Electro Politics

Must...resist...obvious...reference...

I will be shocked if anybody besides me is at all interested in this sort of navel-gazing but thought I'd ask anyhow because I always feel a profound sort of historical disconnect/reconnect when I'm listening to this stuff: something to do with the politics of "retro," which I'd consider conservative, except that this particular retro engages some futurist tropes that wilt/melt some of retro's uglier implications.

right then I'll just get my coat

ya tvoy slogu ... ya tvoy rabotnik!

(and that IS a serious answer ... sorta, anyway)

No, stay. I will say this, on this one electro comp I have is a cover of a Gil Scott-Heron song -- but it's "The Bottle" rather than "The Revolution Will Not Be Televised," say. Meanwhile, if you count "White Lines" as electro (I dunno if anyone does), there's politicized commentary. However, that's not quite the politics you're addressing, though it could be argued that there's an engagement with the present that offsets the presumption of music of/for the future.

The historical disconnect I'm talking about, by the way, is very pleasant - it's part of what makes the music so enjoyable for me: but I am very wary of the retro impulse because I think it's really unhealthy. What electro does for me is to punch some of the (admittedly pleasant, Wordsworthian) retro-buttons while sort of keeping an eye on itself: not wanting to invoke the retro trope without questioning it in some way.

Doesn't that assume more of an explicit engagement with retro on the nature of its creators, though? Which might exist. I mean, in a world where 'old' bluegrass was as much a product of time and technological advance as any in terms of recording technique and dissemination...

Something to do with a retro that refers to earlier visions of futurity through sound (i.e. playful not conservative), rather than rock retro which seeks to draw value from adherence to a perceived canonical tradition (i.e. conservative). But I'm very tired.

Well yes! I mean, using patches specifically designed to emulate Synsonics, 808's, etc. seems at least nominally retro - as do tropes about "the future," etc

xpost: what noodle said

except that I think that playfulness you're referring to is perhaps a very constrained playfield i.e. more conservative than it feels

For some reason I'm thinking Sparks all of a sudden, but that's a different kettle of fish.

felix da housecat = today's john fogerty?

Only if he comes up with an anthem about playing baseball. As our own John should know.

Ned, what is this "The Bottle" cover that you speak of?

Felix da Housecat is a really really good example of what I mean: there's something in it that makes me ask 'how is this different from, say, oldies night on the cruise ship?' and the first answers that offer themselves aren't satisfying at all: i.e., if the oldies band on the cruise ship are themselves aware of their anachronism, does that really recontextualize what they're doing so much that it makes it sound different? and what if the audience is also aware (as they surely are)? damn Eisbar that was a really great, super-gnomic boiling-down you did there - I must meditate

oh no wait that's Goa

Hold on here, Spencer. *rummages*

C.O.D., "In the Bottle," produced by Raul Rodriguez, released 1983, writing credit to Gil Scott Heron. I have it on this three disc set called _Absolutely...the Very Best of Electro_ that DeepBeats Records released in 1997.

i think i know where yer coming from, john, re this thread. i've started thinking that electro-clash (for lack of a better word) is sorta today's roots-rock -- i mean, for folks like felix da housecat (not to mention miss kittin, ladytron, etc.) their roots ARE old-school electro and synth-pop. i haven't given this notion TOO much thought, much less think through its socio-political implications, but i HAVE thought something along those lines.

Must...resist...obvious...reference...
mwahaha

i don't understand all this talk about electro = retro. electro hasn't rejected any of the advances of time. it's not out of date. electro artists are willing to engage with the newest advances in programming and hardware (in the case of your anthony rothers, drexciyas, rotters golf clubs, etc) or willing to engage with current culture (tiga turning in a non-ironic take on hot in herre, the friendliness of electroclashers wrt ghettotech and southern bounce, etc).

mind you they don't do it simultaneously but that's a lot for anybody to handle. new electro, at the outset, was referencing music that was a bit passe (ten years old? five years old?) but i don't think it ever explicitly rejected the now in the way that john fogerty or tom petty or what-have-you roots rockers did.

which electro artists are you talking about, john?

He doesn't mean Drexciya, that's for certain.

fuck politics. let's dance!

well, the odd thing is that drexciya is retro in certain ways. when they came out they were called "old-school" by just about everybody because they used old-sounding drum textures and recorded their music live.

what drexciya was able to do that was notable, though, was incorporate the 4/4 stomp rhythms of jeff mills and UR and the screaming acid of synewave or noom instead of just reiterating the same-old same-old.

it goes without saying that drexciya wasn't acting out of an oppositional stance against mainstream dance, either. or at least they never showed that side, even if their fans did at times.

i mean, i doubt john's gotten into drexciya while i wasn't looking but i think you could ask the original question about drexciya; similarly you could answer john's question in the same way as it relates to electroclash (mount sims references the sounds of freestyle without simply reiterating or updating freestyle)

I think electroclash is tagged as retro to a disproportionate level relative to other dance genres. It's hard to think of a dance genre that *doesn't* resurrect a lot of past signifiers. Certainly I think the similarities between electroclash and original electro are as close/tenuous as those between, say, French House and disco. or (to use a non-dance example) Two-Tone and rocksteady.

Dance music, esp. now, is very much caught up in the concept of permanent memory, the dissolution of borders between past present and future (as simon r would have "roots'n'phuture"). This is distinct from most rock retro moves (or eg. explicitly old skool indie hip hop) in that a reinvocation of the past does not equate to a declaration of war on the present. I was about to say that dance doesn't have the same "flight from eden" narratives that rock has, but perhaps the truth is that it has *too many*: there is I think a much stronger awareness of the potential multiplicity of icons, monuments and narratives, such that one can be "conservative" and promiscuously pluralist at the same time.

The flipside of "permanent memory" is an absence of menory: memory is basically our means of arranging and narrativising past experience, but the flux of past and present which defines a scene like electroclash kind of reduces such a narrative to a flat plane such that everything is effectively new and thus on equal terms with eachother, and what to the DJ might be an explicit act of canon creation can on the dancefloor feel like canon-dissolution.

Maybe in this sense (by which I mean all of the above) electoclash is "retro" in the same manner as Under Construction (another example of what I consider to be retro at its most fun and inventive). The ultimate conservativsm of both, if I had to find one, is that their respective fusions of past and present are built around notions of expediency: while the present is not made to genuflect to the past, the two are united through a shared similarity of functions, approaches and goals - the dialectical engagement almost inevitably gives way to a middle-ground synthesis (perhaps this is another way of explaining my dissatisfaction with This Is Not A Test: the polyphony of old and new still present on Under Construction almost imperceptibly transforms into a unison of voices reciting a single melody). In other words: a marriage of convenience.

More interesting, more undeniably "progressive" as such, is a situation where elements of the past are placed into a context of *friction* or conflict with the present: an obvious example which comes to mind is Roll Deep's "You Were Always", where samples of honeyed sweetness on the part of SWV are dropped into what amounts to The Misogynist's Complaint.

It seems with stuff like this, 90% of the arguments are over semantics anyway.

depends what you mean by semantics

djdee stole my joke!

arabian prince back with a style that's hype