words and music

[devi]

So, dear readers, here are the ideas behind that genres poll I did last week.

It starts with something I thought would be a confession, a dangerous one of the sort liable to get me lynched or get objects lobbed at my head. Now the results are in, I feel a bit safer saying it. I like dance music.

Thing is, I also love indie music and (a lot of) goth music and all manner of verse-chorus-verse music, music with lyrics that make sense of life, and it doesn't even have to be well-sung or well-played, if the lyrics are good enough to carry it. I like music that's right next door to spoken word performance, where the music takes a back seat to the lyrics, but the lyrics are shiningly brilliant.

This makes perfect sense to me. Music is for different things, serves different functions. Dance music is for, well, dancing to, that sort of hypnotic wild trance-dancing that strips you of self-consciousness and daily worries and leaves you elated. (Hello ultraruby!) And it's for spurring myself to work - I write faster and maybe better with a pulse of beat in the background, with slowly evolving melodies; lyrics are too distracting. It's music that provides a soundtrack for travelling at speed, or for travelling in your imagination. Music with guitars, by bands, with words, is for something else entirely. It's about that twinge in your heart when you hear a lyric that expresses something perfectly. It's music you live through and feel through, music that helps you explain things to yourself, music that puts you on an emotional rollercoaster from hope to misery and back, or that just helps you laugh at life. Music that provides a soundtrack for walking in the dark or standing moodily down in a tube station at midnight.

I couldn't do without either of these things, even though they're such different experiences it seems clumsy even to call them both 'music'. Fair enough, you say. Eclecticism is good. The poll results seem to bear that out.

But back at Dublin City University it was a different story. I didn't know any other eclectics who liked, say, Orbital as much as they liked Radiohead or the Smashing Pumpkins. You were a rocker or a raver, and the rockers and the ravers tore each other to bits in a perpetual scrap on the music boards of the BBS, and never the twain did meet.

And the divide seems to have persisted among my various groups of friends (or at least I thought it had until I did the poll). I've always felt like the lone advocate of electronica among a nation of trad-goths and indie-kids, and when I try to defend it, I'm told more often than not that it's chav music, stupid music, music for people with no brain cells. I reply that they're probably not listening to the right dance music, that it can have intelligence and complexity, that I like it with the same bit of my music brain that grew up on classical and for a lot of the same reasons (Pachelbel's 'Canon' has much the same effect on me as Orbital's 'The Girl With The Sun In Her Head'). But things remain the same: I have a yen to go to dance clubs and no one to go with.

And it looks like the whole world is going that way too. Alexis Petridis wrote recently in the Guardian that dance music is dead. (Though, if you read the article, I think I'm pleased that he says it's going back underground. I'd prefer little underground scenes to great big impersonal superclubs any day.)

So my poll had several purposes. Firstly, to see if the rocker/raver divide still exists, and to find other eclectics. Pleasingly, there are quite a few of you.

Secondly, to see if my flist was actually as anti-dance as I thought, and it's true that the indie/rock/etc people - those of you who chose no dance at all - vastly outnumber the eclectics and the dance-only folk. But there are more of the latter two types than I'd been expecting.

Thirdly, I wanted to investigate my half-formed hunch that people who liked dance would get along with classical, and vice versa. This wasn't borne out at all. In fact, it was the indie/goth/rock folk who tended to like classical, rather than the other lot. I guess I'm on my own there, then.

There's another post bubbling under in my brain, about what clubbing is for, but that's for another day. Thank you all for ticking the tickyboxes.

Comments

[philipstorry.livejournal.com]

Can't say I'm a massive fan of dance, really. It's the antithesis of music in many ways, as far as I'm concerned.

That having been said, I suppose I'm warming to "totally electronic" music. Ben's stuff (found here: http://music.qolc.net/cgi-bin/songs) can be absolutely brilliant - I like it for much the same reasons I like classical music.

I think that this is probably a culture thing, actually. Music tends to be heavily linked to culture. I grew up having no real preference, and was thrown into the rock culture as a teenager. I went to gigs, drank lots, and sat around comparing bands to other bands with my mates. It seemed a world away from the dance culture, which was more drug-related and less interesting.

Yet the first two CD albums I ever bought predated my rock interests. One was dance, one was rap. I veered away from rap because, well, rap isn't my culture. Most chart rap seemed to describe a completely different world which had no bearing on me whatsoever. Chart rap is something I find very difficult to listen to, because it's just not at all linked to my hopes, fears, aspirations and dreams. Whereas my Dream Warriors album is rap, yet keeps my attention by having absolutely no mentions of guns, drugs, and all the usual shite that's in rap.

That's probably it, now I think about it. It's not a musical genre that I dislike - it's the culture that it reflects. Give me Bruce Dickinson of Iron Maiden doing rap, or Joe Satriani doing dance beats with a guitar over it, and I'm happy. Give me eclectic dance or rap, and I'm happy. Give me the mainstream of that culture, and I just can't relate...

[bluedevi.livejournal.com]

That's a good point about scenes. I've never felt any attraction to the mainstream dance scene. Maybe if I had actually been involved in it, the dance music experience would have soured for me.

Why is dance the antithesis of music? Do you believe that music made on machines is necessarily soulless? (I know lots of people who share that view.)

[philipstorry.livejournal.com]

Yes, although I say I don't mind some dance music I would never say I feel any particular attraction to the dance scene. Or the rap/hip-hop scene. And I've not been a pre-teen for years, so I can't possibly get into R'n'B. ;-)

I viewed dance as the antithesis to music because it was soulless. But soulless is a very unspecific term. *thinks*

*thinks more*

There is good dance music, and as I mentioned it shares similarities with classical or rock in the way it progresses the song - often building on simple themes and weaving together a complex whole. Rock music is actually probably the simplest of the three (classical, dance and rock) if you exclude "chart dance".

Often, chart dance has little or no progression. It's repetitive. All music is repetitive, but chatr dance more so. It seems designed so that you could join the song at any point, which I suppose would make sense.
But the net effect is that it's as though Deep Purple had come up with the riff to Smoke on the Water, though "Hey that's, great, let's do that for four minutes!" and just looped the damned thing. They actually seperated it with other bits, and the song has some variety as it moves to tell its story.

When I was fifteen, the dance era was starting to hit mainstream I guess. And in the "music labs" at school, we had those 100-voice bank keyboards. You could program them. And we did. We often fond great little riffs, threw a crappy drum beat behind it, and called it music. But none of us ever thought to take that to EMI and ask them for a record contract. That would be cheeky - nay, it would be a slap in the face to real musicans. But a lot of chart dance didn't seem much better than what we could create in ten minutes in a GCSE music lesson.
(That played a major part in turning me off dance music, too. I may have liked what I produced, but I knew I was no Beethoven. It gave me a sense of value for the music I came to love, shall we say.)

A musician can take electronic kit an make music with it. A monkey can take a Casio and make a chart hit with it. Electronic music isn't soulless. But a lot of electronic musicians are, perhaps...
;-)

[bluedevi.livejournal.com]

I agree entirely about chart dance. Chart dance makes me froth at the mouth with rage. And I had to work in an office where Kiss 100 was permanently on for a whole year of my life. Aaaargh!

Call On Me by Eric Prydz is my current pet hate. Especially since I like the original song.

But it is possible to put your soul into electronic music-making. I know, I've seen my little brother do it :)