Let's talk about Derrick May

What's the story with the unreleased May LP on wire's "100 records that set the world on fire" list? google is failing me.

tbh may records are all about the breakdowns

also strings has no bassline

do you think derrick may has copies of his records that actually stay on time

this is the perfect time of year for mayday

just my $0.02

Emporors new clothes music.

I've been attempting to hear the 'soul' in his music for 20 years to no avail, all I hear is tedious joyless keyboard demos forged by a great self-promoter with a deft knack for pushing a genre creation myth to people who desperately want dance music to be more than the sum of its parts.

that's because you're a cloth eared dunce

OTM

But to hark back to the OP's original question back in 2001 - " I just can't see why it was such a breakthrough, and why electronic music freaks still go wild for it. I hear people talking about "soul" when talking about May, which sheds no light for me."

I've read the whole thread and noticed that May's music is always referred to in the context of its surroundings, or in comparison other music of the time. If you were listening for the first time in 2014, unaware of the history etc surely its pretty missable?

yes yes, very interesting, say more about that

You know what I'm really enjoying about nu-nu-ilx is the influx of normals and challops, really shaking things up around here. Does raccoon tanaki have any opinions4u about Derrick May?

normals and challops

wow. back to lurking for me.

peace out bro!

damn, harsh. i sorta agree with you Willl. this post from top of thread is rad. bring back the old internet!!

This may be boring and obvious but: the greatest thing to me abt Detroit techno seems like a drawback when you're just listening to tracks back-to-back: the relative sameness and consistency of the instrumentation (The Roland sound, etc.). I know this has been beaten to death but I'm going to draw a parallel that reinvigorates your interest in the entire genre ;) That sameness allows a gifted DJ (like uh... JEFF MILLS) to do things w/turntables that are literally impossible with other techno and house genres. When the handclaps from one track are the EXACT SAME handclaps in another, you can build a set that is sneaky, unique, and utterly seamless. I feel weird saying this because I have a kind of "anti-seamlessness" stance towards most DJ music these days, but minimal Detroit stuff allows the DJ to be much more of a "musician" than almost any other genre (besides hiphop tunrtablists of course).

The parallel: the World Wide Web. In the very early days of the web, every page looked exactly the same. Gray background, left-justified. No images. That was the vision: every page was just a page among other pages, the "site" was the entire web itself, cross-referenced with everything else. Nothing with its own prominence or personality. The value was in combination, not isolation. I personally get very bored with Surgeon, Jeff Mills, Derrick May, Blake Baxter, etc. on a track-by-track basis but I got bored with individual web pages in 1994 as well - the WHOLE is what gets me goin.
― Tracer Hand, Thursday, 21 June 2001 17:00 (13 years ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

w/e

telling people they got tricked into liking something is always going to be a non starter

The Great Beige-ing

i like how racist early ilx was, thats p cool

i love listening to detroit techno on a track-by-track basis. sure the quality varies but for the most part i just keep hearing good to great jams, with seams visible because it's made for djing but that's part of the charm imo. the music here is not lacking something on its own.

racist how, lamp?

I've been attempting to hear the 'soul' in his music for 20 years to no avail

It's just cool music, who cares about 'soul' or mythmaking or whatever, i'll bet you like some pretty shitty music yourself, mr emporor

like, is it just a total buzzkill for you whenever somebody drops a derrick may track in a set, because he's so emporors new music?

Mike Taylor's posts about "you need to walk the dark streets of detroit to understand this music" = massive groan, head in hands

^^^ the kind of sh*t that still helps sell loads of Detroit and Chicago-based dance records in Europe and Japan, seemingly. This comes from what friends "in the know" have told me and i find it mildly depressing in this day and age. But this is a whole other tangent/thread.

Not to say that many of the Detroit guys haven't helped push this "only the world we come from could produce this music" viewpoint.

The value was in combination, not isolation. I personally get very bored with Surgeon, Jeff Mills, Derrick May, Blake Baxter, etc. on a track-by-track basis but I got bored with individual web pages in 1994 as well - the WHOLE is what gets me goin.

Yeah lately I've been hearing about this thing called a DJ mix or a DJ set..

My early posts in this thread were bullshit but no one else was doing much better really.

I'm kind of frontin because honestly, i didn't get into Derrick May for a long time (context: didn't arrive at clubbing age until early 00s) "Nude photo" and "strings" did weird me out and make me feel things but for the most part his stuff just went right through me. Certain tracks kept worming their way into my 'soul' and at a certain point I started listening to Innovator a ton and eventually it all hit me like "damn, those hats are sick, that synthstring lead in "is it was it is" is filling my heart with universal love, "r-theme" makes me imagine purple deserts and castles in a utopia on another planet, these drums overall make me want to dance/escape my body". Listening to his drum breakdowns brings such pleasure to me, such a good time.

brimstead your posts itt fill me with joy

^^^^^

lol i never know when people are being sincere around here (myself included), but thank you (sincerely)

sincere luv bruv

i think I'm increasingly w(e)ary of using anything other than the music itself and its effects as a basis to defend or criticise something.

Like stores about soul have zero interest for me but this is just really fucking ace music so let's talk about that.

otm

i think i used to like certain music for shall we say "sociological" reasons and i'm kind of over that these days

also basically w(e)ary of any stripe of broadbrush oppositionalism but that's a me-thing that I don't necessarily expect others to share.

thing is sometimes the conclusions from the sociologial reasoning aren't wrong, but they're maybe right for the wrong reasons?

People who want to talk about the magic of Derrick May are onto something essentially true and correct but they may then bullshit themselves or others about what the nature of that magic is.

As usual the issue isn't the music itself or our reactions to it but how that gets reduced to conversations.

Of course this whole line of reasoning is basically "how I talked myself out of being a music critic".

'the music itself' is never just 'the music itself' some things are indivisible

fully support not being a music critic though

xp yeah especially when it comes to music with lyrics

'the music itself' is never just 'the music itself' some things are indivisible

― ≖_≖ (Lamp), Saturday, November 8, 2014 5:46 AM (5 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

On the one hand sure, on the other hand like what though, apart from what the listener imagines.

I'm not saying "let's not talk about the artist or the music videos or politics" so much as that the idea that you'll understand derrick may when you've felt the streets of detroit in your soul gets it the wrong way round.

Better to say: "one of the things I like about derrick may is that when I listen to his music it not only reminds me of walking the streets of detroit but makes that reminiscence feel more meaningful than it might otherwise."

the 'walking the streets of detriot' guy is also the 'perfect synthesis of refined european culture and savage african soul' guy and obviously its all of a piece in how he hears derrick may and i think its valuable to know that. i mean id rather he talk about that stuff than try to describe the music in technical terms because even the 'purely musical' is going to be shaded by his whole 'cerberal kraftwerk vs. soulful black music' dichotomy

i mean i dont think i need to walk the streets of detroit or buy into some noble savage myth to 'get' derrick may but obviously 2001 ilm poster micheal taylor did and thats sort of interesting to me

okay to be clear I'm not trying to draw some strict dichotomy between musicology vs other stuff, more this idea that you can appeal to some higher authority of any sort (incl. musicological authority!) outside of "this is how this shit makes me feel."

Which is not the same as hyper-subjectivity though it probably looks like it.

Weird to be having this argument now though b/c my immediate thought when reading back was "I'm more sympathetic to mt's position than I was back then".

i half agree with you

i think im always more interested in how music is situated in the world than strictly how it sounds but i understand others who dont share that feeling, i dont think thats the best or only approach. but i do think its generally easier to dialogue with

funnily enough i dont really agree with any of that dudes take on derrick may but i can see how for a british in 2001 it might make sense

mt's not a british though

"It's just cool music, who cares about 'soul' or mythmaking or whatever, i'll bet you like some pretty shitty music yourself, mr emporor"

― brimstead, Saturday, November 8, 2014 1:14 AM (5 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Yeah I stand corrected, I was being a contrary prick earlier today.

I dont play Derricks records as often as others from that time perhaps, but this is probably the one i play the most, great stuff

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oxiyXoY3vVk

The track on NDATL is great too, not sure if unreleased from the vaults he contributed or recent recording

i think im always more interested in how music is situated in the world than strictly how it sounds but i understand others who dont share that feeling, i dont think thats the best or only approach. but i do think its generally easier to dialogue with

to square this off, I agree with this, but I think most of "how music is situated in the world" is really in people's heads and the power of that really derives from how many heads get swept up in or changed by that, or to put it another way, the persuasiveness or the contagiousness of that frame.

Which is what I mean when I say I think of the "Detroit Soul" of Derrick May's music as an effect rather than a cause of its greatness.