Simon Reynolds - C or D

"letting its inner rhythm descend to the tribal repetition of its ancestors"--inner rhythms have ancestors?

"Jungle and brutalism demand and require belief; belief that culture and community can be better, that they will be better, provided a collective commitment to progress is made and honoured."--there was no moodyness at jungle nights ever, ok.

Jesus, that parallel between brutalist architecture and jungle is so torturously wrong on every level. Based on the quote above I thought the guy must be inventing a new genre called brutalism but no such luck.

I have a lot of time for Reynolds but his followers like this guy or Dissensus Kru do him no favours.

in the book, simey appends a little paragraph to each essay, deflating what he said (quite often), or saying "actually, i quite like the redskins/oasis/conscious rap now". he also says categorically that dance music has been in stasis since the publication of 'energy flash' -- so i'm more stoked than ever for the second edition. and it's got some intriguing bits of autobio, like he'd been living in new york all of 1993 but came back just because jungle was blowing up. that's quite an investment, if it's true; but then he finds he has a really shitty time in uk garage clubs because, shocker, there's quite a bit of conspicuous consumption and coke going on. ie just like the trendy london club scene he thinks acid house/ardkore ripped up.

wonder what he'd make of fwd.

if the guy grew up in a brutalist estate and feels that, ok, kind of have to allow it. but there's been a shitload of commentary from the left about the ways post-war housing did help the tendency toward social atomism blah blah blah. i'm not a great believer in architecture-determines-behaviour type stuff in either direction, but it's not as if the only people who have not enjoyed the "brutalist experience" are conservative architecture critics.

This Mentasms blog reads like Miles Kington RIP doing Blissblog at its worst.

This brief assemblage of slightly countercultural and embarrassingly outdated buzzwords

You said it, mate.

(aren't these people spelling "collective" with two "k"s and a "v" any more? Fancy!)

You need your own gang of ChurchOfMe Juniors, Marcy.

familyguy_herbert_and_victorian_orphans.jpg

Six years on, this revival has allowed me finally to read Edna Welthorpe's response to that nutter who started the thread.

but it's not as if the only people who have not enjoyed the "brutalist experience" are conservative architecture critics

It's more wrong in the ways it links the aesthetics of the two. My dissertation was partially a defence of brutalism. (It was a shit dissertation tho.)

You need your own gang of ChurchOfMe Juniors, Marcy.

Dingo sees everyone as this tho!

well another thing simey says is, "i don't understand what goldie and roni size and ltj bukem get out of (basically) jazz-funk," and obviously he has a longstanding problem with the whole rare groove/soulboy thing... which leads to contradictions, but at least he acknowledges them. this guy's idea of jungle is strickly Idealist, purged of what a lot of its practitioners put into it...

I don't like the way all SR's books read like disjointed collections of essays, even when they are meant to be unified examinations of one big subject.

I do think, though, that jungle was a trillion x forever times better when it was all disjointed 78 rpm samples and beats which would never fit in with any basslines than when it became d&b and suddenly they all wanted to be bloody Herbie Hancock so that Gilles Peterson would play their stuff.

Wiley's number four in this week's hit parade, though, so who knows? Maybe this Panasonic nutrient architecture boomkat stuff still has wheels.

Vicar, you say that every year! I swear, scroll up and you will see the same comment from yourself.

I suspect that the presence of Wiley on that single doesn't have much to do with why people are buying it, but I've not actually paid much attention to its rise beyond, er, liking it

Pinefoxxx - you have my number.

Move over Reynolds, dance music crit has a new big dog:

http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/music/2008/04/sound_of_the_outsiders.html

"at the same time there was a concurrent scene happening in Detroit."

good old guardian sub-editors

Detroit techno was very much the original punk rocker

xpost TBF they probably had to retype it all from upper case

I do like how 'Minimal Nation' is the most recent track he comes up with to back up his overall point

Simon Reynolds went to my school.

I think.

Cheers.

Back in the 80s, I picked up every house and techno record I could find.

lying bastard!

He didn't buy them, he just picked them up from the racks, thought "This isn't the Byrds" then put them back.

Moany moan moan! Anyways, why do you think that European dance labels like Kompakt get all the kudos from Pitchfork but not Underground Resistance?
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you know what really gets on my tits about Simon Reynolds? It's the disjointednesso his books, the way he - oh never mind.

Moany moan moan! Anyways, why do you think that European dance labels like Kompakt get all the kudos from Pitchfork but not Underground Resistance?
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Pipecock?

the dubious "lifestyle" propagated by some English working class, ecstasy-gulping slack-jawed yobs or other

Snotty & the Wankers: Arctic Monkeys of 2002?

huh?

Digital maximalism is the ultrabrite, NutraSweet, Taurine-amped soundtrack to a lifestyle and a life-stance that could be called NOW!ism. In most dance scenes there's a vein of nostalgic reverence, an in-built deference to a lost golden age. But with EDM, there's just this feeling of NOW! NOW! NOW! And that's the thing I found heartening and refreshing about Hard Summer: the utter absence of any sense of the past being better than the present.

From the updated third edition of Energy Flash - http://www.residentadvisor.net/feature.aspx?1879

so what

he needs to stop writing things like NOW!ism but im pleased he keeps on keeping on

so what

Hm, I might buy a copy of the new edition. Lent my version of Generation Ecstasy to someone years ago, haven't read the section on dubstep from the last version either, plus there's apparently stuff on UK Funky. Also glad he keeps on writing, especially on topics like brostep, digital compression, maximalism, EDM, etc. that rarely get any serious coverage. Reynolds still has strong critical voice, Retromania struck me as essentially a work of net criticism ala Morozov/Carr/Lanier.

NOW!ism feels like something he needs to believe in, rather than a real thing. Mentioning Justice as an example is odd for starters, given their massively obvious love of classic rock. You just can't divide musicians into retro and non-retro camps.

Well, Justice is mentioned by this Josiah Schirmacher dude (a DJ-producer friend?).

I'm sure EDM NOW!ism is a thing. It might not fixate on the past, but clearly ain't no sound of the future either.

Probably unfair of me to judge his whole argument on an extract. Maybe there's more to it.

reynoldzzzzzz

"NOWism" seems more like "young people listening to arena techno/dubstep that never cared about 'dance' music that much before". ie, no past to romanticize = now is better. Only a slight nudge from "entitled internet-era Millennials who think they are smarter than everyone ever". Certainly isn't a "movement" that anyone participating would want to be a affiliated with.

Where is a critic that aims serious music criticism

More cynically, it also just reads as an amalgam of things he's been saying elsewhere repackaged in the hope of selling more books off the back of the EDM hype.

what i'm reading is equal parts obvious (justice is loud, young people are crass) and imaginary (dance music is focused on the past, now!ism exists, young people are engaged with the present in some new way)

I finally read Retromania and it was just as frustrating as I had assumed it would be. I was pretty angry throughout the whole book and I kept adding post-it notes to highlight things that I was going to come here and comment on, but by the end I was so exhausted I didn't care anymore. I used to like Reynolds but lately I just feel like he's hitting DeRogatisian levels of wrongness.

like a lot of popists i think he doesn't have that much enlightening stuff to say about the music so he just projects a bunch of half-baked cultural crit ideas onto the audience

tbf this is kind of a widespread thing in music criticism

Wait are you saying you're a popist or he is? Cause he isn't

I feel like he's personally conflicted about the state of new music and his nostalgia for the old "new" (or NOW!) music of his youth. In Retromania he consistently talked about rave and post-punk as if it were an objective truth that those two genres were totally new or even the only totally new music of the past 30 years. And he did it seemingly without any self-awareness that his opinion was totally colored by personal nostalgia.

In that Hard Summer article he points out that the music doesn't sound that much different from the '90s but then in the end he describes all of the ways in which it sounds and feels new. It's like he's always on the verge of this revelation but he never quite connects the dots and realizes that something can borrow from the past and still be new, or that there can be subtle innovations and evolutions within a genre that are only noticeable to the people who are deeply involved with it. All throughout Retromania I felt like everyone he interviewed and everything he discussed throughout the book was leading up to this revelation. That he was just kind of trolling us and the book was actually going to illustrate the process of debunking the thesis he put forth in the beginning. I kept thinking he was surely going to make a 180 degree turn at the end and realize that he was wrong.

I disagree with the above, a bit - he uses rave and post-punk a lot b/c they were ~his genres~, but while

(a) I wasn't around for them (literally for post-punk, was < 11 when rave was happening); and
(b) I like new music plenty

I also think there's a big difference between the extent of musical possibilities opened up in a few short years in those eras, and the extent we've seen in the last ten years or so.

Like, you can agree that:

something can borrow from the past and still be new, or that there can be subtle innovations and evolutions within a genre that are only noticeable to the people who are deeply involved with it

while also saying "yes but the innovations and evolutions used to be a lot more sweeping than that, as a general rule."

I don't get doom and gloom about that, and I think that one needs to unpack the relationship b/w macro- and micro-transformations (or inter- and intra-) to appreciate that a lot of the time the former are just examples of the latter that were in the right place at the right time.

but I don't think his basic thesis is fundamentally incorrect.

the book definitely disproves itself despite itself!

funnily enough I'm reading totally wired atm and it's brilliant, twice the book rip it up is. Cause reynolds is pushing his thesis but the interviewees are pushing back.

don't hate this guy at all, I think he's cool although he says mindblowingly stupid shit sometimes

(xp)

i was identifying him as a popist which I guess he's not