Kirk DeGeorgio vs Simon Reynolds FITE!

Anonymous Ilxor: "I was reading on Simon Reynolds' blog the other day..."

Tim Finney: "Simon Reynolds' blog

!!! DETAILS"

"get it right, gilles peterson hangs round with ME"

fantastic!

not as bad as the wire article where he couldnt see what great records reinforced were making till they got 'jazzy' (ie, when they began to lose the greatness), this also doesnt exactly fit in with his "right place right time" credentials (the fact that kirk brings up 'hardcore' is laughable, unless he likes it now, now its safely away from suburban proles?)

and since when is discos lineage into house and techno downplayed? all we ever hear about is the loft and paradise garage and studio 54. still, i'm glad that kirks a disco fan (at least thats something we can agree on!!)

i'm certainly confused by all the jesus and mary chain fatboy slim bit, who cares about that! never seen this linked in, and dont see the relevance.

but simon is also wrong, in this:

it’s only your white connoisseur-custodian types, with their velvet-glove approach of fidelity and sickly reverence, who have hang-ups about brutalism and “bastardisation”.

derrick may was only one of many who slated the uk hardcore scene 1992 as a bastardization. 16 year old me could not agree with this then, and i cannot agree with mays comments to this day. and i remember some posse of mills, hawtin and someone else turning up to a jungle event in late93/early94 and being surprised by how good it was. well thanks for your patronage fellas! of course, they werent the only ones.

Gareth it's possible it was Kirk's gf who degoogled and landed on 1471 -- he notes in his rebuttal that she was looking for press packet info for 21st Century SOUL a while back. I always figured it was the curator at the OPART hall of fame who did the degoogling.

what is interesting is that many of the continuity "it wasnt a shock when house broke big in 87/88 because i was playing stuff blah blah" types viewed rave (in its 91/92) incarnation as a schism, as a break, but something to be shunned, something juvenile and bastardized. since many of the rave people went on to become big time players in jungle, the continuity types have had to reel those comments back in a little

(ie, if its all traced back to hancock et al, then why were you saying the opposite when hackney hardcore and criminal minds records were being released??????????????)

http://getretarded.topcities.com/gr5/page26.html

Oh the irony! and all that

Kirk hates Throbbing Gristle cuz they're white and got no soul or whatever.

But Kirk sampled Throbbing Gristle without realising it.

Ho ho ho!

someone dedicated to loving black music so well, so meticulously, so exhaustively, so exhaustingly, that it makes up for the failure to have been born black in the first place.

Since when were Aphex Twin and the Black Dog black, anyway?

Actually I don't think this totally vitiates Simon's argument - considering the context that Aphex Twin and Black Dog first appeared in, they may as well have been awarded honorary black status, or at the very least honorary Detroit status.

eg. according to hardcore-phobes Black Dog was the other "secret influence", along with Carl Craig's "Bug in the Bassbin", that kickstarted jungle - a rather weak attempt at getting around the conundrum that Gareth cited earlier. Now admittedly I can see *some* links between early Black Dog and jungle, but it's like saying that butterflies are the cause of tornadoes.

luminaries like Derrick May had a massive INDIRECT influence on me - in that i loved techno from the start but i didnt know/care/realise who/what Derrick May and 'strings of life' were until 1995 when i started reading dance magazines like Muzik on a monhtly basis and they really pushed the heritage and anal retention angles much further than any dance mag had before

The more I think about it, actually, the more uncomfortable I am with separating music into "white" and "black" music - especially when it comes to techno and most of what sprouted off from it... this is (grits teeth before uttering the word) urban music, and urban culture is SHARED, and in terms of most of the influences and much of the fanbase and the people making the music, techno is as much white music as it is black music to me. I suspect Reynolds himself would agree, which is why this also bothers me:

I'm sure Kirk was so SC he’s never once picked up NME in his entire life (just Echoes and Blues & Soul, ‘course). But when he tells us how as a youngster he liked “disco, soul, jazz funk, rap, electro” and didn’t like “punk, ska, new wave or indie”, he does remind me of the soulcialist creed that only black music was valid (plus a smattering of music made by whites in utter obeisance to “black” values).

I don't refute the allegation that such Soulboys exist, but surely it's possible just NOT TO LIKE the sound of punk, ska, new wave or indie (why is ska lumped in with 'white' music in Reynold's mind anyway, it seems to me to have as much to do with "black" music influences as "white" influences, if not more so?) without being labelled some kind of inverse racist? Punk, new wave and indie aren't really sonically THAT dissimilar to each other, after all.

The other thing I have to say about this is that when SR lays into '"mod" ...as a perennial space in the sociocultural field of possibilities', he's right in identifying a thing but he's ridiculously wide of the mark in everything he says about it. But that's likely because it means a lot to me and he's hated it for ever.