Off at a Tangent ...

Robin, that's exactly what I meant. Even more damaging to the memory of artists like The Associates than a flat dismissal of eighties synthpop is a valorisation based upon nostalgia, the weird fashions and "pure pop fun" rather than musical experimentation. Of course a lot of it was about fashion and pure pop fun, but if that becomes the limit of the discourse, then stuff that falls outside of that is forgotten.

Actually I really dislike the way people attempt to dismiss or defend music based upon tangential aspects like associated fashions, from the eighties to hardcore techno to UK garage (all the complaints about champagne swilling girls in tight dresses as if that's prima facie evidence that the music is inferior).

And speaking of Talk Talk, they hold a special place in my collection, not only for changing their style more radically than any other band I can think of in the course of four or five years, but also because each one of their incarnations is somehow special.

I'm pretty sure the whole world has simplified nostalgia-based rhetoric of the kind you mention, Tim; it'd be stupid of me to think it's a uniquely British disease.

Another music that I dismissed at one point based on associated fashions was street rap, as though it could automatically be written off based around the high-living exterior and boasting of your posessions (I held a somewhat over-earnest "voice of the oppressed" student attitude back then, clearly). I think that's essentially the hip-hop equivalent of the dance scene's tendencies to write off UK garage for the reasons you mention ... the belief in "authenticity" and the denial that there is such a thing as "rebellion-through- conformity" (which is the most accurate description of Berry Gordy's oft-mocked entryism).

Nothing Talk Talk did can be compared directly to anything else they did, which is one of their greatest virtues.

The thing about the "voice of the oppressed" angle is that on the whole socialism in music is pretty boring (I can think of only a handful of mavericks who can pull off socialist manifestos in music convincingly eg. The Coup; and heaps who can't eg. RATM), or at least I'd hate to limit myself to acts who had that sort of earnest-yet-smug "undaground" authenticity. Of course street hip hop is also obsessed with authenticity, albeit of a different kind.

When I am drawn to that sort of music it's the type that is musically, not vocally resistant - music that is "working class" not because it proclaims itself to be so but because the musical aristocracy turn their noses up at it. Once that "oppressed" ethic becomes self-conscious it's generally the beginning of the end for me.

The thing with hip hop though is that it very much still is the "voice of the oppressed", albeit in a distorted way. The reason why not many street rappers talk about white oppression is IMHO because the world of the "white aristocracy" is so far removed from theirs as to be almost irrelevant.

I agree that socialism in pop often sounds incredibly unexciting and uninspiring *however much you may ideologically comment it* - on NYLPM in April I likened Dead Prez to Billy Bragg, not as unlikely a comparison as it may initially sound, since the latter is the only person to have me feeling that he had expressed exactly what I felt at a live show, and then had me leaving early because I couldn't stand the self-parodic ranting of his songs. I fear that Dead Prez might make me feel pretty much the same way if I ever saw them live ...

I guess street rap is obsessed with the authenticity of weaponry, the code of the street, etc.

Tim, I have a suspicion you're referring to the first wave of UK hardcore / jungle when you refer to working-class music that is utterly, thankfully free of self-conscious outsiderdom, and becomes what it is only because the musical aristocracy simply has no opinions *either way*, it doesn't want to know.

Street rap is much the same, its "voice of the oppressed" element now more to do with being utterly ignored by all others, than being discriminated against. That is the main reason why I've become obsessed with it recently, developed a very passionate attitude towards it, however crass it can get; the world of the white establishment quite simply means *absolutely nothing*. It's the polarisation and pluralism of this era, and I wouldn't be without it.

Social consciousness and utter consumerist nihilism can exist alongside each other in the same place and time of course, and the fact that they do is one of the things that makes me love music today so much.

That should read "ideologically commend it", not "comment it".

You're right, Robin, I was referring to hardcore and jungle, but also house, acid house, Belgian techno, gabba, ghetto tech/booty, psytrance etc. I'm limiting it to dance music because in rock, with the exceptions of metal, hardcore punk and the various hybrids of the two, there's very few scenes or collectives that don't have a self-consciously artistic or fashionable ethic, either self-imposed or imposed upon them by critics.

Even the whole Hellacopters/Turbonegro etc. stoner rock angle is in the process of being canonised. I think that's because a lot of rock discourse is all about being as "working class" as possible (the Joe Carducci line, basically).

Anyway, in dance music, I reckon the equivalent of underground/indie hip hop would be IDM, minimalist techno and downtempo: styles that rarely hit the charts but are embraced by discerning dilletantes who sniff at actual dancefloors - similarly hip hop acts like Jurassic 5 are embraced by indie fanboys who would turn up their noses at The Source or Blaze.

Interestingly, IDM, downtempo etc. are hardly what I would call "socialist" or even "left-wing" styles of music. My (somewhat cynical) explanation for that is that indie hip hop's left-wing/afro-futurist/black resistance rhetoric is more of a result of stylistic fetishism than genuine political activism. Like all those latter-day techno artists who scrutinise every single Jeff Mills or Model 500 12", these MCs kneel at the alters of Rakim, KRS-One and Chuck D, and their own rapping is merely a loving tribute to those old masters.

Ultimately the attraction of the black resistance angle is that in many ways it's closer to the expression of white culture through *indie* rock/pop etc. (occasionally angry and defiant, but also articulate and introspective) than the tunnel-vision nihilism and violence of street rap. It almost strikes me as though many bemoaners of street rap demand that MCs have degrees in astrophysics and political science in order to compensate for their *blackness*.

It's like Pat Buchanan saying he'd admire African Americans if they were all like the black woman he knows who's a millionaire business entrepeneur in a wheelchair - the implication being that blacks have to prove themselves worthy before they can win the sort of respect that would be granted to a white person automatically. Similarly "black" music usually has to approve itself as sufficiently intelligent or "musical" before it can be considered respectable by the white cognoscenti (see here indie hip hop, trip hop and intelligent drum & bass), while white musicans are often most respected for the exact opposite: making music as stupid/basic as possible.

This argument is of course absolutely gaping with holes, but never mind.

I couldn't attempt to improve on Tim's post, except for ...

"... Jurassic 5 are embraced by indie fanboys ..."

That was me, two years.

Oh, how I have seen the light!

Oh and Tim, I noticed some fascinating responses in the Skykicking archive to my stuff on The Auteurs (Elidor) and DMX (NYLPM) which I somehow missed at the time. Much in agreement with what you say, especially about the ultimate emotional weakness of Black Box Recorder.

Which reminds me that I actually used to know what "writing" means. I should rediscover it some day ... :).

For which read two years *ago*.

To clarify, I don't think that Jurassic 5 et. al make bad music. It's just that it's kinda unnecessary right now - I already have De La Soul and A Tribe Called Quest, and just the fact that I *know* it's older makes it more interesting to me than 2000-era-carbon-copies. Which is unfair on the music itself, but I think totally fair on the musicians involved.

To look at it from a different angle, as much as the golden era of pop we discussed earlier deserves to be revived in some senses, the last thing I'd want would be Soft Cell tribute bands storming the charts. There needs to be a significant development and (what should I call it?) *contextual neccessity* to the music to justify celebrating it.

Agreed that the ultimate *unnecessaryness* of Jurassic 5 is down to their music being so unsurprising and similar to what came before (as a fellow lover of De La Soul / ATCQ, there's also a sense of "heard it previously"). I was also deeply suspicious of the very idea of calling an album "Quality Control", a denial of the loose, unregulated, charity-shop aesthetic that, for me, runs through all the best pop music, as though they were trying to filter out any influences that didn't live up to their idea of "quality". I got a hidden criticism of this idea into my NYLPM review of The Infesticons' "Gun Hill Road" (it's listed in the index which will tell you which week it was).

Though on similar ground I've been surprised how much I like the Reflection Eternal album on repeated listens - having been put off when I first heard it because of my tendency to lurch from one extreme to the other (I was then going through a very street-oriented phase). "This Means You" and "Down For The Count" are particularly good.

Of course pop that basically just pastiches Soft Cell or early Human League is totally spiritually opposed to it; I've been thinking about which recent British chartpop best lives up to that spirit. I still think White Town's one-off "Your Woman" came closer than anything else from the mid-late 90s, though I'd welcome any other suggestions ...

I should add that the idea of "quality control" in itself totally contradicts the original hip-hop aesthetic that Jurassic 5 allegedly love ...

Exactly. It's that "keepers of the eternal flame" arrogance that probably prevents me from liking more underground hip hop than I already do (basically I like Company Flow and... um...). Even musically though there's a sort of different attitude between the music now and the music then. Like, "3 Feet High and Rising" and "It Takes A Nation Of Millions..." both sound really maximalist for their times - as if they're trying to cramp in every possible sound and are being hampered only by the limited technology of the time. Musically minimalist maybe, but when you could sample whatever you wanted without having to pay royalty cheques, who needed tunes?

With current underground hip hop though there's this whole "keep it real" minimalist attitude that I reckon is in direct opposition of the overt musicality of all street hip hop since g-funk. Of course said musicality only came about because of the expensiveness of sampling during the nineties, so really that musicality was a pragmatic necessity rather than an aesthetic shift. Because of that I reckon that the minimalism used in underground hip hop is a result of misinterpreting the contextual environment of old skool hip hop for the intentions of the artist - an exaggerated analogy would be a Beatles fan saying that since The Beatles never made a techno 12", obviously they would have hated techno.

There's been some underground hip hop tracks that I really liked the sound of precisely because they weren't adverse to adding elements of hi-tech musicality - there's a Dilated People's track I heard that had this wonderful psychedelic kaleidoscope sound to it, but I never followed it up because I was turned off by the critical adulation... perhaps I should.

From the sampling perspective, I think there's still some room for development here - I like some DJ Shadow and Australia's own The Avalanches, who seem to be trying to build a bridge between sampladelic hip hop and Disco Inferno's later work. And of course Disco Inferno's brilliance goes without saying.

And I think that the ideas of sampling, once producers move beyond obvious basslines and choruses etc. could still do great things for pop. I was listening to Madonna's "Erotica" (the song) yesterday and was marvelling at how Shep Pettibone creates a (difficult, to be sure) pop song out of a dense, shifting tapestry of weird samples like Middle-Eastern madrigals. In many ways I consider the failure of either the Public Enemy or the Disco Inferno sound to properly cross over into the rest of the music world to be a double-header tragedy that cast a long shadow over the nineties.

As far as Soft Cell-inspired synth pop goes, I liked "Your Woman" too, because it sounded eighties but in a nineties way, and because the ambiguity of the vocalist made it stand out in a very simple but clever way that most pop stars would be afraid to imitate these days. But even if White Town had been successful, they would only have been to the eighties what Suede were to the seventies, and I doubt a real movement would have formed around Jyoti no matter how many hits he might have had. And ultimately, while the baby boomer generation still controls cultural capital we're not going to see eighties culture become acceptable in a 'serious' way like the seventies are now slowly becoming, at least not for a while.

Generally I think the successors to Soft Cell/Human League et. al. would not be synthpop bands but would get their ideas from urban music forms - R&B, hip hop, garage etc. Scritti Politti were pretty much on the right track with "Tinseltown To The Boogiedown" I reckon, although that was more of a hip hop track with Scritti influences than the other way around. I'm still waiting for a rock group to come along that use Timbaland/garage style beats, and I'm quite appalled that so far only The Beta Band have done so, and only for one single. And they can be dismissed by the general public/media for such a move because they've always been "a bit weird".

The seeming incomprehensibility of European rock digesting American urban-pop seems silly to me when it's so patently obvious how thoroughly disco (along with punk, it's true) provided so much musical impetus for UK bands in the late seventies and early eighties.