Simon Reynolds - C or D

All in all, I think Germany's importance in the advancement of electronic music is overlooked in the British media. When talking about Germany's role in this people talk about Love Parade, Low Spirit and how things went big/mainstream there, but the other side of the story is often forgotten. First of all, the German trance/rave boom made people in more remote countries (like mine) turn their heads to electronic music and make their own bastardization of it. Secondly, a scene that big is bound to create a bunch of underground artists, pioneers and explorers. But because some people still think Teutonic dance music is a joke, that it equals with rigid hordes stomping to a Nazi no-soul beat, the German scene is belittled or ignored.

A good case in point is the scene in Cologne. It had a big part in creation of the current electro craze (with Mouse on Mars, Kerosene, Jammin' Unit, Khan, etc.), it helped to rescue digi-dub from becoming new age music (with Incoming! Records, Nonplace Urban Field & co.), and also gave birth to a number of brilliant but unclassifiable acts, like Air Liquide or Love Inc. Out of these, only Mouse on Mars has gotten the attention they deserve, probably because they appeal to indie/rockist sensibilities. However, the grounding work done by Jammin' Unit, Dr. Walker, Kerosene, Khan, Mike Ink, Burnt Friedmann and others seems to be largely ignored. All of the above mentioned acts were taking place already in the mid-nineties, but since Britain has always had it's own preoccupations, I guess they were lost there.

it is worth mentioning that vath, zaffarano, tanith, westbam etc regularly played huge parties in britain, and, initially at least, alongside mills, beltram, hawtin, angel, wild etc

i think the with the demise of hardcore in britain, that it can be overlooked that a lot of that audience switched over to the emerging german/dutch hybridized techno/trance sound of harthouse, bonzai, important etc, and the way that melded with american stuff like red planet, axis, synewave, UR etc

but again, yes, this applies to the way the euro sound caught on in britain, rather than in europe itself, and i'd love to read a similar book that concentrated exclusively on germany

1)It's created in the US.
2)It's imported in the UK, where it becomes big.
3)It's mutated into million different subgenres by the UK producers.
4)Then, maybe a small chapter or an epilogue about it going worldwide.

Reynolds doesn't claim that his is the complete story, but he also doesn't say it's just the British story. I mean, Reynolds does write about foreign scenes as well, but mostly about the stuff he himself fancies. To be objective you'd have to at least acknowledge the impact the German scene has had on electronic music.

http://members.lycos.co.uk/dubplate/

Second most frustrating thing about ILM: seeing a new thread when it pops up and thinking "Oh I'll have to check that out later" and then coming back after an hour and realizing it's too lengthy to digest. Most frustrating thing about ILM: seeing the same thread revived a year after it started and being reminded of the first time you said you'd have to read it later.

(Then almost immediately thought of the acrimonious debates earlier this year about a certain mud-hut dwelling young lady whose publicity shots invariably depict her crouching on a jungle tree branch; that bizarre net-spectacle of folks who disdain the concept of authenticity engaged in frantic authentication!)

Perhaps someone can clue me in to what he's talking about with regards to M.I.A. here? He is referring to her right? I can't recall a single publicity shot where she's dwelling in a "mud-hut" or crouching on a "jungle tree branch". She appears in a jungle themed setting for the "Amazon" video. How exactly are anti-authenticity types "engaged in frantic authentication"? It would seem to me that so many of her detractors are *obsessed* (perhaps unconsciously) with where she's from (not speaking of Sri Lanka here, but with her art school/class origins? forgive me, I'm only an American here). Is there some assumption that everyone who likes her is somehow reveling in some kind of 1950s cliched exoticism?

As for the phrase above, I've always thought it was originally reversed and very American - i.e. it's not where you're from (place, class etc), but where you are now, where you've brought yourself (by the bootstraps) to. The inversion as quoted just seems like a moderately clever play on the original phrase and something that would mainly make sense in NYC (as in, which suburb do you represent etc).

Sorry if this is the wrong place to bring this up, but I don't have time to figure out dissensus.

Also, could someone please give a layman's account of Simon's nu-rockism idea?

Where she says things like:
"'I'm glad I went that far into it. I was the best hoochie on the West Coast at the time. I had the best clothes 'cos I was coming from England and really good at shoplifting. I had Versace on before Lil' Kim started rapping about it 'cos the only place I could steal at was Harvey Nicks, where it was sooo easy. So I studied, like, the whole thing out in Compton: how the best you could do is be there for your man, be really good at sex, throw barbecues in the park, have babies and keep that unit together with the money that you get.'"

This obliquely reminds me of the revelation about the philosophy department here at UCI. In the men's restrooms there, there's a huge amount of anti-Derrida graffiti, obviously prompted by his residence here every spring. One time I asked someone in the department about that -- "Geez, are the grads here really ticked off with him?" "Oh no," came the reply, "that's from the professors."

thats a great anecdote!

This leads him to conflate the apparently rockist and popist arguments put forward in M.I.A.'s defence. He assumes that all M.I.A. fans are anti-authenticity popists who nonetheless love M.I.A. due to the perceived authenticity of her Sri Lankan/terrorist/anti-globalist lefty imagery.

For him the M.I.A. fan contradicts him or herself by moving between two arguments: "M.I.A. is important because she is [x]!", and "so what if she is not really [x], it is rockist to care about such things!"

It is true that different M.I.A. fans have touted these lines. But unless I'm forgetting some glaring example I can't remember an instance of the same person using both.

the funny thing is, if you look at reynolds' piece in the voice, it's really very even-handed and bends over backwards to give her the benefit of the doubt, even though, at the end of the day, it's critique pretty much amounts to *points finger* "she went to St. Martins!"

and then, after being attacked from all quarters, his rhetoric got surprisingly spiteful online, especially dissensus, and he wound up attacking her for a lot of the things that he went out of his way not to attack her for in the voice piece (eg, supposedly stealing grime's thunder)

and at this point he's reduced to pretty much incoherence i think.

time for a group hug, really

It's not an issue of people contradicting themselves, it's a question of a contradictory articulation of authenticity in the first place: how MIA herself has been constructed. Neither position, either the popist or the rockist, is particularly convincing as a result.

And besides, wasn't Reynolds' original comment that she doesn't "come from anywhere" directed at the promotion of MIA from the industry, at a promotional concert? I don't think that the fans are his target.

not really. it was that she didn't have the right to use images of war and struggle. and she doesn't have the right to use them because she is an outsider. and the only real evidence we're given that she's an outsider is that she went to st. martin's. nothing else about her background, apart from to say that her father's terrorism doesn't fit a third-vs-first struggle.

my beef is really that, all arguments about MIA's rather-more-complex-than-simply-going-to-st-martins background, it's a bit late in the day to be saying that being middle-class, or having the taint of the middle class that going to st. martin's gives you, means you come from "nowhere." it's the old rootless cosmopolitans vs. grounded proles trope. everybody comes from somewhere, including prince harry, and proles (like, for example, hip-hop loving grime MCs) are just as likely to pick up "other people's music" and use it for their own ends as anyone else is.

but god knows i'm not getting involved in this again! vye

"It's not an issue of people contradicting themselves, it's a question of a contradictory articulation of authenticity in the first place: how MIA herself has been constructed. Neither position, either the popist or the rockist, is particularly convincing as a result."

I agree Michael! That's what jars about M.I.A. (positively or negatively, depending on your position) and it's the tension which instigated the entire debate. But the attacks on M.I.A. inevitably did become displaced onto her fans and, by extension, all "popists" (as if popists had been responsible for her campaign strategy).