♥☮☯♫ PC MUSIC ♫☯☮♥ ☺☺☺ ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°✌

Haha this GFOTY mix is mad :D

think I could get with this in a fairly major way - I don't even care if it's impishly playing with convention while obviously enjoying itself; oh no my sainted Pop is being deconstructed! oh no! stop this! etc

― imago, Saturday, August 30, 2014 4:36 AM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i fold

http://i.kinja-img.com/gawker-media/image/upload/aez0sgfqssu2ciqlu9ig.jpg

i know the convo has moved on at this point, but what's the story behind the hdboyz video linked upthread? it's brilliant

Rolling Worst Music of 2011 iirc.

the hdboyz were all internet art/video art dudes, it was started by noted asshole ryder ripps. seemed super weak to me even as an art project. see also yentech (also hyped by dis magazine)

she should collab with boddika

https://twitter.com/shmuraya/status/603272486042611712

yep

gfoty seems like an entirely redundant rehash of miss kittin's electroclash-era shtick without the music but with added racism and v pointless in an era of nell "hold my dick" diamond and the rich kids of instagram if one wants to laugh at un-self-aware caricatures of very rich people

otm, I've been equating PC Music with electroclash since it plopped, same thesis same class of creators same synapses of enjoyment. If anything tho, that association has made me slower to criticize PC Music, EC was fun and dumb and problematic-in-hindsight but was also just a bunch of stupid kids who made some tracks I still love and play out. When we say "nobody cares about PC Music in 2016" it's like yeah probably no nobody cared about Jeans Team in 2004 neither

imago, your whole theory about these are just kids learning the world man falls the fuck apart because their entire thing is WE ARE THE INTERNET ON THE THE INTERNET GUYS INTERNET and so they've probably encountered some progressive, non-racist politics on whatever kinja site they read

she should collab with boddika

and lest we forget it was very obliging of kozelek to open up the proceedings for international month of the bigoted dickhead

on whatever kinja site they read

― lil dork (Whiney G. Weingarten), Tuesday, June 9, 2015 2:22 PM (5 minutes ago)

i have sincere <3 for both you and lj, but you're both competing for the gold medal in the self-clowning oven olympics right now

itt og plopping

Time for a new display name.

EC was fun and dumb and problematic-in-hindsight but was also just a bunch of stupid kids who made some tracks I still love and play out. When we say "nobody cares about PC Music in 2016" it's like yeah probably no nobody cared about Jeans Team in 2004 neither

mm i was thinking about that comparison and was electroclash actually that problematic? tbh you're right - all the fifth-tier electroclash acts evaporated from memory as soon as they existed, pretty much - and a lot of them everyone saw through instantly - and i guess electroclash as an era is looked on more favourably now because of a couple of key genuinely talented artists (felix da housecat obv, but miss kittin was a bit of a plot twist) and anthems like "emerge" that still hold up

The aesthetic focus on body-positivity, and generally equal footing for female and queer voices divested EC itself in my view, but it was still garbagey music made by garbage kids with garbage ideas and not a small amount of genre-appropriation. At least an afternoon of classic tracks though

What was the genre appropriation in electroclash? I'm not familiar with the term.

electroclash got a huge amount of backlash for being 'fake', 'disingenuous', 'a flash-in-the-pan fad' at the time and yet somehow it left a much deeper impression on the decade that followed, long after people stopped using it as a term.

i guess it was taking the futurism from electro and leaving the afro- behind?

garbagey music made by garbage kids with garbage ideas and not a small amount of genre-appropriation

all pop music from the beginning of time IIRC

For what it's worth - electroclash was coined by Larry Tee and associated with those NYC parties initially, but was also a convergence of a bunch of broader trends and styles from indie/queer/feminist stuff like Le Tigre and Peaches, italo/electro revival from I-F or International DJ Gigolos and a turn to "80s" pop in general dance scenes, and had a big influence almost immediately.

PC Music feels really small by comparison; if anything, I see it as capitalizing (belatedly) on vaporwave styles or James Ferraro/Oneohtrix Point Never by adding some vocals and 90s Swedish pop influences.

I wouldn't even care about it not being groundbreaking, if it was at least exciting or interesting. Or in any way appealing. The collective persona of PC Music strikes me as pretty contemptuous.

I wouldn't even care about it not being groundbreaking, if it was at least exciting or interesting. Or in any way appealing.

Yeah this is how I feel really. Wasn't aware of the background to electroclash, I haven't thought about electroclash in a long time even though I liked/like a lot of the music!

Electroclash was gleefully shallow though, it was art-school as hell but it never made any claims for any artistic depth and as far as I remember it didn't have any of PC Music's ludicrous self-invented 'theory' surrounding it.

I've not read anything about PC Music that has convinced me that there's anything more nuanced or intelligent going on around it than, say, a particularly hamfisted and unsubtle Banksy.

i thought a part of PC Music's image/stance is that it's quite deliberately reveling in plasticity/superficiality to an obnoxious degree?
i guess that's what electroclash was also about to an extent. But electroclash had this detached numbness, that chilly Euro android-gynous thing that Miss Kittin did so well which gets supplanted by PC Music's sugary lucre. Despite the ostensibly varied personae on offer, all the PC Music singers seem to have the same Shampoo-esque posh-Brit tone; an uncanny-valley clone effect - cute, creepy, disposable - much like the Innocent Smoothies aesthetic where a product tries desperately to be your friend. It's egregiously bouncy music too - like a radio ad produced by the Bonkers crew.

It's been said a lot now, but this is in itself a comment on a particular strain of post-hipster media-centric London culture that only really manifested around the time of the Olympics; and these guys are very aware how much of a hall-of-mirrors they're creating by holding up that mirror to themselves and the world they grew up and worked in. it's self-fellating, self-flagellating music, for and about media burnouts, and this follows in a very British tradition found in things like Nathan Barley and the Mighty Boosh, both of which held hipster culture in a love/hate deadlock.

What repels many about this music is exactly what attracts others - the OTT gaudiness, the vacuous messages, the uneasy, seasick feeling that lurches between moments of pure indulgence and utter cringiness. You can find this push/pull effect in all sorts of music, from punk rock to ratchet hip hop - the paradox of 'We're horrible, but you love us'.

FWIW, all the complaints currently being thrown at PC Music (other than the recent racist incident) were also made about electroclash in its day.

The discourse around dance music has become so much more theory-driven over the past decade though. When electroclash happened it was more like, "Oh, the vibe is bored, ironic jetsetters doing coke in VIP rooms. Got it." PC Music come with so much more baggage. Look at the P4k review - I don't remember reviews like that of Miss Kittin or Felix Da Housecat.

is there an argument to say that electroclash was the first 'high-concept'/post-modern dance music? other than futurism things like Drexciya etc..

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actually drexciya was pretty high-concept but not in any way the same way. not a good example.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Detroit_techno

that may have had some influence on what followed - though not many people have heard of those guys

what are you doing?

afaict detroit techno is conceptual, but not in the same post-modern / self-referential / ironic way as electroclash and PC Music.

i'm not even going to bother because i have a life

LOL

is there an argument to say that electroclash was the first 'high-concept'/post-modern dance music?

...kraftwerk, afrika bambaataa...

is there an argument to say that electroclash was the first 'high-concept'/post-modern dance music?

smh.

i don't know enough about the history of disco and hi-nrg to suggest pertinent examples from those genres, but if you just want to restrict it to white art-school dorks, malcolm mclaren springs to mind

also aphex twin?

Things like Kraftwerk strike are obv highly conceptual, but modernist rather than post-modernist. Even though there's a commentary and conversation surrounding all these earlier techno and electro acts, there's a self-belief and sincerity to most of them that seems different from the postured 'dance music about dance music' thing people like Fischerspooner did, and which PC Music seem to want to take to an extreme. Maybe electronic dance music hadn't quite been around long enough to be able to reflect upon and satirise itself and its past, i dunno. Malcolm Mclaren is maybe the godhead of this - turning rebellion into money, then turning money into rebellion.

Xp

Although I'm not saying there weren't loads of examples of this happening before EC but it was one of the first times I was aware of a whole scene or genre in electronic music that hinged almost entirely on retro, on satire, on the fact it knew in itself that it was a fad and embraced this.

there speaks a man who didn't live through romo

dunno if sigue sigue sputnik were part of a larger scene but they seem to be v close to what you're talking about

yeah i wasn't around for those guys.

romo was an indie thing wasn't it? i was chattign with someone who was in a romo band a little while ago. prob loads of parallels in rock music - Steely Dan, The Darkness etc...

Great swathes of 90s commercial dance pop (including Aqua) was satirical, self-aware, engaged with the concepts of 'product' and 'disposability', etc.

I'd also argue that a lot of electroclash was very, very serious even if it wasn't always perceived that way. There was a big crossover with coldwave.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aQUIsgrlp10

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QAR8cq5Bl94