Simon Reynolds - C or D

I mean shouldn't actual eclecticism, by dictionary definition even, mean people picking stuff from different eras, different sources, etc?

er, yes, that is what it means! but that is also 'just dabbling'. why does it bother you if people 'just dabble'? whence the moral imperative to get stuck into things in a big way?

I am indoors now - shortly I will be on the street. Then, I will be part of The British Street. I don't suppose that the records SR is pushing will say much about that experience.

Yo motherfucker!
Over there is RADA.
They have a cafeteria
Open to the public
No fucking discount
Though

because if everyone just dabbled there would be nothing to dabble in.

I think one of the key issues is not whether music is eclectic or pure, but whether it forges a sound that is distinctive and singular enough that it sounds "of a style" - hip hop is eclectic, sure, but when you hear it you still think "hip hop" rather than "one-off fusion of two other genres". Bad eclecticism is, I guess, where there doesn't seem to be any point to, or logic behind, the polystylistic choices being made - it's just a jumble of musical signifiers whose only purpose is to demonstrate the diversity of the set. But this is not an indictment on eclecticism as a whole - there are bad versions of most things!

sure we do *now*, 25-30 years on; but i'm wondering how g-man wd have reacted to 'adventures' in the day.

Any examples spring to mind?

bang on

we must bust him out

"If I want to listen to complex, baroque classical music, I will listen to, um, classical music. Just like a garage remix of a Lighthouse Family single isn't going to be as satisfying as a proper garage tune (or as a Lighthouse Family single, if you insist on liking that sort of thing), so Goldie 'doing' a symphony isn't going to be as good as "Terminator" or an actual Arvo Part symphony. The 1990s' fetish for eclecticism has radically opened up the sound-bag for cannier operators, but many others have ended up bogged down in an insecure need to prove themselves polymaths and genre splicers. We should demand eclecticism of listeners, not of artists."

And then:

"The most successful pop/classical crossovers, like Shut Up And Dance's, are generally those which brutally subsume the classical tradition as more raw materials for the pop process, rather than emasculating the most vital musics of our time as a sacrifice to an imagined posterity."

I perceive the broader point here as being that what is in error is not the impulse to combine breakbeat dance music with classical music (else "The Green Man" would be bad too), but rather the impulse for the music to be effectively eclectic. Which is to say: "The Green Man" may sample classical music but it doesn't feel the need to appeal to classical listeners as well as hardcore techno listeners. One set of genre demands is subsumed in the services of the other. Obviously the same thing happens when hip hop utilises a host of unusual multi-genre sample sources - it is not expected that the resulting music will automatically appeal to people who liked the source music it samples.

Goldie OTOH makes a piece of classical/breakbeat crossover which seeks to succeed on both sets of terms, and ends up not really working on either. The effectiveness of both source genres is "emasculated" for the sake of compromise.

This is not to say that all attempts to find a middle-ground between two styles will be unsuccessful - what i'm describing is perhaps not so much a rule as a case of reverse engineering. But I would propose that where such middle-grounds are successful, it is because what is created is essentially a third term, a new creature whose "eclecticism" could conceivably form the rallying point of a new form of genre-purism - or as I put it above, "it forges a sound that is distinctive and singular enough that it sounds "of a style".

Not always a good thing - I'd like Atom Heart more if his stuff across different genres didn't all end up sounding the same to me. (But I guess you're talking about eclecticism within a single work, and I'm talking about someone's eclecticism within a body of work.)

He's under house arrest.

My favourite anti-eclecticism argument is chuck eddy's in Accidental Evolution, where he points out that since all pop continually reuses and pirates other pop and other types of music the fetishisation of a virtuous eclecticism is a bit rich, and implies an opposition between 'sophisticated' and 'dumb' music which is ultimately rather banal.

well then, great!

i think we're talking about approaches here. lots of music that falls in the rockist sphere is good too! so, its about the lauding of this approach, i dont like this approach, and think it makes for bad music. im sure it makes for some good music on occasion too, i just cant think of many examples

whereas the eclecticism i'm decrying is something that leaves, or attempts to leave, genre, to become something else

Grime acts using live drums, guitar etc. - I can see that this would seem worse too - same as it was with Jungle (altho both Adam F and Reprazent were hot live originally!)

What about the 'eclecticism' of The Avalanches or Basement Jaxx though? These artists are pretty much defined by this approach, both in their albums and their DJ sets. And for me it works perfectly. Maybe for it to be fully convincing you have to set the stall out from the beginning, start as you mean to go on. People knew from the first records that they'd be doing a mixture of stuff.

And then there's big Pop icons whereby it's traditional to release party tracks, ballads and whatever comes inbetween. Nobody seems to complain about this, I guess because each song still fits a particular genre (MOR/power-ballad/pure pop/faux-urban pop etc.).

Point taken, but a couple of lines are a bit too tangential to make for a classic, um, text.

Funnily enough that piece by Tom sounds as if it's from when he was in his most Reynolds-inspired phase i.e. against the 'gentrification' of jungle via its aspirations to a veneer of musical sophistication. (Obviously jungle IS musically sophisticated, but the argument would run that some of its producers aspired to a cultural status which they felt they could only achieve by going 'jazz' or 'progressive').

The funny thing here is, I always felt that Reynolds played more of a part in the gentrification of jungle than he would care to admit. Not intentionally, of course. But he essentially created the belief that jungle is musically sophisticated in the early essays he wrote championing it and hailing it as a radical musical breakthrough. A lot of of people climbed on the bandwagon after that, and this atmosphere was created where I think producers felt like, because they were so sophisticated, what they should be doing is classical music! They missed the point. OK, Goldie was probably always a raging egotist, but perhaps if he hadn't been hailed as Britain's Derrick May, King Tubby and Public Enemy rolled into one, he might not have felt like Mother was a good idea...

Youn, I have maybe always associated his move to NYC with Lloyd Cole's; it was perhaps at a similar time? Or perhaps later. He interviewed Lloyd, terrifically, in Lloyd's early NYC phase, so I think I will maintain that he got the idea from Lloyd.

What The Avalanches/Basement Jaxx have is a certain sonic aesthetic/vibe/etc. which persists regardless of the specific style they're working in, same goes for Saint Etienne too. And M.I.A.! And Andre 3000!

So what makes the first three examples of great eclecticism and Andre 3000 (post-Outkast) an example of bad eclectism? Perhaps it's that what I sense as being the aesthetic/vibe at work within The Love Below is nothing but this idea of a restless pan-genre eclectic genius, i.e. it literally becomes eclecticism for its own sake. Of course others may not sense this at all, or they may sense something different - but a lot of ideas about eclecticism or purism exist primarily in our heads, which is where they do the most damage. If I hadn't read so many articles about The Love Below being a genre-surpassing work of genius, would i still feel this way?

For me a key transition from good eclectic to bad (or at least less good) eclectic is the move from Moby's Move EP to Everything Is Wrong, for which he rerecorded his "All That I Need Is To Be Loved", transforming it from a stomping dance track as hard as a thrash metal track into a "proper" faux-thrash-metal track.

Am I crazy to think the two are really the same thing or is someone willing to make the case for a distinction?

Did the British press not refer to anything as "new wave"? Was that just a U.S. phenomenon?

I'd appreciate some well-informed perspective on this.

One thing that sticks out is Reynolds lumping in the US indie-rock movement as part of postpunk, that whole axis of bands (husker du et all) saw themselves in opposition to "the second British invasion," rejecting the futurism and fashion-consciousness of new wave for a recherche avant-garde primitism. Hence the birth of "alternative."

i like his recent posts. it's funny, though, he admits to listening to mary-anne hobbes' 'breezeblock' for the *first time ever*, and notes how fresh it sounds... i stopped listening to it about seven years ago i suppose, but, well, fi you're going to make calls on the voice of the streets...

http://69.93.254.120/G/storage/site1/files/24/84/77/248477_012789581bd154y3o9qr06.jpg

Plus surely Reynolds =

http://www.uktv.co.uk/images/standardItem/L1/529996_L1.jpg

http://bringthenoisesimonreynolds.blogspot.com/