quoted 1 line DAT is fine but there is no substitute for watching some one play
>DAT is fine but there is no substitute for watching some one playquoted 314 lines Article from the WEEKEND AUSTRALIAN dated January 16-17
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> Article from the WEEKEND AUSTRALIAN dated January 16-17
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> ASCIIfied by David Smith
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> CULTURE? WHAT CULTURE?
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>The niche appeal of today's dance music suggests that a pop culture
>which united the young has never existed. DAVID BREARLEY argues that
>the death of the three-minute pop song is a serious threat to some of
>the most powerful institutions of our time.
>
> Every generation struggles with it's children's music. Fortysomethings
>had a problem with Elvis in the 50's, with the Rolling Stones in the 60's,
>and with the Sex Pistols in the 70's. But today's music is a giant
>headache for all except the very, very young: anyone over 25 is likely
>to feel alienated.
>
> The difference between Elvis, the Stones and the Pistols, and what is
>happening today, is enormous - evolution in the first case, revolution
>in the second. The modern dance sound represents a complete reassessment
>of western musical principles and reflects a profound change in its
>audience. Pop is well and truly dead - as a style of music, as a way
>of thinking, and as a system of indentification.
>
> When parents first heard Elvis and said 'It's not music', all they
>really meant was : 'It's loud, it's crude and I don't like the way that
>young man moves his hips.' When they heard the Stones and said 'It's not
>music', all they really meant was: 'It's noisy, it's lewd and I don't like
>the way that young man moves his lips.' When they heard the Pistols and
>said the same thing, all they really meant was: 'Those people can't even
>play, and I don't like that young man.'
>
>
> But when today's parents hear techno or hip hop and say 'It's not music',
>they mean exactly that. And in certain vital respects they're right,
>because much of what we understand to be music is absent - junked,
>dismissed by the young dance composers as an irrelevance.
>
>
> Think of beat music - rock, rock 'n' roll', rockabilly, blues, country,
>Mowtown, soul, funk, bubblegum, psychedelia, surf, glam, disco, punk,
>thrash, new wave, new romantic..the lot - as a combination of two elements:
>the backbeat and the 12-note tonal system. These were the pillars of any
>Sex Pistols song, as surely as they were the foundation of the most
>complex opus by, say, Led Zepplin or Queen.
>
>
> Not any more. The dance movement, or at least the progressive wing of
>it, has freed itself of the 12-note tonal system. In doing so it has
>rejected a glorious repertoire that stretches back at least to Bach
>and a theory which Pythagoras helped develop two-and-a-half millennia
>ago. Tune as we know it is gone, and harmony with it, All that remains
>is the beat: 20 hertz, 120 times a minute - that's the prescription.
>The sound of the 90's, a bloody loud kickdrum, is so hypnotic it acts
>as a giant safety net, accommodating any other sound imaginable.
>Pantonality has arrived. All sound, pitched or unpitched, has become
>music.
>
>
> Hip hop by the likes of Public Enemy has no tune and therefore offers
>none of the comfort and reassurance we expect from beat music. Without
>a tonal system, the songs cannot resolve themselves; changes from
>verse to chorus, where they still exist, are not signposted; the point
>at which a song begins and ends becomes arbitrary. It's a new headspace.
>Ears are either born to it, retuned or obsolete.
>
>
> This is problematic stuff. The death of the three-minute pop song, and
>the erosion of the entire pop mentality, is a serious threat to some of the
>most powerful institutions of our time. Our best active songwriters, pop
>craftsmen such as Neil Finn, are finding it harder to address young people
>than their forebears did only a decade ago. Obviously, anyone with a
>product to sell and a young market in mind - from sitcom scripters to
>soft-drink manufacturers - has to come to terms with the new headspace.
>
>
> The first step is to admit it exists. The six major record companies,
>the ones with the most to lose, are fighting a desperate rearguard action
>against change, using nostalgia as their weapon. The number one album in
>this country for 1992 was 'Jesus Christ Superstar' while Michael Crawford's
>collection of Andrew Lloyd Webber tunes was number eight. Jimmy Barnes and
>The Commitments weighed in at three and 10 respectivley with compilations
>of soul standards.Neil Diamond's greatest hits package was the year's
>seventh-best seller, Abba's was the 12th, and Queen placed 11th and 16th
>with two such offerings. Older record buyers replacing classic vinyl with
>compact discs also accounted for a considerable volume of back-catalogue
>sales.
>
>
> Venues reflect the trend. Entertainment centres in the capital cities
>have become museums for pop dinosaurs such as Elton John and Rod Stewart,
>while the pub rock circuit is host to a swill of tribute bands dedicated
>to replicating the look and sound of old chestnuts like Meatloaf, the Doors
>and (of all things) Bad Company. Australia's very own Abba tribute, Bjorn
>Again, enjoyed such heady success in Scandinavia last year it is rumoured
>the members of the real thing are considering a reunion...
>
>
> All this belies the fact that the new music - 'tuneless' dance music
>has a strong and growing following. Rap, in which the tonal relationship
>between vocal and instrumental is completely broken down, is no longer
>an exclusively black phenomenon. The charts are full of it.
>
>
> Public Enemy,whose message is aggressively at repressed black Americans,
>have played to a huge Australian audiences twice in the past five years.
>Their music is a collage in which sirens, wails and scratches take
>precedence over traditional instruments, and sounds are mixed by intuition
>rather than according to a recognized tonal system.
>
>
> Single dance parties attract tens of thousands through DJ's and designers
>whose role is to set a mood and maintain it, create a trance atmosphere,
>avoid the series of stops and starts, fast songs and slow that we associate
>with rock concerts and radio formats. The tune is not altogether extinct
>-
>you'll still hear a little Kylie or Madonna at the bigger dance parties -
>but it's fast becoming so.Techno raves feature music that would make
>little sense to, say, Paul McCartney, much less to composers of earlier
>generations and much less again to casual listeners.
>
>
> Almost independent of the mass media, the dance movement is a healthy
>and complex beast with its own networks, subcultures and sub-subcultures.
>Asking some kids if they like dance music is as about as square as asking
>if they like pop. 'Which' dance music? House? Deep house, Italo house, diva
>house? Acid? Techno? Hardcore? Trance, Breakbeat, Belgian, Detroit? Dub
>reggae? 'Which dance music'?
>
>
> The divisions prove dance has become far more than a fad, and they
>present a dilemma for the record companies. Niche markets are notoriously
>hard to attack from a global perspective.
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>
> It's not hard to argue that pop music had run it's course by 1970. It's
>signature instrument, the guitar, had already reached its limits in the
>hands of Jimi Hendrix. Mowtown had elevated pop songwriting to a level of
>sophistication never seen since. The major movements had established
>themselves; all that remained was for second-generation rockers to combine
>and cross-pollinate existing styles.
>
>
> Punk was an admission that rock was out of steam, but far from being the
>revolution, it was hijacked and sold off as a commodity. Punk musicians
>played the same instruments, used the same chords, sometimes even sang the
>same songs as their predecessors. Their revolution was all attitude and
>no substance; five years later the mainstream was lamer than ever.
>
>
> Dance, a real revolution in purely musical terms, exposes punk for the
>false promise it was. The record companies don't understand it as music
>or as a product. They don't know how to exploit it. The music played at
>raves is pressed on vinyl, at least half of it in extremely limited
>editions. Moreover, those pressings are not the finished product - it's
>what the DJ does with them, how he mixes them and what he overdubs that
>counts. Then follows the tricky issue of context; the music is designed
>to be played at high volume in unseated arenas under spectacular lights
>and - here's the ugly bit - on a headful of drugs. There's not much point
>buying a copy to play in your bedroom after school.
>
>
> Clearly, dance says pop is dead as music. It also says pop is dead as
>a set of beliefs. Radical shifts in art reflect radical shifts in society,
>and the appeal of dance music is symptomatic of a rejection of pop values
>that were thrust on young people four decades ago.
>
>
> There was a time earlier this century when teenagers had no identity,
>meaning they had no money. When they finally established themselves as
>a financial force certain false assumptions were made; a market became
>a demographic almost overnight. Commercial necessity and the media's
>tendency to generalise gave rise to a false teenage profile, the myth
>of a vital homogeneous mass untied by common hopes and beliefs - a pop
>culture. Critics of today's divided youth speak of those years with great
>reverence, recalling a time when everyone was doing the twist, or later
>when everyone was dropping acid, when everyone was tuning in, turning on
>and dropping out.
>
>
> But were they? Or was the pop culture part fantasy? Is it possible that
>we are dealing here with the illusion of community rather than community
>itself? The Beatles, probably the most conspicuous single embodiment of
>pop, played to 10,000 empty seats at Shea Stadium in the summer of 1966;
>days later 11 fans greeted them at Seattle airport. Even allowing for John
>Lennon's 'bigger than Jesus' remark earlier that year, those are pretty
>ordinary turn-outs - hardly the stuff of a united teen movement sharing
>a single pop consciousness. Mid-60s footage of Beatles and Stones concerts
>shows two seperate audiences, one distinctly younger than the other.
>
>
> In popular mythology, Elvis was a rocker and so was Cliff Richard. The
>simple truth is they were poles apart - if you pitched them both at
>today's youth they'd tell you straight: Elvis had balls and Cliff was a
>pussy. But in the late 50s and 60s they were both new phenomena;
>teenagers had not yet learned how to dispose of the disposable, and Cliff
>somehow found a place in rock history. Today there's no shortage of pap,
>but teens and even the mass media have learned to recognize it. Nobody
>believes a group such as Girlfriend is of any significance whatsoever.
>as for Michael Bolton, the modern equivalent of Cliff Richard, it's
>highly unlikely he has a single fan under the age of 25.
>
>
> Today's teenage society is infinitely more sophisticated than previous
>ones. It has divided and sub-divided into evermore discriminating factions-
>niche markets - and with the rejection of specific musical styles comes a
>rejection of specific characteristics which were once thought to be
>inherently 'pop'. The first of of these is the myth of a united movement.
>
>
> I believe there has been a subtle shift in the old "world is good/world
>is bad" dichotomy, and that shift has exposed many of the falsehoods that
>went with pop. Our happy-endings culture, a cornerstone of the pop ethic
>doesn't make as much sense to teenagers as it once did. Youth might have
>lived under the threat of Armageddon in the 60s, but at least the danger
>was a tangible one. Woodstock represented an age of great optimism, a time
>when young people could visualise a carefree, post-nuclear world of their
>own making. Well, where is it? The Woodstock generation are now masters
>of their own universe, admittedly with a greatly reduced nuclear threat,
>but is it the Utopia they expected?
>
>
> The most popular song of the post-punk counter-culture, the song voted
>to No 1 year after year by 2JJJ listeners, is Joy Division's 'Love Will
>Tear Us Apart': "When routine bites hard, And ambitions are low, When
>resentment rides high, And emotions won't grow, Love, Love will tear us
>apart." Always in the Top 20 is the Boys Next Door's 'Shivers': "I've
>been contemplating suicide..." What is this if not a rejection of the
>happy-endings culture? And what is unresolvable music - music which has no
>tonal logic, which cannot end in the right chord-if not a rejection of
>the happy-endings culture?
>
>
> In rejecting the happy ending - or in the case of the dance crowd,
>replacing it with a more realistic drive for hedonism - you call into
>question at least half the baggage that goes with pop. The very idea
>that you can buy a neat little slice of pop and take it home with you
>becomes less appropriate.
>
>
> So does the star system. In serious dance circles, the people at the
>top of the tree are often faceless. The hottest DJ's in the world are
>Sasha and Joey Beltram, but can anyone picture them? The hottest DJ in
>Australia is Pee Wee Ferris, but can anyone picture him? Certain British
>"groovemasters" pride themselves on their anonymity. And recent surveys
>suggest Australian school children look to their parents for role models;
>girls might like Kylie and Madonna, but only in context; they don't see
>Kylie and Madonna as embodiments of their own aspirations.
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>
> Revolutionary music does not happen by accident and should not be
>dismissed out of hand. Paul Williams, the doyen of all rock critics,
>wrote this in the 80s: "The danger for people of my generation (I turn
>38 next week)and even for the generations that follow us is that we may
>be so attached to past glories - experienced first-hand or just heard
>tell of - that we miss the new and different glories of the present
>moment as we stubbornly hold on to and hold out for the return of the
>way it once was."
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>
> The concert hall had a similar problem early this century. By 1908,
>Schoenberg had accepted that the notion of a key signature was purely
>academic. He dropped it and a large part of the audience dropped him.
>Five years later the creme of Parisian society was reduced to spitting
>at each other, driven wild by the rhythmic excesses of 'The Rite Of
>Spring'. Yet only a year after that, another (younger) Parisian audience
>gave Stravinsky a standing ovation for the same work. By 1940, the
>greatest of all populists, Walt Disney, considered it a fitting soundtrack
>for 'Fantasia'.
>
> The jury is still out on Schoenberg, but what is now widely accepted
>is that he was no knee-jerk reactionary. He was a legitimate product of
>his time, his theory was beyond reproach, and his music was a considered
>response to the richness and complexity of Wagnerian orchestration.
>Nobody, not even his greatest detractor, doubts that he changed 20th
>-century music for ever.
>
> Dance music will come to be understood in the same way: problematic,
>unpleasant maybe, but legitimate. And in time its most radical elements
>will be recognised as progress via tradition. The accent on beat is what
>happens when black Americans lean on their African roots, and in the late
>20th century it sounds right to young people. Even the idea of sampling,
>appropriating slabs of other people's music, is nothing new - Satie
>quoted Chopin and Schubert in his own piano pieces.
>
> For many devotees of orchestral music, Schoenberg represents the
>apocalypse; jazz purists strike the same wall with Miles Davis' 'Bitches
>Brew'. They expect today's composers to respect earlier traditions to
>the letter, and in doing so they limit themselves to a stagnant repertoire.
>In 1993, beat music reaches its own Rubicon.
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>
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>David Brearley writes regularly for The Australian on popular music
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>Posted without permission
>
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