Struck me that there is a distinction between people who are into dance music meaning music that is designed primarily for dancing to, and people who dance to the music they like
So for instance, take the historical (possibly ongoing, I wouldn't know) phenomenon of the student indie-disco - this is a case of people who, while professing no interest or indeed rather often absolute antagonism to "dance music", can be found dancing exuberantly to the music they like
In fact most forms of popular music have a dance aspect
Possibly all forms of popular music, in potential (given that the ballad once upon a time would be considered a slowie, for that point in the night when the couples do up-close body to body dancing)
Even metal and hard aggro rock has a dance element, if you count headbanging and moshing as dancing, which I think you should. (Air guitar and air drums etc are also forms of dancing, in a way).
But equally your dance music fanatics who think only the functionalist, purpose-built stuff is proper dance music, you can say, "yes, but look at all these people moving their bodies in patterned ways to music with a beat. You don't own this concept or this practice".
At one point, the concept of 'dance music' as a separate domain from the rest of pop/rock didn't exist, all bands were dance bands - the Beatles, the Stones etc.
Then things got more 'head'-y with pyschedelia, prog etc.
But even then, if you look at the crowd footage of e.g. a Grateful Dead show, the audience is dancing. Indeed there's a distinctive Deadhead dance which no doubt would have appalled contemporaneous fans of Northern Soul or jazz-funk (as would the Deadhead clothing). But it's dancing.
Conversely, I'm sure for some fans of "dance music proper", their enjoyment is bodily inert - largely a cerebral and immobile practice.
Garcia (who always maintained that the Dead were 'a dance band' first and foremost) had an interesting note about how arbitrarily these genres are labeled - when asked in an later-in-life interview how he defined 'psychedelic' music, he said he had no idea - "All music is psychedelic. Country and western music is psychedelic. The blues is psychedelic. Everything is psychedelic. All music." Which, if you take 'psychedelic' to mean 'causing a trance-like state leading to a greater sense of awareness', is self-evident.
ReplyDeleteComing back to note - I've been thinking about the desire to group as much music as possible under one banner recently, in light of the total exhaustion of the rockism/popism divide (the most recent manifestation I've seen, a Guardian response by (I think) Snapes over some chump's ancient 'what are rappers doing at Glasto' nonsense, seemed like an anachronism on both sides), and it seems to me that there's always internal motives that are at cross purposes with these attempts.
ReplyDeleteJust like 'rock' itself was initially an attempt to gather all the various strands happening in the late 60s/early 70s into one catch-all, only to gradually harden into its own kind of exclusionary prison of genre, so too does poptimism of the 00s/10s now seem like an unintentional alliance between those with progressive intent (making room for the non-white, non-male, and non-guitar-centered) and those with conservative intent (to stop moaning about 'authenticity' and 'selling out' and enable full-throated embrace of the market) - goals that seemed complimentary until they suddenly weren't.
Kelefah Sannah is a great example of this, because he's the person arguably most responsible for popularizing these terms, and yet in recent years has came out as far more on the conservative side of the equation (and I fear, was only condescendingly assumed to be progressive by well-meant whites on account of his race): 'But it’s funny, when the arguments against rockism arise in the early 1980s British music press, they’re almost nihilistic. They’re like, “This stuff is ridiculous, nothing matters, let’s get some money, make a big hit. Who gives a fuck about everything else?” The version of so-called poptimism that arose in the U.S. in the late 2000s and 2010s is different; it’s idealistic. It’s like, “Old rock & roll values are bad, we’re gonna embrace good values, and enshrine something worthy of respect,” rather than saying, “This idea of respectable music is ridiculous.”' (From: https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-features/kelefa-sanneh-interview-major-labels-book-1235176/)
A way you could picture the hidden divide is in Beach Boys terms: between those who correctly intuit that Wilson's music has little or nothing to do with 'rock' as it is commonly thought of, but feel that shouldn't prevent him from being appreciated; and those who consider Mike Love to be the REAL misunderstood genius of the band, which is a viewpoint I've come across more often than you think, and seemingly always among political right-libertarians.
There's a big contrarian streak to Sanneh's recent writing: praising mainstream country over Americana and saying he's OK with the genre as essentially white, exploring the butt rock scene for the New Yorker. This was always a part of 2010s poptimism, but you get the sense that a lot of writers were fighting old men in their heads who sounded like Greil Marcus and Robert Christgau. I don't think actual teenage girls who were listening to "Call Me Maybe," One Direction and Katy Perry cared nearly as much what their dads thought.
ReplyDeleteThis characterisation of anti-rockism in the UK postpunk / new pop context is way off:
ReplyDelete"But it’s funny, when the arguments against rockism arise in the early 1980s British music press, they’re almost nihilistic. They’re like, “This stuff is ridiculous, nothing matters, let’s get some money, make a big hit. Who gives a fuck about everything else?”
it was much more idealistic but also much more playful - about throwing off the shackles of rock hang-ups about substance and relevance, a certain view of music that saw value only in Clash / Jam / Costello etc, or, in black music, Bob Marley / Marvin Gaye's 'What's Going on' / political soul. Freeing up yourself to enjoy things that might be lyrically inane but all about pure pleasure and groove, or surface flash. With some Oscar Wildean perversity / Andy Warholism thrown in - the provocation of asserting, as did Morley, that a 12 inch by a plastic pop group (Tight Fit, you wouldn't know who they were if aren't British and a certain age) was better than Led Zeppelin III. Celebrating Dollar over Killing Joke or the UK Subs.
It was not some kind of "anything goes now, it's okay to sell out" type cynicism. But it was intended to free you up to enjoy manufactured pop things that might be mercenary and cynical in their motivations. You didn't have to worry about integrity or worth or content.
I feel like Sanneh is - or was at that point - politically conservative. I feel like he wrote a piece about that somewhere - and what was it like being Black and people always assuming you voted for the Democrats. But I might be imagining that.
ReplyDeleteI don't understand the whole line of "functionl dance music"/dj tools. If it's functional then why bother more than functional lightworks or drinks or toilet?
ReplyDeleteAn idiot like me, can love loopy tracks they are not like either pop or serious/classical music.
Of course, I love pop music and classical music because it's not like loopy stuffy for idiots.
If he's stated an explicit party affiliation, I missed it, but one of his recent New Yorker pieces was an attempted rehabilitation of a 'cancelled' minor club comedian accused of sexual harassment that placed a fair bit of blame on 'wokeism' et al, so he's at least gotten substantially more comfortable with displaying where his sympathies lie. And I agree that his analysis of 80s UK popism reveals more about his mindset than anything else.
ReplyDeleteGoing back to that quote about “This stuff is ridiculous, nothing matters, let’s get some money, make a big hit. Who gives a fuck about everything else?”… It may not be accurate as a description of what the critics were thinking, but it does seem to fit some of the artists.
ReplyDeleteI just watched the Wham documentary on Netflix, which has a long clip of George Michael explicitly repudiating the “socially conscious funk” tag they were given after Young Guns (Go For It), and explaining that he was aiming squarely for the mainstream.
Phil Oakey, Adam Ant and others who began their careers as cult heroes have talked about their carefully strategised moves to start having pop hits. The Pet Shop Boys’ Opportunities (Let’s Make Lots of Money) is part-satire, part-celebration, part-example of this pattern.
That may indeed be what Sanneh is thinking of - there's always been a gap between critics like Morley who earnestly believe all that stuff about subverting the mainstream from within and the actual musicians who are specifically aiming there, who are perfectly willing to indulge them up until it's time to put money to mouth, whereupon they inevitably leave them in the dust.
ReplyDeleteIn a 35th-anniversery article about Kings Of The Wild Frontier, Marco Pirroni of the Ants had a brace of amazing quotes that line up incredibly closely to Sanneh's: https://www.theguardian.com/music/2016/may/26/adam-and-the-ants-heroic-sexy-warrior-bravado-kings-wild-frontier
'“I hated post-punk, even though I was in a post-punk band. Actually, I hated the band I was in,” says Pirroni. “And I hated Adam and the Ants, Dirk Wears White Sox, all that bollocks. Scritti Politti, gigs at the Acklam Hall, I hated it all. [It was] not as good as it thought it was, not as clever as it thought it was … banging on about credibility, going on Top of the Pops and acting like you’re embarrassed to be there. If you’re going to be a band, do it properly – you go on Top of the Pops, sell records, make a lot of money, have big cars. Don’t fuck about acting like you’re embarrassed.”'
...
'They signed a publishing deal, which led to a contract with CBS Records – although, Pirroni claims, not without a struggle. “It was so hard to explain to A&R men who wanted to toe the NME line. You’d go: ‘Look, you know pop groups, you must have seen this – pop groups have gold discs, they have money, they have the best clothes, they have model girlfriends, big cars, it’s that.’ ‘No, not getting it.’ ‘Oh, for fuck’s sake …’ It was absolutely going against everything that was happening at the time, which was what appealed to me.”'
...
'“I literally used to rack my brains to think of stuff that the NME would hate,” laughs [Pirroni]. “Panto. They’ll hate panto. We should make it more panto!”'
Great quotes!
ReplyDeleteI think those Pirroni quotes are post-rationalisation. I mean, if he hated Rema Rema while he was in Rema Rema, he's a idiot - they made a great EP on 4AD. He's more or less claiming that he was a weak-willed person who went along with with fashion, and secretly all he ever really wanted to be was Jimmy Page. But they was plenty of scope at that time to be a Jimmy Page type - he could have gone into heavy metal. He could have formed a group like Def Leppard.
ReplyDeleteActually, if he wanted to be a rock star guitar hero, he'd have done much better to stick with Rema Rema and then gone along with the general Goth drift towards the Return of Rock. Then he could have been in a band like The Cult. The Panto version of Adam and the Ants didn't have much scope for guitar heroics. It stopped being a band, it became Adam Ant plus minions.
Also he's confused because Adam and the Ants got way more attention and acclaim from NME during Kings of Wild Frontier / Prince Charming Panto phase than earlier (when they were considered flimsy art-punk poseurs). NME's New Pop push was the framing for the shifts made by groups like Adam, ABC etc.