Off at a Tangent ...

For which read two years *ago*.

To clarify, I don't think that Jurassic 5 et. al make bad music. It's just that it's kinda unnecessary right now - I already have De La Soul and A Tribe Called Quest, and just the fact that I *know* it's older makes it more interesting to me than 2000-era-carbon-copies. Which is unfair on the music itself, but I think totally fair on the musicians involved.

To look at it from a different angle, as much as the golden era of pop we discussed earlier deserves to be revived in some senses, the last thing I'd want would be Soft Cell tribute bands storming the charts. There needs to be a significant development and (what should I call it?) *contextual neccessity* to the music to justify celebrating it.

Agreed that the ultimate *unnecessaryness* of Jurassic 5 is down to their music being so unsurprising and similar to what came before (as a fellow lover of De La Soul / ATCQ, there's also a sense of "heard it previously"). I was also deeply suspicious of the very idea of calling an album "Quality Control", a denial of the loose, unregulated, charity-shop aesthetic that, for me, runs through all the best pop music, as though they were trying to filter out any influences that didn't live up to their idea of "quality". I got a hidden criticism of this idea into my NYLPM review of The Infesticons' "Gun Hill Road" (it's listed in the index which will tell you which week it was).

Though on similar ground I've been surprised how much I like the Reflection Eternal album on repeated listens - having been put off when I first heard it because of my tendency to lurch from one extreme to the other (I was then going through a very street-oriented phase). "This Means You" and "Down For The Count" are particularly good.

Of course pop that basically just pastiches Soft Cell or early Human League is totally spiritually opposed to it; I've been thinking about which recent British chartpop best lives up to that spirit. I still think White Town's one-off "Your Woman" came closer than anything else from the mid-late 90s, though I'd welcome any other suggestions ...

I should add that the idea of "quality control" in itself totally contradicts the original hip-hop aesthetic that Jurassic 5 allegedly love ...

Exactly. It's that "keepers of the eternal flame" arrogance that probably prevents me from liking more underground hip hop than I already do (basically I like Company Flow and... um...). Even musically though there's a sort of different attitude between the music now and the music then. Like, "3 Feet High and Rising" and "It Takes A Nation Of Millions..." both sound really maximalist for their times - as if they're trying to cramp in every possible sound and are being hampered only by the limited technology of the time. Musically minimalist maybe, but when you could sample whatever you wanted without having to pay royalty cheques, who needed tunes?

With current underground hip hop though there's this whole "keep it real" minimalist attitude that I reckon is in direct opposition of the overt musicality of all street hip hop since g-funk. Of course said musicality only came about because of the expensiveness of sampling during the nineties, so really that musicality was a pragmatic necessity rather than an aesthetic shift. Because of that I reckon that the minimalism used in underground hip hop is a result of misinterpreting the contextual environment of old skool hip hop for the intentions of the artist - an exaggerated analogy would be a Beatles fan saying that since The Beatles never made a techno 12", obviously they would have hated techno.

There's been some underground hip hop tracks that I really liked the sound of precisely because they weren't adverse to adding elements of hi-tech musicality - there's a Dilated People's track I heard that had this wonderful psychedelic kaleidoscope sound to it, but I never followed it up because I was turned off by the critical adulation... perhaps I should.

From the sampling perspective, I think there's still some room for development here - I like some DJ Shadow and Australia's own The Avalanches, who seem to be trying to build a bridge between sampladelic hip hop and Disco Inferno's later work. And of course Disco Inferno's brilliance goes without saying.

And I think that the ideas of sampling, once producers move beyond obvious basslines and choruses etc. could still do great things for pop. I was listening to Madonna's "Erotica" (the song) yesterday and was marvelling at how Shep Pettibone creates a (difficult, to be sure) pop song out of a dense, shifting tapestry of weird samples like Middle-Eastern madrigals. In many ways I consider the failure of either the Public Enemy or the Disco Inferno sound to properly cross over into the rest of the music world to be a double-header tragedy that cast a long shadow over the nineties.

As far as Soft Cell-inspired synth pop goes, I liked "Your Woman" too, because it sounded eighties but in a nineties way, and because the ambiguity of the vocalist made it stand out in a very simple but clever way that most pop stars would be afraid to imitate these days. But even if White Town had been successful, they would only have been to the eighties what Suede were to the seventies, and I doubt a real movement would have formed around Jyoti no matter how many hits he might have had. And ultimately, while the baby boomer generation still controls cultural capital we're not going to see eighties culture become acceptable in a 'serious' way like the seventies are now slowly becoming, at least not for a while.

Generally I think the successors to Soft Cell/Human League et. al. would not be synthpop bands but would get their ideas from urban music forms - R&B, hip hop, garage etc. Scritti Politti were pretty much on the right track with "Tinseltown To The Boogiedown" I reckon, although that was more of a hip hop track with Scritti influences than the other way around. I'm still waiting for a rock group to come along that use Timbaland/garage style beats, and I'm quite appalled that so far only The Beta Band have done so, and only for one single. And they can be dismissed by the general public/media for such a move because they've always been "a bit weird".

The seeming incomprehensibility of European rock digesting American urban-pop seems silly to me when it's so patently obvious how thoroughly disco (along with punk, it's true) provided so much musical impetus for UK bands in the late seventies and early eighties.