From Sean Cooper Sent Fri, Apr 9th 1999, 22:08
From Sean Cooper Sent Fri, Apr 9th 1999, 22:08
>yeah, i think andrew has a really good point there. the other thing that >people forget about is the motivation behind reynolds' polemic -- that is, >his ideal of techno (or, really, pop music in general) as an inherently >populist medium. whether you agree or not, that's his position (and, in a >similar vein, the reason he's so interested in ecstacy and its effects on >the techno scene, bringing people together and erasing certain social >divisions [at least for a limited time]). i'm not saying you have to agree >with him (i have a lot of trouble with the extent to which his drug-culture >theories drive his aesthetic judgements), but just recognize that he's >making a very particular argument. the super-underground, lo-fi geektronica >doesn't square with him because it's inherently exclusivist and doesn't >permit the kind of youth-culture populism he's looking to promote. and i >don't think it's the star system, exactly, that reynolds is affirming. more >like the cultural practices that bring people together (massive raves, media >exposure, whether underground or mainstream, etc.). most important, in >terms of these cultural practices, is the FORM of the music (materially and >sonically) -- is it readily available? does it only exist in editions of >200? and does it support gatherings of people, who come to unite & dance (i >know, sounds awfully hippy-dippy to me too)? most bedroom IDM doesn't, >frankly. the four-to-the-floor beat is incredibly effective for crowds (too >effective, for the adornians among us) -- hence its valorization by >reynolds. (actually, perhaps i'm overstating -- i don't know if reynolds >has ever explicitly deconstructed particular beat structures -- 4ttf, >jungle, hip-hop, etc.. but i'd be interested to see what he'd do with >them.) these are really important points. and they also lay bare how dated and incomplete reynolds' dialectic really is. the analytic framework he employs in his writings about rave culture are pretty much lifted wholesale from the birmingham tradition, first worked through in the '60s and '70s by simon frith, dick hebdige, stanley cohen, et al (you may recognize some of these names from their writings about punk, style, subculture, etc.). british cultural studies scholars have been struggling desperately to combat the reductive effects of some of birmingham's fundamental observations ever since, including (primarily) its quasi-marxist tendency to valorize mass cultural movements as indicative of broad shifts in economic and social relations, and its simplistic reduction of the complex exchange between "mainstream" cultural forms and "underground" or "marginal" cultural forms (such as punk, ska, rave, and, one might posit, idm) to a sort of (you've got it right there, phil) hippy-dippy, blind celebration of "movements" and "cultural phenomena." as an alternative to reynolds' all-too-ideological line of thought, i'd suggest sarah thornton's "club cultures" (wesleyan, 1996), which aims to understand the internal logics of subcultural forms and their situation in/relationship to the larger divisions out of which they grow, through which they are articulated, and with which they are in inevitabe dialogue. imo a far more rigorous and enlightening read (particularly, perhaps, where something like idm is concerned). sc onnow: joshua kit clayton : 4mod3 (pthalo)