Encounterculture

Okay, Were You Ready?

Right now, we’re in the throes of what seems to be, if all the indications are correct, a musical revolution, as dancepunk, Son Of Electroclash, seems poised to take over the critical discourse in much the same way that postpunk FOOOOOOOKED dragged us away from the experience-first modality of Lester Bangs. The Rapture’s Echoes was named the album of the year by Pitchfork, which for all its many, many, many, many, many, many, manymanymanymanymany flaws is probably as close to a journal of record as we’re likely to get right now; DFA mixes and LCD Soundsystem tracks have become increasingly hard to avoid/ignore; and it’s damn near impossible to read a review of a beat-propelled album without exhuming the tautological equine known as I Don’t Care It Makes Me Shake My Ass.

But let’s spin it back for a second.

* * *

Because there’s been such a singular deluge of writing done on the subject of pop culture since World War II – a phenomenon born from the combination of the lull of peacetime and the violent explosion of the standards of what constitutes leisure-time activities – we, the consumers, tend to internalize its content without really considering the conventions. Usually, that’s fine, since most albums and songs are by definition conventional; I love Guitar Romantic as much as anyone on this planet, but the only thing I really have to add to the discussion of it is a series of Buzzcocks comparisons and giddily profane superlatives. This, of course, is because music itself, and especially pop music, is damn near omnipresent, far moreso than it’s ever been before (although not as much as it’ll be tomorrow). Flying back to Durham, North Carolina on a red-eye flight last month, I had already started acclimating myself to the stench of the guy sitting next to me (who, as best I can guess, was returning from a month-long vacation inside of a humidor) before I realized that I recognized the artfully inoffensive song coming out of the overhead speakers. Better yet, the fact that now I can’t remember for the life of me what that song was only proves how disposable all this stuff is: in one ear, processed in the brain, out the other. And I could, of course, listen to KROQ or G105 for two hours and probably come back reporting the same thing: if you’re honest about how it sounds to you, eventually it all kinda runs together.

It should, of course, go without saying that even within this definition, there’s plenty of room for experimentation and notion-breaking; Whitney Houston and Mariah Carey probably had more of an impact on what we consider “good” female singing to be these days than Madonna, but given Madonna’s efforts to stretch the boundaries of what’s acceptable content (lyrically and musically) of a pop song, I doubt I’d even hesitate if asked which of the three was “the best”. And yet “Justify My Love” just sounds like “Slave 4 U” a lot earlier and quieter. “Hey Ya” is nothing if not El Hijo Del “Superstition” for a generation that needed it like oxygen. Matchbox 20’s “Bright Lights” just sounds like Journey’s “Lights” just sounds like Perry Como. Et cetera.

At the root of any definition of dancepunk is the simple concept of the meeting of music that makes you dance with music which challenges your aesthetic sensibilities, which in other words means it’s just another extended comparison. Dancepunk is not changing anything; socially awkward 20somethings managed to find a way to dance in every day of every year before this one, so it ain’t the music, it’s just you learning to chill the fuck out and fruitfully look like an idiot for a while. I love “Echoes” and “House of Jealous Lovers” and “Danger! High Voltage!” and “Synthesizer” and “Losing My Edge” and “Me & Giuliani Down by the Schoolyard” as much as most people, I guess, but at the same time I could hand you fistfuls of CDRs full of trance and house tunes which just SLAY them in terms of sophistication and composition and melody, all of which are perfectly acceptable reasons to get your ass on the dancefloor even if the scraggly mane protruding from underneath your trucker hat won’t let any of them actually penetrate your ears.

What neuters dancepunk as a viable force of progress for me is the fact that I can’t escape the preexisting contexts for it. It probably took me at least six months of listening to and thinking about the Rapture before I buckled under the weight of my own conclusions and decided that hell, they’re good enough for me to like a bunch. Simply put, I knew how to react to it: until you get used to the conventions and find a place secluded enough for you to start attempting to move to the music (in my case, an automobile with a steering wheel for me to slap the fuck out of in time with that magnificent cowbell), it really does sound like shitty atonal rock music. I’m sure that plenty of people would object, of course, but all I have to offer those people is a shrug and an apology, because that’s all I got out of it. I have heard some shitty, shitty bands in my life, and many of them had a singer like that over hooks as ineffective as those and strange synth sounds just like those too, and as I don’t really care much about shitty music, the Rapture got filed away in my I-respect-this-but-I-don’t-much-like-it cutout bin. As it turned out, I was just being bullheaded and stupid, but it wasn’t without basis. The Rapture, in spite of all the bounty that I eventually was able to reap from them, just didn’t stand out to me at first – at all.

* * *

I was born in 1981, so I missed the punk explosion and the hip-hop explosion simply as a result of forces beyond my control; by the time I became aware of pop music they were both tenable musical paradigms in the eyes of the Powers That Be, both critical and corporate (but I repeat myself OH ZING). When I first heard Guns ‘n Roses for the first time, I couldn’t have been more than eight, and when I heard Nirvana for the first time there’s no way I was older than eleven; when you compound this with the fact that I was one of those unlucky children with watchful and attentive parents who wouldn’t let me watch non-PBS television outside of Saturday mornings, I think you may get some semblance of a picture of how dramatically ill-suited I was to understand any of the importance inherent in either band. The memory of encountering Dr. Dre’s “Dre Day” and, later, Biggie’s “Big Poppa” stuck with me if only because of the endearing accompanying memories of the manifold new kids at my middle school – white kids redistricted from rich neighborhoods – suddenly seizing gangster poses and looking fucking ridiculous. I do remember hearing Beck’s “Loser”, the Spice Girls’ “Wannabe”, and Britney Spears’ “Hit Me Baby One More Time”; in each case, I got nothing more than a pleasant pop diversion and a faint impression that this wasn’t like what was on the radio.

I was, of course, wrong. The above is the barest-possible-bones version of the history of what comprises pop music; every single song on that list changed more than what we’re willing to accept as pop music – it changed the discourse about pop music itself. I remember hearing “Teen Spirit” for the first time and thinking it was the shittiest piece of shit that I’d ever heard, since that guy couldn’t even sing and the music was so simple and the words don’t make any sense and so on. In time, of course, I grew to like it an awful lot (although not as much as the rest of my middle-school coterie; my Nirvana song was always “In Bloom”), if only because it stood out so dramatically from everything else I had access to at the time.

Freeze. That’s the key right there.

* * *

For nearly three and a half years, the Belgian Dewaele brothers – aka Soulwax, aka 2 Many DJs – have been compiling the most important body of work since the Sex Pistols decided to commit their songs to wax, and you can quote me on that. Along with Richard X and Freelance Hellraiser, they have served as the key figures in the bootleg movement, releasing singles famously pitting the Clash against the Basement Jaxx or Salt & Pepa against the Stooges or the Breeders against Skee-Lo against Survivor, among others. I do have to confess that if we’re just talking about bootlegs, then I’d probably go with Freelance Hellraiser’s output; in addition to releasing the single most significant bootleg so far, his pop sensibilities just seem that much sharper (go listen to “A Stroke of Genius” and tell me that shouldn’t be on your local top 40 station). But there are times when one must force favoritism to yield to quality, and as someone whose ridiculous taste forces him to make that concession frequently, let me tell you this: I’ve never made that concession with nearly as much gusto as when I say Soulwax is better than everyone right now.

In 2002, Soulwax put out their now-legendary As Heard On Radio Soulwax Volume 2 mix, part of the still-ongoing 2 Many DJs line. All of a sudden nobody could shut up about it; if it wasn’t the super-filtered disco remix of Kylie Minogue’s “Can’t Get You Out Of My Head”, it was the mashup of 10cc and Destiny’s Child, or maybe it was that “Fire in the disco” song (for all intents and purposes, they broke the Electric Six) that’s kinda catchy, innit? As with all of their albums, AHORS 2 had been taken from one of their famous sets compiled for Belgian radio, yet most people couldn’t have cared less – it was that compelling of a document. And it really wasn’t just the standout tracks; the transitions were something near-spectacular in and of themselves, little independent collisions between ridiculous pop vectors. To this day, I still remember getting chills hearing the first few cheap synth sounds and then KAAAAABOOOOOOM, there’s ELO’s “Peter Gunn” as the Basement Jaxx holler “WHERE’S YOUR HEAD AT” and before you can even start howling along, the foot of quality has stricken your gut and you’re sitting there in awe of what you’re hearing. It ain’t like anything else, or at least it wasn’t back then.

Tom Moulton, famous producer of Philly International acts like the Trammps and First Choice, once said that he didn’t make dance records, he made records that you could dance to, and that’s probably the best way to approach the 2 Many DJs CDs. From the ground up, these discs are engineered to make you move, be it a simple embarrassed-hipster head-knock or a full-on freak-out in the club or the car or the whatever. Soulwax CDs are, to this day, defined by what appears to be a steadfast refusal to play by any rules, even the by-definition loose rules of mashups; just today I was listening to one of their sets and they introduced a track setting the beat of “Billie Jean” against the vocals of “Smooth Criminal” and I tell you, kind audience, that I motherfucking lost my shit when it got to the chorus. The Dewaeles have no shame; you will suddenly be listening to Chicago or some other equally lame band and you will be LOVING IT, or you just don’t get the point, which is simply that it doesn’t matter whether the text itself (here, the song) is any good whatsoever; it’s how you use it in the context of the whole. It always reminds me of one part from the excellent movie 24 Hour Party People, as the Happy Mondays’ Shaun Ryder, having just been pitched to a producer as “the greatest poet since Yeats”, volunteers as an example of his lyrical ability something to the effect of “Good good, good good good good” or something. It sounds stupid and awful, just like all of the Mondays tracks did up to that point; they’d show them recording their songs in the studios and it sounded like hell being put on wax. And then all of a sudden they’re playing “Tart Tart” live, and everything just starts exploding; Bez starts dancing, everyone starts dancing, that ruthless white-boy funk guitar starts tipping your head back and forth, and goddammit if Shaun Ryder’s lyrics don’t sound motherfucking amazing. That right there is Soulwax.

Typically, this is where I start drawing endless connections between the mashup and punk rock, pointing out the DIY ethos which made the scene so initially attractive and quickly passé, or underscoring the relative brevity of their peaks (who was it who said that no true musical revolution lasts longer than 18 months?), or by making a comparison between the second-wave of mashup kids like Dsico, Go Home Productions, Magic Cornflake, Dinbot, and such with the postpunks (in both cases, the sophistication of the music doesn’t touch the giddy let’s-see-if-this-works recklessness of the first wave, although you'll never catch me shortchanging anyone’s talent). The problem with this line of reasoning, of course, is that it goes no further than creating the genre of the mashup and preordaining a continuity and giving lazy critics a framework in which to churn out reams of the same exact essay (“You Ungrateful Pissants Weren’t There For ______”). Which sucks, because a case can be made that in many ways, the mashup is an even more subversive working mode than punk rock. Consider:

1. Aesthetic vs. Content. If you attended high school during any year after 1977, you know the type: the ass who thinks he’s a punk, dresses like a punk, listens to punk music, screams about how he’s punk as fuck at every given opportunity, but in reality, he’s just an ass. Punk rock as an ethos, unless everyone important from that era whom I’ve ever read or seen interviewed is lying to me and God and everyone, isn’t about the leather jackets or safety pins or even the speed of the music or the volume; it’s simply, in the words of Mr. J. Rotten, “Attack…attack…attack”. Yet today, the legacy of punk is pretty much that of the Izod shirt for the disaffected: act like this and you’re in the club. The same simply cannot be said of mashups. There is no mashup code of dress (many artists go to ridiculous extremes to hide their faces; notice how the cover of every 2 Many DJs CD is a man with a bag covering his face), nor is there a mashup chant or pose or anything like that. Hell, when you really get down to it, there’s not even a mashup sound, since the principles of the mashup are so amorphous and indefinite; the only rule is that it has to sound good. Recently, notorious steezjacker Superstar DJ Keoki attempted to jump on the mashup bandwagon by releasing a CD colliding a bunch of shit with a bunch of other shit (he actually couldn’t get the licenses for the songs he used – unlike Soulwax, still by far the leaders in the field - and as a result had to pen shitty cover versions to take their place) and as you might expect, got laughed out of the building. Granted, the mashup phenomenon is still relatively young and there are plenty of fakers, but at the moment, it ironically seems to be nearly steal-proof.
2. Stealing the medium. What made the Sex Pistols so great wasn’t simply that they were smart and funny and great rock stars; they also wrote very amazing pop songs which just happened to sound nothing like any other pop songs in the contemporary consciousness at the time. Likewise, one can make the argument that Soulwax are less important as DJs (since the consensus is that they have to mix the sets either on computers or with the extensive aid of computers) and more important as radio programmers putting both their encyclopedic knowledge of music and their ADHD to astonishing use. Melody and beat give their sixty-plus minute sets a propulsive effect frequently lacking from songs only encompassing a thirtieth of that. And while it’s important to keep in mind that, as with the Sex Pistols, the shockingly untraditional aesthetics guiding the music make it easy to read it as a polemic against the status quo, ultimately it’s the poppy accessibility which keeps it in your CD player. The shock of the furious new, after all, only lasts for so long.
3. The medium itself. I have a feeling that music historians of the future will be placing a lot of importance on the fact that the first Radio Soulwax broadcasts went out over the airwaves in 2000, as those of you with elephantine memories may remember this little program called Napster doing for file-sharing what the Pony Express did for mail back in the 1800s. Naturally the bootleg scene benefited greatly from all of this sudden access to music, but more to the point, so did Soulwax. Word of mouth flew around the globe; the time between when I heard about their mix CD (and generally, I presume that once I’m hip to something it’s no longer “in”) and when everyone else on non-music-related discussion boards suddenly got all up in bootlegs was dizzyingly brief. Everything, even/especially the mixes got shared, of course (the 2 Many DJs website makes reference to an early “Billie Jean” bootleg which was even released as a white-label without the permission of the Dewaeles), but more to the point the word got out, and things started happening. Of course, you can say the same thing about punk (and here’s where I’m sorely tempted to bang the DIY-made-the-scene drum), as it’s important to remember that a Bay City Rollers single looks exactly like a Sex Pistols single if you rip off the labels. What’s remarkable about bootlegs, however, is that they existed outside of the music industry wholly and completely; at no point did anyone involved in the commercialization interfere with the production of the mp3 file (which, incidentally, looks no different on your desktop from a Clay Aikin mp3 if you change their titles). Put another way, built into every punk single was the irrevocable proof that this had to be some kind of good since someone obviously thought enough of it to pay to record and press it up. My grandmother can make mp3s, but they don’t sound anything like 2 Many DJs.
4. The immediate familiarity. Nowadays, of course, punk has the edge, as the catastrophe which opens “Anarchy in the U.K.” and “London Calling” and “Neat Neat Neat” are pretty much canonized alongside “Layla” and “Stairway” at this point in the Great Big-Ass Book of Rock. This, of course, is the benefit of decades of praise and criticism being heaped on these licks, on their endless dissection at the hands of writers who experienced them and felt inspired to pen gigantic screeds like this one. What gets lost is the expressive character of the music; I have yet to encounter a piece of criticism of the punks who just plain missed the point (probably due in no small part to the fact that I don’t have to read EVERYTHING being written about the first-run punks, but still, it ain’t like I sit around on my ass all day). That’s not to say that there’s a party line as to what was being expressed through the music, but rather just that there didn’t seem to be any need for time to digest what was being presented (as compared to Led Zepplin and the Doors, whose bullshit is still being sifted through by the betunnelvisioned today). The same can be said of G’n’R, or Nirvana, or Biggie, or the Beatles, or the Stones, or any great pop act ever. When all of a sudden I’m listening to “Sweet Talking Woman” in the middle of Hang All DJs Vol. 4, it’s clear from the jump that I’m being presented with something silly and fun, not to be taken seriously. Am I supposed to dock it points simply because it’s uncheckedly offering up that instead of rage or something? I don’t rank my emotions or my reactions; all I know is that when they’re being triggered that brutally, I am in the presence of something that requires my attention.

And so on. The point is simply this: if there is a theoretical point to Soulwax, it lies in their seemingly unique ability to make you aware of the fact that you live in a world of music, something that dancepunk wishes to separate itself from (“No, this is the music that you can dance to!”) and electroclash wishes to magnify to the point of the grotesque seemingly just for visceral thrills. With a mashup, you react to what you hear, unless of course you are shamelessly determined to react to the creative middleman at all costs (and I have a certain fondness for the DFA but they are nothing if not different, albeit very talented, middlemen). With a mashup, there are no comparisons; the text itself is the comparison that you wish you could have made, just made for you, and made to sound good.

* * *

Mashups, by just about anyone’s watch, are pretty much dead. The scene died a while back; it’s now starting to get aggressively formalist (see Dsico’s impressive cutup remixes of pop songs) rather than aggressively expressive, and if you’re going to be honest, only dorks really care about form (and I say this as a flag-waving dork who will argue about the form of Exile on Main Street and “Heart of Glass” until the cows come home, so I’m not exempting myself here). Of course, plenty of people argue to this day that punk died the moment when Johnny Rotten posed the question of whether or not people had ever felt as if they’d been cheated (and I’m not exactly ready to say they’re wrong), but we’re still talking about it today. The point of pop culture criticism, if you want to make something noble of it, isn’t to find out where everyone will be going before everyone gets there (although that’s so much fun to speculate about that I can’t really disapprove and mean it), but rather to figure out what’ll be worth defending ten, twenty, fifty years from now, and while I don’t want this piece to come down to simple handicapping of the future, I’d say that right now Soulwax is a better bet than the Rapture or the !!! or the band that’s going to come out in a few weeks and kick the shit out of all of them. When you get down to it, what stands out about the Soulwax mixes isn’t the songs, but rather the music itself. I gave my sister one of the CDs for her last birthday – my sister, the one who has elected to retain some sanity rather than sacrifice it to understand pop music and cinema – and she lost her shit; more recently, I went to Amoeba to see which ones they had, and not only had they sold out of the most recent edition, a guy was morosely flipping through the few copies left on the racks. He kept going through them over and over again, as if this time maybe that copy of Hang All DJs 1 or As Heard On… Volume 7 was going to reveal itself to him. But I guess he came up short, because he kind of sighed, started shuffling away, and muttered (either to me or to nobody in particular, I’m still not sure), “Man, those never turn up used.”