the juke/bmore/bloghouse frankenstein dance music they play at clubs

how clever, your way with words is astounding!

actually, it's funny. the more shit i talk on forums like this, the higher my traffic goes. this is not only fun, but it gets more readers. it's wonderful how life works out sometimes.

"how clever, your way with words is astounding!

― beggin-ass keith (The Reverend)"

i'm a professional, what can i say?

"If you strike me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine."

crazy strategy - clearly all of us here on ilx are looking for a blog dedicated to fighting the status quo by covering all the music we love and showing how it is all interrelated.

http://a603.ac-images.myspacecdn.com/images01/35/l_c470a46ac6e5febeaddcab9e69e067e2.jpg

Famous blogger pipecock contemplates the music he loves and how it is all interrelated

come on, jordan, you should know that dillawall.jpg is the canonical pipecock pic

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so many meme possibilities in this thread!

can't believe ppl would suggest-ban pipecock

i started making a frankendance track on saturday, altho really it is a S.U.A.D. homage

i hate to validate disco nihilist / tombot style grousing about production technology but i am sort of coming around to their take on software vs hardware

why bother concentrating on programming rhythm when you can just take an mp3s and chop them to bits on your laptop? then it just becomes a matter of showing off your taste in your "productions" rather than, i dunno, musicality or something. no surprise then, that this music is like the domain of blogger dudes who check turntablelab every day?

One of the things that has changed with the democratization of production technology is that it is brought down the length of apprenticeship considerably. Theo Parrish once said that if you want to be a producer you should just be a dancer for a few years, then become a DJ for a few years, and then start making music. I agree with this because it gives you a working knowledge of the whole picture of dance music and actually make you a part of a subculture with a working vocabulary.

You can make good music on hardware or software or a combo of both but you have to know what you are doing. It is a lot easier to just grab chunks of audio and warp it to a beat than it is to actually sit down and program or play a beat. That is why people mention the fact that people's samples don't fit together or that their productions don't actually flow up thread. Ableton can be great tool if you know what you are doing on a technical(knob twiddling) and a musical(the actual ideas underneath the production) level. The problem is that you can get a cracked copy of Live and Soundforge and start sending audio out to your social network within a couple weeks of fooling around. You might not get good results, but you can get results very quickly.

Most of the examples of the bad stuff on this thread are just people cutting up their collection and stitching it back up in Ableton in really unclever ways. It is just a mish mash of off key synth loops, blocky drum loop that swerve all over because the producer can't write variation in their drums(they can't program so they just grab loops and they don't have the skill to chop them ala pete rock), and bad stabs that aren't really rhythmic or melodic.

I think the other thing is that people go from joining the audience to creating content very quickly. If you dance for years you are going to have a physical understanding of the psychology of the dance floor. Your body will know why some rhythms work and others don't. You would also have an understanding of why you play a certain record at a certain time and how to make music ebb and flow in a continuous way. You are also going to stick around long enough to really get to know the music and spread your taste around. I can think of people who either got into the music and got out once they stopped doing the drugs or they only got into one tiny aspect of it(one micro genre) and then left once they got bored with it. I think that is good because they didn't have real love and they didn't have enough perspective to bring their own voice to the table. Nowadays some of these people would be making music and DJ'ing on their laptop and adding untold layers on top of crap that we have to wade through these days.

It is hard for me to say how the actual culture works on the ground because it seems to be a mash up of several different directions and it seems that some directions work better than others. I don't like the fidget stuff but I can see why it would work and what it is going after. The amateur hour b-more/juke stuff just leaves me scratching my head. I have seen enough of the hipster dance scene in Austin to know that I am not interested in being a part of it on a musical level(the only thing I can interface with since I don't drug anymore, I don't wear the clothes and I am not interested in the people...). Then it was JUSTICE, some b-more and mash-ups trainwrecked together on laptops and now I imagine it is the same shit with slightly different sonic wallpaper. People were on the same cheap Mexican coke and booze like every other club downtown.

That being said, I also know that I need to accept the fact that this stuff isn't coming from the dance music continuum and it shouldn't be judged according to the same criteria. If anything this stuff is probably the North American version of grime. It has a lot of the same weaknesses and will probably have about the same longevity as a genre. I can't really get upset about this stuff because it is going to go away as quickly as it came. At some point there is going to be a sea change in music like the amped rock band was to the big band in the 50's or disco was to cabaret music in NYC in the 70's. This stuff isn't it.

I'd love to wave my cane around and tell these kids to get off my lawn, but this just isn't enough of a threat to justify that attitude.

If anything this stuff is probably the North American version of grime.

I should clarify that I mean that from a production stand point. I understand that the MC angle isn't there and that the class issue isn't there in most cases.

Correct me if I am wrong, but frankendance does seem to have a strong working class/poor angle to it. Regional hip-hop and commercial R&B fill that niche in NA regardless of race in urban areas.

i think saying its not gonna last as long is probably pretty wrong. kids with guitars, kids with synthesizers, daft punk is the new nirvana, whatever

Correct me if I am wrong, but frankendance does seem to have a strong working class/poor angle to it. Regional hip-hop and commercial R&B fill that niche in NA regardless of race in urban areas.

― that song on a freebie compilation I got when I ordered a pizza. (Display Name), Monday, December 15, 2008 5:57 AM (46 seconds ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

it genuinely seems to cross from both working class / poor to middle class / slumming here. it has a broad-based but niche (clubgoing) audience.

Correct me if I am wrong, but frankendance doesn't seem to have a strong working class/poor angle to it. Regional hip-hop and commercial R&B fill that niche in NA regardless of race in urban areas.

it genuinely seems to cross from both working class / poor to middle class / slumming here. it has a broad-based but niche (clubgoing) audience.

And that is why I have asked clarification questions up thread because this stuff is being used in different ways in different places. This stuff would be played to hipster's in Austin and there might be an economic range within that subculture but it is still within that tiny sliver of clubs.

Texas/Houston rap music is the default club music of younger poor/minority down here. Thugs are not bumping bmore out here.

well its niche music but post-kanye, at least in chicago, it has diverse appeal. it doesnt have popular appeal but its not the dominant pop music in the 'burbs either.

"One of the things that has changed with the democratization of production technology is that it is brought down the length of apprenticeship considerably. Theo Parrish once said that if you want to be a producer you should just be a dancer for a few years, then become a DJ for a few years, and then start making music. I agree with this because it gives you a working knowledge of the whole picture of dance music and actually make you a part of a subculture with a working vocabulary."

I feel this is so OTM, but I wonder if it's because I'm still in the "dancer" phase so like any argument which validates my lack of progression.

i guess Theo Parrish would make an exception for Ron Trent and any other people who made big tunes before they were old enough to actually get into most clubs. it's an understandable, even reasonable pov but it's also very much tedious rockism. the amateurish Fun side of popular dance music has always yielded good and bad. i agree about the democratisation/accessibility saturation thing but there are so many bad records made by competent musical guys anyway.

I don't like the apprenticeship aspect so much as the idea of approaching dance music from the perspective of a dancer. But then I would.

i kind of feel like its the point. i would approach djing from the perspective of a dancer also

still i suspect you can be a bad dancer but still make good dance tracks (for some reason the Chemical Brothers were the first to spring to mind here).

and have you ever seen Jeff Mills at a wedding? pretty embarrassing...

What is the ratio of Ron Trent's vs just flat out bad amateurs. 1000 to 1, 10,000 to 1, perhaps 30,000 to one these days...can you even find the Ron Trent's that are buried/ignored in all the shit that comes out today?

The myth of the Sex Pistols is really great(and it's a myth because Matlock could write, and the 2nd line up could actually could play) but do you really want to listen to every copy cat punk recording that came after it for the next 5 years? A ton of gems came out of that era, but so did a lot of crap. The most of the gems were not done in a vacuum, there were a lot of skilled people involved even if their pictures were not on the covers of the records.

I don't want to live in a world where the police enforce criteria on creative work but I am also not going to say that unlimited access to content creation and easy access to distribute the content is a good thing. Obviously there is a balance and the idea of a good music tribunal is abhorrent. It is their right to make bad music and it is my right to bitch about it.

true. to me it is much like going on flickr to search for photos and seeing the most relevant ones are all unsubtle really poorly done HDR shots with 8000 views, 500 faves and 67 comments half of which embed the tackiest 'award' gifs ever.

I don't like the apprenticeship aspect so much as the idea of approaching dance music from the perspective of a dancer. But then I would.

It isn't a romantic way to look at it, but it is a good metaphor. In a lot of ways I think music production is a skilled trade. That is why I think the apprenticeship system is good. You start dancing, then you hand out fliers and carry records, and then you learn about mixing and throwing parties and then you get to know producers and learn from them and then you make your music. Back in the day in Detroit there was a system that you went through to learn the big picture and if you stuck around long enough you got to wear every hat.

It was the same as rock music, and I don't think there is anything wrong with a informal body of knowledge being passed through a subculture. The problem with computer production is that it is often done solo and it doesn't bring you into contact with other people that have different specialization in music. That is one of the things that I love about disco records. You can hear the contributions of several different people in one project. It seems like you could learn so much from being in a room with session guys and a producer who could give you pointers on how to make your records better. There isn't anything like that now for underground dance music.

Jeff Mills is a perfect example of this system at work. I love the way his face lights up when he talks about the dance records of the early 80's.

I don't think you need to be a great dancer but you should know what it feels like to get lost in the music on a dance floor.

To be clear, I don't have a real issue with apprenticeship in this context, I just don't think it's crucial. Or, perhaps rather, the issue is that an overemphasis on apprenticeship can create a very linear form of artistic succession - to use your example again, for every groundbreaker, there's a thousand musicians faithfully recreating the standards.

Whereas I tend to think that being a performer is or should be kinda like a more intense version of being a member of the audience. And the great thing about being a member of the audience - especially on the dancefloor - is that you're caught up in this experience which is at once communal and individualistic, hearing what others are hearing but also mishearing it in a way that is personal to you. It's in the tension b/w that communal tradition and the differential articulation of it in your own head that then allows you as a musician to make interesting, distinct music. There's an interplay there.

The non-audience aspects of apprenticeship to my mind are secondary that; or maybe it's that they are components of this process already. I think doing something like promoting a club night because you feel an allegiance to a particular sound or style is an intermediary step between dancing and creating, insofar as you're advocating for a version of the music that you're hearing in your head.

went to a party on sat and they were playing all frankendace - btw there were many hot chix there - everyone was talking abt it

the chicks or the frankendance

the chix - there were no ilxors there to be tedious with - everyone just dancing getting wasted or whatever

i did actually try to talk abt the music :/

im sorry i like to talk about dancing and dance music bro

Talking about dancing is like architecture about music or something like that.

architecture about music sounds pretty good

or... looks pretty good!

the Experience Music Project begs to disagree

http://www.thecityreview.com/phaid55.jpg

^dope

are you kidding me? It's the ugliest building I've ever seen

fuck Frank Gehry forever

what will future civilizations think

whoa hay rev take yr sex fantasies to tmi plz!

frankentecture

smash Frank Gehry forever

frankengehry

that is a totally dope building

it's a fucking eyesore... it's basically the archetectural equivelent of all the neon bullshit this thread is about

I can't believe y'all are riding for the EMP.

are those blue strips solar panels?

dunno

I don't think so, and I can't seem to find any evidence on google that they are