SIMON REYNOLDS DISCUSSES CURRENT DANCE MUSIC IN TODAY'S NY TIMES

I dunno if anybody's actually saying this. My reading on SR's article is that, if anything, he's lamenting that 'dance music' is not popular in the US, without going into any realistic discussion as to why that music would be on a different scale here than in the UK or Germany. And he does it in such a simplistic way (tho given the NYT audience, and more likely his editors, i understand that) that if I was, say, German, I'd be offended! I mean he writes like Tresor or Basic Channel or even Kraftwerk didn't exist!

to say that there is one sole reason why some people didn't like disco is as just as specious and strawman-ish as anything a homophobe could actually say about homosexuals!

However there are US internet radio websites such as

dirty radio
http://www.dirtyradio.net/

I have read comments by Felix Da Housecat and Cannibal Ox, for instance who are scathing in their contempt for US mainstream music media.

The thing is, the u.s. already has its own unique dance culture in place - european dance music would have to supplant the weird hip-hop/pop conglameration that currently rules the charts in order to have any effect. And Philip Sherburne's article from a couple months back did a better job at this - european dance music is having an effect subversively, in that hip-hop artists use some similar sonics to euro dance artists. But the idea that european rave culture is going to (or ever really had a chance of) supplanting American dance culture is sort of ridiculous.

xpost - i wasn't responding to any point you made, ronan, but to that specious claim that all disco haters are fag bashers or whatever.

Also, perhaps what puzzles people about the relative failure of dance in the US is House and Techno's American roots?

also in today's NYT:

One Word for What's Happening to Actors' Faces Today: Plastics
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/23/movies/23darg.html?oref=login

I agree that what people dance to is entirely dependent on context, I said pretty much the same myself above. It's worth noting that pop dance which does not fit the super minimal description counts for alot of the 'dominance' over here, or has counted for.

And are you saying that a big part of the anti-Disco thing wasn't the perceived Gayness of the music and its fans?

were you at Comiskey? I didn't see you there with me and all the other homophobes!

(actually i was like 1 or 2 at the time, wasn't there, and why would i go anyway? I like a lot of disco)

Ignore metal at your peril.

the weird hip-hop/pop conglameration that currently rules the charts

Wait, why weird? I can't imagine anything LESS weird.

It's a bit like bioengineering a creature that's a big blob of tits, asses, and vaginas and expecting straight men everywhere to want to fuck it.

Sounds like the Internet to me!

I think the argument about hip-hop and r'n'b producers adapting European dance sonics is perfectly fair, dee. Timbaland and the Neptunes being obvious examples. It still seems strange that those particular rhythms exert such a stranglehold on American dance culture tho.

OTM. it is completely ridiculous that hip-hop is never mentioned in the article. it's dance music, just not in the above referenced parameters (see bugged out's post). and it gets played in plenty of clubs that are marginalized along racial lines. until that line gets broken, until kids of different economic and racial backgrounds get together, we won't have a dance movement like the late 90s supposedly foretold.

Haha Ned I direct you to Jess' blog post about Lil Wyte:
http://shutyrgob.blogspot.com/2004_10_01_shutyrgob_archive.html#109788172574591929

Lil Wyte himself is one of those ghetto ass skinny white guys with the veiny arms and unshaveable pube 'stache which us fat, vein-less, clean shaven white kids were always scared of because they would beat your ass (i.e. the subtext of his new hit single.) This may well be the first racial stereotype that occurs everywhere, as applicable to Olympia as Biloxi. They've just traded Priest and Maiden for Triple-Six and Mobb Deep.

Seriously, did he just miss the whole Crunk thing?

This is spot on. I guess there's also a long history of European paranoia about American cultural dominance and American paranoia about European cultural snobbery running alongside it.

Yeah, but wishing and expecting are a bit different, don't you think? To me, it sounds like Simon (and the people on that CMJ panel that I mentioned earlier) really think that Americans have fucked it up and that they were SUPPOSED to embrace this culture. Maybe I'm being unfair to them. Definitely a possibility.

The only way to create mass media change is to alter the mix of systems inputs [radio playlists/ programming] - therefore creating changes in music listening - which influences what music people celebrate - the systems outputs.

I thought we'd agreed to re-name that fucking r-word.

I thought my point was pretty simple, but I guess not...

Of course rock can be dance music, and so can hip-hop, etc. But like it or not, there is a genre of music called "dance," and it's pretty widely understood--including by Americans!--that it refers to house, techno, electronica, etc. You might think it's a bad genre name, and I would agree with you. But when Simon Reynolds writes an article about how "dance" music isn't doing well in the US, he isn't saying that people don't like to dance in the US, or that music for dancing isn't doing well in the US. He's saying that the "dance" genre isn't doing well. So bitching about how he didn't mention hip-hop is completely beside the point.

More nomenclature confusion here -- SR is writing about the European definition of "dance music", and how well *that* music is faring in the US.

What is actually popular in American clubs in place of that music (asnd why this is so) isn't the focus of the article.

Hey, Kid Rock already showed that combining all three strands results in a new synthesis, so bring on more of that. (Bubba Sparxxx fully going goth-metal via Nick Cave wouldn't surprise me at all.)

He's saying that the "dance" genre isn't doing well. So bitching about how he didn't mention hip-hop is completely beside the point.

No, because the reason that the "dance" genre can't make it in the u.s. is because we have our own dance genre in hip-hop/pop!

Yeah, and if he wasn't so myopic in his little culture bubble, he probably would've made that clear to his American audience reading it in an American newspaper.

hip hop is much much bigger than techno or house music in europe too. let´s not think anything else. I think many of you americans have a warped idea of how popular dance music is in europe. yes, it is more popular than in the us but that doesnt mean much.

true he does...excerpt: in recent years it may have been beaten on the shake-your-booty front by dancehall and Southern rap.

But he doesn't recognize it as being a part of the "dance" genre. Instead he says it's something to be absorbed by dance culture, like rock, to inject it with some newfound vitality.

exactly my beef with the whole thrust of the article. i mean, why not examine what moves americans rather than why french house never shook booty in midtown like it was supposed to?