. The Daft Punk fans sneer at the Felix Da Housecat fans. The Afrika Bambaata fans sneer at the Daft Punk fans. The Kraftwerk fans sneer at the Afrika Bambaata fans. The Delia Derbyshire fans sneer at the Kraftwerk fans. The Stockhausen fans sneer at the Delia Derbyshire fans. The hydrocrystalophone fans sneer at the Stockhausen fans.

OK, I made some of those links up. But you get the point.

This stuff will continue to exist so long as a new generations of idiots think there's something new about sticking some WUBaWUBaWUB synth noises on indierock.

I think the first proper electro revival began already in the mid-1990s: I'm talking about stuff like Jedi Knights, Jake Slazenger (and some of Mike Paradinas' µ-Ziq stuff too), Drexciya, Jammin' Unit, Kerosene, Pharma Records, etc. To me Tiny Reminders is a part of that continuum, because Two Lone Swordsmen were already doing electro back in the 1990s (see the Black of Blue Sparks EP, for example). You're right, though, that this stuff wasn't really popular among "mainstream" listeners, but then again, how many of the 00s "electro" artists are truly "mainstream" either?

The difference between the first electro revival and 00s one is that the 90s artists were pretty much building upon the dance/funk/hiphop roots of electro, whereas the 00s stuff has always been a marriage of electro and rock. Even if the current electro stuff doesn't always use "rock" sounds (such as guitars, horrible rock singing/shouting), it definitely has a rock aesthetic: emphasis on harsh/distorted sounds and the high end of the sound spectrum, less funky and less syncopated beats, "edgy" lyrics, and a self-consciously lo-fi aesthetic. (Whereas I think most of the original 80s electro artists weren't lo-fi out of aesthetic choice, but due to more limited hardware and lack of resources.)

When 90s "nu-electro" was replaced by 00s "electroclash" and "indie electro", that's when everything went wrong. To me "electro" itself isn't a dirty word, but the incorporation of the worst elements of rock music into it have diluted/tainted the genre and the term, so whoever comes up with a new genre that builds upon the dance/funk/hiphop aspect of original electro (like 90s nu-electro did) probably has to come up with some other term.

The Stockhausen fans sneer at the Delia Derbyshire fans

No no, I'm sure they get on like a haus on fire

Anyway, in answer to the original thread question, the real shark jumping moment has probably already happened, and that was when Calvin Harris's 'Acceptable In The 80s' came out.

Will the sound disappear? Maybe not, but it'll become astonishingly unfashionable pretty soon, because everything does. Will dubstep dominate 2010s pop? Doubt it. Will some rock bands stick dubstep bass under everything? Probably. I'd imagine Enter Shikari or someone are probably doing it already.

Enter Shikari already have and have attracted even more derision than they already do as a consequence

Tuomas OTM, except I still have fond memories of some of the tracks which came out of the electroclash years, and some of the 03/04? electrohouse sounded good at the time.

what is this thread even about

tuomas, yes there was electro-influenced stuff in the '90s (although I'd have put Drexciya more in the Detroit techno revival category, but that's splitting hairs). I don't think the 00's revival was necessarily a bad thing, just that it's become such a default influence on so much music and such a defining 00's sound that we're all starting to get, well a bit bored of it by now. In five or ten year's time, I think it'll be a sound that will be as synonymous with this decade as (for instance) that '80s new wave slap bass technique that fell out of vogue in the '90s.

that '80s new wave slap bass technique that fell out of vogue in the '90s.

Oh for Christ's sake just stop. You're not really doing anything other than parroting received wisdom and getting it a bit wrong.

Can I start posting electroslash yet?

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v28/hisori/random/studiob1.jpg

that nneka remix by chase & status (who seem to be fast becoming the pendulum of dubstep these days)

chase & status aren't dubstep (tho)

It's a bit like when he said Washing Up was minimal house.

(Sorry, I'm being harsh here, but it's a bit exasperating reading this because it's a very long-winded way of asking "is a currently fashionable sound going to go out of fashion?")

-clash

Matt, mate seriously, I know I might not be as informed on some subjects as you but it seems all you ever do when I start a thread is criticise me and what I'm saying. I don't know what you mean by parroting received wisdom, because I didn't receive anything from anyone - but really I don't understand why every time I post anything on ILM I can almost guarantee you're going to turn up a few minutes later going "ARRGH JUST STOP SAYING WHAT YOU'RE SAYING! YOU IDIOT! DON'T YOU KNOW ANYTHING?". Harsh doesn't even describe it.

If, in your opinion, all meta-music discussion is futile, what's the point in discussing ANYTHING at all short of recommendations lists?

Lex, Chase & Status have been on the dubstep bandwagon for quite some time now, although I know they're originally d'n'b.

http://i4.photobucket.com/albums/y148/Juror8/indie-club-o.gif