[Dixielandjazz] The Real Cutting Edge in Dance Music

[Steve barbone]

While we are all hung up on Rap, Hip-Hop and all that other "old music",
here is where "The Dance Music Scene" is, according to Mr. Reynolds.

CAVEAT - NOT OKOM - BUT A FUN READ FOR MUSIC LOVERS.

Cheers,
Steve


January 23, 2005 -  N.Y. TIMES - By SIMON REYNOLDS

The Turn Away From the Turntable

N the first months of 2005, two of electronic dance music's biggest bands
will release what are generally referred to as long-awaited albums. But
what's uncertain is how many people are actually waiting to greet the
Chemical Brothers' "Push the Button," out this week, or Daft Punk's "Human
After All," due in March. If the humiliatingly lukewarm response to last
fall's comeback albums by the top dance acts the Prodigy and Fatboy Slim is
any measure, neither Daft Punk nor the Chemical Brothers ought to bank on
teeming throngs at the record stores or a warm radio welcome.

During the halcyon days of the late 90's, these groups were the Big Four of
crossover electronica, their music fusing techno's pounding machine rhythms
with anthemic hooks and hard riffs that worked as well on rock radio as they
did on the dance floor. The Prodigy's success eclipsed everybody else's
("The Fat of the Land" sold nearly three million copies in America alone),
but Daft Punk and Chemical Brothers enjoyed MTV hits ("Da Funk" and "Setting
Sun," respectively), while tracks by Fatboy Slim achieved ubiquity via movie
soundtracks and TV commercials.

In those days, electronica was so trendy that Madonna jumped on two
different techno bandwagons in swift succession, assimilating the euphoric
riffs of trance with "Ray of Light" and aping the spangly effervescence of
French house on "Music." The bullish mood in the electronic community back
then was typified by Paul Oakenfold, the British superstar D.J., who tried
to break his moistly emotional brand of trance in America, in the belief
that this country was set to be dance music's next big commercial frontier.

Quite the opposite happened. In the new millennium, the mainstream profile
of dance music dipped alarmingly. This downturn occurred on both sides of
the Atlantic, but it was particularly precipitous in America, where
electronica was edged off of the charts by the twin juggernauts of nu-metal
and pop-punk, along with the perennial might of hip-hop. But it wasn't just
a case of mass-media gatekeepers abandoning electronic music. Something was
ailing at the grass roots of the scene. Formerly packed superclubs began to
close, or move to smaller venues. Large raves, once the mainstay of dance
culture, became nearly extinct. "Rave is dead in the Los Angeles area," says
the West Coast scene watcher Dennis Romero, who is news editor at the dance
magazine BPM.

As recently as 2001, Southern California was still the most vibrant rave
scene in America, but according to Mr. Romero, the kids just aren't coming
out to big events anymore, partly because of Ecstasy burnout. "The
superclubs here are starting to see diminishing numbers as well," Mr. Romero
says, "with popular nights like Spundae taking a hiatus and Red closing down
altogether."

Not only were sales of crossover-oriented electronica plummeting; the
underground dance music sold in specialist record stores also declined. Some
of those shops have closed because business is slow and record labels are
suffering. "People I know who run labels keep getting worse and worse news,"
says William Linn, a San Francisco-based dance party promoter. "Partly it's
because of the Internet, people just taking the music for free. But it's
also because people aren't buying the stuff in the way they were when the
music was a really new thing back in the early 90's." During that rave
culture heyday, an underground anthem could sell anywhere from 10,000 to
50,000 copies. Today, shifting a thousand copies of a 12-inch single is
considered a good result.

What happened? One cause is the continued fragmentation of dance culture
into myriad micro-genres with narrow aesthetic parameters and niche
followings. Another factor is musical overproduction, which effectively
divides the pie into smaller slices. But the overall pie also seems to be
shrinking as well. Dance music has simply lost the ear of the floating
consumer. This may be, in part, a matter of fashion: electronic dance music
had been around long enough to lose its "new kid on the subcultural block"
status. The music had become familiar, and familiarity bred ennui.

Other genres have certainly suffered this kind of problem; dance music is
going through the kind of midlife crisis that afflicts any genre that's been
around a while (think rock music in the 1980's). "We're just waiting for the
next Big New Thing in dance music to come along," says Norman Cook, the man
behind Fatboy Slim. "Right now we're between New Things, and no one quite
knows what the next one will be."

The central idea of electronic music's unwritten manifesto was always to
surge full-tilt into the future. But in recent years many creators of dance
music have been investigating the genre's own history, reworking ideas from
electro, synthpop and Italodisco. Even more oddly, others have been looking
to rock music for reinvigoration. Mr. Cook's "Palookaville" used rock
instrumentation (guitar and bass) and more conventional verse/chorus song
structures. Last year's biggest dancefloor anthem was Alter Ego's "Rocker,"
whose simple, chugging rhythm and squealing riffs are transparently modeled
on heavy metal. Swaths of Daft Punk's new album, "Human After All," resemble
an electronicized version of hard rock. Two highly touted early 2005 albums,
the self-titled debut from LCD Soundsystem and Mu's "Out of Breach," have a
rough-hewn, "live" garage punk feel to much of their contents.

Other currently hot outfits like Black Strobe, Tiefschwarz and Kiki hark
back to 80's alternative rock genres like Goth and industrial. Kiki's "End
of the World," for instance, features the Finnish-born producer paying vocal
homage to the doomy, hollow-drone baritone of Andrew Eldritch of the
goth-rock gods Sisters of Mercy. Perhaps the most bizarre example of dance
music ransacking rock's archives was last year's fad for schaffel (German
for shuffle), which involved producers renovating the stomping rhythms of
70's glam rock artists like T. Rex and Gary Glitter. It's hard to say
whether all these different forms of rockified techno represent a
subconscious attempt by the scene to ingratiate its way back into the
mainstream, or are simply a case of producers looking for genre-crossing
thrills. But none of them exactly restake dance music's claim as the music
of the future. 

Alongside its commitment to constant innovation, another central tenet of
dance culture was the idea of being underground, an outlaw scene. In the
early days, dance culture was oriented around one-off raves in unusual
locations, often involving organizers breaking into warehouses or invading
outdoor spaces. Proper safety codes were rarely observed, drugs were rife
and the behavior of the participants verged on anarchy. Gradually, the
thrills and dangers of raves were replaced by the more reliable pleasures
offered by superclubs - organized by professionals and regularly scheduled
but still fairly wild in terms of drug-fueled hedonism.

Today, the action is mostly in small clubs - like APT (419 West 13th Street)
and Ikon (610 West 56th Street) in Manhattan - in some cases barely more
than glorified bars. There, the audience exudes a clean-cut, metrosexual
aura. At times it feels as if the room has been teleported to a chic bar in
Barcelona or Berlin, especially as, more often than not, the D.J. is from
Europe. Germany, in particular, is the spiritual homeland for American dance
hipsters these days. Most of the leading labels - Kompakt, B-Pitch Control,
Playhouse, Get Physical - are based there. In fact, some North American
D.J.'s and producers like Richie Hawtin have moved to Germany because the
climate for electronic music is more supportive.

If neither sonic futurism nor underground edginess apply any longer,
electronic dance music's remaining raison d'être is, well, dancing. But in
recent years it may have been beaten on the shake-your-booty front by
dancehall and Southern rap. In response, some dance producers have started
to draw upon raucously vibrant "street" beats: crunk, Miami bass, dancehall,
grime and so forth.

The result is a growing hybrid genre, highlighted on the recent, excellent
compilation "Shockout," known as "breakcore." Purveyed by artists like
DJ/Rupture and Teamshadetek, the music combines rumbling basslines, fidgety
beats and grainy ragga vocals to create a home-listening surrogate for the
"bashment" vibe of a Jamaican sound system party. Others within the
breakcore genre, like Knifehandchop, Kid 606 and Soundmurderer, hark back to
rave's own early days, their music evoking the rowdy fervor of a time when
huge crowds flailed their limbs to a barrage of abstract noise and
convulsive rhythm. It's a poignant aural mirage of a time when techno music
was made for the popular vanguard rather than a connoisseurial elite, as it
is today.

Today's sharpest contemporary dance music operators, like Tiefschwarz or LCD
Soundsystem, are roughly equivalent to recombinant rock auteurs of the 90's
like PJ Harvey and Pavement, who generated sounds that weren't strictly
innovative but managed to somehow feel original. Tiefschwarz's
brothers-in-production duo Ali and Basti Schwarz and LCD's James Murphy have
an almost scholarly knowledge of dance music history. They're adept at
getting period sounds, but they combine them in fresh ways.

On LCD's album and Tiefschwarz's superb remix collection "Misch Masch," we
don't really encounter the shock of the new; instead we get the frisson of
novelty, subtle twists and cunning permutations within an established form.
Which will have to be enough for now, until dance music producers once again
figure out how to smack listeners upside the head with sonic strangeness.