theo parrish s/d

"if being confrontational isn't the way to go, what is? people are not committed to this music enough to go out of their way to learn about it on their own. the only way is for people to break through the deafening roar of the newest hype, and that doesn't happen by playing nice."

Clearly the only solution to this 'problem' is forceful, obnoxiously holier-than-thou indoctrination.

house is a feeling

of superiority

Clearly the only solution to this 'problem' is forceful, obnoxiously holier-than-thou indoctrination.

-- glynsync,

exactly. i can't stand that kind of attitude.

arguing on messageboards is saving the universe from shame

nothing in the world is better than a great night and a great floor, and imo, the music is only responsible for switching it from great to 'uhhh' when something just stinks up the fucking room. these things are usually mash-ups.

i don't know a lot about dance music or techno or house. trance is kind of too fast for me. i could probably 'get' it and enjoy it though. i love disco, pretty much all of it i hear: "underground," "cheesy/gay," "mainstream." i honestly haven't heard any theo parrish, sorry. :( the few revival disco nights i've been to in l.a. have been fun but a little hit-or-miss: too reserved/cool, too many clumsy beardos, (too much like pipecock ha!) that is until everyone gets drunk enough and/or the floor becomes crowded enough that it's all off the hook.

house nights are the most fun though, even though i don't actively seek it out for 'listening time.' that's my loss. i don't know what kind of house they usually play, but it's fun as hell to dance to, and the floor is racially mixed, which is a breath of fresh air (i probably go to all the wrong clubs).

all of this is totally off-topic, sorry.

house is a feeling

-- haitch, Friday, July 18, 2008 1:09 AM

of superiority

-- haitch, Friday, July 18, 2008 1:09 AM

i LOL'd for real

i have found that the more fucked up the Theo record sounds, the better the dancefloor reaction. 1987 EP crushes it

Agreed, I love that record. I also love the fact that he made it on his uncle's casio keyboard and a kawai drum machine when he was 14. The best part is that the distortion comes from a short in the wire that he jiggled when he wanted the sound to change. That is fucking brilliant.

I am loving the ilx hand wringing the last few days. I check in once or twice a day with a bucket of popcorn and some jujubes to see what happened. It's better than the movies.

blunt, can i borrow "deaf sloth" as the name for a record label? it's too good to let evaporate. :)

listening to the new theo mix on rbma that he did for sonar and its weird. he mixes james brown into savage project and then gets into post-punk disco and then latin music ??? i have not been to witness to theo's sets but is he usually that eclectic ? i hate that term but you know what i mean.

yes, sometimes

check it: http://www.allphon.com/tracklisting/theo.php

wow, that's a wealth of knowledge right there. thanks for that link. i need to catch up on this guy's sets, the tracklistings look great.

it's not as nice as the old twoplayer theo shrine (RIP) but it'll do in a pinch

IIRC you can look at twoplayer.net and forcefield (amazing arnold) on the internet archive but the formatting never looks quite right.

"yes, sometimes

-- moonship journey to baja"

when he is at his best, IMO. some of his more "house" sets are very nice as well, but he can string together some wildly divergent records better than just about anybody out there that i can think of.

this is up for debate but i always think of "these days & times" 1 and 2, listened to back-to-back, as the quintessential theo mix.

if you want a straight house set "contemporhythms" is great. i think i mentioned it upthread, maybe?

"this is up for debate but i always think of "these days & times" 1 and 2, listened to back-to-back, as the quintessential theo mix."

that is a good one. "eclectic aesthetic" is another great 2 parter, along with the "live @ demf" ones.

"if you want a straight house set "contemporhythms" is great. i think i mentioned it upthread, maybe?

-- moonship journey to baja"

what is funny to me about that mix is that is it probably one of the most straightforward house sets, but it still has a bunch of disco and jazz stuff in it. for another good mostly house one, his set with rick wilhite is pretty much classic.

I really dislike the casual hate directed towards gay clubbing on ILM.

Not every club has to have some musicologist-approved manifesto cum playlist. Sometimes it's really fucking nice to be at a club and not know the name of the anonymous diva house track playing, or "worse still" get down to a sped up gay house version of Sugababes' "About You Now" (this is choice, people who know, get on it). And not really care either way because you're busy trying to catch the eye of the really cute guy dancing five meters away who has a wicked shy smile.

Yeah, lots of gay clubbing involves clubbing for reasons that aren't strictly to do with a reflective pledge of allegiance to the black detroit continuum or even the greatness of Villalobos or whatever. Lots of gay clubbing is about cruising for sex, or taking drugs, or getting shitfaced with friends, or being able to sing and dance along to camp pop hits, or just to lose yourself in a crowd of likeminded people.

None of these things is a constant defining feature of what I look for when I want to go out and dance, and gay clubbing forms a minority (although still substantial) component of my clubbing. But I've clubbed for all of the above reasons at one stage or another (and some of them heaps and heaps of times); people who think they're illegitimate reasons distracting from a proper appreciation of quality music just have the wrong attitude towards social behaviour and really should stay in their bedrooms.

True, I could wish that gay clubbing was a bit more dynamic musically. The Freemasons have done a marvelous job this past two years but they've become a bit of a crutch for DJs. Something like Joey Negro's "Make A Move On Me" should be just a standard track in quality-terms rather than a stand-out. But then some of the most impressive nights out from a musical perspective have been at gay clubs: DJs who have a perfect ear for the just right mixture of schlock and cheese, or (conversely) DJs who have been keen to reconnect contemporary gay clubbing with some of the feel of Chicago house - though usually the result is closer to second wave (Green Velvet/Cajual/Radikal Fear) than first wave; or some of the finest (because sly and sexy) deep house and vocal garage nights i've been to. And one of the biggest dancefloor revelations I've had in the past few years was hearing the Freemasons remix of Beyonce's "Ring The Alarm" for the first time on New Years Eve at a rather unassuming gay bar.

Usually, the best dance music scenes are those where musical and non-musical factors converge, where people are too intent on having fun to become furrow-browed amateur musicologists, but the music is just too good for them not to take notice of it and want to follow where it's going. What we can call (for want of a better term) the German house continuum of this decade was great for as long as it was too restless and too populist to really care about questions of lineage, purity and manifestos. The reemergence of these questions in the past twelve months is to mind a direct consequence of the crisis of direction besetting the scene.

Undoubtedly no stern producer's manifesto could endorse something as silly (and brilliant) as the Freeform Reform mix of Freeform Five's "Strangest Things" - one of the best of 2004's run of preposterous electro-house anthems. A manifesto just wouldn't have made sense and wouldn't have been necessary at that point. But then, "Strangest Things" is much closer to gay club music than anything that'd usually get talked about on this thread. Ironically, Ewan Manifesto Pearson's greatest achievement remains his most gay club moment - his remix of Freeform Five's "Perspex Sex", a record that has more in common with Mousse T than it does with the Belleville Three.

All of which is why I have rather fashionably shifted my allegiance to UK funky house this year - a music that has and needs no manifesto; a music that is undoubtedly enjoyed by most of its audience as just great club music to soundtrack their drinking, partying, drug-taking and cruising (albeit of a straight variety); but also a music that is so good that it's impossible not to drop everything in a frenzied search for the identity of that one great track.

people who think ... just have the wrong attitude towards social behaviour and really should stay in their bedrooms

tim i agree with you 100% on that post but you have to remember this is the internet

"Lots of gay clubbing is about cruising for sex, or taking drugs, or getting shitfaced with friends, or being able to sing and dance along to camp pop hits, or just to lose yourself in a crowd of likeminded people.

-- Tim F"

good for it, i care as much about that as i do straight clubs based on the same principles: not at all. there are an innumerable number of clubs of all types that play terrible music to people who don't give a shit, they are are equally worthless.

on what criteria

"tim i agree with you 100% on that post but you have to remember this is the internet"

Yes, well, if I had to make one criticism of Phil's Pitchfork column, it would be that it appears to take at face value what people on the internet say about dance music culture (although Phil avoids endorsing the notion that ILM's current handwringing is justified).

But re pipecock's most recent post, I agree with Ronan on this general point: a dance music crit discourse that defines 90% of how people actually use and engage with dance music as "worthless" is ultimately a self-hating discourse, basically trying to destroy dance music qua dance music. I.e. it's rockist in the mark s sense of the work "rockist" (the ideas about music it pushes ultimately undermining everything good about the music it purportedly seeks to defend).

Wine tasting doesn't derive it's legitimacy from outright dismissing the worth of every person who goes to the pub after work. I'm not sure why techno-tasting requires such a last-canon-standing fortress mentality.

This is not to say that the public is always right, or that the populist move is always the correct one, or that elitist attitudes are by definition incorrect. But I do believe that any kind of useful aesthetic position has to be engaged in some sort of critical dialogue with populism, even if it's a strained, convoluted or tenuous dialogue. The public isn't always right (if only because the public is always in contradiction with itself, often many times over) but they're always onto something, even if they have difficulty articulating what that is.

I can't agree with people who would choose to devote themselves to (say) Kitsune over Liebe*Detail or Planet E (to leave people's continental preferences aside), but I recognise that they're onto something when they feel some connection to a scene which still notionally believes in fun and pop hooks (the problem with Kitsune stuff is more in the execution than the idea: rather than fun and pop hooks you get "fun" and "pop hooks". They get it right more often than they appear to from the outside though). It's not coincidental that this scene really began to gather steam in 2006, just as the drive towards tastefulness kicked into gear again in house and techno.

Outright dismissing the decisions of entire audiences and scenes means you miss out on the phronesis (practical wisdom) that any scene can impart at least in small portions. I could never identify as a gay clubber but I think the insight that gay clubbing has given me is pretty invaluable, and it ultimately changes the way I approach all dance music.

By the way, I reckon the San Sebastian Planet E 12 inch is pretty fabulous - one of my favourite dance tracks of the year.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=el_LVfoDC-I

sadly, this is even more absurd.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nJJTVcSEp-s

Tim F for president

ha ha that is awesome. i would totally hang out with tiesto. he reminds me of a really smarmy grad student i know who is apparently like america's greatest kant expert under 30 or something like that.

he is from germany and he looks just like tiesto

it's rockist in the mark s sense of the work "rockist"

did you ever read the mark s thing about slash fiction?

if so, what do you think about this (warning, links to big PDF file) frank broughton-penned piece of fanfic about junior vasquez, gay black clubbers and the sound factory?

No I didn't! I'm sure it was good. he touched on vaguely related issues in his punk piece which I loved.

Will check that out! I am totally in favour of slash fiction.

My proudest moment as a music critic was when some slash fiction writer dedicated her story about Pete Wentz and the singer from P!ATD to one of my reviews.

"I'm not sure why techno-tasting requires such a last-canon-standing fortress mentality."

you are the keymaster. i am the gatekeeper.

Pipecock gets to be the Stay Puft marshmellow man.

that might have been the same piece. it was ostensibly about lester bangs, but had a big digression on slash fic. "thirty years of 'orrible noize"?

rise and sprawl of horrible noise

important reading for people who hate horrible progressive house

Tim F, I can't get into it heavily right now, but really, my hatred of most gay club music and gay clubs generally is not inspired by homophobia. Just dislike of the sound.

thoughtful argument

condescending post ^^^

sympathetic self awareness^^

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v204/day465/Soulstrut/megaeyeroll.gif

dope gif^^^

ban deej

"Tim F, I can't get into it heavily right now, but really, my hatred of most gay club music and gay clubs generally is not inspired by homophobia."

I didn't think it was. Okay I'm getting way off topic, but anyway:

I can understand why lots of gay guys are keen to distance themselves from what they consider to be the shallower or more myopic aspects of mainstream gay male culture. But I think in doing so they're often too quick to assume that they understand mainstream gay culture in all its depth and complexity (or, rather, its apparent lack thereof) merely by virtue of their being gay. As if, being into mainstream gay culture is the default position for any gay guy, and correspondingly one's distance from that scene is prima facie evidence of a certain level of critical discernment.

Whereas gay guys being into Kylie or progressive house (anyway most gay clubs actually don't play progressive house, this is a misnomer - in my experience gay clubs are more likely to play Freemasons-style vocal house, "club" mixes of pop hits, original versions of pop hits, hard house and electro-house before they are likely to play progressive house) is often a lot like any adult being into populist music: frequently they come from a prior position of rejection and have to "learn" to like this stuff.

Here's something interesting that the clever Angus Gordon wrote recently:

"...I still have a soft spot for the original SAW Kylie (note to younger readers: by SAW I mean not the torture porn franchise but "Stock Aitken and Waterman", ask your mum and dad), the Kylie who was more or less strictly for The Gays, the Kylie I saw perform at Mardi Gras (the only time I ever went, actually). In any case, "Better the Devil You Know" has always been my favourite Kylie song so in the end it was the only possible choice.

I thought then, and still do, that the music is quite striking, especially the harmony. Listening to sequence of contortions required to shift the key from the B flat major of the verse to the distant D flat major of the chorus ("a hundred times or more-ore-ore-ore!") you're struck by how weird SAW could actually be at times. No I'm not going to push some "they were more avant-garde than Stockhausen!" line, but for anyone who thinks they made paint-by-numbers pop this is a corrective. There's an even weirder example in "What Do I Have to Do", another song from the Rhythm of Love album that marks the high point of the Kylie/SAW collaboration.

I've also always found Kylie the most enjoyable to listen to of all the female singers with undeniably weak voices. She seems to find a way of putting her limited instrument to the best possible use, and this song is certainly an example of that.

Mostly, though, this one's about memories, my first tentative forays into gay life (in Adelaide! the glamorous Mars Bar! but still!), my learning not to be embarrassed by cheesiness. It occurs to me that the latter is a subtext in the whole "rockism" debate, there's an association for me at least between anti-pop sentiment and the closet. I wonder whether that's why some gay men become such ardent popists. It certainly always made me sceptical of the young gay men I would meet (they were often my students and would expound this point of view earnestly in their essays) who thought that their interest in indie music was some act of guerilla resistance against hegemonic gay culture. I quite liked hegemonic gay culture because of what it rescued me from, and I still do. And of course I still love Kylie."

ask your mum and dad - hate it when journos write this.

I think some kids might've been into Kylie, as well as the gays.

Both of yr points are correct.

lol don't EVER ban deej

As if, being into mainstream gay culture is the default position for any gay guy, and correspondingly one's distance from that scene is prima facie evidence of a certain level of critical discernment.

Thank you thank you thank you for articulating something I've been mulling over a lot recently.

As if, being into mainstream gay culture is the default position for any gay guy person, and correspondingly one's distance from that scene is prima facie evidence of a certain level of critical discernment.

Well exactly!

if there are really two sides to this debate (and i don't think there are because it's just not that simple), it seems like they could be characterized as "gatekeeping militancy" and "the militancy of being reasonable" (just as radical!). i think the truth is somewhere in the grey area and it's dependent on your own personal experience.