simon reynolds: classic or dud

oh great, reynolds tries to make dance music fit in with tired critical theory memes pt. 94.

titchy -- i've seen it in numerous places, including unsworths on euston road.

that's not really a meme, it's just plain wrong.

i have the book actually (the bring the noise one right?), i just wanted to know where you can get books on trojan for 2 quid!

Simon Reynolds is dead.

Dead serious about dance music.

What a lamestain.

I will not be swingin' on the flippity flop with him anytime soon.

that "acid burn" thing was written by a clueless nme or mm journalist in '87 who was having his leg pulled by some chi-town producers.

And his name was Simon Reynolds?

"I'm Paul Harvey."

Reynolds did correct himself on the acid burn wrongness in Energy Flash to be fair.

from his blissout blog

On February 11 I'm going to be in Liverpool to give a talk on the Hardcore Continuum hosted by FACT (Foundation for Art and Creative Technology), in association with The Wire. There'll be an audio-visual component (expect: rude 'n' cheesy) and the main body of the talk will be followed by an onstage discussion with Mark Fisher (Acting Deputy Editor of The Wire/K-punk) and then a Q/A session with the audience.

Location: FACT, 88 Wood Street, Liverpool, L14DQ
Date: Wednesday February 11th
Time: 7.00pm to 9-00 pm
Admission: £7.00/£5.00 (members & concessions)
Information: tel. 0151 7074444 or http://www.fact.co.uk

i have the book actually (the bring the noise one right?), i just wanted to know where you can get books on trojan for 2 quid!

Camden High Street!

the main body of the talk will be followed by an onstage discussion with Mark Fisher (Acting Deputy Editor of The Wire/K-punk) and then a Q/A session with the audience.

this is gonna make frost/nixon look like a mutual handjob session.

watch out simon! prepared to be tested!

Liverpool, though.

He likes terrible music.

Yeah I wasn't feeling that last Ruff Sqwad mixtape either.

the Giggs love is baffling

I don't think that's fair, I think he's still got it. Did he not set up all the goals against West Brom the other day?

i just knew someone was gonna make that joke

No you don't understand, Ryan Giggs is the name of my dog.

his debunking of some of the tony wilson / factory myths in WORD this month is a right lol. i half agree with him.

so now he's atacking Factory? IS NOTHING SACRED?!

In this Sunday's Observer, Nick Cohen debunks the myths about Grunwick and Lady Falkender.

http://www.factmagazine.co.uk/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=1923&Itemid=105

this is getting into jom jones territory tbh.

k-punk undermines himself by dismissing the role of funky and also typically (not so much of him but of "hardcore continuum" boosters generally) completely mischaracterizing it.

Plus a perfect example of my strawman "people will argue that Kode 9 being into funky makes it interesting" complaint.

i don't think he's actually a fan of any of the music he's writing about. it's completely comprehensible to me and i haven't heard hardly any of it -- that's got to be a problem. it just seems like leavis in the 50s, or really one of leavis's hypemen, running out the clock. he seems to be fitting his taste to the model; where does 'i don't like it so it isn't in the tradition' stop and 'it's not in the tradition so i don't like it' start?

neither is a great way to go about listening to music.

i guess the desire for a 'rupture' comes from 1) some kind of notion that this shit has something to do with revolutionary politics 2) the fetishization of 'rupture', change in 'paradigms' or 'epistemes' in various once-fashionable theorists.

but it sounds more than anything like some old lag demanding a 'new punk', on the misguided assumption that there was an 'old punk' that was as savage and beautiful a rupture as one might read about in books.

The thing about the hardcore continuum that makes it completely meaningless to me is what is included in the tradition and what isn't and how arbitrary this inclusion/exclusion is. You could make as big a case for nu-school breaks being part of the continuum as you could for bassline house. But no-one will because it's shit/uncool.

and he does really need to get his head out of his ass boosting bassline house while being down on funky. I'm no stan of the latter and hold it in far less estimation than a lot of people on ILM but damn, bassline is exciting but funky is undercooked?

I think Simon himself is a bit more nuanced about the way he talks about the "continuum" - or, rather, more straightforward: the continuum is the audience, and by extension whatever the audience listens to. Which helps to separate the theory from his own personal tastes. Simon's own stuff on funky (which he doesn't like by and large) basically says "this is the current incarnation of the continuum but i don't like it much."

I don't mind the basic model that Mark is using here but I think where he goes off track is in his tendency to box things very quickly and then diagnose a broader theme that relies on that boxing process. Funky isn't going to shock you if you have mentally decided that it starts and ends with "Do You Mind" and therefore refuse to listen to anything else under that tag. If he actually heard Lil' Silva's "Seasons" or Pro2Jay's "Skank Calm Down" or Roska's "Climate Change" or Donaeo's "African Warrior" (all of which sound much more "continuum"-ish than bassline or dubstep) the whole argument would quickly founder.

I agree with Mark when he says that a 1998 techstep or 2-step garage track would have sounded very odd 4 years earlier, but this has more to do with the general speed of sonic advances across the board - you could as easily say that of a 1998 Timbaland track, or a 1995 IDM track, or etc. etc. In its early stages "the continuum" was swept up in this same process - how could it not be? But I don't think that's ever been a central fact of this music.

While it's correct to say that this population of listeners switch up their tastes very quickly, it's also been clear since the emergence of speed garage (i.e. for the last twelve years) that this tendency does not possess the futurist linear narrative progression that mark ascribes to it here. Yes the transformation into 2-step made things more interesting sonically, but this is more about the way in which this music generally tends to absorb music from outside of itself and quickly mutate it, rather than some conscious dedication to futurism. You can hear the same thing going on with funky.

"The thing about the hardcore continuum that makes it completely meaningless to me is what is included in the tradition and what isn't and how arbitrary this inclusion/exclusion is."

Again, I think the term works only in the more pragmatic/prosaic reynolds sense of describing an audience (east london basically).

tbf, once upon a time reynolds would have been alone among his peers in picking out a random nu-skool breaks banger in the name of ardkore continuuist cheese.

what makes k-punk most intolerable for me, quite frankly, is that he totally lacks flair.

otoh, if the two of them think a new miserly continuum is the best available stick for beating down bullshit like zomby then MARCH ON, MY RHIZOMORPHIC NODES!!!111!

tim's last par makes a lot of sense on just... commonsensical grounds. an air of mystification envelopes the nuum otherwise, especially when it's apparently a matter of (forgive me) spoddy white dudes with degrees peering in enviously at what other people are listening to in east london.

i suppose i mean it isn't music criticism as such. im also a bit suspicious of the futurist-rush element, too -- it's obviously tied up with ulterior, irrelevant stuff, and k-punk is not exactly good at being specific about what makes x more future-y than y.

i also think that the notion of 'scenius' is soooort of... dodgy. brian eno and other culture heros get to be individuals who make decision. but the nuum has a kind of 'course correction' because it has a perfect producer-consumer loop. i suppose it's a matter of personal preference, or in k-puink's head political choice, but he and reynolds are ok with romantic individualists when it suits them. (and why not?)

The irony though is that a lot of the emphasis on the scenius angle in simon and (especially) mark's writing dropped away circa grime, at which point more traditional cult of personality stuff took over. Which is how Burial then became such a pivotal figure for both.

funny that r|t|c invokes zomby at this point because I was just thinking about him in connection to this thread. One issue I have with the way the "hardcore continuum" argument is trotted out is that it increasingly becomes "tell don't show" - producers and artists are praised because they explicitly align themselves with this theory, in a kind of grisly feedback loop that ultimately results in museum pieces like "Where Were You in '92" (not that Zomby necessarily talks about the "hardcore continuum", but there's a sense in which this kind of boomkat-approved revivalism is the easiest way to get critical nods nowadays).

Back circa 1999, reynolds would praise New Horizons tracks that brought in a bleep'n'bass plonky metallic feel, but there was no sense that the value of these tracks was the way they paid tribute to early LFO or whatever, or even that the producer necessarily knew about LFO. It was the unintentionality behind these coincidences that made them interesting and that made the "continuum" an interesting idea - this sense of an ever expanding bank of dancefloor tactics that could be redeployed in new combinations and reiterations.

I may have mentioned this in the funky house thread, but now you get everyone actively ignoring the (increasingly prevalent) LFO influences in funky until the point where Mr Roach releases a rather weak tune actually sampling LFO and suddenly everyone's mind is blown. Which strikes me as the musical equivalent of tuning into the new 90210 because you might see five minutes of Shannon Doherty.

See also: everyone overrating Lil' Silva's funky remix of "Pulse X". I guess critical hardheads need to be hit with blunt objects in order to register anything.

Re scenius: I'll make the tired point again that you don't actually see people writing about Dubaholics and Groove Asylum in the same glowing celebration-of-scenius sense that they write about Remarc.

These people have terrible, terrible taste

perhaps they just have broader taste than you

Our Hannah has broader taste than etc etc

i don't think he's actually a fan of any of the music he's writing about. it's completely comprehensible to me and i haven't heard hardly any of it -- that's got to be a problem. it just seems like leavis in the 50s, or really one of leavis's hypemen, running out the clock. he seems to be fitting his taste to the model; where does 'i don't like it so it isn't in the tradition' stop and 'it's not in the tradition so i don't like it' start?

This was pretty apparent when he went through that I-like-Girls-Aloud-they-herald-a-new-age-of-robot-people phase.

They might have broader taste than me, and terrible taste

They might have narrower taste than me in some areas, and terrible taste

gonna stick with 'just broader' for now

grow up pinefox

http://www.factmagazine.co.uk/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=1949&Itemid=105

^^ cif makeweight dan hancox, explaining the meaning of the term 'procrustean bed' and amusingly attributing it (or so it seems) to lenin.

annoyingly right, though, i guess.

'procrustean bed'

Sounds rather unpleasant

hard lols at thinking Lenin invented the term procrustean bed but basically very otm article.

redux:

if u don't like funky
LEAVIS ALONE
if ur not a badman
LEAVIS ALONE

ha ha.

I've decided that my efforts to get with K-Punk's position usually founder on the following contention (snipped from his website):

"The 'moral' critique that Alex detects in my post - though I'm not really sure that 'moral' is the right word - is aimed at writers, for allowing slackening rates of innovation to become normalised; or what amounts to the same thing, for succumbing to the general condition of reviewing - as opposed to criticism - where records are assessed on blearily defined hedonic criteria alone, part of the background twitter of tepid cheerleading for late capitalism's minimally different commodities."

The broader issue is "what is the point of writing about music". At base Mark's position seems to be that we should write about music in a way that somehow challenges the capitalist status quo (either because the music does or because the writing does).

The narrower issue is "how does one identify innovation".

This raises pretty much the same perspectival issue that I was discussing w/r/t louis in the ILM Albums Poll. Funky (like - let's be honest now - garage and grime) is a genre whose "innovations" can only be discerned close up, when you're exposed to enough of the music to see what it's doing. I think part of Mark's argument above involves an implied insistence on standing back from music for fear of being tainted by the dirty job of mere reviewing - if the innovations don't leap out at you across that distance then they're not real, they're a hedonic mirage. (jungle is in a separate category: I think its obvious futurism at the time is more indicative of a general technology/drugs/culture based futurism that characterised early house/techno/etc. almost across the board from the mid-eighties to the mid-nineties)

US writers by and large never acknowledged what was so distinctive about garage or grime ("Timbaland does this better"/"Southern hip hop does this better"). Mark did but I wonder how much of that was due both to access and prior official endorsements given by people like Reynolds (this is perhaps an unfair allegation but let's leave it in for the sake of the argument). Certainly (Dizzee Rascal excepted) he always seemed to talk about the idea of these musics more than the music itself (again perhaps part of his rejection of "reviewing").

Except that he's always been willing to get his hands dirty w/r/t dissecting dubstep (esp. Burial and Kode9), Junior Boys, even wonky, for all his reservations about the last. The common thread being that all these artists tended to be pursuing individual aesthetics with a faintly intellectual (or at least music-history-savvy) agenda. So in form he appears to be tied up in engaging with a "genius" model of music while at the same time deploring the relative depletion of "scenius" criticism.

Perhaps Kode9/Burial/Mark now all have a very similar "critical" approach (obv. Burial only through his actual music and interviews etc.) which involves always seeing the present as something which needs to be redeemed by the past. One of the first articles Hyperdub ran (when it was still a thinkpiece website) was on No-U-Turn's garage sub-label 'Turn-U-On'. Still think that was a great name trick and the Horsepower records they put out were ace. But the overall implication was very much: "you can measure garage's worth by the manner in which techstep is now buying in - i.e. garage becomes interesting insofar as it continues (albeit twists beyond easy recognition) the legacy of techstep". This logic is repeated in Kode9 making "funky" records which redeem funky by drawing them into a dubstep narrative, and of course Mark then ritualistically bigs-up these records as being a potential means by which funky might actually be useful and meaningful. This is the most heavyhanded way to go about endorsing the hardcore continuum: looking for moments when the old music actually doffs its cap to the new.

I would love to see Mark write about honest-to-goodness 2-step garage (rather than Burial, or dubstep, or some cop-out halfway position like Dem 2/El-B/Zed Bias/Steve Gurley aka the "roots of dubstep" godfathers) because I would love to be proven wrong in my suspicion that his distaste for hedonism extended to basically not liking much of the genre in actuality.

I do remember an article he wrote at the end of 2000 or beginning of 2001 hating on a Dreem Teem mix-cd and bigging up So Solid Crew etc. He might have been exaggerating his antipathy towards the former so as to be more obviously on the side of the future, but the mix in question actually had a fairly unimpeachable track selection, not to mention quite a bit of So Solid related material!

To my mind an emphasis on futurism at the expense of hedonism is a really dubious way to think about garage in particular. It cuts out 90% of what the scene was about and basically makes it into the dubstep-forerunner that so many fans of dubstep like to pretend it is.

http://www.factmagazine.co.uk/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=2028&Itemid=101