From Chris Fahey Sent Mon, Sep 20th 1999, 17:06
From Chris Fahey Sent Mon, Sep 20th 1999, 17:06
david turgeon wrote:
> as much as some people can't understand music outside the
> dancefloor, i
> for one cannot understand music _inside_ the dancefloor. i don't care
> about dancing, i think it looks silly, & it's definitely not
> part of my culture.
Your culture... hmmm... could it be, um straight white middle class male
culture?
I'm *partly* kidding here, but you were the one who brought up culture as if
it were possible to exist in a culture in which dance is not present in some
form. To me and to most other humans, dancing and music go together pretty
much hand in hand. If you don't want to or like to bust out and dance,
that's cool, but I find that music has many ways of appealing to me, only
one of which is subjecting it to intellectual analysis. Dancing is an
extreme form of another way of appreciating music: with your body.
I don't mean to sound like Hugh Hefner or some New Age anti-intellectual
freak when I say that, though. I mean that I find it hard to beleive that
anyone can appreciate any music fully without allowing some part of their
body to participate in the experience as well. Some people sing along, some
people dance, some people's blood pressure rises or pulse accelerates. If
you only nod your head or tap your toes you are in fact experiencing this
too.
> dancefloor music isn't made for the _head_, it's made for the
> _booty_.
> i don't care how easy or hard it is to create a track that goes boom
> boom till your legs bleed, the only people who're going to wonder how
> intelligently the track was created are fellow musicians & djs. with
> idm, there's actually a concern on how it affects the 'intellectual
> sense' so to speak.
Huh? You're saying that IDM fans are more intelligent *listeners* than
people who listen to 4/4 house music? Even those IDM fans that aren't DJs or
musicians?
And what's this "intellectual sense" you're talking about? Is it music
theory or is it something else? It seems to me that unless you have some
understanding of the structures of music theory and music technology, there
is very little empirical "intellectual" content to *any* music. Your
argument thus appears to be saying that IDM fans are smart enough and
interested enough to find these intellectual elements in their music and
house (or whatever, "booty" music) fans are not.
IMHO, you are making two mistakes: #1 is assuming that "booty" music
contains little intellectually interesting or sophisticated content (we've
been through that already), #2 is asserting that IDM contains a lot of such
content. Frankly, I find a lot of IDM isn't really all that intelligent at
all, usually favoring style over substance. I think in many ways IDM is a
*pose*: To listen to the "hardest" music, the most "esoteric" music, the
"weirdest" music. For every really interesting, musically inventive, and
thought-provoking artist mentioned on this list, there are dozens of other
artists also mentioned whose work, although not dance-floor friendly, is
nonetheless created with little intellectual labor, contains almost no
display of musical skill or knowledge, is derivative of other artists, is
shallow and unsophisticated, etc, etc. I'm not saying that this music
doesn't appeal to me - some of it is very interesting for reasons beyond the
obviously intellectual - for example, it might bring up a memory, contain a
political message or, god forbid, have a funky groove.
I get the feeling that many IDM fans consider their music superior to others
because it "affects the 'intellectual sense'" without specifying what this
"intellectual sense" is. You speak of it as if it were some passive but
abnormally well developed sensory organ in your body that defys any
explanation beyond saying that it is the polar opposite of whatever it is
that makes all those other people wiggle their butts like a bunch of morons.
If IDM is so intelligent, where are the conversations on this list about
song structures, leitmotifs, improvisations, intervals, time signatures, key
changes, etc? Where are the discussions about sampling, songwriting/lyrics,
collaborations? About arpeggios, sine waves, gamelan music, atonal music,
polyrhythms? About IDM's relationships to film, to radio, to our everyday
sonic landscapes?These types of "intellectual" topics pop up sometimes, but
usually it comes down to which records and which labels are 'cool'.
So, please, get off your high horse, IDM. We're not *that* smart. If there's
one element that differentiates IDM fandom from booty/house fandom, it's not
intelligence, it's just good old-fashioned pretentiousness.
> as for those who see 'intelligent' as derogatory for others: well,
> yeah. let's shun intelligence. what GOOD is intelligence?!?
> who cares
> about intelligence??? let's not be stupid or intelligent, let's be
> nothing at all!
> & i'm back to this point: are we going to trash dance music because it
> makes the body exercise & therefore improves health?! what about sick
> music?! that's so derogatory!!! let's call the genre police!!!!
Say what?
-Cf
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