jacques lu cont: can do no wrong....defend/refute

CONTROL CONTROL CONTROL CONTROL CONTROL CONTROL CONTROL CONTROL

BTW: spoof of the dancing robot ad

the vocal version is fucking awful, on first listen. the dub must be the one erol and co are playing.

(2 mins later, after toast)the vocal version is actually absolutely dire, it's still playing here, the missy vocal just sounds so so wrong. so I'll see what the dub is like in a few minutes.

(i typed this bit earlier) on a more general level jacques dj sets are really a travesty by now, the guy hasn't bought or even listened to a new record since making the fabric mix.

-- kevin says relax (surl... ), February 13th, 2005.

er right, so some hipsters now like it so what *was* yawnsome and decadent is now a-ok. his horrible jeans are still horribly 80s.

honestly "decadent"! jacques lu cont and his cronies are making the streets of Great Britain a far more dangerous place. Why just last week I saw a gang of tracksuited youths making fun of war veterans while playing Avenue D.

I have been loving the JLC mixes I've heard, including the Missy one, it's not as if the vocal line on "Lose Control" was particularly stunning anyway.

I like the dub alot better than the vocal version, the music is very similar to some of the other mixes but it's still good.

I am not sure he is amazing, but I think he is good.

"decadence" still applies maybe, but it's a different kind of decadence, the decadence of "One More Time" and "Digital Love" - ie. the sonic decisions (and, in the case of retro-isms, sonic quotations) are partially determined and wholly transformed by the emotional content of the music. What decadence there is is a certain emotional over-investment. Of course not all his work is emotional in the specific, soppy sense of the "Mr. Brightside" or "What Ya Waitin' For" remixes, but even stuff like the Juliet or Fischerspooner remixes feel somehow larger than life, unsustainable in their monolithic grandeur.

Whereas the decadence you attribute to LRD would be, if I'm on the same page as you, something rather opposite: an investment in structure and form over and against emotional content - which wouldn't be an issue (this is dance music) if the music wasn't so retro. "Now" sonics in dance music tend to be their own justification, but revivalism seems to make most people (myself included) want to impose the burden of proof on the artist in demonstrating that there was a suffienciently good reason for it.

I like how, to the extent that JLC still does feel 80s-ish (and this is reduced too; his remix of Juliet's "Avalon" is like a weird combination of electro-house production and mid-90s salsa-house), the stylistic quotations in his recent work can be really counter-intuitive and confusing. When I wrote about the "Mr. Brightside" remix on Skykicking I was really struggling to pin-down what his assortment of sighing and twinkling synthesisers were intentionally or unintentionally referencing, if anything: New Order yeah, but also the kind of uses of synthesisers you would expect from exactly the srt of rock bands who fall outside the parameters of electroclash 80s revival - The Cure circa Disintegration, The Chameleons, Tears for Fears, mid-to-late 80s U2, Big Country, Marillion... Actually I'd love to see what Glenn from The War Against Sound would think of it!

the decadence line takes me into autobiog. basically i see LRD as big beat: i liked big beat, but by 1998 was a bit bored with it, mainly because of the preponderance of 'comedy' in, eg, bentley rhythm ace, midfield general, etc. and LRD, who was on wall of sound, ur-big beat label, fitted this pattern. his clothes, his fake-frenchness, his 80sness, were all about the roffles. people laughed because he wanted them to laugh. and electro refs, iirc, were staples of big beat but not generally in dahnce at that point in time.

following daft punk (who i loved), he was kicking off an 80s revival, and 1998 was in some ways the height of the 70s revival (boogie nights, lots of disco-house). so i guess it was refreshing for some people.

but anyway, 'now' sonics don't justify themselves -- it has to rock -- but yeah revivalists really have to bring some serious game. and i suppose back then LRD was like the dahnce jurassic five for me. and, lo, missy has now boosted both -- it's funny cos back then i had J5 and LRD down as 'indie'.

but how do you mean that being dance music exempts you from having to provide "emotional content" -- how, in fact, do you discern this from the actual physical means by which emotional content is produced (ie 'form')?

nb -- somebody somewhere asked where the 'music make you lose control' sample comes from. it's on the tip of my tongue, *and* i think it was on a big beat record, but i'm not so keen on listening to my old big beat records (except for 'not another drugstore' which is awesome).