Simon Reynolds is a gobshite

and that most people i know who've been to/live in Berlin say that speed is extremely popular, more so than K.

but again, Simey couldn't make a crap connection between minimal and wonky if he stuck to the truth.

hate this whole idea of 'synergy' between drug and music tbqh. lurking behind it is some really dubious deleuzian 'man machine' ish. no idea what the appeal of it is as a meme.

I hate it not because of the dubious ideas that might be lurking behind it but because it's just complete bullshit make it up as you go along filler for crap articles like that.

Don't get the obsession with having some sort of theory to account for all new trends in music.

Wonky as a style of music is surely not defined enough at this stage to start boxing it up w/ this drug or that drug shurely... I mean when its proponents are playing out it's almost always going to be on bills primarily dedicated to more established styles amirite

Wonky just seems to be a catch-all term for 'music we can't categorise elsewhere' afaik.

I think there's value in charting musical trends and scenes and i guess whatever drugs were popular or what might have influenced, it just needs to be done much later. that kind of thing doesn't lend itself to up-to-the-minute blogging.

I don't really agree with that, since any look at this in hindsight will only intensify the inaccurate, wishful thinking, wild conjecturing nature of these kind of observations.

haha

Presumably Reynolds actually went to raves back in the day, clearly he doesn't go out to clubs playing wonky now, but that doesn't make his contention about hardcore that "pills got speedy, this made the music darker and weirder" any less than just syllogism.

seems the prime source for that article was a year old thread on dissensus. Noone but crust punk injectors do k in berlin and the only dubstep fans that do it are smelly hoodied d&b refugees. This is even less informed than the sunday times style mag piece on dinner party k use nad thats saying something

wonky? donk? funky?

it seems like british people add one noise or rhythm to something and then give it a whole new name every week.

i can't keep up any more, guys

is "bass line" a style of music too?

(didn't read the article, but i generally like simon's writing btw)

I buy maybe an argument that certain drugs appeal more in certain places and times, and maybe coincide nicely with certain musical trends in those places. But this "X drug makes depressing sounding music because X makes you depressed," stuff is nonsense. People don't immediately start loving reggae the moment they smoke a joint. Let alone start writing it.

lolneurofunk.jpg

I am pretty sure I have never heard any wonky but it has been given attention so disproportionate to amount of actually existing music that it's bound to be hated by many before anyone ever hears any of it.

it's more like prelash these days, not backlash

I buy maybe an argument that certain drugs appeal more in certain places and times, and maybe coincide nicely with certain musical trends in those places. But this "X drug makes depressing sounding music because X makes you depressed," stuff is nonsense. People don't immediately start loving reggae the moment they smoke a joint. Let alone start writing it.

― Mordy, Thursday, 5 March 2009 16:12 (8 minutes ago)

i think the connection in some cases is a lot stronger than that, but i agree with this k piece it's way spurious. people on k are always going to be in the minority in any crowd (and that's a good ting)

lash-foward

i dont know, go on a night out in manchester and leeds and the place is literally dripping with the stuff

this has nothing to do with what hes on about though

wonky= post hyperdub dubstep/idm hiphop crossover

k is really popular now, definitely. no doubt on this, it's prob as popular as ecstasy amongst people in their go out every week all weekend phase.

well at least amongst my friends

wow i had no idea. can you dance much on it?

depends how much you do, theres quite a run in. once you do its a great way to kind of 'lose yourself' on the dancefloor ie trying to ignore the shoreditch funsters around you while prosumer is on

that 'tuck in' quote is almost too good to be true.

Later, of course, many of these young intellectuals would literally destroy their minds by trying to write about the then popular form of disco music known as "rave". Sadly, despite (or perhaps because of) their cleverness, they never grasped that there really is nothing clever to say about music that is designed to be twitched to by people who've taken a drug that makes them want to twitch to music that's been designed to be twitched to by people on that drug.

full article : here

swells having a dig at simon here i wonder ?

He said "young"

no way am i reading anything with that url

"leaving them unfit for anything except working as feature writers for Mojo and Word."

lawl

too wells; didn't read

I think Simon Reynolds may have written the world blurb I have ever read, from the back cover of Owen Hatherley's book on modernist housing estates:

With svelte prose, agile wit, and alarming erudition, Owen Hatherley pries open the prematurely closed case of early 20th Century modernism. This slim and shapely, ideas-packed and intensely-felt book is neither a misty-eyed memorial nor a dour inquest, but a verging-on-erotic mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. Rediscovering the enchantment of demystification and the sexiness of severity, Hatherley harks forward to modernism's utopian spirit: critical, radically democratic, dedicated to the conscious transformation of everyday life, determined to build a better world. --Simon Reynolds, Author of Rip It Up and Start Again - Postpunk 1978-84

"Alarming erudition"? "Verging-on-erotic mouth-to-mouth resuscitation"?

i'm so glad you typed up the full thing, i could only remember a couple of phrases here and there! it all makes me wonder whether he knows what any words actually mean

but yeah as i said at the time: only an idiot is ever alarmed by erudition. use another word!

I actually really want to read this book but that's by the bye.

One of the ways ILX has ruined me is that I will always associate the word "svelte" with Jordan Sargent.

ha, why? it's a good word to be associated with, as words go.

"Verging-on-erotic mouth-to-mouth resuscitation" - I actually think this is quite a funny image, but it does make Owen H sound like a borderline necro.

xp: Because he described Lil Wayne as such when he was new and ended up on the recieving end of one of the greatest zings in ILX history.

dylannn wrote this on thread MTV News' "Top 10 Hottest MCs in the Game" on board I Love Music on Aug 1, 2007

dudes with gay porn names talkin about lil wayne being "svelte" on a fucking mixtape track are schooling me on the genius of bun b.

the book does sound kind of interesting

i wonder if he was thinking of that one silver jews song

why because it look intersting

"the prematurely closed case of early 20th Century modernism."

riiiiight. suffering from real neglect, that 20th-century modernism.

when he says "prematurely closed case" he doesn't mean suffering from neglect but that everyone's already made up their mind on what 20th century modernism means, what it was for, and how we're going to treat it in the future.

Oddly enough the book is hampered by its aesthetics - it looks so cheaply made, the photographs are horribly rendered, and it has that terrible The Wire habit of capitalising things that don't need capitalising, which is so disruptive to the eye. You do not get the sense that anyone other than Hatherley took the time to proof-read or sub-edit it, which is really weird given how interesting it is and how much a labour of love the whole Zero enterprise seems to be. Also I'd really appreciate an index, which is another thing that I know takes time and effort and galley proofs (i have done one, it was an utter pain) but, um, I really want to know if Hatherley talks about the failures of Fourierist socialism to deal with Fourier's attitudes to sex because I totally think they would be a relevant precedent in chapter three, "revolutionary orgasm problems", and I feel an index would help w/ this given the density of the man's prose.

i mean, here is a funny thing: there is a certain crapness about Zero books which I guess is a sort of ideological shorthand - "this is shoddily made because it stems from the purest motives, you can tell it stems from the purest motives because it's shoddily made". Like fanzines and anarchist pamphlets having to be cut-and-paste even long after the widespread adoption of the laser printer. Unfortunately this is exactly the worst kind of book for this reverse-aesthetic nonsense - or maybe the best! - because it makes you think about, e.g., the "shoddy, prole-stacking Ronan Point tower block" (p12!) and a whole history of people blaming the failure of an idea on the idea itself, rather than looking to the half-hearted execution of that idea.

You'll be pleased to know that "brutalist continuum" is a Googlewhack.