Strictly 4 My Underground Homo Deep House Thugs: DJ Sprinkles - Midtown 120 Blues

Ball'r was my song of the year before the year began. I.e. technically released in 08 there wasn't a moment I new of a better track this year.

I think this was the only album I bought/heard in full from 2009, actually.

oh yeah, here's the RA link: http://www.residentadvisor.net/feature.aspx?1121

They sez:

DJ Sprinkles - Midtown 120 Blues [Mule Musiq]
"There must be a hundred records with voiceovers asking 'What is house?' and the answer is always some greeting card bullshit about life, love, happiness."

In 2009, it seemed like there were at least one hundred more. But the above quote, taken from DJ Sprinkles "Midtown 120 Intro" and the album that followed, was a striking moment in which the complexity of life—and music—was laid bare in 80 minutes of house music. Questions became more important than answers, ambiguity more important than certainty, hearing just as important as listening.

Midtown 120 Blues provided plenty of pleasure as well. The sublime, building "Sisters, I Don't Know What This World Is Coming To" and the otherworldly ambience of "Grand Central, Pt.II (72hrs. by Rail from Missouri)" are two of the finest representations of the most important loves—deep house and experimental electroacoustics—ever put to tape by Sprinkles, AKA Terre Thaemlitz. But the album is RA's favourite because it went far beyond making a crowd move, providing music journalists with angles or satisfying the home listening contingent. It's the best album of 2009 because it makes us wonder that if other producers—hell, other people—were as consistently brave as Thaemlitz, what this world indeed would be coming to.

the Redshape album is actually really amazing. highly rec'd.

huh, my top 15 has four of those. most of the ones listed there made me snore, though i'm glad Lawrence got big ups, cuz that album was really lovely.

weird that the resident advisor list was so close to my list, i don't really listen to that much techno, still I think M120blues is gonna do well in the ilm yr end poll, i'm voting it #1 tho so persp

So, ResidentAdvisor picked this as their album of the year and it's great. Was it popular on here (i've only lurked for a bit, was too intimidated to in the past).

its really from abt the seven minute mark that sisters kicks off, still the best track imo

Dwight, check the thread, this seems to have gotten a lot of love on ILM including from people who don't haunt the usual dance music friends. Pipecock doesn't like it but that's like a roundabout endorsement really.

Tim Finney, I salute you for this thread and alerting me to this record, my fave of 2009 (tied with Memory Tapes)

Man this record is just too good. I've said it before and I'll say it again, the fact that it has caused as much as as considered discussion it has - even if you don't agree with what TT says - is a testament to the success of not just a 12" but a whole album of that not only transcends the 'can you dance to it?" criteria that forms so much of the backbone in current dance music discourse. Moreover, I'd identify its ability to really make you feel things (like, emotions and stuff) that gives it that sort of edge, where for me, a straight white man at the beginning of his 20's, to examine my relation to dance music.

i always wonder what brenda's $20 dilemma was and if it worked out okay

I love this record. I feel like an outsider to this discussion -- I don't really understand the nuances between different sub-genres of electronic dance music -- but after reading the thread and spending a few days with the album, some thoughts have developed for me:

• I think Sprinkles' rant in the opening song is a crucial table-setter. He is bitter (e.g., "Most Europeans still think deep house means shitty vocal house tracks"), but that's okay, and he softens it with humor (I thought the point of his anecdote about not being able to get into The Loft at the exact moment the DJ is playing his song -- "I shit you not" -- was to lighten the mood, as opposed to him just passing along some weird experiences he's had).

• Ironically, in spite of Sprinkles' dismissal of "shitty vocal house music," I think the vocal samples save the second song (Midtown 120 Blues). I say "saves" because repetitive instrumental tracks sometimes go on too long for me, and I look for something to hold onto (vocals work well in this regard, even if they are just clipped samples, like in this song).(n.1) I think this highlights a difference between experiencing the music in a club versus on headphones; in a club, I imagine you want the groove to lock-in and keep-going while you're dancing, but on headphones, I get anxious to move on to the next new sound or nuance or development.

• I love the idea of the club as a political arena and dancing as an act of political opposition or expression. Maybe Sprinkles doesn't mean it this way, but that's how it comes across to me.

• The way the piano softly drops into the songs is really lush and inviting.

• Has Madonna ever addressed this charge that she didn't give due-credit to trans-gendered culture (not sure that's the right phrase) in Vogue? My first thought when I heard the accusation in the song was that maybe she couldn't comfortably fit those references into the lyrics, but that doesn't make sense, and it's an even thinner defense if she directly lifted the notion of voging directly from that dance community.

• In some ways, this hit me like Burial's Untrue record. I felt like the sounds had floated in from outer space, even though I'm sure it's old-hat and uninteresting to those paying closer attention to the genre.

________________________________________
(n.1) For instance, someone upthread said that Sisters I Don't Know What This World Is Coming To doesn't take off until about the 7:00 mark.

Ughhhh. Sorry. That all sounds so stupid.

Let me just stop at: "I love this record."

Daniel, it isn't really necessarily 'transgender' culture. It's really about Madonna not giving due-credit to the culture of voguing, which was (arguably) a liberatory phenomenon mostly involving African-American men dressing up in expensive, often androgynous clothing, and posing/dancing/voguing in these costumes as a way of subverting dominant paradigms of white, straight culture. Leo Bersani (himself an old white guy) has critiqued the culture because he claims it essentially reinforces the repressive mores and cultural styles that the African-American men were trying to subvert. I don't know how I feel either way, but there are two great movies about the subject. One is "Paris is Burning," which is essential viewing for anyone and everyone, imho, and the other is a short documentary called "Tongues Untied," which discusses African-American gay men in Harlem in the 1980's, among other things...

That's interesting. Thanks. FWIW (not much, I admit), I took my cue from the lyrics I found online: "She had taken a very specifically queer, transgendered, Latino and African-American phenomenon and totally erased that context with her lyrics."

I mean, there were pre-op trangendered people in those houses, certainly, but many of the young Latino and African-American men were doing their own, more stylized and contemporary version of what might have been called 'drag' in the past.

here's a clip from Paris is Burning:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qGzfFaj2Jv4

you can watch the entire thing in segments on youtube, too.

"Ball'r (Madonna-Free Zone)" is also in reference to this culture— it was called 'Ball Culture,' forgot to mention that.

Wow. Never seen anything like that before (re: the YouTube clip). Puts a new gloss on the disc, and Sprinkles' comments.

DO watch the entirety of Paris is Burning. It's all on youtube.

Paris Is Burning is so fucking amazing

http://i386.photobucket.com/albums/oo305/lejospopo/pibyo.jpg

looks like a good doc - stuck it up on my netflix queue.

btw, the infamous Tongues Untied clip that has pretty much become part of my everyday spiel:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YHZxRvCldlE

you say this every day?

well, no. just, "i ain't you bitch *snap*. yo bitch is at home wit' your kids *snap*."

in fact, when i give my MFA thesis reading in the spring, my friend is gonna yell 'bitch' at me from the audience, and i'm going to say just that.

say the whole thing.

but you see, i'm not black. or 45 years old.

so maybe i'll just change it to : i'm a white, 25-year-old white man who enjoys ENJOYS taking dick in his rectum. i ain't yo bitch. your bitch is at home with your kids. (snaps included of course)

and if possible do that thing with your eyes.

i can do that.

Paris is Burning is great. I still haven't heard this album :-( Suffice it so say, if TT is angry about Madonna stealing someone else's culture for her own benefit, I get it. Everyone in the documentary is dead, and probably died poor.

sorry ...everyone FEATURED in...

Man, just added two more movies to my xmas-movie-marathon to-watch list. i have no idea how i frequently manage to be ignorant of so many important/well-known docs.

i would have something to say about midtown 120 blues if i was remotely capable of absorbing it all. i'm on my second or third listen and i don't even have the vocabulary to talk about what it does.

that fore-mentioned "Paris Is Burning" doc is great, watched it on Xmas eve and been playing Cheryl Lynn "Got To Be Real" and Diana Ross "Love Hangover" (both on the soundtrack" ever since.

It also reminded me of Malcolm Maclaren's vogueing tribute which is excellent:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a9KDmJQjS_0

i would have something to say about midtown 120 blues if i was remotely capable of absorbing it all. i'm on my second or third listen and i don't even have the vocabulary to talk about what it does.

Yeah, this is how I feel.

tongues untied is all over the k-s.h.e album (another DJ sprinkles alias). amazing. check out "crosstown":
http://www.comatonse.com/releases/k-she/

oops, sorry, this is the link with mp3 clips:
http://www.comatonse.com/releases/k-she/cd.html

> i always wonder what brenda's $20 dilemma was and if it worked out okay

probably the same story in the cartoon on the back of dj sprinkles "sloppy 42nds"?
http://comatonse.com/img/c006feefee.gif

oooh! thanks beavis. huh huh, huh.

re: downloads
here's dj sprinkles' take on juno and the rest:
http://comatonse.com/releases/c018/
http://comatonse.com/soundfiles/
to sum it up, terre's been burned by major online distributors selling albums without contracts. midtown 120 blues is apparently authorized for download through pay sites, but other thaemlitz albums are not.

NOTE: Be sure to tell Iris to remove the works from their EU partner Junodownload.com as well - I and others have noticed our works remained available on Juno for over a year after Iris should have removed them. They were removed after a second request was submitted to Iris.

Had no idea. So my Juno download purchase was unauthorized? Is Juno a disreputable service? FWIW, I searched for DJ Sprinkles on eMusic, but nothing from him is available there.

*THIS IS THE WAY ~WE~ JACK THE HOUSE*

Got halfway through Paris is Burning (mother's apartment's shitty internet connexion does not like youtube ugh). I like it a lot!

Although, I feel kind of weird watching it. As a middle-class cis white queer in my early 20s two decades on, this is clearly NOT my world and it feels intrusive and tourist-y to observe, almost. In part this might be a result of the film being MADE by a middle-class white lesbian who stood to gain a lot from selling the stories of marginalized queers of colour to a straight, white audience, but to some extent its an issue inherent in ME as well.

In the same way that I feel disconnected from Thaemlitz's music, I feel removed from Paris is Burning. Removed from whatever process of education/integration/etc. into queer culture that exists? existed? at one point - that specific idea of queer culture as LOCALIZED and GEOGRAPHIC and COMMUNITY-BASED that is made explicit at various points in Midtown 120 Blues - my ability to view 'queer culture' as something I share ownership of is compromised, be it Deep House or drag or actresses of the 30s or whatever at any given point in time. As a result, I often feel like I appreciate queer film/music/art as an outsider/observer. Which is to say, Midtown 120 Blues sounds gorgeous and makes me profoundly ANGRY on behalf of Thaemlitz et al. and is a sublime artistic statement, and it makes me THINK but I don't necessarily think it was made for me.

I don't know if the above is particularly coherent but its the best response I can come up to the album for now. Suffice it to say, I will be listening to this album a lot more.

i dunno i just thought that movie was fun and that some of the guys were kinda hot

Haha! It is fun! And some of the guys are hot! But the movie made a couple million for Miramax and won a bunch of critics awards, and the ball-ers in the movie for the most part gained a bit of exposure, not much money, and...I dunno. From what I've read via google they got a pretty raw deal. One of them was murdered before the film was released, a bunch of them died of AIDS-related conditions in the early 90s. Not to fetishize tragedy or to diminish the strength of the movie's subjects - they're astoundingly interesting and strong people - but (to regress into undergrad-speak) the documentary seems to be 'problematic'.

I am writing in the manner of the kind of queer studies I usually want to punch in the face, but this is why I normally steer clear of this stuff. *Shaking My Head*

yeah ppl in documentaries don't get paid tho and they're not like innocent lambs, they were pretty much grownups who wanted to get a bit famous so like i kinda think its a bit patronising to frame it like that

like tough on them they missed the reality tv era

A few things:

1. Alex, this culture does still exist. It is even more glammed out now, for obvious reasons, but it DEFINITELY exists. I have been to a ball or two.

2. I highly recommend reading some Guy Hocquenghem. He pretty angrily, but logically, destroys the idea of 'ownership' of identity. Or at least he equates such an idea of 'ownership' with a capitalist framework that should be subverted. Check out "The Screwball Asses" or "Beyond Gay Identity." Or pick up a copy of "Polysexuality: A Semiotext(e) Reader." That has one of his primary essays in it.

3. As said above, Bersani has talked not only about the white lesbian who made the film, but also those who participated in it. In "Homos," he criticizes the ball'rs as actually glorifying the culture they are trying to mock by elevating it to a level of prestige— of capitalist excess and high, white-owned fashion— thus allowing themselves to be consumed. His critique is one that troubles me greatly, and I frankly don't agree with him, but I find it interesting nonetheless.