More Genre Bashing
I love it when people wreck genre walls. It doesn’t even matter which genre they’re wrecking, just so long as everything I “know and love” about it is crushed into an ambiguous pulp and rearranged to look like something straight out of Frank Lloyd Wright’s worst nightmare. I’m talking bulldozer and wrecking ball status. That’s what really makes music appealing. You thought you liked genre’s for what they are. You thought you fell in love with disco because you loved those relentless, won’t-stop-for-nothing beats. You were wrong.
It’s not what music is that makes it good. It’s what it isn’t. Justice blew up in 2006, and if you ask anyone, they’ll tell you it was because their sound was heavy and distorted whilst also maintaining a disco type groove, however, this is more an explanation of their approach to the solution, rather than the solution itself. Justice made it big because of what they weren’t. Sure, they were dance music, but they most certainly were not cheezy house music. They used the same synths everyone else was using, but they weren’t making bad techno remixes of 90’s movie theme songs. And sure, they were all kinds of heavy, but they didn’t bother with the cliche guitars, flesh eating monster tattoos, and neck beards. Justice was a piece of everything we’d already heard, and yet these guys were brand, freaking new, because they broke all the rules of music, and ended up spewing out a couple tunes that sounded like nothing anyone had ever heard before, and (FACT) that’s what makes good music.
Take a look at the evidence: Justice’s debut prompted a slew of impressionists to attempt to make their millions doing exactly what Justice had already done, but instead of being respected for make music that sounded almost exactly the same, these guys were despised and have long since been forgotten. In fact, each subsequent act earned just a little bit less respect than the one before it did, despite the fact that they were making the same stuff.
What’s my point? How about this: It’s not what you put in your music that makes it good. It’s what everyone else doesn’t.
Check these couple of tracks. Not only is San Fransico’s Eskmo making some of the most well produced beats I’ve ever heard, but he’s also doing to dubstep what Justice did to disco. Who would have thought dubstep could work in 3/4 time?
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And then there’s Nosaj Thing, who’s somehow taken flying Lotus’s approach to tempo and beats, and made it just as friendly to IDM fans as it is to dubstep fans. How? Only an mp3 can tell.
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Jogger – Nice Tights (Nosaj Thing Remix)
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Tags: eskmo, Justice, nosaj thing
