Maligned Genres aka "I like everything except..."

yes, the only ever good one

Ok @ electro-swing. I just have never heard this. Sounds like something that could be played in a chain resraurant.

Also don't know what "Jump-Up Drum'n'Bass" is, like, how is it different from normal DnB?

Lol Doop ok - that's good

does anyone have examples of electro-swing that is good (besides Doop)? I like the idea in theory, but every example I've heard is so corny

this stuff doesn't swing at all and it's not electro so what are we doing here

I like disco era stuff that has a swing/jazz age influence, like Dr. Buzzard's Original Savannah Band or Tena's Song by Foxy, and there's new wave/synth stuff that has a similar vibe, and latin/samba stuff like Blue Rondo à la Turk or Matt Bianco is more self-consciously 'old-timey' dance music with a modern twist - it should be possible to do this so it sounds good?

oh i just had a realisation maybe this is the electro-swing equivalent of proto punk

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KNAYyUJ3tQA

We No Speak Americano also feels less objectionable than most. On Dan P's tip above I checked out Caravan Palace live, but I can't get past the immediate cringe. It feels like it starts from the cosplay and builds up from there.

if it was all like the donna summer track I'd love it

don't know the others mentioned but dr buzzards sound like they're actually bringing a deep love and understanding for the older music to then-modern sounds but (based on skipping around that youtube for a few mins) the old timey stuff there sounds like obnoxious window dressing and the beats are just nothing

Think it's also that Disco comes at Swing via camp, Broadway, a queer nightclub culture continuum that was still within living memory at the time. Electro swing producer's first memories of this stuff are probably the same as my own, i.e. old cartoons, and their music follows suit.

(nb the swing in old cartoons is awesome don't get me wrong)

so jealous of the people here who have managed to avoid Electro-Swing, though when i come to think of it I think I have only ever heard it in England, so could it be a peculiarly English abomination?

I was just in Berlin and passing through Dreiecks-Beete Fernsehturm there was a small charity fair sort of thing going on but with two dancers on a stage showing off gymnastic moves to some electroswing. The dancers were good at least!

Re: disco, there was a lot of 40s revivalism going on in fashion in the 1970s and the music of the time would come with it.

Yeah, "1970's doing 1940's" a whole movie subgenre too.

Electro swing producer's first memories of this stuff are probably the same as my own, i.e. old cartoons, and their music follows suit.

like Betty Boop/Max Fleischer stuff?

this bit on the Betty Boop wiki page was interesting in the distinction it draws between the flapper/jazz era and the swing era, electro-swing probably collapses all this into one thing I guess?

When the flapper/jazz era that Betty represented had been replaced by the big bands of the swing era, Fleischer Studios made an attempt to develop a replacement character in this style in the 1938 Betty Boop cartoon Betty Boop and Sally Swing, but it was not a success.

The last Betty Boop cartoons were released in 1939, and a few made attempts to bring Betty into the swing era. In her last appearance, Rhythm on the Reservation (1939), Betty drives an open convertible, labeled "Betty Boop's Swing Band", through a Native American reservation, where she introduces the people to swing music and creates a "Swinging Sioux Band".

there the 70s jazz age/20s/art deco revival as well with Redford/Farrow Great Gatsby film.

Xanadu feels more specifically 1940s, maybe?

the thing that elevates electro-swing from "dull music" to "abomination" is the way it erases the (obviously amazing and important) swing era and replaces it with this insipid middle class costume party bullshit, trampling over 20s jazz at the same time because they neither know nor care that it's not the same thing. I know that this process isn't by any means confined to this fairly obscure genre, but it's like, that's all there is to it! literally nothing else to see here!

Jump-Up, as I understand it, is the term for DnB that came out around the late 90s when it was more about lumpen kick-snare rhythms (as opposed to breaks or more complex rhythms), enormous builds and drops, pretty much the precursor to brostep.

Just been going through a Spotify Jump Up playlist, and the first track pretty much sums up what I'm thinking. It's kind of exciting for 2 minutes and then I just find it exhausting and annoying:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ANx0CIhtF6s

I love lots of that stuff, never heard it called "jump-up" before though.

Doop must have been the first electro-swing tune surely

i also loathe Doop which stole it's idea from Cajmere & Dajae -

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E4kcG-jeTCI

I actively enjoy the way our shared culture just sometimes gets these nigh-inexplicable fascinations that arise, spread, and suddenly vanish.

Feature, not bug imo.

Like tulipomania or that time in the 90s when Gregorian chants were a thing. Or that other time in the 90s when a very specific funhouse mirror vision of swing was briefly popular if - and only if - you had the word "Daddy" in your band name (Big Bad Voodoo Cherry Poppin etc.).

In about 1994 I was working for a magazine and someone wrote me a very earnest letter that began, "The problem with most vegan hardcore bands is..."

Until precisely that moment I hadn't known that vegan hardcore was a sufficiently established genre. So finding out that a human being could identify trends and systemic problems in it was also a surprise. My colleagues and I tried, but failed, to invent and popularize other diet-based music genres. Ovo-lacto disco, carnivorous reggae, macrobiotic punk.

xposts I do remember 'Jump Up' being used in the mid 90s too referring to (iirc) the particularly rushy Amen-heavy stuff

I'm particularly keen on it but Electro Swing is pretty harmless retro-fodder in my book. Same ballpark as Rockabilly revivalist music.

A few of these are holdovers from when a certain style was super popular with adolescents and absolutely inescapable - for example, Nu-metal and Happy Hardcore/Gabber were a punchline, but have been all but dead for nearly two decades now, it's like the "dead as Disco" joke, it was very specific to a certain point in time.

Opera, Death Metal, Free Jazz etc all have some inaccessibility to the sonic/complexity aspect of it. Psy-trance with all the sensory-overload of eastern-scale melodies probably has this problem too.

Hip-hop hatred always seems to work on a generation-specific subset - geriatric soul/disco fans hate all of it, oldschool heads from the 80s don't like anything G-Funk or later (hence, the backpacker stuff), the generation that grew up with Wu-Tang and Jay-Z still shits on autotune rappers, etc.

All from my POV obviously.

Edit: I'm not particularly keen on Electro Swing, etc.

does anyone have examples of electro-swing that is good (besides Doop)?

Mr. Scruff's Get a Move On is another arguable originator and that's very good.

I'm also partial to Dorothy's Blind Date-riffing What's That Tune? which we discussed in the TOTP thread a few months back.

get a move on is just a moondog sample, barely altered, from 1969 (plus a few other samples)

But Scruff recontextualizes it - a bit like how Sliced Tomatoes isn't northern soul in Fatboy's hands its surf rock.

just fyi i don’t think nu-metal is dead anymore

It also seems to have bounced back in popularity and critical evaluation in kind of a big way, as has grunge. I remember, especially the UK press, being extremely critical of a lot of grunge (especially post-grunge) at the time. Probably a saturation thing more than anything else - so many Nirvana and Pearl Jam soundalikes being signed up. As for nu-metal, plenty of people enjoyed the first Korn and Deftones albums, but by the late 90s it felt like everyone from Slayer to the Prodigy to Atari Teenage Riot had been all-but forced to incorporate traits of nu-metal into their sound

First time hearing of electro-swing, agreed that based in my limited exposure it’s lightweight fluff.

Dr. Buzzard’s was an early version of Kid Creole & the Coconuts I think? They’re very good.

Straight polka doesn’t do much for me but the Northern Mexico version of it is dope, and I don’t know if we get zydeco without polka? So it’s fine with me.

I actively hate Nu Metal, so it gets my vote.

has anyone invented a garish rockabilly-edm fusion yet?

Sigue Sigue Sputnik

Nothing wrong with Kid Creole and he has nothing to do with electro-swing. Electro-swing is house that prominently samples 1920s Charlston/big band music. Think "circus tent at the festival" vibes, circus hippie types from places like Brighton and Bristol, twirling canes, moustaches, burlesque, jazz hands. The type of people who think https://www.ilxor.com/ILX/ThreadSelectedControllerServlet?boardid=77&threadid=82861 is still hilarious....

opera

in general everything is long and repetitive -- made in a time where you would only hear a performance once. some of the least pleasant singing styles being considered the best.

there's a few verdi operas that i can stand.

Related is that kind of music that doesn't really have a name but is a kind of rap/ska thing played exclusively by middle-class UK music-school drop-outs and invariably feature a white guy with dreadlocks rapping about Grenfell, a dude in a leopard-print waistcoat playing the fiddle, a bookish lady who looks very out of place on saxophone, some chump on bongo drums, and a guy called Didge who plays (you guessed it) digeridoo. Usually they have someone doing human beatbox as well. And they have an obligatory "sea shanty" they do live too.

There are a surprisingly large amount of bands in the UK who do this and it is literally the worst thing in the world. Someone sent me something by these guys once and I nearly crashed my car while listening to it, I was so annoyed:

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

xp

suddenly feeling a bit wistful for electroclash, witch house and vaporwave reading this thread

what kind of music is this?

I have watched this twice and I simply can't believe it's real and that I haven't just been gassed by the Scarecrow's fear toxin pic.twitter.com/Qgn36xl6WC

— Ewan (@jelly_pack) August 7, 2019

bad music

WikiHow music

meltrock

Electroclash and Vaporwave both genres with plenty of good stuff in them. Witch House I never investigated much.

A capella covers is conspicuously missing here

oh i just had a realisation maybe this is the electro-swing equivalent of proto punk
― Hmmmmm (jamiesummerz), Wednesday, May 17, 2023 5:59 AM (three hours ago)

"I Remember Yesterday" is, no question, among my top 5 favorite Donna Summer records.

Witch House was over in a couple of years but it has had a lot of influence since, there really needs to be a retrospective.

A capella covers is conspicuously missing here

The modern a capella genre def horrible but otoh the Flying Pickets ruled.

landfill indie in a landfill landslide— everything else here has some merit, milquetoast bland rock music the most offensive

Dat, my family includes a bunch of opera fanbois and as a result I have had to go to way more operas than I could ever have wished to.

Generally I am cool with operas in Italian or French or German. When I don't understand the words I can procees it as music.

Opera in English usually hurts my ears because the words are just plain dumb.

One exception is Henry Purcell's "Dido" which for some reason completely slaps.

the thing that elevates electro-swing from "dull music" to "abomination" is the way it erases the (obviously amazing and important) swing era and replaces it with this insipid middle class costume party bullshit, trampling over 20s jazz at the same time because they neither know nor care that it's not the same thing. I know that this process isn't by any means confined to this fairly obscure genre, but it's like, that's all there is to it! literally nothing else to see here!

― the world is your octopus (Camaraderie at Arms Length)

Yeah, it's this. A large part of what makes electro-swing so horrendous is that it's so shallow and so incurious about the possibilities of music. It really is music for estate agents, as someone said upthread. The idea of using old styles in an electronic fashion is fine in itself, the resultant paste is hideously vile.

Honestly astounded that so many people here dislike opera.