From david turgeon Sent Mon, Sep 20th 1999, 17:48
From david turgeon Sent Mon, Sep 20th 1999, 17:48
you misunderstand me. > Your culture... hmmm... could it be, um straight white middle class male > culture? unfortunately that's where i come from. > 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. bravo. so i do experience it when i head nod or tap my toes. sometimes i get a chill down my spine. but i hate dancing. is that okay? > 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? no. house talks more directly to the part of your body that wants to move. that's always how i understood house. that's exactly what it's for. nobody is going to make a house track that doesn't have a regular rhythm made for dancing. house = dance music. i say that idm talks, at least partly, to the 'intelligent' part of your body. let's admit it's a quick & dirty definition, but that's how it was originally intended, & that's what my point was. idm is a hybrid genre: it owes as much to house, hip-hop & jazz as it does to contemporary, musique concrete, etc. which are definitely destined to an 'intellectual' understanding (i.e. your head gets it, not your guts.) > 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. please stop putting words in my mouth, especially things i'd never say or think. i'm talking of the 'intellectual sense' as something which makes us (or some of us) want to be intellectually challenged. when i listen to something like the most abstract parts on lp5, or 'ischemic folks', or david kristian's 'cricklewood', or farmers manual, there's no direct emotional appeal. the music appeals to your head, to your imagination, to your intellectual understanding. everybody can experience it, so long as they care to. like i said, some people do & some don't, & there's nothing wrong with either. > 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), i didn't say that at all! i said that the only people who are likely to care are fellow dj's & musicians. of course some people (like you, obviously) will care about how intelligent house music, just like there'll be people to care that 'she's so high' has been intelligently created. intelligence in house music means how subtly & efficiently you can create emotions, make a booty move, etc. intelligence in pop means how many people are going to buy your cd. what we've been seeing with music that's experimental, not immediately appealing, is an appeal to the intellect for no reason other than to be appealed. idm is a bit of both. (hence the 'i' & the 'd') it'd be hard to draw the line, but compared to house, idm does care about this 'abstract' quality which doesn't seem to mean much to people like you. > #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, oh, & that only happens in idm, right. there's NO bad house. EVER. the fact that you shun it with words like 'hard', 'esoteric', 'weird', means that you don't even appreciate for that sort of musical research. i don't see why you should expect everybody to go for the 'single-minded', 'easy', 'stupid' house. > 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. once again, thanks for putting words in my mouth which i never meant. i consider the 'danceability' of music with much respect; the most subtle minimal house gets my headnodding. for house, it's a personal preference, i don't care about it. but i'm not going to claim that autechre or squarepusher is superior to any other music in the world. (they're not even my favorite bands.) > 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'. i've seen more of those discussions on this list than on any list i've been on. i've had a few privately. i've written about it. granted, i don't subscribe to the avant-garde music lists so maybe i'd see even more on that subject on there. but, once again you misread me. 'intellectual', as i shall repeat, doesn't mean you have to talk about it, or even think about it for that matter. idm appeals, at least partly, to the part of you that likes figuring your way out of an abstract painting, or understanding a hermetic philosophical sentence -- i called it 'intellectual sense' for a lack of a better word. i just think that this sort of thing triggers thought. but it isn't tantamount to thinking. > 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. on your next house set, just put some richie devine, or bogdan raczynski, or colongib, or fennesz, or downpour. when you're done, tell me how many people were left on the dancefloor & come say again that house & idm are one & the same. -- david