Was in Rough Trade in Covent Garden and saw that the Hoxton Electro thing is still in force down there. Ever since pre-Ministry Fischerspooner (ha remember them!) and that Felix Da Housekatt LP I've had the genre ear-marked as "probably worth checking out if there weren't so many other more interesting things to investigate" and "music made by people too similar to myself (white, middle-class, over-educated, over-privileged with too much time on their hands) to necessitate taking seriously." It kind of flitters before my eyes: City Rockers, Tiga, Anthony Rother, Ivan Smagghe etc. All probably quite excellent stuff, er, except that in spite of living one minute from Hoxton (been here since 1996) it means nothing to me.
Is this a fault on my behalf? I think the "genre" has good things about it. As an electronic music ditching the muso baggage and aligning itself closer to cocaine, fashion and club dynamics than sonic experimentation it's doing healthy things. Music which is later rehabilitated by muso gits like myself is often originally 'superficial' and socially mechanical. Or at least that's how it used to be in the days before there was a cluster of academically-inclined fruits ready to praise The Sound of the Pirates.
Then there's the residual anguish I have about being an old raver. Am I dismissing this genre fallaciously cos I think it's a rehash of better music from better days? You can just FEEL the creeping gentrification of the whole dance music explosion. Naturally "Energy Flash" (as Simon said as much in it's outro) was the first manifestation of this. It's just a matter of weeks before those day-glo smiley-face compilations of old-skool rave anthems DO garner lush repackaging in leather-bound CD cases and Q magazine is full of interviews with Carl Craig and The Prodigy. As a critic (flourish of horns) I fear being roped into praising it, and as much as I relish getting stuck in to Desi, Kwaito, Grime and Funk I still worry I'll that at heart I'll always be a raver. Old swampy. I guess you can't shake off those drug-impressions. "I got high in 1992" or more accurately in my case "I got high roughly between 1987 and 1996."
But there is so much in the electro revival that I find puzzling, unenthralling even. Why do these people fetishise the eighties? Strange how the eighties, in their hands, reads as _shallow_? What was shallow about the eighties, I don't get it? Mark Fisher please talk to these people immediately. Also why don't these people design their record sleeves properly so they look sexy? All electro-clash records look like shit. Maybe Electroclash's pinnacle of achievement is at the axis of mainstream entryism with the jolly "The Show" and "Some Girls"?
Posted by Woebot at July 22, 2004 10:55 PM