PUMP UP THE VOLUME /V/S/ PUMP UP THE JAM

this "It Takes Two" voter is all about "Pump Up The Volume"

pump up the jam is funner.

Pawmp up the jam

Both these songs are about pumping.

I just realised that.

ha I was just about to comment on "Pomp up the jam" although listening to it now it seems it's more "Pump up the jam/Pump it up/While your feet are stumpin'"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iMjG2s6UOaw

and u'll find out if u do that

HARD!

Pump up the Jam even if only because it has a soft spot in my heart as I clearly remember one of my cousin's German friends asking me if I knew it by singing it in very heavily accented English. Also, it is a jam.

technotronic has certain flaws imo

keep talkin

pump up the volume was totally mind blowing the first time i heard it

I was always a little made that Felly was named "Felly"

it just seems like anyone named "Felly" should have a mustache

Technotronic Vs Snap

such a treat

I don't remember why that was locked but I can't argue with the decision

Ya Kid K`s voices is a member in every music world

― loeiok (triamas✧✧✧@yak✧✧✧.c✧✧), Wednesday, November 12, 2003 4:53 PM (7 years ago) Bookmark

Pump Up The Jam is incredible. There's a strange two-note synth sound that starts around 1:20 which reminds me of Laura Palmer's theme. There's something strangely dark and almost industrial about the bassline too. Feels like it has one foot in the EBM / New Beat camp and the other in straight Eurodance. Much more interesting than Pump Up The Volume. Both classics, though.

Technotronic is absolutely tied to New Beat, there's no doubt about that.

still, only one of these songs samples Ofra Haza

pump up the volume no question

YA KID K VS REGGIE VS FELLY VS MC ERIC (TECHNOTRONIC)

locked again

went "pump up the volume" but could easily go either way

It Takes Two > Pump Up The Jam > Pump Up The Volume

all ridiculously classic

I clearly remember one of my cousin's German friends asking me if I knew it by singing it in very heavily accented English.

I was on a French exchange in 1989 and made friends with one of the French girls in school because we both like Technotronic. This music will unite us all.

a girl :) She looks like a boy , i know in 1990. Thers a pic in www.nenemusik.com --popdance--- Ya Kid K from 2003 She looks like great

― triamas✧✧✧@yak✧✧✧.c✧✧ (triamas✧✧✧@yak✧✧✧.c✧✧), Wednesday, November 12, 2003

pump up the jam >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

the threads were locked because either Ya Kid K herself or the prez of her fanclub was starting a whole bunch of Technotronic threads all on the same night

Pump Up the Jam is cute but Pump Up the Volume is much, much better, sonically it's a fucking wonder

pump up the jam >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

― sorry for party blogging (D-40), Friday, September 16, 2011 8:14 PM (59 minutes ago) Bookmark

yes yes I know you guys really treasure your childhood memories but as grown up music dudes you should rep for the clearly better jam here i.e. the one that doesn't have "get your booty on the floor tonight, make my day" in the chorus

WHAT

Pump up the jam makes volume seem leaden by comparison

Aero are u arguing for or against "jam" that last post is unclear

-1 to pump up the volume for not having "get your booty on the floor tonight, make my day" in the chorus

wow today's youth really are overly stimulated if "Pump Up The Volume" comes across as "leaden"

although they are saying this in defense of a song made up of 8 measures looped for 5 minutes so maybe it is us oldies who are overstimulated

the use of the | or / as a stylistic device is underused

just played pump up the volume for the first time

have probably played the first ar kane album about fifty times

i weirdly have no opinion about this question

gonna go listen to both in a row and see how i feel

pump up the jam is also one of the greatest videos ever

wow today's youth really are overly stimulated if "Pump Up The Volume" comes across as "leaden"

today's youth like yesterday's iirc will exaggerate the seriousness of any claim just to have something to argue about

I may not rc in my world of old codgers however

fyi google sez

http://i.imgur.com/8OUk3.png

as grown up music dudes you should rep for the clearly better jam here i.e. the one that doesn't have "get your booty on the floor tonight, make my day" in the chorus

This is Folly Itself, as William Blake would say.

anyone want to predict my verdict here before i weigh in

lol @ "pump up the kicks"

some dude you are going to vote for 'pump up the

there was a kid on my floor freshman year who drove four hours to see technotronic

he probably owns my company now or something

Pump Up the Volume always seemed to me to be trying too hard (to what? be edgy? something like that).

http://www.canningbasics.com/images/jamthing.jpg

Aero are u arguing for or against "jam" that last post is unclear

anyway pump up the jam is a fun but hopelessly dumb dance jam, no harm, nice synth sound, inane lyric but there's something about ya kid k's sort of disinterested reading that's compelling

pump up the volume is one of those songs that when the key sounds in it drop through a decent system you think "I want to die, right here, tonight, on this dance floor"

IOW pump up the volume = I'm that type of guy, pump up the jam = paid in full

ugh I hate VEVO why is the LMFAO guy at the left of my pump up the jam youtube vid

hets like "epochal" art.

gays like to pump

what do gay people like instead of the Beatles?

Crystal Waters.

Disney World

i have some serious thinking to do

gays otm

http://images.quickblogcast.com/39531-36457/gay_days_disneyland_anaheim.jpg

I knew that it takes two partisans were actually PUTJ supporters

ok awesome

medium #rare

A deserved victory for the wise-in-their-silence majority.

lol

much like the irl u.s. 'silent majority' theyre a dominant majority that perceives itself as a persecuted minority

deej otm, it is seriously overwhelming how many times I've heard people who like pump up the jam complaining about their persecution & their outsider status - it's like a constant drone permeating the mediascape

hahaha deej u crazy for that one!

deej otm, it is seriously overwhelming how many times I've heard people who like pump up the jam complaining about their persecution & their outsider status - it's like a constant drone permeating the mediascape

these same people voted for Bush iirc

I'm moving this over to the longest thread in ilx history which spawned some of our most contentious beefs, PEOPLE WHO LIKE 'PUMP UP THE VOLUME': WHY ARE THEY SO BAD AND HATED?

Is the DMB thread really the longest on ILX? I've never tried to read it.

hets like "epochal" art.

I seriously wanna beef about these scarequotes though. because here's the deal. the longstanding (going on 50 years I think) movement within the academy & criticism to interrogate canons* and to remain on guard against received wisdom, generally-accepted Big Cultural Moments, etc., is the long view a healthy tendency I think. But when it filters down to generalized rejection of anything that's heralded as momentous, then it's not only no longer healthy: it's moronic. People don't praise It Takes A Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back because they feel the urge to conform with the received view of it; it's a masterpiece, and I don't think a healthy suspicion of received wisdom actually disallows masterpieces or really unseats any of them. "Pump Up the Volume" is a watch with many working parts; its potential to be text-productive is pretty readily apparent. You could wring a fair amount of prose from "Pump Up the Jam," but only if you wanted to prove a point. "Liking epochal art" I don't think is in play so much here as "favoring a dense text over a transparent one."

*...CANNONS

the first grocery bag footnote???

that's me, just setting rap trends yet again

epochal moment

I think it's cool that different people have different standards but what really unites us is dance and I feel this community was really fractured by this debate so why don't we start the healing process with some dancing and for that I will put on

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9EcjWd-O4jI

Good idea.

I trust you know I was having a laugh, aero.

I'm part of a historically aggrieved minority; we know something about praising stuff because it's epochal, you know.

aww man I was ready to throw down about "important" "works" of "art" and stuff :(

but now you're dancing

I was with you aero until you attributed picking PUTJ towards a 'generalized rejection of anything that's momentous' impulse - I think PUTJ fans have made some strong arguments here!

no I agree with you there, I was putting Alfred's remark inside the same box as the 'generalized rejection of anything that's momentous' impulse

I believe 'contrarijam' would have sufficed

lol @ 'contrarijam'

Aerosmith's post is all well and good and correct w/r/t canons in general, but there is a difference between:

a) preferring a piece of art that happens to be epochal over one that happens not to be; and

b) preferring a piece of art because it is epochal.

I don't think anyone in this thread is really deep down doing (b) but it's a pretty common human error when justifying taste to fall back on (b) as an explanation for (a) rather than actually delve into one's specific, actual taste.

Also the "dense text" vs "transparent text" dichotomy is not terribly useful here, because notions of denseness and transparency map onto pop music even less successfully than they map onto literature.

If I like "Pump Up The Jam" because of its weird lyrical ellipses and intriguing vocal accent and brutal beat and menacing synth chords, and I like "Pump Up The Volume" for its echoing guitar chords and unexpected samples and unpredictable iterations around the central rhythm... how is one text dense and one text transparent?

I think that dichotomy springs from your assumption that "Pump Up The Jam" has less uses than "Pump Up The Volume", but almost inevitably assumptions regarding the multiplicity of uses that a piece of music can be put to proceed from (or, at least, alongside and intertwined with) a judgment about its worth. If you don't much like a song you're not going to spend much time perceiving all its multifarious qualities.

If I like "Pump Up The Jam" because of its weird lyrical ellipses and intriguing vocal accent and brutal beat and menacing synth chords, and I like "Pump Up The Volume" for its echoing guitar chords and unexpected samples and unpredictable iterations around the central rhythm... how is one text dense and one text transparent?

I'm just thinking in terms of composition, really - "Pump Up the Jam" is a song in a pretty trad model using (then) new sounds and rhythms. "Pump Up the Volume," as pastiche/collage, without the center that a vocalist provides but instead disembodied sampled voices, asks more of the listener I think. Of course it also doesn't: it's a dance jam, you can work out all that complexity with your body instead of getting professorial about it. But the text itself seems inherently richer to me, even though I know asserting inherent richness to a text is pretty dicey territory.

> I'd like to note that the gays itt (unless I'm missing somebody) went 7-1 in favor of Jam.

Sorry, Rev, but to skew yer stats I voted for Volume (still love both)

so you're bi?

ha
is that what loving both means?

Obv, I was only going by people who had posted their vote, not trying to read minds of lurkers or whatever.

no you're trying to out me

I'm just thinking in terms of composition, really - "Pump Up the Jam" is a song in a pretty trad model using (then) new sounds and rhythms. "Pump Up the Volume," as pastiche/collage, without the center that a vocalist provides but instead disembodied sampled voices, asks more of the listener I think. Of course it also doesn't: it's a dance jam, you can work out all that complexity with your body instead of getting professorial about it. But the text itself seems inherently richer to me, even though I know asserting inherent richness to a text is pretty dicey territory.

okay this makes more sense to me.

I think it's fair to say that PUTV would seem more exciting if you remember being puzzled by it at the time. Its "richness" in this regard is contextual rather than inherent - the 90s so thoroughly explored (and, by exploring, rendered familiar, obvious even) sample-based collages that PUTV itself no longer seemed to ask so much of the listener after that.

In this regard richness of form (vis a vis richness of content) gets "cheapened" over time as the form itself no longer seems particularly noteworthy and the mode of judgment is reduced to "mere" content. Today's listener probably does not say "oh wow this is a sample-based collage, how amazing". But rather, "as sample-based collages go this is pretty cool." On these metrics I think PUTV still does tremendously well, but I think any notion that it is inherently a better or more interesting record falls away.

I suppose some younger listeners try to imagine what it would be like to hear a record in its original context, but this seems to me like a fairly artificial way to decide how much you like something.

I suppose some younger listeners try to imagine what it would be like to hear a record in its original context, but this seems to me like a fairly artificial way to decide how much you like something.

mmm I think there's merit in historical listening but I think we part ways there pretty sharply - your "artificial" is something else for me; for one thing, contemplating context/knowing it/engaging it isn't an all-or-nothing proposition. I can listen to Mahler and consider how radical the changes are that he's ringing contemporaneously & also have gut/subjective/ahistorical reactions: the one actually potentiates the other, but the actual power of the response isn't "artificial" For me, and I understand this isn't true for everybody, being able to engage a piece historically with enough involvement to feel its innovation, to get to a gut level through harder readings - that's just a reading skill, like being able to detect shades of irony in literature. but as I say I think that you & I have some pretty divergent ideologies about present-moment vs. i-don't-know-what-to-call-it-that-isn't-immersed-in-the-same-way listening.

that's just a reading skill, like being able to detect shades of irony in literature. but as I say I think that you & I have some pretty divergent ideologies about present-moment vs. i-don't-know-what-to-call-it-that-isn't-immersed-in-the-same-way listening.

This is a rather deceptive analogy IMO, as "reading skill" refers in one case to an awareness of how a text functions (shades of irony in literature) and in the other to an emotional response to a text's place in history (what would this record have meant in 1987).

It is of course possible to "feel" the way in which PUTV does what it does first, and I apply that kind of historical reading all the time to my enjoyment of records (e.g. "woah this Anthill Mob record from 1997 has such unexpectedly futuristic beats, how were they so ahead of the curve?") - the difference between us is perhaps more precisely that I would consider that this is a second order judgment you arrive at following a response to content, because the shock of form is no longer really a visceral "in the moment" sensation.

It's not irrelevant to judgment by any means, but the idea that it should be a highly determinative factor is what feels false to me, like the listener is consciously privileging the text's place in history over their response to how it functions.

faith in this place restored

― kid ᒓᴥᒔ (Whiney G. Weingarten), Friday, 23 September 2011 01:02 (8 hours ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

brothers and sisters!

― master musicians of jamiroquai (NickB), Friday, 23 September 2011 01:02 (8 hours ago) Bookmark

tim f otm obv

It's not irrelevant to judgment by any means, but the idea that it should be a highly determinative factor is what feels false to me, like the listener is consciously privileging the text's place in history over their response to how it functions.

Iterations of this argument ("Understand the history first!") took place recently on one of the threads championing "Sun City" – we should applaud the record because it was the only one of the '85 charity singles which employed hip-hop artists. In this sense it's a variant on the argument over praising good intentions.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nViWpVc1x_4

PUMP UP THE JAM
PUMP IT UP

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zIsc6zirBSw