tmidgett wrote:What is "dubstep?"

Does it have defining characteristics?

It's a largely instrumental variant on British two-step garage (pronounced 'gah-ridge') that infuses, as the name would suggest significant elements of dub reggae (the heavy bass and 'atmospherics', for want of a better word). It's the tamer relative of grime music, it's most recent forebearer.

simmo wrote:The only coherent point at which one could say that the music has been created is when the creator is done with it

I'm talking about the naissance of sound. The electronic artist seems rarely to be present at this point and almost never directly responsible for the sound.

A rock band's transition from silence to sound requires their presence. The electronic musician is dealing with sound that already exists. The electronic musician retrospectively manages/compiles sounds that would largely exist whether or not the electronic artist existed.

Part of the rock musician's art is to create sound where there was none, this doesn't appear to be a significant part of what it is to be an electronic musician.

I think that's a pretty fundamental difference in terms of what rock and electronic music is, relatively speaking.

Rimbaud III wrote:

tmidgett wrote:What is "dubstep?"

Does it have defining characteristics?

It's a largely instrumental variant on British two-step garage (pronounced 'gah-ridge') that infuses, as the name would suggest significant elements of dub reggae (the heavy bass and 'atmospherics', for want of a better word). It's the tamer relative of grime music, it's most recent forebearer.

OK, thanks.

Another question--I don't know much about modern electronic music, so bear with me:

Who puts the names on the genres/subgenres? Do the artists bother to do it, or is all that pasted on by critics after the fact?

same as any genre of music i guess. press bullshit. in electronica is more self-conscius from the artists.

Alberto the Frog wrote:

simmo wrote:The only coherent point at which one could say that the music has been created is when the creator is done with it

I'm talking about the naissance of sound. The electronic artist seems rarely to be present at this point and almost never directly responsible for the sound.

A rock band's transition from silence to sound requires their presence. The electronic musician is dealing with sound that already exists. The electronic musician retrospectively manages/compiles sounds that would largely exist whether or not the electronic artist existed.

But what is that sound until it's hammered in to shape?

tmidgett wrote:Who puts the names on the genres/subgenres? Do the artists bother to do it, or is all that pasted on by critics after the fact?

How long is a piece of chicken and egg?

Case study: New Rave

Rimbaud III wrote:

tmidgett wrote:Who puts the names on the genres/subgenres? Do the artists bother to do it, or is all that pasted on by critics after the fact?

How long is a piece of chicken and egg?

Case study: New Rave

Right. So it's same as rock music. Someone comes up with something funny to call their stuff, and some writer w/no sense of humor who needs an angle quotes them as gospel.

Next thing you know, there's grunge and math rock and dubstep and so on and so forth.

So, those of you who are dismissive of this music: do you think it is:

Corrupt?

Incomplete?

Dishonest?

Uncreative?

Again, genuinely curious.

tmidgett wrote:Right. So it's same as rock music. Someone comes up with something funny to call their stuff, and some writer w/no sense of humor who needs an angle quotes them as gospel.

Funny how? Funny like a clown?

A guy in Mudvayne being interviewed wrote:You probably didn't know this, but they talk about other bands now as being math metal. I named that; I was the first person that ever said that. They were interviewing us a couple of years ago, like, “How would you describe your music?” I was like, "Um, we're fuckin' math metal. Bring your abacus!" Now they use that, and I'm like, I coined that fuckin' phrase! It's awesome.

Thanks, Clarabelle.

Okay, sorry. Carry on.

P.S.

Hey, that grimestep or dubhard or goa-rage or whatever it was by the Burials was pretty good I thought.

-r

I certainly don’t agree with the notion that in order for music to be any good it has to be resistant to the uses to which Real World producers and ad executives want to put it. How many times have you heard Mozart in a car commercial or Beethoven in a crappy film? That’s a very old-school, modernist idea that in order for art to be any good it has to confuse and repel 99.5% of the population, and I don’t buy it. The fact that a song enhances the allure of a product is not the song’s fault—although constant TV and radio play can no doubt transform anything from novel and pleasing into where’s my razor blade.

I also don’t think it’s necessary to reach for the most esoteric or challenging instance of a genre in order to argue its legitimacy. That’s like hauling Melt-Banana before the judge in order to justify rock and roll. I’m actually somewhat indifferent to non-dance, non-club electronica, so I’m gonna try to make the case with my favorite group of 2007, Justice.

Justice is a French electronic duo that has created some astonishingly complex yet infinitely appealing compositions that you can fucking dance to. They have an exhaustive knowledge of funk, house, synth soundtrack music, r’n’b, rap, 90s and 2000s electro, and a fondness for Metallica, all of which they put to use in creating coherent music that shrugs off many techno orthodoxies and that rocks. And their debute album, Cross, took a long-ass time to make. I’m not sure how helpful this will be if you don’t know some French, but it might give you a sense of the thinking that goes into the music:

http://youtube.com/watch?v=wFrAp-EKUQ4

I do think there is something to be said about the caliber of a group being reflected in the audience it attracts and excitement and devotion it initially inspires. I used what meager disposable income I had from my internship stipend to fly from Albuquerque to Seattle to see Justice in October, and spent the evening dancing next to a fellow who had flown in from Alaska. Mackro was at that show, and his description of the event is great:

Mackro wrote:Yes, I saw that show at Neumo's. Having seen Daft Punk just months before, the stage thing didn't really excite me as much. (Big white flashing cross, ooh) however the crowd energy was really really great. It's the most energetic crowd I've ever been in where no one was a douchebag -- at all! and no PLUR either. It was kinda dancing, kinda shoving, like an air popper of pop corn in slow motion. It was just this hunger for volume, whatever whoever made it.

[fuck, I keep missing typos]

I think I come from a different perspective from you guys in terms of what constitutes a "valid aesthetic".

For me, art as such has no cultural value. It's not "useful". Its ties with offensive genre signifiers don't signify anything to me. So I have to say that I consider all of this talk about whether dubstep is or is not made in "bad faith," or about how it may or may not be made by means of an acceptable production technique to be peripheral at best and uninteresting at worse.

Art is pure form as well as pure substance. There should be no distinction between the two, and no defending of music as respectable and valid in terms of its production and dissemination will suffice when the attack on the music in question has been aimed at its formal inadequacies. Since I consider the best art to appeal more to one's intuition than one's conceptual analysis, I tend to think this way about it.

So, although I admit that my statement that it "takes no talent" to make this sort of music was a bit flippant, that's not what I base my dislike of Burial's music upon. I base that on the fact that his music blows donkey dicks from here to Rappahannock. It's just not good. Hence, it's of no value whether or not it's culturally interesting or "good for us" or ostensibly made with a great deal of care and earnestness.

Whether or not classical musicians disrespect rock music can make no difference, because our appreciation of rock has nothing to do with the amount of music theory possessed by rock musicians, or the amount of practice they've put into their instruments, or whether or not rock is just an excuse for people to go to smoky clubs and procure some poontang. No. All the chips fall on the question, "Is it good or not? Better than this? Weaker than that? Why?" This view of art goes back to the Greeks, who staged dramas together in day-long festivals and ensured that only the best of them would survive and make it to the canon. This is a process they called agon, or a struggle of aesthetic value and power.

I do think that today's climate of media saturation has instilled in us a habit of talking about everything peripheral to the music (clothes, fanbase, biography of the musician, past influences, etc.) rather than dealing with the music itself. I don't think these discussions are altogether uninteresting. But their relevance isn't from a properly critical perspective -- it's a result of mere curiosity or the need to fill up webspace/magazine columns.

Burial's music fails because it's nothing more than wispy strands of shit and nothingness.