week 41
– Went to a great space called CFC to hear the first all-skwee set of my life, care of the Ancient Robot crew. Was interesting. Also heard a group called Master Choice play, who will be great if they can figure out that dance music doesn’t need every track to have a long, slow, tear-down outro.
– The Ninja Tune guys have outdone themselves with Beat Delete. Is this the future of vinyl? I really do suspect so.
– The Harlem Shake. I’ve seen some people talking about the ‘obscuring of culture’ around the original Harlem Shake vs. the Baauer-based meme. These are true and good comments. I feel the need to add that this has always happened with dance music, with music, and with culture in general – and it has especially happened with marginalized cultures: black, gay, latino, any sort of underground, etc. In terms of my entrance to dance music, trance came from high energy which came from disco…and if you had told any of the trance bunnies of the late 90s that they were actually dancing to music from the 70s, they would have looked at you like you were insane.
To tangent a bit, A gent named Alan Kay, who invented a very important programming language called Smalltalk made the comment that “pop culture holds a disdain for history”. This is deeply important in dance music. I don’t know if this requisite disdain for history has to go hat in hand with cultural appropriation, but they certainly reinforce one another.