Is electroclash the acid jazz of the naughty aughties?

But it's funny, when I was in London 1995-6, the kids were ALL about Acid Jazz and I REALLY didn't get it then, I'd love to hear some of that stuff now just to check it out... for kicks, y'know?

or maybe this is ilm music criticism which for all the "you guys love everything" stuff is actually v. dubious about new product.

Maybe both introduced a coolness into clubland at odds with E-led messiness, but Electroclash seems much more hedonistic than the Acid Jazz dudes. They chased the cool in (their idea of) the Miles Davis sense - feel and bohemian charm - where Electroclash goes for a brasher, seedier decadence. Plus Electroclash people don't seem to give a shit if it doesn't last another season, while Acid Jazzers wanted to spread a vague message of "positivity" by rewriting "Songs in the Key of Life" eternally.

And maybe there's less of a conflict in reanimating explicitly synthetic sounds than organically textured ones? Acid Jazz was always too reverent to its source material and seemed destined to regress into "authentic" musicianly values - it was never going to better the Herbie Hancock breaks it aped or sampled, just prolong and appreciate them in a chin-stroking fashion. Electroclash's lifeblood is hard-edged machine music they can actually *do something with* - they can enhance the stridency of old synth records with post-rave production finesse.

Apart from 'Emerge', 'Silver Screen Shower Scene', 'Sunglasses After Dark' and 'Set It Off'. Though it depends on yr def of 'hit single'. if it means appearing on TOTPs then they win.

I still maintain that *proper* electroclash is just posh house and DFA et al is something altogether different.

Tok Tok - Missy Queen's Gonna Die & Day of Mine
Golden Boy & Miss Kittin - Rippin Kittin
JCA - Begin To Wonder
Ladytron - Playgirl
Zombie Nation - Kernkraft 400

Vice Magazine! seriously though.

And I wouldn't say Vice is a critical bastion of anything, but electroclash is *certainly* their scene and central to all the style-bullshit they propagate...

Actually, this is based upon the Dutch and German charts. I don't really follow the UK charts that well, and the US charts are a complete mystery to me...

secondly, i think these similarities between acid jazz and electroclash exist simply because that is just the nature of music these days. in a few years we'll be hearing all about some other thing that's a revival of whatever mixed with modern technology and no real "breakout personalities/performers" due to mainstream indiference. then - pffft.

so i guess yer on to something.

eg. have you heard Sascha Funke's "When Will I Be Famous?", the Ellen Alien remix of Golden Boy's "Rippin Kittin" etc.?

Most of the dismissive arguments I see about why electro is stupid and irrelevant seem like they could equally be applied to punk having been stupid and irrelevant.

Restart the reclamation wars! Wasn't a whole point of the rhetoric around punk to be willfully stupid?

For the record, my favorite recent electro track is about 4 years old now: Les Rythmes Digitales' remix of Deejay Punk-Roc's "My Beatbox."

Michaelangelo-Being that commercial sucess and critical success are mutually exclusive do you mean either or both? Do you think that a band or a genre can be sucessful if it makes big in the United States? Because it seems to me that this stuff is doing well commercially in Europe so why call it a failure?

Which is can be said of jungle, trance, uk garage, hardcore, techno, hardstyle and house as well. The fun of DJing and buying comps & 12"s is filtering the bucketload of crap for the gems.

01/02-model electroclash focuses on different artists and seems to have a different focus to the original formulation.

(To me this is like one of those charming little differences you note when you're a tourist.)

no, I mean as music, or critically (by my estimation, at least, though I am a critic so I guess that term therefore applies)

Admittedly though the best hyped dance genres tend to justify their hype by having high wheat-to-chaff ratios - think hardcore/jungle 92-94, garage 98-01, microhouse 99-now.

spot on. I'll be a little more macro here and say that most electro has historically never been all that interesting/good--I can think of dozens of great hardcore/jungle tracks and relatively few great early-'80s electro ones outside of the usual suspects (Bambaataa, Baker/Robie productions, "Al-Naafiysh (The Soul)," a few others). so I'm not that surprised it's about the same now.

Can I just butt in that I non-sarcastically love discussions of dance music because of the scale of the time frames: "Yeah, that reminds me of that stuff that was big during the first week of November in 98, which I think was a really big influence even as far as the following January, not to mention the whole retro rivival that went on in mid-December.")

historically, this doesn't seem all that much different than, say, Swinging London circa '64-7, or peak Motown; the main difference is that home/bedroom recording makes it easier to bang trax out faster (as opposed to writing, arranging, rehearsing, recording, overdubbing a song w/a band, producer, session musicians), and that overall communications have gotten faster and faster. when you account for that difference it lines right up. (and you're right, it is exciting, and fun--that's one reason I love this stuff so much!)

But...but...that's just marketing talk!

i still think DMX Krew is far better at this stuff you know!