i never wanted to but more and more it looks like i'm going to have to ... i mean i really thought dance music was a plur utopia compared to, say, hip hop rock country or metal ... shows how dumb i was
― the late great, Saturday, 12 September 2020 17:09 (three years ago) link
DJ Mag talks to many of the women:
https://djmag.com/longreads/multiple-women-report-sexual-assault-and-harassment-derrick-may
― Alba, Thursday, 12 November 2020 16:02 (three years ago) link
just absolutely fucking awful
― mellon collie and the infinite bradness (BradNelson), Thursday, 12 November 2020 18:18 (three years ago) link
Sickening.
― stirmonster, Friday, 13 November 2020 12:10 (three years ago) link
A further story, more accounts:
https://ra.co/features/3828
― Ned Raggett, Friday, 29 January 2021 22:10 (three years ago) link
the difference between detroit and those other cities is that there are semi-interesting things happening there. it is a near vacuum out here. There are poor people everywhere, but those cities have actual functioning urban environments. You know, like people walking around downtown after 5pm. Detroit is screwed up even in the nice places, if you want to see what happens when regional planning makes every decision incorrectly for 60 years, it will look a lot like southeastern michigan.
Yeh, but May wouldn't be able to spend 10 minutes in a London jungle club without crying like a baby fearing that the unemployed crackheads were out to shoot him. That's what you Yanks don't get about UK, you wanted to disavow hip hop for not being elegant enuf, whereas we had no pretensions otherwise. Of course 91 hardcore made rave awful! That what makes it so good, give the posh blokes an aneurism. It got even better in 93 when people started to get mugged. It's the truth. Jeff Mills was total rudeboy, he is miles above May because he started out in hip hop. You can tell it in his mixing. There's also more of a futuristic latin vibe in Mills, much more how samba actually sounds in Brazil at that speed.
― RobbiePires, Tuesday, 29 June 2021 06:53 (two years ago) link
great revive
― bobo honkin' slobo babe (sic), Tuesday, 29 June 2021 06:58 (two years ago) link
xtra xtra xtra spiced funky, m8! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=az3VJj88OAM
and
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7OZyBuweob8
Kraftwerk were tbf the original sin of techno, too feudalistic and romantic, too indebted to petit-bourgeois psychosexual fascination with mastering machines. Techno got really good when the dead labour living in the machines dominated man. What was needed was a psychotic soul, derived from electro.
― RobbiePires, Tuesday, 29 June 2021 07:45 (two years ago) link
hey thirdform.
― ennui soundsystem (doobydoo), Tuesday, 29 June 2021 07:55 (two years ago) link
Kraftwerk were feudalistic AND petit bourgeois? Does that mean they were European AND white? My lack of awareness just shows how much I’ve been assimilated, probably. This bit tho:
It got even better in 93 when people started to get mugged.
― recovering internet addict/shitposter (viborg), Tuesday, 29 June 2021 08:35 (two years ago) link
I was just listening to I think Fabio & Grooverider’s first Kiss FM show from ‘91, it’s a bit shit. I can certainly see how ‘93 would be an improvement.
― recovering internet addict/shitposter (viborg), Tuesday, 29 June 2021 08:37 (two years ago) link
nah, you want Top Buzz nye 1991-1992. Leo Anibaldi bassbar!
― RobbiePires, Tuesday, 29 June 2021 08:45 (two years ago) link
*furiously Googling*
― recovering internet addict/shitposter (viborg), Tuesday, 29 June 2021 08:46 (two years ago) link
Shit I accidentally bolded
Kraftwerk were feudalistic AND petit bourgeois? Does that mean they were European AND white? My lack of awareness just shows how much I’ve been assimilated, probably.
No, just romantics for a bygone society. D.A.F were the true blood, muscle and sinew of German proletarian music at the time. No real classical melodic content, just bluesy synth sequences set to punish yer body industrial beats. The factory is sex. Screw that hippy space nonsense. Get raw.
― RobbiePires, Tuesday, 29 June 2021 08:49 (two years ago) link
Hoping for someone to recommend me private press Mongolian cumbia meets throat singing meets speedcore noise lps on here. Other place is getting a bit too grandad. Told Lucius to defend the lads before the Germany game but alas.
― RobbiePires, Tuesday, 29 June 2021 08:57 (two years ago) link
*furiously Googling*― recovering internet addict/shitposter (viborg), Tuesday, 29 June 2021 09:46 (one hour ago)
check this one as well from '91
proper guttertronix https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DooDLH23w-Y
― RobbiePires, Tuesday, 29 June 2021 10:00 (two years ago) link
I like how the Derrick May thread now becomes a dumping ground for all that hardcore stuff he so deeply despises.
― Siegbran, Tuesday, 29 June 2021 10:29 (two years ago) link
Well, since you asked so nicely:https://www.mixcloud.com/y7nlwz/dj-dsl-energy-fm-879-1st-april-1995/
― RobbiePires, Tuesday, 29 June 2021 11:14 (two years ago) link
That's what you Yanks don't get about UK, you wanted to disavow hip hop for not being elegant enuf, whereas we had no pretensions otherwise.
literally what the fuck are you talking about with this bullshit?
― Blues Guitar Solo Heatmap (Free Download) (upper mississippi sh@kedown), Tuesday, 29 June 2021 13:17 (two years ago) link
lmao
― Linda and Jodie Rocco (map), Tuesday, 29 June 2021 14:45 (two years ago) link
so sad that the US disavowed hip hop. will we never understand this strange and exotic music the way the UK does?
― Mr. Cacciatore (Moodles), Tuesday, 29 June 2021 14:55 (two years ago) link
lool some steaming hot-takes
― calzino, Tuesday, 29 June 2021 15:24 (two years ago) link
is this Leeroy Thornhill
― an eco-conscious Music Box (DJP), Tuesday, 29 June 2021 15:28 (two years ago) link
I'm guessing he means UK hiphop, but it's a puzzler.
― Alba, Tuesday, 29 June 2021 15:37 (two years ago) link
literally what the fuck are you talking about with this bullshit?― Blues Guitar Solo Heatmap (Free Download) (upper mississippi sh@kedown), Tuesday, 29 June 2021 14:17
It's not bullshit. There's no hip hop in Derrick May's vision of detroit techno. May was a complete europhile (probably the most europhilic out of that bunch.) So when people like Michael Taylor called hardcore awful, it makes sense why. I mean it was $25 to get into the music institute, hardly cheap in peak reagan era was it? May has marketted himself well, which is why people are shocked by him being an absolute piece of nasty work, because detroit techno is not a righteous music at all, not until UR and Mills come about. And Rob Hood was a big Public Enemy fan and Mills started out in hip hop. It's why they had a greater taste for hardcore and minimalist sounds.
― RobbiePires, Tuesday, 29 June 2021 17:13 (two years ago) link
Not really clear though how Derrick May is representative of US attitudes toward hip hop.
(also debatable that there's no hip hop influence in his music or DJing)
(also weird for views on techno and hip hop to stop somewhere in the early 90s)
― Mr. Cacciatore (Moodles), Tuesday, 29 June 2021 17:18 (two years ago) link
also weird because Mills was a popular DJ in Detroit before May even started
― Mr. Cacciatore (Moodles), Tuesday, 29 June 2021 17:20 (two years ago) link
He isn't. That would disqualify a lot of aux 88, Drexciya, detroit electro and ghettotech orientated djs like DJ Assault (who incidentally has played chipmunk hardcore and jungle.)
But the US (and tbf UK Mayday purists) almost see dance music as being opposite to hip hop. In the UK hip hop merged into dance music. Quite a bit of hardcore actually has a britcore chassy which at the time was called hardcore cos it was faster than US HH.
And behave yourselves: there is no such thing as UK HH, it's a post-93 invension, angsty whiteboy rubbish.
yes, Mills was a hip hop orientated radio DJ. That's my point!
― RobbiePires, Tuesday, 29 June 2021 17:26 (two years ago) link
so in other words, the UK didn't have much of a hip hop scene, so they ended up embracing dance music that drew influence from and embodied the spirit of hip hop, while in the US, which has a massive hip hop scene, people tended to just enjoy hip hop. I think this mystery has been solved.
― Mr. Cacciatore (Moodles), Tuesday, 29 June 2021 17:43 (two years ago) link
Yes, hip hop and acid house were part of the same imported street beats continuum. It's why we were all over Todd Terry sampladelic ny hip house, even if that stuff was unthinkably mechanical for the proper disco/paradise garage-descended bods.
But, for instance, James Stinson and Gerald Donald were far more inventive than May ever was, but they don't fit into the same kind of white mythologising, because their music is not as susceptible to mythmaking. Whilst I cringe at this guys personal journey he has a point about a lot of white detroit purists:
The sense was like ‘they’ had tried to tell you that techno was something white, something cheesy, something commercial. Something soulless. But here, so the counter-narrative would have it, was ‘high tech soul’, made by real, oppressed black people (dreaming of space from a post-industrial ghetto). It was, so the riddle ran, a music so unquestionably authentic that to present an opinion to the contrary would invoke an accusation of ignorance, or even heresy, followed by a lecture on the Belleville Three. For white kids from the Melbourne suburbs, this allowed them to be righteously proud of aligning themselves with a noble tradition, which, in turn, allowed them to make peace with the fact that they all grew up listening to…. Technotronic, Snap, and M People, of course. Is it any different to the quiet joy of the Vanilla Ice fan who discovers Ice T and Ice Cube? He who ended up in Wu Wear often began with Twelve Inches of Snow. Never, ever underestimate the power of guilty pleasures in shaping musical taste.
So many old bods love Pink Floyd, one of the most obnoxiously English posh boy public school bands of all time. And actually, a lot of italo disco is the cheesy eurodance of its day. Noone in London likes it, because the black electroboogie/rnb from America (which maydays high school prep parties swerved to an extent for europhilia) was just so much more ahead of plustwo - melody or crazy gang babys song. I like both of those records, but I don't call them 'progressive' they are cheesy as all hell!
― RobbiePires, Tuesday, 29 June 2021 21:06 (two years ago) link
oops here's the article I pulled that quote from. http://mnmlssg.blogspot.com/2008/06/detroit-myth-hating-myth-creating-part_19.html
― RobbiePires, Tuesday, 29 June 2021 21:08 (two years ago) link
But the US (and tbf UK Mayday purists) almost see dance music as being opposite to hip hop. In the UK hip hop merged into dance music.
I don't think this is remotely true at all! It ignores the existence of the ghetto house/juke/footwork continuum, ghettotech, electro in its various forms, Baltimore/Jersey/Philly club, Miami bass, NYC house going back as far as Todd Terry, LA beat scene/wonky stuff, ballroom/voguing beats, Detroit house, hip house, like 75% of Afro-American dance music ever made. Maybe true of whitewashed festy stuff and techno europhiles and some of the more purist house strains (the latter of which absolutely embraces other pre-electronic Black American musical forms), but so much US dance music has been intimately connected to hip-hop all along, just not necessarily the stuff that's been embraced the most by the yt dance establishment. And Moodles' point applies as well. If I go see any of my friends DJ, at least half the tracks they drop are going to have explicit hip-hop influences, if not just straight up dropping hip-hop tracks into their dance sets.
― Get Me Bodied (Extended Mix), Tuesday, 29 June 2021 21:15 (two years ago) link
James Stinson and Gerald Donald were far more inventive than May ever was, but they don't fit into the same kind of white mythologising
what?!?!?!
because their music is not as susceptible to mythmaking
WHAT?!?!?!
― lukas, Tuesday, 29 June 2021 21:16 (two years ago) link
Does Derrick May extensively play ghetto house or juke? Because I never heard him do so and ive listened to quite a lot of his sets. i saw DJ Rashad in London at around the same time I saw May, and I know which one I would go see again, if he were still alive.
― RobbiePires, Tuesday, 29 June 2021 21:22 (two years ago) link
Pink Floyd rules
― Blues Guitar Solo Heatmap (Free Download) (upper mississippi sh@kedown), Tuesday, 29 June 2021 21:22 (two years ago) link
I feel like this goes back to the argument we had on twitter a while back when you described east coast club as posh, middle class, student-y dance music, which is not how I as a Black American experience that music at all.
xp: not afaik, but it looked like you were painting US dance music in general with that brush, not just Derrick May
― Get Me Bodied (Extended Mix), Tuesday, 29 June 2021 21:23 (two years ago) link
But the US [...] almost see dance music as being opposite to hip hop.
― Get Me Bodied (Extended Mix), Tuesday, 29 June 2021 21:24 (two years ago) link
would absolutely see rashad over may
― Linda and Jodie Rocco (map), Tuesday, 29 June 2021 21:25 (two years ago) link
same, although seeing Carl Craig end a ight by dropping "Strings of Life" and playing air piano was an absolute moment of bliss
― Get Me Bodied (Extended Mix), Tuesday, 29 June 2021 21:27 (two years ago) link
night*
ohhhh fuck, I completely missed the assault accusation stuff :(
― Get Me Bodied (Extended Mix), Tuesday, 29 June 2021 21:30 (two years ago) link
Fair point. By dance music I meant more the house/techno mainstream. I have to remember that here house+techno in its more mainstream ittiration shies away from our more (hate the term) but 'urban' dance music forms.
I feel like this goes back to the argument we had on twitter a while back when you described east coast club as posh, middle class, student-y dance music, which is not how I as a Black American experience that music at all.xp: not afaik, but it looked like you were painting US dance music in general with that brush, not just Derrick May― Get Me Bodied (Extended Mix), Tuesday, 29 June 2021 22:23 (one minute ago)
tbf I wasn't referring so much to the actual jersey club stuff there but more this kind of Lotic/M.E.S.H/Mhysa (SP?) pan deconstructivism. I'd be the first to admit I know very little about jersey club, but its not my thing. Then again, this nicely segues into the point you made about experience. To me, Club was only presented through this university night slugs prism, by kids who would pretend to be so bad and heavy when they were anything but. And that is the charm of techno. This misinterpretation of italo disco, basically a music that predominantly has an afterlife outside of Italy and is not remembered as fondly over there.
― RobbiePires, Tuesday, 29 June 2021 21:34 (two years ago) link
A UK crowd at a Slimzee sidewinder set is totally different in every way to a UK crowd going to see Moodymann, Atkins or May. They just are, not even racially.
― RobbiePires, Tuesday, 29 June 2021 21:40 (two years ago) link
But then, conversely, people in UK crowd at a banging night seeing Surgeon and Jeff Mills are more likely to be into Wiley or Giggs. And most of them will probably be huge Remarc fans. That's how I got into techno, through jungle. so the fast banging stuff is not an aberration for me.
― RobbiePires, Tuesday, 29 June 2021 21:45 (two years ago) link
ftr I don't think all dance music has to be influenced by hip hop and not all electronic music I enjoy is so. But I can't see why May would else rail against breakbeat hardcore when it was no more cheesy than the Italo gash of his highschool days. In fact there is not much overtly evil darkside Italo is there? Whereas even in '91 there was quite a bit of dark breakbeat hardcore, Eon/Jay Saul Kane immediately come to mind.
― RobbiePires, Tuesday, 29 June 2021 22:05 (two years ago) link
tbf I wasn't referring so much to the actual jersey club stuff there but more this kind of Lotic/M.E.S.H/Mhysa (SP?) pan deconstructivism.
Yeah that's really an entirely different lane, which yes is more middle-class and studenty and intellectualized (and tbh really a bit past its peak), whereas actual club is just populist straight-up party music. The Baltimore stuff in particular is actually pretty deeply influenced by your beloved hardcore in its use of breakbeats to break away from a 4x4 house structure, which carries through to the Jersey and Philly stuff even if they drop the breakbeats a lot of the time. The deconstructed stuff is pretty explicitly a more middle class reinterpretation of more vernacular dance forms (club among others) though.
Try these on for size:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dP0UV5My4vA
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LsxaYtu-Klk
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tj70BvCC7JE
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zZiY8xb_lGk
― Get Me Bodied (Extended Mix), Tuesday, 29 June 2021 22:34 (two years ago) link
Sure, and that rings true here as well, but in our case "mainstream" mostly just means divorced from its cultural, if not necessarily musical, roots. I don't really care that much what white american dance music people who don't fuck with most of the shit I listed earlier are into or not.
― Get Me Bodied (Extended Mix), Tuesday, 29 June 2021 22:53 (two years ago) link
I guess my ultimate point is that May's europhilia and disinterest in if not outright rejection of hip-hop is ultimately much more exceptional among Black American dance music producers/DJs than not.
― Get Me Bodied (Extended Mix), Tuesday, 29 June 2021 22:57 (two years ago) link
i actually was at a gig that UNIIQU3 played at, i think it was a butterz night with Elijah and Skilliam, DJ Q etc. But I arrived at the end of her set cos my friends were being weird. Will give em a listen. Do you know this queen beat byrell the great? They did this quite cool vogue house mix, but it was very clattering, almost like 90s (hate the term) but 'tribal' rimshot vibes. This must have been 2014 or so, will need to check my hd.
Yeah Reynolds describes the archetypical house/techno head in the UK, upper working to lower middle class and quite discerning as a form of separation. As someone who is Asian i tend to see positives in both the ruffneck junglist warriors and the cool, composed shirts and shoes garage/rare groove types. If I was a white kid though I'd probably be more punk about this. Thank heavens thats not the case.
― RobbiePires, Tuesday, 29 June 2021 23:00 (two years ago) link