Here’s a game I used to play in college when my friends and I were killing time before class. All it takes is a piece of paper, a writing utensil and some imagination.
Start with a topic everyone is familiar with (let’s do actresses). Now draw two intersecting axes and pick different adjectives that apply to that topic (say, acting ability and sex appeal). The finished product is a bastardized Cartesian plane that let’s you describe the topic using two different qualitative variables (is this getting too math-y yet?). Now here comes the fun part: start plotting points. You’ll get something like this:
Don’t agree with the graphic above? Of course you don’t. That’s the whole point of the game. Get prepared to spend hours arguing. Switch around the topic and adjectives until you run out of ideas. Some topics that have worked well for me include fast food restaurants, movies we’ve all seen—especially Disney movies—and (everyone’s favorite) the opposite sex. You can also try expanding this game into the third dimension (it gets very hard to draw) or even an arbitrary n-space (virtually impossible).
It’s fun to think about music this way, too. Imagine you’re trying to describe the sound of the Bloody Beetroots to a deaf person. What would you say? It’s hard to accurately describe music with words. And it’s impossible to do so using the method I explained above. Still, if I had to put the Italian duo’s sound on a made-up coordinate system, I think I’d draw something like this:
These guys perfectly straddle the line between music and noise. I don’t mean that as an insult or a compliment, just an observation on their style. Someone actually once said to me “Is your computer skipping, or is the song supposed to sound like that?”
Below is a song from their recently-released Christmas Vendetta EP. It’s a perfect case study. The first seventeen seconds are just distorted guitar whining noises. The song itself is heavy, screechy and repetitive. You can tell Bob Rifo grew up listening to a lot of hardcore punk music. I think it sounds fantastic, but I can totally see why someone else might think it sounds like a broken computer. Love it or hate it, I definitely wouldn’t recommend listening to it after a night of heavy drinking.
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[It brings me great grief to have to mention this, but this article was written prior to the death of Adam Goldstein, aka DJ AM. We at UhOhDisco were all greatly affected by the loss of our good friend. May he rest in peace.]
There are thousands of reasons for which a modern musical artist might be praised. These reasons span an enormous range of natures, reaching from those having been derived simply from lifestyle admiration (DJ AM owns clubs and drives Maseratis) to others, for flat out musical genius (artists like DJ Shadow and Royksopp are said to have created unparalleled works of art), and for the better part of my life, I (and likely a rather large number of the rest of us), have allowed myself to believe that these artists were all receiving this praise, or to take it a step further, receiving these labels (DJ AM: Celebrity DJ, etc…), due to the annoying tendency of today’s music industry to need to qualify and quantify everything into a mess of titles and genres. However, if the recent explosion in popularity of the electronic music has taught me anything, it is that I have been grossly misguided, and that from start to finish, an artist has complete control over the labels which he will later bear. And this is not to say I was previously unaware that an artist was free to pick his genre, but rather, that the niche he eventually ends up in is entirely determined by the artist himself.
Luke Vibert
I suppose this might prove a rather difficult riddle to decipher at first, but I assure you, there is [usually] a reasonable amount of sense in my speculations. You see, I’d always imagined the most successful musical artists to be the most musically wise. More specifically, I had assumed that a determined musician’s long term goal would generally be to fully comprehend music in and of itself, and not merely the music of the nooks and cranny’s he’d been placed in. Thus, the acquisition of such a “celebrity dj” or “synth master” etc. type title would seem to prove both offensive and counterproductive. I have, however, realized my mistake:
People don’t find their niches by sacrificing all other genres and styles for one that they like best. No sir. Instead (at least in the case of the more respectable musicians I know), the artists is bombarded with a nearly infinite amount of music throughout his life, all of which eventually serves as fuel in the creation of one final product; That is, the music an artist releases, and thus his genre, style, and labels, are all a product that that particular artist considers to be the absolute best combination of everything he or she has ever heard or been influenced by.
At this point, I’m wondering whether I’ve made a point, or if I’ve merely succeeded in uselessly rambling for far too long, but either way, it seems only fair to share with you the reason for my ineffectual pondering:
You see, I’ve fallen in love with happiness.
This morning I discovered a layer to my music collection that I was previously oblivious to, said layer being the one holding the key to the emotional state of the composing author. My eyes were closed, my headphones were on, and I sought to fill my mind with the music that would carry me through the day. My music was playing in no particular order, so each new track was a surprise, however, one of these songs proved to be especially surprising: It was a song I’d heard many times before, and yet this time through, it brought to me a warmth I had not felt before, almost as if I were seeing the world anew through the eyes of its author. And the best part about it was that the author was happy. And not the fleeting, feigned kind. This artist was truly satisfied with the way of the world, and with his or her place amidst it all, and hence, so was I.
I shall forever love the multitude of themes, styles, and emotions expressed in music. The horrifying giddiness of the Bloody Beetroots will always be a brilliantly engineered thrill, Felix Cartal’s angry build ups and abrasive basslines will always fulfill the need to be an untamable creature of the night. And people like AM and Aoki will always offer a habitual dose of Los Angeles, live-in-the-moment, careless partying. But in the end, it’s happiness that’s rooted itself in my soul.
I hope I don’t need an excuse to let these tracks wander a bit from the usual genre.
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Let’s face it: There’s virtually no point in doing a piece on The Bloody Beetroots latest (and massively leaked) album, “Romborama.” [Dim Mak] Though I did consider it for a brief moment, I came to realize rather quickly (after having scoured the countless other pages offering the leaked material) that the opinions people have to offer (or at least the ones expressed in writing) regarding the style, intent, and success of the infamous Italians are scattered about in nearly every possible direction, and as such, whatever “wisdom” I could potentially offer as a result of an article would likely be deemed callous and assuming by the large percentage of people who do not share the exact same opinion that I do.
As a result, I’ve become content with the notion that there simply cannot be a unified perception of these outlandish noisemakers. Where bands like the Beatles (I know I know, outdated reference. I chose it because of its irrefutability.) or, as a more contemporary example, Justice, can generally be considered “revolutionary” and “talented” whether or not you actually like their tunes, The Bloody Beetroots are forever destined to be those two guys that either ruined, or revolutionized the disco scene.
So here’s what I’m proposing. Take a good hard listen (if you haven’t already) to a few of the more enterprising tracks found on Romborama, and then if you please, let us all know exactly how you feel about the direction The Beetroots haven chosen to embody. Is it brash and unnecessarily noisy? Are they simply cultivating a field of sound and putting a beat to whatever they can get their machines to spew out? Or are they still the praiseworthy, pioneering geniuses that took control of electro back in 2006 and showed us how to really “do it hard?”
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There is a range of musical taste in which things tend to stay within the reaches of what we tend to consider “normal.” This range typically spans a great deal of territory, beginning on the leftmost side at “soft” and “gentle”– an ambiance typified by artists like Sigur Ros and The Album Leaf–and progresses to the right, all the while becoming louder and heavier, until it culminates at a point where many people (generally those above a certain cutoff age) see fit to classify it simply as “noise.”
Now this scale is one that composers and producers try with all their might to fit in to, largely due to the fact that each point on the scale has its own respective crowd (or if you will, “scene”) which it corresponds to, and that making music to please a certain “scene” is a surefire way to pull a hit out of the hat. As such, this electronic world with which we associate ourselves is full of remixes and collaborations who’s authors’ styles balance each other nicely, and cause the final result to rest neatly within the scale of acceptance.
Let’s say the scale is a pretty boring one, and goes from 1 to 10. That puts a few of the most eminent acts at the moment (to name a very small number of them) at:
Kid Sister: 5
Rusko: 8
Dj Mehdi: 5
Boys Noize: 9
Miike Snow: 3
Royksopp: 4
MSTRKRFT: 8
Soulwax: 7
Simian Mobile Disco: 7
The Bloody Beetroots: 9
Tiga: 6
Now, when these guys decide to remix each other or work together, they usually tend to be pretty complimentary styles. Let’s take a look:
Simian Mobile Disco & Kid Sister – Pro Nails
Heavier electronic combined with milder, peppier hip hop
Result: 6
Boys Noize and Tiga – Move My Body
Tiga track with a solid beat, given the Boys Noize treating yields a pretty heavy mix.
Result: 9
Rusko & Kid Sister – Pro Nails
Kid Sister earns some wild dubstep bass.
Result: A grimy 7
Miike Snow & DJ Mehdi – Burial
Mehdi’s househop links up with a mellow pop tune.
Result:4
I suppose you probably get the idea by now. The results are usually within reason; That is, two differing styles and melded together to yield a new tune that falls somewhere else within reason on the scale. I must however, encourage a large amount of weight to be placed on the word “usually”, for due to an event not dissimilar to what I expect the apocalypse to feel like, the laws of reason and logic by which I had previously lived my life were beaten (and in particular, kicked) into nonexistence.
What happened you ask? I suppose you could say curiosity got the best of the cat; That is, the disco world finally grew tired of the predictable results of combining two different points on the scale, and decided to see what would happen not only when two very similar parts were combined, but pushing insanity even further, to see what would happen when two artists, both of whom are nearly bursting off the top end of the scale already, combine their power. The result:
The Proxy (nearly a perfect ten himself) & The Bloody Beetroots
Never before in my life have I encountered the kind of anger and abrasive noise. Naturally, the track entitled “Who Are You” (though I would have deemed it more appropriate to call it “What Are You”) cannot be contained within the boundaries of our precious scale, but seeing as the track is so deafening so as to pose the potential risk of opening a rift in the space time continuum, to analyze just how far off the end it travels would be reckless foolishness.
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Seeing as music is generally considered a purely auditory art form, it’s rather perplexing to see how very different the paths that artists take to a hit tune frequently are. One would think that an aspiring artist would be limited to a simple, “The better the song, the bigger the hit” formula, but it seems that with the advent of technology, this relationship has been stretched to its breaking point.
Take a look back to the eighties; Michael Jackson (rest in peace, old friend), decided that simply playing music on the radio limited the potential that the art form had to provoke emotion, and thus, proceeded to pioneer the world of music videos by incorporating dance, and even story into his tracks. His approach was naturally a sensation, and thus, the concept of including visual creativity and dance as part of a whole “musical experience” caught on and has since continued to evolve (although the direction in which it is evolving is debatable) over the years. Throughout the nineties, for example, pop artists among the likes of Britney Spears, and her countless boy band counterparts used (or perhaps abused) the concept of dance and showmanship to a point where their stage strut was debatably more responsible for their success than the actual music itself. In fact, after discovering for the first time that many of these artists chose to dance at the expense of actually singing their own songs in a live setting, I began to doubt whether the exploitation of miscellaneous art surrounding the music industry could be any further exploited; Soulja Boy’s rise to fame in early 2007, however, served as proof that it could. Seeing as there is almost no feasible way that such a poor quality track could have made it to the top of the charts unassisted, it must be assumed that it was (virtually exclusively) the dance that went along with it that allowed it such success.
I suppose all I’m really trying to convey is that today’s industry relies on many more factors than simply the quality of an artist’s music, and though it’s generally true that an artist without musical talent is unlikely to encounter much success, one cannot deny the fact that the creativity involved with the image that the artist surrounds himself with can certainly influence the ease with which he rises to fame.
The reason I’ve brought all this to attention is that the aforementioned “image” aspect of music seems to have grown to envelope the world of dance music much more completely than it has the rest, and said world has thusly been transformed into one that refuses to believe that a DJ could do his job without having decked himself out in designer headphones and fluorescent American Apparel gear. Though this might seem a display of ignorance to those dedicated to purely the auditory world of music, I personally am intrigued by the competition this battle for style provides for. After all, who’s to say that artists like The Bloody Beetroots, with their symbolic masks and notoriously aggressive music videos, or Soulwax, with their night long Radio Soulwax parties, would even exist without their desire to stand out in such powerfully different and creative ways?
Much in the same way as the aforementioned artists, French production team Make the Girl Dance have thrust their careers and reputations to an almost unreachable level with their recent single, “Baby Baby Baby,” the video for which is an astounding tribute to the culture of our beloved world of disco. Make the Girl Dance have managed to capture, in its entirety, a visual representation of the image of bold confidence, lack of boundaries, and general disapproval for rules, and regulations within music that drive the sweet emotion of the moment that disco was invented to stand for, and oh, does it look good…
Did I mention that this entire video was shot candid, live, and without permits on the streets of Paris?
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You know what the best park about the music industry is? As counterintuitive as it may seem, the highlight of it all–the selling point that causes it to attract such wonderfully colorful people–is its failure to have become organized in any way at all. Make a comparison to the other (largely lamer) forms of media out there: You’ll notice that film, for example, looks like a prison compared to music, what with its organizations dedicated to delivering “official” ratings and awards and such. What gives a corporation the right to tell me how good my movie is on the one to ten scale. Hasn’t art always been subjective?
Now you’re likely itching to point out that I’ve failed to notice the giant corporations that surround the music industry as well, and you’re certainly not wrong in letting your mind wander so, however, you’re failing to factor in one important observation: the music industry is awful. Point and case: iTunes can give my favorite tracks whatever rating they want, and it’s not going to mean a thing to any of us. Danger’s 11h30, undoubtedly a stepping stone on the path to electro as we know it, was given 1.5 of 5 stars upon its iTunes release, and all this says is that Steve Jobs (and the loyal fan base of tone-deaf tools which he’s managed to create by means of the iPod) doesn’t care for electronic music, which (I can only assume) doesn’t play much of a role in choosing whether or not to buy a particular track. Naturally, this lack of agreed upon ratings keeps music, and the creation thereof a dynamic process: People (at least the ones who care enough to realize that songs that are played on the radio are not necessarily required listening) have never been restricted to the cut of tunes deemed “appropriate” by some hypothetical checklist. Needless to say, we’ve been quite lucky.
So He Just… Plays Records?
Chances are, if you’re reading this, you either are, have been interested in, or know someone that has decided to seek enlightenment through the art of dj’ing. That being the case, chance also says that at some point in recent history, one of your friends (likely one with less than half as many cool points as you) has made the foolish mistake of asking you the forbidden question: What exactly does a dj do, and why does he get so much credit for it?
Of course, the intolerant anger starts to well up in your stomach. How could someone even ask that question? Isn’t it obvious just how much of a phenomenon it is that a single man can capture the hearts and minds of musically ignorant crowds on a nightly basis, purely through his use of music? Does this ignorant inquisitor really think his record playe–ahem–iPod can give him that same experience that a DJ can? Unfortunately, the answers are no, and sadly, yes, respectively. And the worst part is, you’ve got nothing to say that’ll make him think any different; Or at least you didn’t, until now.
What does a dj do that makes him so special? How is spinning a record, (or to be more politically correct with these a-changing times, pressing play on a midi keyboard) such a respectable deed, and what exactly is is that keeps the creatures of the technicolored night so faithfully returning? It is the plain and simple fact that no matter how many DJ sets he’s studied, and no matter how many times he’s encountered success in the past, there simply is no correct and guaranteed-to-work method of DJing. In contrast with all other forms of media, a DJ cannot simply make a playlist out of fivestar-ed iTunes songs and rest assured knowing his audience will be satisfied. Rather, DJ’ing is the art of adapting to an audience, and convincing them that though their minds tell them that they aren’t particularly fond of a particular song, that their bodies perceive every minute of it as exactly what they want to hear.
The Bloody Beetroots & Steve Aoki
So how does all this relate to anything at all? It’s quite simple, really. See, in a scene where musical taste is so incredibly inconsistent, it becomes important to get a grasp on the general reception of each particular release, despite the enormous difficulty associated with doing so. For example, releases like the latest from Simian Mobile Disco are frequently propelled into a massive collection of opposing poles, comprised of those in love with, and those disgusted by the band’s new direction, which makes it difficult to assess a particular individual’s response. There are, however, exceptional cases, one of which happens to be the latest Dim Mak release entitled “Warp”. When a track has been featured in a mix tape by just about every major artist before its actual release, has been remixed by that same lot, as well as by quite a few lesser known producers, has seen the attention of more than one false music video, and (here’s the kicker) has an official music video that grants us the privilege of staring at Steve Aoki’s screaming face for a solid 20 seconds, it becomes clear that there shall be no controversy over the response; A thousand sweating bodies is all the five star rating I need.
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I’m wondering just how many regulars I’ve lost due to the drastic increase in the text to music ratio on this site. Perhaps I should step it up in the way of audio contributions…
Although, whether he even left in the first place, I’m not quite sure. The guy’s approach on music is certainly a strange one. While most prominent artists (granted most fail to withstand the test of time) make a conscious attempt to produce music similar to that which has already found celebrity within the disco scene, Oizo has chosen to cling to the sound he pioneered nearly a decade ago, and to allow it to drip through its hypothetical IV so as to maintain a constant presence within the club scene.
Brilliance, consistency, and a wicked beard. What more can you ask for?
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One last thing. I feel the need to give my greatest respects to those who have somehow managed to actually read this highly nonsensical post. Seeing as much of my writing makes so little sense upon looking back, having done so seems a most notable accomplishment.
