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

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

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.

See, this is OTM. As dance music it's fail because of the boring thudding beat and the lack of flow that all the glitchy bits and sudden changes of direction induce. But not all nightclubs play dance music. Rock clubs have been around for years. And when you look at audience reaction to these tunes it's very like audience reaction to rock tunes in bars/clubs - there's a brief roar of excitement and possibly some bouncing around in a manner somewhat independent of the rhythm of the track and then it subsides again. Frankendance just tries to compress as many of those rushy moments into the night as possible.

I think this is a great example of how useless the term "dance" has become. The first nail in the coffin was hip-hop which wasn't acknowledged as being "dance" music despite people dancing to it. Now we've got lots of music which sonically ought to be dance music (hefty beats etc) but functionally isn't...

good point^

yeah now you can have dance music that people don't ever dance to, because a couple decades ago people danced to music that wasn't called dance music! totally on your wavelength

yeah! now that you mention it I realise that rock has nothing to do with geology either.

i agree that a lot of this music resembles rock in some ways

I'm still thinking that a lot of the complaints that revolve around lack of groove still come down to unimaginative deejaying. Maybe deej had the right idea earlier in the thread and some quick and nasty edits might have some benefit here?

Anyways I'm listening to Fake Blood at the moment, like his bass sounds.

And this is really old news but anyone give a shit about the Machines Don't Care album?

Blue strips aren't solar panels. They are decoration meant to evoke tangled strings on a broken guitar. (???) EMP is hideous, but I don't think that has much to do with its success/failure as urban object/public space. Its intent is to be "fun", and it succeeds on that level, in a ghastly sort of way. That said, they really do need to lose the ribbons.

success is always ghastly contenderizer trust me

this is an interesting thread

who listens to this kind of thing, huh?

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.

yeah

especially in terms of the midwestern US, there is no cohesive scene or fundamental set of ideas that drives this sort of music

it's just a bunch of lonely, isolated young people who seem barely aware of each other, let alone any sense of context or history to what they're doing

words like "bloghouse" that have been coined to describe this kind of thing are like the word "hipster" in that the essential meaning of the word is different from region to region - it's not like europe where there's any kind of aesthetic/historic/social continuity to it

it's less a genre than a vast collection of iChat file transfer windows that self-styled tastemakers occasionally try to pass off as a format

the minneapolis people mentioned in the thread are erol alkan acolytes and not really representative of the types of DJs that really push this kind of music, like the ones from chicago

also i mean you can finger big beat for birthing this but as far as i'm concerned the beastie boys have a lot to answer for here

i imagine that shoegaze playlist DJ is involved somewhere