electronica goes straight to ubiquity (1999)

Electronica Goes Straight To Ubiquity

New York Times, June 6th 1999

by  Simon Reynolds

The usual trajectory for a new form of pop music is from underground sound to mainstream omnipresence, followed by eventual banalization as the style filters into television commercials and background music.

That's what happened with grunge. In 1991, after a decade brewing in the indie-rock margins, the sound exploded onto the pop charts with bands like Nirvana and Pearl Jam. Within a year, grunge's fuzzed-up guitars were part of the soundtrack for television commercials like the Subaru Impresa advertisement that featured a scruffy slacker hailing the car as ''just like punk rock''.

Two years ago, electronica – a music press and record industry buzzword for a disparate array of electronic dance music genres – was hyped as the new grunge. Despite the success of the Prodigy and the Chemical Brothers, it never quite became the next big thing. Instead, electronica has done something peculiar: it has skipped the pop hegemony stage and gone straight from underground noise to ubiquitous mood music.

Sounds associated with the rave subculture and linked to the use of drugs like Ecstasy and LSD are diffusing into the mainstream of American life in the form of ''quotidian music'' – a term some cultural-studies academics use to describe music that you hear but don't consciously listen to.

Radio and MTV generally shun electronica, but you can hear its clattery beats and screeching synthesizer riffs in countless commercials for products as non-subcultural as Mastercard, BMW, Call AT&T, LA Looks hair gel, Smint breath fresheners, Skechers sneakers, GMC Sonoma and even the United States Army. Its frenetic rhythms are used to get the viewer's pulse racing on the Bravo channel and even on ABC News.

If your only window on the pop world was commercials, you might think the English D.J. and producer Fatboy Slim was as big as the Beatles. In the real world, his album You've Come a Long Way, Baby has only recently edged into the Billboard Top 40 after an eight-month build. But in television, Fatboy Slim (whose real name is Norman Cook) is king. Six tracks from the album and two from its predecessor, Better Living Through Chemistry, are featured in commercials for brand names like Nike Air Jordan, Surge, Adidas and Oldsmobile or in trailers for movies like Cruel Intentions, Office Space and 10 Things I Hate About You. One Fatboy song, 'Gangster Tripping', appears on the soundtrack of Go, while another (with novel spelling), 'The Rockafeller Skank', was the backdrop for a crucial scene in the smash hit She's All That. New commercials featuring Fatboy music seem to be broadcast every week; a recent addition is the Gap Kids ad that uses his remix of Cornershop's 'Brimful of Asha'.

It's hard to think of another musician who is so relatively unknown and yet whose music is so pervasive. In addition, countless commercials imitate the big-beat sound popularized by Fatboy Slim, a blend of uptempo hip-hop beats and squelchy techno riffs that Mr. Cook pioneered along with the Chemical Brothers. Sometimes the imitators are actual artists whose music has been licensed, like the Crystal Method (whose single 'Busy Child' was used in a Gap commercial more than a year ago). And sometimes the Fatboy soundalike tracks are commissioned from companies that specialize in composing for commercials.

Compared with many other styles of electronica, big beat is accessible – it's peppy, it's crammed with hooks and its riffs often have a rock-and-roll feel. But you can hear raw underground dance-music sounds in commercials, too – the twisting, convulsive rhythms of jungle, the futuristic burbles of acid techno. One of the most sonically adventurous spots of recent months is the commercial for the Philips recordable CD player that was created by the agency Messner Vetere Berger McNamee Schmetterer. It is set in a rave environment, with clubbers dancing to formulaic techno, until an individualist called Leon plays his own music (the British dance producer Talvin Singh's hybrid of jungle and Indian bhangra) and does a weird-but-graceful dance, which the crowd immediately imitates.

Such commercials show that despite its failure to conquer the mainstream, electronica has won an ideological victory. The youth of America may actually be moshing to funk-metal bands like Korn or dancing to ska and swing revivalists, but rave culture has somehow managed to establish itself as the signifier of youth today. Yet electronica in commercials is less a generational marker, as hip-hop is and grunge was, than a reflection of the tastes of the advertising industry, which contains a high quotient of hipsters and is largely based in cities where club culture has a strong presence, like New York, Los Angeles and London.

There are also technical reasons electronica is increasingly the creative director's first choice. ''The pacing of ads today is so frantic that techno works really well with it,'' said Anthony Vagnoni, editor-at-large of the trade magazine Advertising Age. ''The composited images, saturated colours, bizarre camera angles and scrolling of text down the screen – that kind of imagery overload lends itself to a futuristic music treatment like electronica.''

Modern dance music is attractive to video editors for precisely the same reason it appeals to DJ's – the tracks are designed for cut and mix. ''The density of rhythmic activity and the highly nuanced sonic layers provide wonderful cut-points for video editors,'' said Rick Lyon, a composer who has scored commercials for major American agencies.

Although classic rock of the '60s and '70s and this decade's alternative rock are still used in commercials (even techno-infatuated Philips uses a remake of a Beatles song as a musical signature in its commercials), electronica has advantages over rock. It is energetic yet usually devoid of the distracting sonic foreground of a lead singer. ''If you compare a band like Korn with Fatboy Slim, both are very youth-oriented,'' said Robert Kaplan, the Messner music supervisor responsible for the Philips CD player commercial. ''But Korn comes with a lot of baggage: it's very angry, sonically, vocally and lyrically. Whereas Fatboy Slim doesn't stand for anything.'' In this view, it's the meaninglessness of dance music (or at least, the absence of an overt meaning) that lends itself to background usages of all kinds.

Yet for radio and MTV, it's precisely this anonymity and meaninglessness that make electronica tracks problematic. ''Modern rock'' radio stations have generally found that only the most rock-flavoured electronica tracks – those featuring songlike structures or vocal hooks – seem to prosper. Listeners connect with a voice and a lyric. In 1997, MTV was briefly enthused by electronica's candidacy as the ''next big thing'' – the channel programmed videos by the Prodigy, Chemical Brothers, Orbital and Underworld and started Amp, a late-night show dedicated to more experimental electronic music.

But last year MTV abruptly ceased its flirtation with techno. Today, electronica videos are almost never played, while Amp has been relegated to a graveyard-shift slot on Sunday nights between 2 and 4 A.M. MTV's reluctance to play electronica videos is offset by the channel's paradoxical partiality toward using techno, drum-and-bass and big beat as the soundtrack to docu-drama soap operas like Road Rules and The Real World, and as ''interstitial music'' – the sonic element of the graphically bold interludes and animated logos that act as punctuation between shows.

Is this use of electronica as aural wallpaper by MTV and other channels like Bravo contributing to the trivialization of this once alien music? Maybe. Are advertisers debasing an underground sound that matters deeply to its core audience? For sure. But it's also possible that by insinuating this music, with its strange timbres and rhythmic idioms, into people's living rooms and lives, advertisers are actually preparing the way for a future pop breakthrough of electronic music.

In the meantime, the commercials are helping to sell the music as well as the intended products. ''I get listeners phoning in and saying, 'Can you play the song in that Volkswagen commercial?' '' said Aaron Axelson, music director of San Francisco's KITS, a modern rock station friendly to electronica. So in addition to the fee that the group, the Orb, was paid for the use of its track in the television spot, the band can thank Volkswagen for some extra sales.

slackerdelia - Mercury Rev + Medicine

Mercury Rev / Medicine

The New York Times,  November 22,  1992

by Simon Reynolds

After the explosive success of Nirvana last year, and the ensuing breakthrough by Pearl Jam and the Red Hot Chili Peppers, alternative rock is now in a paradoxical state. Commercially, it has never been more powerful, but musically, it has become increasingly less adventurous.

The rise of the punk-metal hybrid known as grunge has led to a new orthodoxy of sound and attitude, based on a mix of Black Sabbath-heaviness and punk aggression, bludgeoning riffs and bleary disaffection. With older groups like Sonic Youth trimming off their experimental edges in an attempt to sound more raunchy and younger bands like Helmet and L7 offering a belligerent hard rock, the alternative scene has gotten predictable and oppressive.

But for those who long for something a bit more multidimensional, there is an alternative to "alternative", in the form of bands that still adhere to the former underground spirit of expansiveness and idiosyncracy. Some of these groups have been swept up in the music industry's frenzy to sign alternative bands. In particular, two groups have recently made striking major-label debuts: Mercury Rev's Yerself Is Steam (Columbia 53030; CD and cassette) and Medicine's Shot Forth Self Living (Def American 45067-2; CD and cassette). Both bands are darlings of the British independent-rock scene but are not yet widely known in their native America.

If Mercury Rev has a kindred spirit in this country, it's Pavement, whose album title, Slanted and Enchanted, captures Mercury Rev's dazed and confused aura as deftly as does its own. The sensibility of these two groups recalls the absurdist world view and daydreamy drifting of the characters in Slacker, the 1991 cult movie directed by Richard Linklater. Slackers are beatniks without the get-up-and-go to venture "on the road". Instead, they achieve nirvana by cultivating apathy until they become highly attuned to the bizarre details of everyday life.

Mercury Rev's musical antecedent is not the despondent heavy rock that influences grunge, but another early '70s style, the cosmic rock of Pink Floyd and of German bands like Can, Faust and Neu. The latter, affectionately known as the "Krautrock" movement, were dedicated to exploring the electric guitar's cornucopia of textures. Similarly, Mercury Rev's guitarists – Jonathan Donahue, Grasshopper and David Baker – eschew riffs in favour of a dense tapestry of distorted and distended guitar lines.

'Chasing a Bee', the opening track on Yerself Is Steam, begins with undulating clouds of feedback juxtaposed with what sounds like cows mooing in the distance but is actually overdubbed guitars run backward. The song shifts between mellow, bucolic passages and a manic deluge of noise, interlaced with a child-like flute courtesy of Suzanne Thorpe.

'Syringe Mouth' echoes a particular Krautrock idiom called motorik, which evokes the exhilaration of cruising on the freeway, enjoying the onrush of stimuli as one hurtles along the road to nowhere. The gorgeous 'Coney Island Cyclone' is another paean to aimless propulsion. "Sweet Oddysee of a Cancer Cell t' th' Center of Your Heart" begins with the incantation "onto the ice floe"; then the song revs up and dashes across dazzling expanses of white noise. But Mercury Rev isn't always torrential. It also excels at slow-burning ballads like 'Fritters' and the stately, majestic 'Carwash Hair', in which gilded guitars and poignant melody rival anything in the Velvet Underground songbook.

Medicine is another American band that likes to wring startlingly new noises from the electric guitar. On its new album, the effects-laden guitar textures and Beth Thompson's and Brad Laner's androgynous vocals recall English trance rockers of recent years like Spacemen 3 and My Bloody Valentine.

'One More' is a dazzling roar of fuzzy drones and feedback that leaves listeners reeling as though afflicted by the imagination's equivalent of snowblindness. 'Aruca' starts with a fractious din and finally slips into a fragrant swirl of psychedelic funk.

Like My Bloody Valentine, Medicine juxtaposes extremely brutal, grating sounds with incredibly sweet, delicate melodies. Sometimes they get the recipe wrong and err on the side of saccharine '60s retrospection. But at its best, Medicine reinvents psychedelia rather than replicates it.

'Sweet Explosion' is a brilliant blend of modern trance-dance and acid rock. Thompson's crystalline vocals and the glassy guitar are as disorientating as a kaleidoscope. 'Queen of Tension' starts beguilingly, with Thompson's dulcet tones heard beneath a steady drizzle of guitar distortion. Then the song blasts off into the firmament, as Laner turns all the switches to "interstellar overdrive".

Medicine and Mercury Rev aren't alone in invoking the cosmic ambitions of the Krautrock bands or early Pink Floyd. On a similar wavelength one finds the Boston group Cul de Sac and the British rockers Bark Psychosis. All these groups shun the populist hard rock that is now the alternative norm in favour of soundscapes that inspire a riot for the mind's eye. Where grunge rock rubs the listener's face in grim reality, the slacker bands dream of being lost in the wilderness of outer or inner space.

Ambien Music - where faded meets fey

I did an interview December 2018 with Beatrice Finauro of Dry magazine (Milan) about trap / mumble rap - and why it was my favorite music of recent years. Here it is - resequenced a bit - and with a riff woven in from a separate interview with an Italian journalist that touched on the subject glancingly, and a few other stray thoughts.

Is trap a heresy, a new classic canon or both things at the same time?

On one hand, trap is just rap – the same old, same old. Gangsta rap, part 12. If you listen from a distance, you won’t hear anything you’ve not heard before. But immerse yourself in the music, and you hear a host of micro-innovations. Most of them are in the domain of vocals – the creative use of auto-tune and other vocal processing, the emergence of ad libs as kind of antiphonal commentary on or reinforcement of the lead vocal, the blurring of rapping with singing so that you can’t distinguish between rhythmic speech and melodic trills. 

Listen to the almost choral weave of voices in Migos - the main rap, the ad libs (often shouted or whooped or gasped nonverbal eruptions of pure jouissance), and then the rippling hyper-Autotuned backing vocals - again, wordless moans of ecstasy that sometimes resemble psalms or monastic chants. This is a new thing in music. And just as striking and interesting, it's a new kind of melting, woozy subjectivity for hip hop masculinity - almost effete at times. 

This new subjectivity and the vocal modes that have emerged alongside it seem to have been produced by changing drug use patterns  - the different vibes  generated by drugs like Xanax and Percocet. Although purple drank has been a southern  hop hop staple for a long while. But these numbing anxiety killers and pain killers have turned rap of the Migos, Playboi Carti, Lil Uzi Vert, Rich the Kid, Travis Scott type into a kind of ambient music - or even Ambien Music.  It exists in a zone between faded and fey. 

Texturally the floaty, wafting, twinkly IDM-ish sounds in the production make trap one of the last remaining bastions of minimalism in modern music, which otherwise tends towards maxed out digitalism. Trap has digimax's hyper-real contoured gloss, but in combination with minimalism - so you get this killer combination of spare and sumptuous. Trap tunes often consist of just a few vaporous sounds looped and these highly repetitive vocal hooks, and often there are a rather small total number of words in the entire lyric. It's a break with the whole tradition of MC lyricism, it's much more about texture and mood, and these sing-songy, rippling hooks. This is music that invites you to trance out, to listen in a semi-attentive stupor. Tracks ooze out of the car speakers to cloud the vehicle's interior - and especially if you're driving at night, it's like you're gliding along inside this futuristic glowing capsule. 

Adam Harper defined the characteristics of Hi-Tech aesthetics Vs Indie aesthetics. I think some of the features of Hi-tech, such as the harsh vision of the future, being decadent, excessive and aggressive, and originally linked by Harper to artists such as James Ferraro, Laurel Halo and Oneohtrix Point Never, can be also attributed to the trap genre. On the other hand, we have the supposedly warm, benign, archaic and, I’d say, lifeless realm of Indie to which the trap is opposed. In your opinion, which are the main trap’s features and where does trap lie in the contemporary ecosystem?

The supposedly subversive or parodic elements of vaporwave or hi-tech / hi-def – to me they pale next to the reality of what is streaming out of the mainstream airwaves. Which is to say the hyper-reality of it -  a lifestyle that is fantastical, psychotic... What could be more insane or morbid than the subjectivity in a Drake record or a Kanye song? The black Rap n B mainstream is further out sonically and attitudinally than anything the white Internet-Bohemia has come up with. Rap and R&B, Travis Scott, the Weeknd, Cardi B, Migos: is already the Simulacrum, is already decadence. I call it Weimar n B.

Trap spans from the original formula, such as the one of Gucci Mane, T.I, Young Jeezy, to the Ebenezer’s one, influenced by R&B and Gospel, to London’s Drill and so on… And each country has its own version. Is there a common ground, rule or standards that is cross to the different types of trap?

There are certain beat patterns that recur (yet also a surprising diversity of grooves and feels). You can connect trap back to early 2000s sounds like crunk and New Orleans bounce – the idea of the Dirty South – to labels like Cash Money. 

I suppose if there are two things that define all 21st Century hip hop is that it doesn’t use samples very often and it breaks with the looped breakbeat approach of classic East Coast Hip Hop. The beats are programmed and relate to a longstanding Southern U.S Hip Hop tradition that was rooted in drum machines and 80s Electro. Trap is part of that, as was the related L.A. sound of Ratchet as pioneered by DJ Mustard. But in a larger sense it’s all trap, it’s all gangsta rap, it’s all rap. There’s an absolute continuity, a changing same to quote Amiri Baraka.

Why does trap have such an influence on kids?

Kids want something that feels now and that belongs to them, and trap is the most convincing and intoxicating contender for that role. Most other forms of youth music are static or overly shadowed with heritage and history.

The other thing is that trap is one of the few music around that drips with a disruptive and illicit jouissance. Trap – especially Migos and Young Thug, but all of it – is ecstatic. The performers seems entranced by themselves, in a swirl of ecstasy and glory. Think of the feeling in Rae Sremmurd ‘Black Beatles’ . The fact that their trope for that feeling of excess, triumph and abandon is rock stardom tells you something. This is supplying what kids got from the Rolling Stones or Led Zeppelin: a fantasy of a life without constraints.