A Year of Music

For a long time, “dubstep” was more or less a free signifier very loosely attached to the music made by a small group of British producers who all knew each other. It was mentioned in print – when it was mentioned at all – by electronic music cognoscenti like Simon Reynolds and Woebot, had a loyal, tiny internet following and was otherwise very much a London scene nobody else knew or cared about. A couple of years ago, though, it became a Thing – it got written about in music magazines, had its own club nights all over the world, generated a couple different series of compilations, and got a lot of breathless hype from Mary Anne Hobbs over high-profile remixes of indie artists. Its sudden popularity caused Simon to instantly pronounce it dead, the producers to start grumbling about how the newcomers just don’t get it, and all the other things kids in the underground do when they suddenly find themselves confronting an expectant public they were never particularly interested in meeting.

Still and all, it’s weird to watch people police dubstep’s margins, to watch fans and DJs try to issue decrees about what is and isn’t proper dubstep. It’s a warning sign that classicism is setting in, and that people are trying to own a style – something that’s patently impossible. That usually coincides with me losing all interest in the style for a while, because being obsessed with “the classics” gets tedious in a hurry. This happened in a major way to Detroit techno, and as a result, there’s been very little new music from Detroit that’s genuinely excited me for a long time. I’ve heard stuff that’s insanely well-crafted and that moved me, but none of it has struck me as all that innovative or different.

I bring all this up because I was reading Blackdown’s newest monthly summary of the dubstep and grime scenes, and something about it set off my bullshit alarm (emphasis mine):

There’s something very timely about Oneman’s selection. Between the rise of funky, Mala’s continuing “broken dub house” direction, and the return of the 2step influence to dubstep, be it through Burial’s beats, Geiom’s “Reminisin’”, most of TRG’s productions, Martyn’s selection or Kode9’s sets, the vital link from dubstep to “house and garage” seems to be rejuvenating (in an interesting parallel to the Berlin/Bristol dubstep/techno axis). Oneman is most definitely at the forefront of this, going so far back in the dubstep continuum that old becomes new, classic sounds fresh, when placed in relation to the dominant styles that fill the bulk of dubstep in 2008. Plus, to much of his audience, pre-2005 or even pre-2006 dubstep is new ground, and that’s not even touching the vast number of current fans who wrote off UK garage in its entirety.

and

To say TRG’s sound owes a debt to Horsepower and to a lesser extent, early Zed Bias, would be an understatement. But set in the context of dubstep’s recent output, there’s something refreshingly welcome to the re-emphasis of swing and rhythmic variation (2008 dubstep producer in “snares-not-on-the-third-beat shocker!”). Increasingly there is the sense that if someone doesn’t re-ignite this style, it might be lost from dubstep’s canon for good. 2002 it seems, is the new 2008.

Come on, dude, 2002 was only 6 years ago. There’s a ton of records coming out that are still obviously indebted to the old garage sound, and the free interplay between dubstep, grime and newer UK garage (funky house and bassline house most specifically – read his past columns for more details on those styles. Blackdown knows the score) makes it pretty clear that the only ghetto dubstep is in is one consciously created by its critics and fans. It’s a little early to be talking about dubstep having lost its hardcore.

At the same time, I think I see his point, or maybe a version of it. Specifically, there’s a whole crowd of drum’n’bass producers – most prominently Tech Itch, who should know better – who seem to hell-bent on translating their fun-free mechanical techstep idiom into something that sounds the same as their usual, idea-free crap but runs half as fast. UK garage was a reaction against exactly that kind of tedious one-note darkness, and although I love Tech Itch’s old drum’n’bass, I really wish they’d leave dubstep alone. At least until they actually engage with all the stuff that happened since dnb and dubstep ended up on parallel paths.

I do really enjoy the totally uptempo, dancefloor-oriented dubstep that folks like Skream!, Caspa and Rusko are making. It’s plastic and pop, and it ditches the weirdness and obsession with dubstep’s musical dialectic with itself that makes artists like Shackleton, Burial and Various Production so interesting. Rusko’s “Jahova”, Distance’s “Traffic” and Skream!’s “Check It” are all slick as whaleshit, and sound even slicker in the mix, but they’re all fun, bass-heavy dancefloor stompers. As DJs crews, Skream! and Caspa & Rusko are unapologetically prejudiced in favor of ass-shaking, and they put together very consistent, slick sets that still encompass a lot of dubstep’s diversity while still being clubber friendly.

I think the club-friendliness is probably the main thing that bugs Blackdown and people like him. It sucks to watch your special thing go mainstream, especially when the people doing the mainstreaming don’t seem to understand what it was that made it interesting or cool in the first place. Maybe it’s easier for me to not care because I’m only a casual bystander (although I’ve listened to a lot of dubstep and grime in the past few years). I don’t know. I’m just wary of the impulse to build a canon, to worship the classics. A good tune will remain a good tune forever, but if you fasten upon the classics of the past, you might miss the classics of the future.

I’ve had the following set of evocative descriptions of Dmitri Shostakovich’s fifteen string quartets by Rachel Kiel sitting on my computer’s desktop in a sticky since sometime in 2006, after reading it on Alex Ross’s blog:

The First Quartet is a blade of grass,
the Second Quartet is a pocket knife,
the Third Quartet is a captive bird,
the Fourth Quartet is an old train car,
the Fifth Quartet is a piece of blue glass,
the Sixth Quartet is a worn dress,
the Seventh Quartet is a red crayon,
the Eighth Quartet is a forest fire,
the Ninth Quartet is a paper fan,
the Tenth Quartet is the bottom of the ocean,
the Eleventh Quartet is a bullet,
the Twelfth Quartet is a sleeping lover,
the Thirteenth Quartet is a horse’s skull,
the Fourteenth Quartet is a strand of black hair,
the Fifteenth Quartet is an empty room.

I keep them around both to remind me to listen to Shostakovich’s work more, and to remind me of how much can be said about music in how few words.

Hard on the heels of my post on Fucked Up and Kelefa Sanneh’s laudable efforts to get them noticed by New York Times readers, I bring to your attention this excellent article by him about dubstep’s ongoing half-assed attempt to penetrate the American gestalt. He does a great job with the nearly intractable problem of describing dubstep (a thing more defined by what it’s not than what it is) and he does it without talking down to the audience. He’s now my favorite critic writing for the Times.

This is an example of why I have John Darnielle, aka The Mountain Goats, prominently included in my diminutive blogroll. This is the sort of thing I wish I wrote:

These guys are from Minneapolis and they sound like they are pissed off about it. Singer is up on the early-90s screaming-at-mom-because-she-fucked-up-the-French-toast emo style. No not that kind of emo you worthless piece of shit. The other kind. Remember Gravity Records? No I didn’t think you did. I’ll be right back I gotta go put my head in the oven.

Now I gotta find some Ganglion. I remember Gravity Records. Shit. I’m old.

UPDATE: Ganglion have some free MP3 samples up on Interpunk, and their pleasant mess reminds me a lot of Circle Takes The Square, who doth rule. Quoting my own review of Circle Takes the Square’s first full-length, As the Roots Undo:

Overwrought sincerity coupled with music so intense it verges on breaking down throughout its running length makes for a chaotic tangle of gothic punk / hardcore that is a splendid mess from start to finish. Positively baroque. My favorite record from 2004.

and this other mention, from one of my paleoblogs:

I picked this one as the record of the year back when it came out at the beginning of the year, and I see no reason to change my opinion now. Sprawling and organic, heavy and anarchic, too emo to be punk, too punk to be metal, too metal to be emo: truly, it takes you in circles.

All of which is evidence that I need to get me some Ganglion bad, because I love this kind of post punk splatter.

Ursula K Le Guin, a very wise author, critic, feminist, anthropologist, and all-round God Who Walks, once wrote a spirited essay entitled Genre: A Word Only the French Could Love. At some point, I’ll discuss this essay in depth, especially as it pertains to music, but for now, the title is enough. I’ve spent an inordinate amount of my time on earth trying to file the art I like into little boxes that are partitioned into subboxes that have little halo-like graphs of signifiers and tags rotating around them in a complexified hyperdimensional paraspace. It’s always been lots of fun, but I eventually decided I wasn’t sure how edifying it all was.

These days I’ve shifted to cleaving to another notion stolen from literary critics, which is that an interesting piece of art is a finished work that has something wrong with it. This notion of the problematic comes to me from a quote of Randall Jarrell’s (“a novel is a prose work of a certain length that has something wrong with it”) cited in an interview with Samuel R Delany, who was using it to point out that even The Dispossessed – Ursula K Le Guin’s most successful novel – was flawed, but it really gets to the heart of what is special about the music that has stayed with me the longest: it exerts a kind of Lovecraftian hold over my imagination because there’s something going on that just doesn’t quite work, signs of a reach exceeding a grasp.

Smoosh all that together and you get Mordant Music’s The Tower – Parts VIII-XVIII. They don’t seem to have any idea what they want to be when they grow up. There’s some bathtub electronic experimentalism in the vein of early Tangerine Dream, a hint of Mogwai’s bombastic instrumental post rock, some bass-heavy dubstep miserablist isolationism (Shackleton once put out a record on Mordant Music’s eponymous label), a lot of Glenn Branca’s rigorous and tendentious guitar drones, but none of it’s in the service of any kind of structured program. The net effect is as if they’ve somehow captured on disc music in the raw, a protean cloud of sound, but it’s more beautiful and affecting than most of the outsider electronica it superficially resembles. It’s remarkable, and surprisingly accessible, even though it’s far from perfect. It would be far less interesting if it were perfect.

I have sort of a disdain-hate relationship with Nick Denton’s would-be media empire. Over the years, I’ve read Gizmodo, Gawker, Defamer, Jezebel, io9, Fleshbot, Kotaku and Idolator. Sooner or later, all of them except Jezebel have started to really piss me off. Denton encourages an irreverent house style that’s reminiscent of a brain-damaged version of British tabloid culture: gossip reigns supreme, sincerity is toxic, and a cheap, facile presumption of auctorial authority oozes out of every page.

Jezebel makes it work. At least one of the editors is like a retarded kitten, and you want to pet her even as you kind of pity her, and the rest of the editors know how to be provocative (and funny) enough to get Jezebel’s thriving community going on a given topic. Their commenters have sort of taken charge of the site’s vibe, and they’re an interesting group. That’s the only reason I still read Jezebel, even though I probably shouldn’t.

Idolator, on the other hand, makes me crazy in the head. Maybe it’s just that they’re treading very close to where I live, but for all of their cheap cracks and flashy insider knowledge, they still come across as no-talent assclowns. They act like they’re letting you in on the scene, but it’s all written from the consumer’s side of the music biz firewall, so they never really offer you the economic analysis or industry context that would allow you to understand the larger forces at work – something I think is critical in understanding how and why we get the music we do. In place of thoughtful analysis (or useful criticism) we get the same tired-ass shallow celebrity gossip horseshit: who’s got beefs, who flashed their beaver in public, which famous person said something dumb or mean about some other famous person, Amy Winehouse is gonna die, Britney’s still alive, etc. And occasionally some totally insipid “pop” criticism from writers who I know are capable of much better.

That’s the thing that gets to me the most, I think: I know that Jess Harvell and Maura Johnston are die-hard music fans with interesting tastes. Anyone who will go to the mat for Scritti Politti is clearly on my team, and Harvell’s recent analysis of what internet hype is doing to the development of new artists was sharply written and perceptive. It’s just when they write to match the Gawker style that they piss me off, because it does a disservice to music, which I fervently believe deserves to be taken seriously, and it does a disservice to their own skills when every sharp insight is immersed in a sea of semi-pointless snark.

I only subjected myself to them (again) because I’m trying to keep a closer eye on the business end of music myself, and it sort of seemed like they might have some insight into deals like the recent flaps at EMI. But they’re using the same primary sources I am, and tossing it into Nick Denton’s Borg processor to be extruded as partially hydrogenated meta-cultural product, and it’s all terrible and makes me sad. Don’t support their asinine bullshit. Even Pitchfork is better, and that’s not something I admit lightly.

(NOTE to Annalee and Charlie, should they ever stop by: I like you guys just fine, and I wish you all the best in your new gig, but trying to read io9 just makes me sigh. No offense. I think I just come at fandom from another angle.)

If you’re a fan of Joy Division or Devo or ever liked a song by ABC or Human League, you really ought to read Simon Reynolds’ Rip It Up and Start Again. As this blog pretty well reflects, I am a die-hard music snob who’s devoted the majority of his life to stashing useless bits of music trivia into every semi-empty corner of my brain, and I still found it useful as a way of (re-)framing a lot of the music I love. Reading it has considerably enriched my music collection, even if my bank account has shrunk correspondingly.

One of the ways I found it most valuable was the way that it inclusively pulled a lot of my favorite old industrial[1] groups into the context of British post punk. I’ve always liked Cabaret Voltaire, but once Reynolds pointed out that they essentially started as a garage band with some weird electronics (which they are: they cover the Velvet Underground and “Theme from Shaft”), it put them in a whole new, more interesting light. Instead of focusing on their aggression and coldness, now I listen for the weird skeletal rock, funk and dub / reggae that informs a lot of their early material, and that brings out the fact that, at root, they’re as much like early Bauhaus (“Silent Command” almost is a Bauhaus song) or Television as they are like Throbbing Gristle. It adds a whole new dimension to their music. Thanks, Simon.

1: One of these days I will probably be unable to resist blathering on endlessly about the many, many ways in which this term has been abused, but today is not that day.