writing about music #5

specifically, writing about dance music

aka my replies to a 2001 survey by rockcritics.com of "disco critics"

(full piece here)

Q's by Scott Woods 

1. Because house music and disco are conceived primarily for the dance floor, does this make them harder to write about than more “contemplative” or “conceptual” forms of pop?

As U.K. house outfit K-Klass put it, “Rhythm Is a Mystery.” It is very hard indeed to write about why one groove or beat is more compelling than another. Even if you get into drummer’s lingo (tresillo, clave, triplets, flams, syncopation, etc.) or the technicalities of programming, the “it” — that edge of excellence or distinctiveness you are trying to capture — will just endlessly recede from your verbal grasp. For instance, it’s quite easy to write generalities about “breakbeat science” and apply them to whichever jungle producer you’re writing about — but almost infinitely harder to convey the signature that makes, say, a Dillinja or Doc Scott production instantly recognizable and special…Same goes for the particular rhythm traits or production hallmarks of the other genres — the finicky hi-hats in house and garage, the DSP (digital signal processing) timbre effects in Kid606 type IDM, the filter sweeps in French house, the 303 acid-riffs in hard trance etc., etc…What makes for one exponent’s instantly-audible superiority over another?

And even then, you can write about the programming and production and be strenuous in your attempts at exactness, but you might still fail to convey the electricity, the rush…what can you actually say about the nature of, and relationship between, the guitar, the bass, and the orchestral sounds, in a Chic song, that could actually tell you anything about how its magic works…

Mind you, it’s just as hard to say why in rock or pop, one melody is heart-rending and another isn’t, why one singer’s grain-of-voice reaches deeper into you than another…not to mention the great rock mystery of the Riff…

But dance music, by diminishing or stripping away altogether the other elements that one might critically latch onto (lyrics, persona/biography of the artist, relevance to the outside-the-club world etc.) as a bulwark against the ineffable does rather shove one headfirst into the realm of sound and its materiality. (Which a surprisingly large number of people still find quite discomfiting).

Kind of appropriately, really, writing about dance music does confront you in a very direct way with the old “dancing about architecture” futility/absurdity dilemma — because it is so purely musical, functional…what is there really to say? I suspect a lot of the people who might have made good dance critics, who have real taste and knowledge of its history, become DJs instead — because you can actually support the music and evangelize in a very direct way: playing it to people.

So if it’s so hard to do, so pointless, why bother? As an old comrade of mine Paul Oldfield once put it in a zine we did together, Monitor, because there’s “the possibility that words might fail interestingly or suggestively.”

Also true that this music is very site-specific…a lot of the sonic content in dance music is barely audible on a domestic hi-fi…so that with a house record played at home, the kick drum can sound tinny and weak and monotonous, but in a club, on massive system, the monotony becomes compelling because it’s so physically, viscerally impact-ful…the kick drum becomes a cocooning environmental pulse…similarly with jungle, the bass permeates your flesh…unlike rock, r&b, pop it is not mixed for radio or the home hi-fi.

2. What do you try and get at when writing about dance music: beats, textures, words, voices — or some combination thereof?

Everything…you can still use the trad rockcrit arsenal of interpretive techniques too — you can do lit-crit style exegesis of sampled phrases and catchphrases, the song titles can be decoded and unpacked, the artist names…there is always discourse around the music…then there’s the question of the music as social text — the behaviors it is designed to trigger or enhance…you don’t have to have field-researched it and actually heard it played out in a club, ‘cos the records contain these behavioral cues, clues to how they’re supposed to be used or responded to…you hear a trance record and the structure of it, with build, breakdown, hands in the air refrain, etc., tells you how it is used…what tableaux it creates in the club, out of the audience’s bodies.

3. How much of a technical perspective about dance music (i.e., how it’s actually made) do you bring to your writing about the music? Is a technical perspective even necessary?

Try to, while being aware that a) it’s kind of dry and un-romantic and scientific so you need to be sparing ‘cos you can lose the lay reader and b) it’s simultaneously a crucial part of the way the music works and at the same time doesn’t tell you enough, i.e., all that stuff about signature, aesthetic eminence, why one track is better than another even when using the exact same techniques…often resulting in relapse into the superlative, the ineffable, the imprecise…terms like ‘funk’, ‘soul’, etc…

Most dance reviews, when you boil them down, all they’re saying is ‘this is a funky record’. Or that the guy/gal reviewing it finds it funky which doesn’t even tell you whether you’d find it funky.

4. Talk technology. Have technological changes in the recording industry — samplers, computer sequencer programs, etc. — improved, damaged, or made no difference whatsoever to the music?

When a new piece of tech comes on-line as it were, there is always a gap where the trad musically skilled don’t know how to deal with it, and the discursively sharp, culturally astute types — often non-musicians in that Eno mold — seize the time and surge ahead, finding unexpected applications for the new machine, ways of (ab)using it. But then things level out again as everyone assimilates the new technology and the old hierarchies of talent over non-musicality return…you can see it time again — with synthesizers (Daniel Miller of Mute/The Normal said the synth was only any good when used by non-musicians), with drum machines, with sequencers, with sampling…At first the canny ones move in and do stuff, perhaps superficially striking stuff, with it, and then the more musical ones come in and do stuff that’s more sophisticated, in key, arranged a la trad musical values…being an old punkie at heart I tend to valorize the surge moments when the sharp-witted DIY barbarians seize the new tools or think up new ways of bending existing tools…e.g., hardcore rave and early jungle, with the whole speeding up the breakbeats, using timestretching etc. thing. Because they don’t know the Rules of Music…you get all kinds of interestingly wrong-sounding music, improperly integrated fusions…when “musicality” comes back, it’s less interesting, because “music” has been done really hasn’t it, there’s no shortage of pleasant melodies or harmonious, euphonious stuff to listen to.

Ultimately though I tend to think in any era the really musical ones will rise to the top eventually once the new technology-induced commotion settles down… although a lot of musically talented folk get caught in the ‘wish I could make music like the golden age’ retro-trap and get pulled out of the innovation game, as it were.

5. What are the biggest assumptions and misconceptions about dance music that a person writing about it must challenge or at least consider?

That dance music is mindless, that dance fans are not listening closely — a dancer is “listening” with every sinew and muscle and nerve ending in his/her body.

That crowd responses are essentially de-invidualizing — well, they are, but what’s wrong with that? What’s so great about being an individual? That sort of dis is like saying I don’t like cheese ‘cos it tastes cheesy…the whole point is to get lost in the crowd, merge with something bigger than your paltry self.

6. Does one have to go out dancing — participate in the activity and culture of disco — in order to write well about it? Are you a good dancer?

Honestly and truly I’d say, absolutely. Participation is essential… or at least, you have to have gone through a phase of being intensely into clubbing and dancing at some point to really undertand the appeal…the collective synchronized rush induced by certain tracks or certain DJ manoeuvres… dance culture is full of Gnostic refrains like “this is for those who know” or “hardcore you know the score” and so forth, and what they allude to is this physically-felt knowledge that comes from having experienced what happens on a dance floor when a certain kind of bass-drop takes place, or a certain drum build, or whatever…the way goose bumps ripple across the crowd-body…The crucial distinction: it’s not elitist, but it is tribal.

I can almost invariably tell from a piece of dance writing if the writer has experienced this stuff ever…or whether they are writing from “outside” the experience…they might have interesting insights through being totally detached but…well, I would never follow their consumer guidance tips, shall we say.

And needless to say, drugs play a big part in this as most dance styles are full of effects and sounds that play into, enhance, or trigger certain drug sensations…

A great piece of dance music, or a great DJ, makes me into a good dancer, I find… awakens the Dionysus within… the music dances you, as it were…Nietzche: “Now I am light, now I fly, now I see myself beneath myself, now a god dances through me!”…otherwise one can find oneself just shimmying along adequately as if at some office party disco, dancing as social ritual rather than flash of the spirit…

7. What do you think is the most important development to have taken place in dance music in the last ten years?

Drugs — both the highs and the darkside — have massively mutated the evolution of the music and caused it to splinter as it adapts to different social-racial-sexuality-drug oriented factions — not just Ecstasy, but the ever more powerful forms of weed, relatively newer and nastier drugs like ketamine, the perennial amphetamine and acid…and also the rise of the polydrug culture that mixes and matches all of these substances.

Production — with ProTools, plug-ins, Virtual Studio Technology etc. — the level of intricacy and detail in production is staggering — rhythmic complexity of accents and nuances far exceeding any real drummer’s capability…it does mean the music sometimes loses the power of a simple Big Riff though…

Growth of sound systems and a “big room” aesthetic in the music, with tracks designed to exploit the quadraphonic potential of the club space, the frequency spectrum…tracks that are sculpted in four dimensions, riffs like blocs of sound in motion that swoop through the crowd-body…full of almost a-musical wooshes and FX…the music becomes spectacular, a sonic spectacle.

The gradual emergence of a single unified bass-beats-bleeps culture, a trans-Atlantic confederacy of street sounds — whether it’s 2step garage coalescing as an only-in-London hybrid of house, jungle, ragga, and Timbaland-style R&B, or conversely, with techno-ravey-drum’n’bassy sounds and riffs infiltrating US gangsta rap (due to Ecstasy catching on with B-boys?), R&B, and even Jamaican dancehall.

8. Overall, do you think dance music is in healthy shape today? Why or why not? (Feel free to talk about this in comparison with the rock and pop – or any other – world.)

I’m not sure if it’s any more healthy or unhealthy than rock or pop or rap — 90 percent is shit is the general rule — if it has an edge, in terms of being alluring to youth, is that the drugs-loudmusic-brightlights-bizarrelydressedfolk combo of clubland is still an unbeatable leisure paradigm — and also, because the music is functional, even hackwork and clones can play their part by providing DJs with grist to the mixing mill, whereas lame copyist rock or pop is just lame…

9. Where’s the best stuff in dance music today coming from? (You can approach this question in a number of ways: Is it happening in underground circles or on radio? North America or Europe? Is it taking place in some exciting new sub-genre?)

re: dance floor oriented music, London pirate radio culture is still the cutting edge as it was all through the nineties: hardcore to jungle to drum’n’bass to U.K. garage to 2step. Time for another paradigm shift from that quarter.

Germany’s rockin’ it with the Cologne glitch stuff, weird house, Berlin’s dub-techno Pole-types, Timo Maas on the populist Sasha-with-balls tip…

America’s got it’s own post-rave vanguard with the kid606 and friends, Schematic, kit clayton etc. etc. types bringing in humor, personality, urgent opinions and emo-core venting to the rather sterile world of post-Autechre IDM — not sure if much of it really counts as dance music though.

Actually there’s good stuff going on all over the place, mavericks and hacks alike come up with the goods, so much it’s impossible to keep up with it. But at the same time there’s no obvious scene that has surged ahead of everyone else and is the obvious leading edge, as there was with jungle in 93/94/95…there’s no sense of revolution, no next big thing but lots of next medium-sized things.

10. What are the greatest challenges and obstacles in writing about dance music these days?

Er, not being boring? Actually, not being bored is more like it.

Avoiding boosterism and developing a truly critical language for dance music. Most dance reviews are 7 or 8 in essence even when un-graded. there should be 3’s and 1’s and zeroes. Of course, the boosterism is based on feeling like the scene is underground and needs support, so it’s sort of understandable to an extent.

Resisting nostalgia for the early, less professionalized and more anarcho days of rave, before it became an industry. Things can never stay the same. Don’t fall into the Meltzer trap!

Learning that “vibe” migrates and that you can’t keep looking in the same place for your bliss. Knowing when to leave the party (and find another, more pumping one)

Retaining the capacity to be astonished. (So much stuff comes out that the landmark releases don’t stand out so starkly against the plains of lameness).

writing about music #4

a 2014 interview with Jerry Thackray aka Everett True aka The Legend, for an academic study of criticism he was writing

How did you gain authority as a music critic (i.e why and how where you chosen to write about music)?

The music press in the UK was a machine for the creation of that sort of authority – it was self-selecting -- a certain kind of personality and sense of (in print, if not person) confidence was what was attracted to the music press, and it was what prospered there –  you were rewarded for emphatic-ness and categorical-ness, taking strong stances pro and con various things, seizing on a new band or scene and hyping it. So diffidence and tentativeness tended to not thrive in that context.

But writers who came up through that school (the UK music press) often find it hard to translate that kind of charismatic (in print, not in person) model of criticism to other fields of journalism, where there is a more measured tone and a pretence of objectivity – most don’t manage to make the transition and those who do really have to tone it down for the less shouty environs of newspapers and “proper” magazines

What is the role of the music critic?

That’s rather a big question there Everett! People could write a long essay or a small book about it.

It’s much the same as other arts critics – assessing what’s good and bad  in terms of recordings, individual artists, or genres versus the rest of the genrescape;  tracking the evolution of a particular artist; looking for the wider significance or resonance of a recording/artist/genre; making connections between music and other art forms or what’s going on in culture or society or politics; pattern-recognition (spotting the emergence of trends, new genres, etc). 

What’s different about rock criticism as a tradition is that it has tended (historically) to have more role for a kind of prophetic or messianic mode, as in the “I have seen the future of...”.   There have been critics who have adopted that mode with the other arts – Clement Greenberg with art,  certain literary critics probably – but it’s been less common, I think.

Also, rock/pop/etc are hybrid art forms, so there is a lot of levels on which you can appraise or analyse it – music, but also lyrics, persona, performance/theatrics/gesture, visual presentation (clothes, video, record packaging) etc etc.  That helps to account for the huge diversity of critical approaches

In what way are power relations around traditional taste-maker critics changing from print to web 2.0 environments? Were these power relations around traditional taste-maker criticism already changing before the advent of web 2.0 environments?

Obviously the power of critics to guide taste, direct the discourse, and introduce the public to new bands or genres has diminished considerably. That was already in process before the Web took off, as the number of  print music publications, specialist magazines and fanzines kept expanding, but it has certainly diminished dramatically more with the rise of blogs and webzines and message boards and all the other web forums.

Can one critic still wield the same power as they did during the heyday of the UK and US music press?

That’s a rhetorical question if ever I saw one. You know the answer to that!

I think there were several heydays, each successively smaller than the other.

The heyday of the early-mid Seventies, of MM as the progressive paper selling 200 thousand a week, and then being eclipsed by NME, being more glam oriented.  (Although it was Melody Maker  where Bowie revealed to the world he was “gay” and MM that first pushed Roxy Music). 

Then the second heyday would be punk, with all three papers—MM and Sounds were actually slightly quicker off the mark than NME, but NME eventually “owned” the story--being the principal forum in which punk’s existence was revealed to the wider world and where its meaning was thrashed out and fought over.  That heyday carried on into postpunk and New Pop. 

Then the last heyday would be that  period in which you and I were involved—Pixies/My Bloody Valentine/Sonic Youth/etc;  Madchester with Stones Roses and the Mondays; shoegaze; grunge with Nirvana et al,

Britpop seemed like the triumph of the weekly music press but was really it’s death knell, or perhaps a Pyrhhic victory in so far as “the story” got so big it left the music papers behind.

If you read something like Nick Kent’s review of Television’s Marquee Moon in NME, which was a 1977 cover story even though there was no interview with the band,  there’s a tremendous sense of the writer stepping out onto a stage, confident that he’s addressing a huge audience, and that he has the ability to “deliver the news”, which is that Television are one of the most important bands of the era and this is an album that will change rock.  And largely through press raves the album was a chart hit and the band even had some singles in the Top 30.

That sort of confidence and conviction—that you’ve come into the possession of the truth and that there’s a readership who are ready to be accept it—runs all through the music press through these successive heydays, from writers like Richard Williams and Michael Watts through Charles Shaar Murray, Ian McDonald and Nick Kent through Julie Burchill and Tony Parsons Gary Bushell and Jon Savage through Paul Morley, ian Penman, Chris Bohn, Dave McCullough through to our own moment with figures like Steven Wells, the Stud Bros, and in the twilight of that last heyday Neil Kulkarni. 

But I think the basis for that self-belief gradually shriveled in ratio to the circulation of the music papers, and also the number of rival sources of opinion and news about music.

Who are the gatekeepers in web 2.0 environments?

I don’t know if there are gate-keepers in the old sense, but clearly there’s concentrations of influence – Pitchfork.  

Do you read music criticism in print publications anymore? If not, where do you go for critical opinion?

I tend to mostly read print publications that I write for, which means I get sent them in most cases.  But I do pick up issues of magazines like Spin and Mojo and Uncut if there is a story inside or a cover feature that particularly grabs me.

I also read print publications that have a strong presence on the web like the Guardian Music section, or Village Voice and other alternative weeklies in the America. And there is often interesting stuff on music in newspapers like New York Times, New Yorker, New York magazine,  or places like Frieze and Artforum

That said, most of the opinion and news I follow is on the web these days, either from webzines like Quietus, FACT, Pitchfork, etc, or it is bloggers.

The main problem is that there is too much stuff to process – if it’s web, I tend to either save it for later (a later that never comes) or just read it too fast. When you relied on print magazines, you had them lying around the house and you would often reread things so they would have a deeper impact. And even if it was just read once, the reading was less frantic and the words would seem to penetrate your mind more. Of course in those days I was also more impressionable.  

How do people engage with music criticism?

I couldn’t say, that would involve sociological research I’d have thought.  There’s many different levels from cursory, skeptical interest to fanatical taking-it-too-serious.

Judging by the comments in comments boxes, often they haven’t read the piece – I have had people complain about genre overview types pieces I’ve done that “you didn’t mention [artist X]” when in fact, if they had actually bothered to click on the second page of the story, they would find a mention of that very artist! Often they are so impatient to express an opinion they’ve just read the “dek” (I think in the UK, the word is “standfirst” – the bit of blurb, written by the editor, below the headline) and not the piece itself, which is generally a lot of more nuanced and less inflammatory than the headline and dek.   But hopefully comments-boxers are not typical of all readers!

What differentiates opinion from criticism?

An attempt at argument and at persuading the reader to your point of view. But also a different mode of address, in which there is some gesture towards the idea of truth, that this is really is how things “are”.  

Most criticism, when it comes down to it, is largely a rationalization of subjective taste, and the universalization of a very particular perspective. But that rationalization and that universalization are what it’s all about! The mental effort, and the self-belief, involved in doing that are what separates criticism from just mouthing off about your preferences or dislikes. The effort and the self-belief hopefully generates an energized or stylish piece of prose.

Does music criticism have economic and/or entertainment and/or sociological value?

Economic value – to whom?  If you mean towards the exponents, then it’s steadily being deprofessionalized. For the industry, there might be value in the sense that the music press has always had a role in the generation of meaning and significance, which is actually a more effective way of getting people to part with money than just pleasure/use-value. 

Entertainment – for some, yes. I think the best music writing always had some element of flash or style to it. Not necessarily jokes, but the kind of entertainment value of watching anybody – a sportsman or rapper or whatever—do something well. The pleasure of language being flexed energetically or in unusual ways.

Sociological? You mean that it can actually tell you stuff about society and the role of music in it? Possibly. Critical discourse is a slightly more disciplined and focused form of fan discourse, and fan discourse I would have thought was pretty valuable if you were trying to work out the social context and purpose of a music form or scene was.

Is it possible to become influential as a music critic via web 2.0 environments?

Yes but you’ve got the odds stacked against you.

Most of the critics operating today who could be considered influential came up through the old print media and still write for them primarily, or they graduated to print after apprenticing in web land. 

One thing I would observe finally is that the web-reared generation don’t seem to want to be influential in the same way that the music writers that we grew up on wanted to be, or the way we wanted to be.   I think if you look at our peer group – figures like Swells, Stubbs, Studs, etc – we had inherited this excessive (and probably already beginning to be outmoded) sense of the power of critics to shape opinion, grant exposure to the righteous music, do damage to the unrighteous music,  etc.   There was a confidence that the way you saw things was a truth that could be communicated to others and be taken up by them.  In contrast, the Web 2.0 generation are lot more diffident. They tend to eschew the very personalized, subjective approach (Bangs, Morley,  yourself) and to write “objectively”, as if simply describing the attributes of the things they’re writing about.  But it is an objectivity that avoids making large claims about the significance of the music or what it’s impact could / should be.  The new breed’s tone is generally a lot less exhortatory and “you MUST hear this”. Even on blogs, which you’d think would be a natural home for shouty, “this is my truth”  type writing, the tone tends to be more quiet and ruminative. Perhaps they are just have a more realistic sense of things. 

Mekons (1990)

THE MEKONS

Spin, 1990

(possibly unpublished, really cannot remember!)

by Simon Reynolds

"We're not a folk band or a C&W band", insists Tom Greenhalgh of The Mekons. "We hated getting shoved in the roots music category. So we called the last album 'Rock'N'Roll' to clear up the misconception."

Another reason, says guitarist Jon Langford, was that they wanted to reclaim the term from the rock aristocracy installed by Live Aid's public spectacle of philanthropy. "After Live Aid, it seemed like 'rock'n'roll' had much broader connotations than Elvis' quiff. Rock'n'roll started with a pelvic gyration, and ended up capitalism's bastard son."

"We wanted to talk about whether it's possible to carry on writing songs and playing guitars in these conditions," continues Greenhalgh. "And the answer is that it's almost impossible. But you have to try. Our original idea was to call the album "The Music Industry", with have songs titled "The Publisher", "The Distributor", "The Agent", "The Journalist". We wanted it to be like a Godard film: a horrible, brutal, boring deconstruction, with lots of statistics and naming of names."

The Mekons have been 'deconstructing' rock'n'roll for over 12 years now, during which time they've endured ordeals at the hands of record companies, but enjoyed the esteem of a posse of bigwig US critics. Lester Bangs once dubbed them "the most revolutionary band in the world", while Greil Marcus has celebrated them for following the most interesting trajectory out of the wreckage of punk's failed revolution. 

During the Eighties, The Mekons found - in the fatigue and fatalism of C&W and folk - a brilliant metaphor for the blighted dreams of the post-punk aftermath. The bleak, fractured lyrics of their songs described the predicament of a defeated generation, whose lives had disintegrated into a tangle of loose ends and aborted possibilities.

Despite their cheerless subject matter, The Mekons are one of the most rousing live experiences around. And their most recent release, the "F.U.N. 90" EP, actually saw them venturing into dance terrain. "Having A Party" (a cover of Kevin Coyne's blistering kiss-off to the music biz) even borrows the same syncopated, 'Funky Drummer' backbeat that has motored the UK's current indie/dance crossover explosion.

"We're not taking the piss out of the post-Manchester thing," says Greenhalgh. "It's more the case the indie/dance sound is the climate and it's kind of irresistible."

Although they insist that they're not party poopers, the lyrics of "Having A Party" and other songs on the EP do undercut and expose the vacuous positivism of the post-Manchester rave. 

Greenhalgh confirms that The Mekons project is one of negation. "Adorno said that making any affirmative gestures in the post-holocaust era, only affirms that culture. To pretend otherwise is to live in a fantasy land. And that's what most rock'n'roll is. If you are involved in rock you've got to be as dissonant as possible."

The most experimental track on the EP, "One Horse Town" is an eerie, ambient dancescape, featuring a sample of Lester Bangs. 

"We met him in New York in 1981," remembers Langford. "He liked our attitude, and invited us round to his East Village apartment. When we got there, he made me go out and get a nasal spray, which he promptly smashed with a toffee hammer and ate the contents, because it gives a kind of speed buzz. We got on really well, and played some songs together. So when we were recording "One Horse Town" we sampled his voice, as a kind of tribute. That's him going "burn the stars and stripes"."

 From punk, through "C&W noir", to their current forays into "bleak house", The Mekons make de(con)struction fun.