September 19, 2004
Pete Frame.
Rediscovered Pete Frame's "Rock Family Trees" via a secondhand omnibus of them. This kind of completely pointless, lunatic scholarship is generally absent in dance music. Dance music bods *can* get excited about catalogue numbers but there are boundaries to their nerdishness. The nearest thing is probably something like Freddy Fresh's recent 'The Rap Records', but that didn't entail the same kind of turgid engagement with the raw facts. It must have taken Frame AGES to synthesise these awesome (also in the sense of terrifying) charts. In the preface he says: "On an average, I'd say each chart takes about three weeks of solid graft- including research, interviews, transcriptions, digging, checking, plotting, drafting and drawing." Blimey.
I do believe at the core of his programme there is a healthy dose of humour. In fact I'd like to see a similar chart drawn up for the Grime scene, detailing God's Gift, Doogz and Riko Dan's various trajectories through different crews. It'd be particularly funny in fact as it would wind up people who complain about rock-ist readings of dance music. I was going to post the Roxy Music/King Crimson history (which shows the intertwining of those two bands through the ages) though feared Mark Fisher might think I was taking the mick. Here instead is the "Resolving The Fairport Confusion" history, which I particularly like because of the absurd amount of incarnations the band went through. 14!
Posted by Woebot at September 19, 2004 08:27 PM