have dance music genres always had a high ratio of crap to good tunes?

Message Bookmarked

Bookmark Removed

been listening to a lof of rave, hardcore rave, jungle, etc etc comps lately and am wondering if theres always been a high quota of shite alongside the great stuff. obviously i know a lot of dance music's point is to be kinda generic (not necessarily in a bad way i should add), and i think when people kinda lose sight of working in that particular framework (eg - when grime people make stuff that isnt grime, or try and be 'artists' or when junglists like 4hero tried to do soul but ended up being all new age and wishy washy or when techno people tried to go all prog) they start to flounder as they have no context/framework to work within, but i think that was part of what made dance music good, that 'communal' sense of common musical identity, but it seems that maybe along with that, a lot of dance genres cant help but have a lot of crap, maybe more so than other genres cos its easier to get the equipment to make it...... i dunno

― fucker, Monday, 31 October 2005 12:45 (twenty years ago)

there is no such thing as good tunes in dance music QE-fuckin-D

― ESTEBAN BUTTEZ~!!, Monday, 31 October 2005 12:48 (twenty years ago)

the difference between a good record and a bad record is fairly subtle, in dance, it's sort of hard to explain but I would say the reason for this is that the actual forumla for what "works" when you're talking about club orientated track type dance music only goes so far, there are a million ways to make the same dance tune, you could forever sequence it differently, or forever change the way a certain bassline or whatever sounds, or the drums. it's a constant process of production rather than a process of writing/production like maybe other genres.

This is the problem I think, it's difficult to know where you hit the magic forumula, and if you imagine that people are working more with dials as opposed to chords and notes then you get a sense of the massive creative spaces that exist in the confines of even just one snippet of a track.

― Ronan (Ronan), Monday, 31 October 2005 12:56 (twenty years ago)

and i think when people kinda lose sight of working in that particular framework (eg - when grime people make stuff that isnt grime, or try and be 'artists' or when junglists like 4hero tried to do soul but ended up being all new age and wishy washy or when techno people tried to go all prog) they start to flounder as they have no context/framework to work within

in each case i think what they've really done is realise that they can longer work within that original framework as the mileage/scope runs out in terms of what they can keep doing in it. part of it also boils down to wanting to sell more records perhaps, but developing as musicians at the same time, thinking that what they are doing at any given time IS better than what they did before in most if not all respects.

― Sociah T Azzahole (blueski), Monday, 31 October 2005 13:26 (twenty years ago)

the ratio of crapness in dance genres is the same as with any other genres really. 70-99% depending on how strict/particular you are.

― Sociah T Azzahole (blueski), Monday, 31 October 2005 13:28 (twenty years ago)

yeah, i would tend to agree with stevem. though i'd be curious to see how this ratio might, or might not, fluctuate historically, at different points in a genre's evolution. eg, did dance music's foregrounding of technological research and development, compressed into a shorter period of time than i would guess most other pop music genres have developed, historically (though i'm willing to be proven wrong), might have altered its ratio in different ways throughout different phases. but of course quantifying that would require quantifying and standardizing taste and value, so in the end it's impossible.

― philip sherburne (philip sherburne), Monday, 31 October 2005 16:40 (twenty years ago)

Yes, but 70-99% of people at raves are AMAYZING dancers!!!!!!!!

― Confounded (Confounded), Monday, 31 October 2005 17:26 (twenty years ago)

in Bizarro-world.

― Sociah T Azzahole (blueski), Monday, 31 October 2005 17:31 (twenty years ago)

― Confounded (Confounded), Tuesday, 1 November 2005 01:59 (twenty years ago)

Answering the original question: no higher than indie-rock.

― Alfred Soto (Alfred Soto), Tuesday, 1 November 2005 02:03 (twenty years ago)

In any artform, especially commoditzed artform, there's a high ratio of crap:gems. If you've ever looked at the reject bin from a hiphop radio station, you realize that the major labels are funding an even higher percentage of crap in hiphop than in dance music because the rewards from just ONE track or ONE artist hitting the big time makes all the other effort and expense worth it.

― l5, Thursday, 3 November 2005 17:10 (twenty years ago)

three weeks pass...

i think there were certain eras where the ratios in all music were better, but they're usually early. once you can make a lot of $ at something, or there's a specific "genre", the ratio gets pretty wrecked. thisk of disco pre-disco-explosion and post-. the bad disco shot thru the roof with "disco duck" etc.

― james, Monday, 28 November 2005 17:56 (twenty years ago)

I dunno, saying that the signal to noise ratio in a given genre was better before the genre was an actual genre seems like circular logic. It's also hard to tell how much of that perceived quality is contextual--what comes out first has the shock of the new whereas if the same track came out a few years later it'd seem derivative. As someone who tends to discover things in the middle or at the end, I generally prefer sounds once they've had a while to develop. Dance genres seem particularly vulnerable to the trend of building to a critical mass and then rescinding into a core of purists, but I think you can blame this on the fact that small tweaks on an existing sound often produce something that's called a whole separate genre, whereas the divisions are much bigger in other macrogenres of music. Plus somehow considering "dance" a genre seems to indicate that you dislike it.

― Eppy (Eppy), Monday, 28 November 2005 22:39 (twenty years ago)

I also think it might be useful to reformulate the question as "have dance music genres always had a high ratio of crap to good tunes among those tunes that were widely heard?" If you try and take in the whole scope of all music that's produced in a given genre I think it's the same at all points across all genres, whereas there are clear differentiations among what's actually getting out to a contextually wide audience at different points in time.

― Eppy (Eppy), Monday, 28 November 2005 22:41 (twenty years ago)

i would kill for "electroclash goofy"

― Tracer Hand (tracerhand), Tuesday, 29 November 2005 02:19 (twenty years ago)

You must be logged in to post. Please either login here, or if you are not registered, you may register here.