Excited to announce the publication of two books in translation!
On November 16th, Audimat publish Le choc du glam, the French version of Shock and Awe: Glam Rock and Its Legacy, translated by Hervé Loncan. More information here.
On November 19th, Minimum Fax publish Futuromania, a collection of my writing about electronic music (dance + non-dance), translated into Italian by Michele Piumini. More information here.
Here's a really cool thing that I've been meaning to do a post about for a while: The Quietus's new publishing arm, TQLC, has pulled together as a single volume every issue of the ravezine Freaky Dancing, which as the Happy Mondays-derived title suggests was the unofficial house organ of the Haçienda. You can get it here.
Created by Ste Pickford and Paul Gill, the zine consisted almost entirely of comic strips, cartoons, illustrations and visual-led spoofs 'n' satires.
Starting July 1989, the duo gave it away free to punters queuing outside the Haçienda on a Friday.
It ran for 12 issues.
The eleventh issue came out in August 1990, by which point the Haçienda scene was souring in a miasma of drug excess and paranoia, gangs and guns. Which brought the hostile attention of the authorities - such as "God's Cop" James Anderton, the chief constable of Greater Manchester - and ultimately led to the club's demise.
There was one final issue, in May 1994, when the Haçienda had a re-opening night, but that consisted of reprinted highlights from the original run of issues.
unfinished strip for abandoned Freaky Dancing revival issue, circa 1994
Freaky Dancing: The Complete Collection is a marvelous document of a cultural moment happening in real-time - hats off to The Quietus for putting it out and Ste & Paul for doing it in the first place.
Went to bed, after watching Leaving Neverland, feeling troubled...
Woke up uneasy, to find out that Keith Flint has died.
Every week there seems to be some new sickening blow (as if the actual news-news wasn't sufficiently distressing).
What a performer, an energy force.
As Andrew Harrison noted in New Statesman, "the best pop stars are cartoons – instantly recognisable, bright, bold and primary-coloured, and in their simplicity far larger and more thrilling than life."
Keith Flint's commitment to his 2D role gave it an electrifying conviction.
I always liked to compare the cross-over era Prodigy with The Sweet - pure excitement for its own sake, a perfectly wrought storm of hooks and hysteria.
That analogy doesn't quite work because Howlett and crew were an autonomous unit, rather than puppets - writing and producing their own material, fully in control of the hit factory.
But perhaps another punk-before-punk parallel does fit: Alice Cooper. A band that worked perfectly as pop-with-edge for teenagers, while grown-ups might enjoy them without being able to take it seriously. And yet, and yet... for all the vaudeville aspect, a band that in moments actually conjured - purely through sound and structured frenzy - a sense of apocalyptic drama and danger.
Another in that lineage would be Adam and the Ants.
Tuesday, July 31, 2018
Here's a playlist + commentary I did for 4:3 (Boiler Room's platform for underground film + video + docs) on the subject of anti-drug films and commercials. I particularly commend to your eyeballs + eardrums "Curious Alice", "The Maggot", and "Illusions", but the whole thing is worth a peruse, as indeed is the rest of the stuff up at the site.
Here are some extra drug-scare films that didn't make the cut.
Acen's "River Deep, Mountain High" * The second-best version: The best of the rest The best version again - i.e. the first video, the one at the top with the amazing female dancers - the "Monolythikmaniak Mix" - only this time without the annoying hiss and the abrupt too early cut-off
* in the earlier Blissblog post I nominate "Window in the Sky (Kingdom of Light Mix)" as the 300th best hardcore tune of all time (this being an unfinished, indeed barely started project - the #300 tune entry was the only installment of it, I'm ashamed to admit). Having already planned for "Trip to the Moon" to be #1 (ah, but which mix, which mix, eh?), and "Close Your Eyes" at #150, the circularity would place Acen Razvi at the centre of the Canon, its spine). At that point I'm not sure I'd heard the "Monolythikmaniak Mix" - or if I had, it hadn't really registered with me - but if I was to re-embark on that lunatic List, I'd be placing that mix high, much nearer the top. Which would mean that "Window in the Sky" appeared twice. (Not a unique occurrence, actually - three, possibly four, mixes of "Renegade Snares" would have to feature, obviously... and at least two of "Open Your Mind"). Somewhat unusually - given rave's general tendency towards the purely sonic, its downgrading of the visual component in pop's audiovisuality - this was a dance track whose glory was opened up for me by that promo video when I came across it a few years ago. (Who knew there were actually a fair number of rave promos made back in the day?) . Above all it was those astounding dancers.... the chaste frenzy of their movements transmitting and incarnating the sheer ambush of rave - its "something new under the sun" quality - just as forcefully as Acen's beats and vamps.
Here's an essay I did for Pitchfork about Burial's Untrue ten years on. It's also effectively a tribute to Mark Fisher, who is a recurring presence in the piece. It's intentional that Burial's real name is never once mentioned in the piece - honoring his original allegiance to rave's radical facelessness and anonymous collectivity.
Below is my favorite out of the post-Untrue Burial output - in some ways the missing chapter from that album.
There were two parallels and precursors for Burial's ghost-of-rave (as ghost-of-socialism) aesthetic that I couldn't get into as it would have been too much of a digression. The first: Mark Leckey's Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore, which I wrote about here.
And the second: "Weak Become Heroes" by The Streets. What Burial related through samples and moody
orchestrations, Mike Skinner conveyed with words, describing the flashback of
a former raver abruptly set adrift on blissed memories of love and unity on the dancefloor. “All
the commotion becomes floating emotions... They could settle wars with this... Imagine the world's leaders on pills... All
of Life's problems I just shake off.” Then he's snapped back to the dreary streets of a hostile and
hopeless 21st Century England: “gray concrete and deadbeats... no
surprises no treats... My life's been up and down since I walked from that
crowd.” “Weak,” in Skinner’s song, means not just personally
frail, but politically powerless. The weak became heroes when they became a
mass, uniting around the unwritten manifesto in the music: someday there’ll be
a better way, but in the meantime let’s shelter for a while in this dreamworld. What
the critic Richard Smith (like dear Mark also “late” now – so many ghosts these days) called
“the communism of the emotions” triggered by Ecstasy seemed to
prefigure a social movement. But the collective energy never
got beyond the level of a pre-political potential; the moment dissipated.
“I love those hardcore and rave tunes because they sound deep, hopeful, for the times, and the people... It’s unbelievable, that glow in the tunes, it almost breaks your heart.” - Burial, someplace, sometime
"The tunes I loved the most…old jungle, rave and hardcore, sounded hopeful.... All those lost producers…I love them, but it’s not a retro thing…When I listen to an old tune it doesn’t make me think ‘I’m looking back, listening to another era.’ Some of those tunes are sad because they sounded like the future back then and no one noticed. They still sound future to me." - Burial, someplace, sometime In a way, it's a shame Burial stopped doing the interviews - he was almost born to do them, even more than make music! He's better at describing his own music and motives than any of his critics, except K-punk himself. I remember Mark telling me after he'd done the interview that he couldn't believe his own ears - the stuff that Burial was coming out with was so poetic and evocative, too good to be true almost. A dream of an interview. Anwen Crawford told me of a similar experience: as I recall it, it was like she was hypnotized, sent into a trance by his voice over the phone. But at same time he was completely real and genuine - somehow down to earth and an ethereal being floating out there at the same time.... "I wanted the tunes to be anti-bullying tunes that could maybe help someone to believe in themselves, to not be afraid, and to not give up, and to know that someone out there cares and is looking out for them. So it's like an angel's spell to protect them against the unkind people, the dark times, and the self-doubts" - Burial on Rival Dealer EP / "Come Down With Us" ^^^^^^^^^^^^
Actually there's a third parallel/precursor - The Death of Rave by V/Vm, a/k/a The Caretaker - another of Mark's favorites of course...
At Resident Advisor, an extract from the new section added to Energy Flash: a visit to an EDM massive, differences between now and the Nineties, the rise of digital maximalism.
^^^^^^^^
At CBS.news, David Chiu's thirty-years-on piece on New Pop / July 1983 as peak of the Second British Invasion features quotes from me alongside Messrs Fry, Bailey, Taylor, et al, plus Ms Nina Blackwood. Check for a classic homophobic response in the comments. Heteronativist bigotry rages still!
Thursday, August 02, 2012
EDM in the USA -- Guardian piece by me on rave's better-late-than-never conquest of America, covering Electric Daisy Carnival, the irresistible rise of brostep, rocktronica god Skrillex etc
