Blogspotting: Aging and Techno
first issue:
“As a man (and a father) in my 30s, I constantly ask myself why this music (yeah, techno/house/electro, that’s what I’m talking about) is still relevant (to me). Now, I’m being completely subjective here, but as I’ve followed the path that normal society expects me to take (career, relationship, house, kids), where does my love of deep electronic music fit in, especially as the majority of my peers have left this shit behind, and its importance seems less and less significant?
[…]
But back to house/techno and how it is perceived in society. In this city (Dublin, Ireland), you go to a club and the average is under 25 (it seems that way to an individual edging ever closer to middle age). But in Berlin, for example, that age demographic is radically different. The city is techno. Someone in their 30s does not feel out of place (a darn good feeling), because the music is ingrained in the culture. It’s given much greater credence and respect – it has legitimacy, something that it seriously lacks in Ireland and, to a certain extent, the UK (even after all these years). It has certain connotations – it’s drug music, it’s simply boom-tsk-boom-tsk, it has no perminancy, it’s not even music – that’s what some of the detractors say (okay, my dad). Well, they’re wrong – this culture has legitimacy and, hopefully, is not ageist (heck, most of the top djs and producers are middle-aged, why not the fans?). I’m gonna stick with it, even if I embarrass my kids with my dancing. They can have their R&B (when I think of that term, I think James Brown, not Usher) and I’ll keep my Surgeon (still the man). I may lose my dignity, but I guess that’s the price I’ll have to pay.”
second issue (from an answer of some guy):
“Dance music is not legitimate because it critiques certain assumptions about art and ultimately about the self that you find in the Anglo-American perspective.
The most important of these is the rejection of the indivisible self
[…]
So dance music is the music of the decentered self, and this gives rise to the “disposable” nature. I put disposable in quotes because in reflects a bias toward the artifacts of music — tracks, songs or albums. Traditionally, the creation of these artifacts is considered to be the purpose of music for those that insist on an indivisible self, because they represent the artist after he has died, as in the phrase, “I am listening to Mozart.” It’s as if the artist achieves immortality through his or her artifacts, so preserving them and identifying their original author is very important. Remixing, sampling or otherwise blurring the bright lines of authorship is seen as suspicious, and the concept of artifacts that are collectively owned, such as myths, legends and other forms of folk art is rejected. The main criteria of whether an artform is legitimate is whether it has the potential to confer “immortality” on individual artists.
So where traditional art is seen as generating metaphorical discrete objects, the better metaphor for dance music is ocean waves. A wave only have temporary existence, and it never exists independently of the ocean — the body of influences and cultural factors — that produced it. So dance music doesn’t produce eternal artifacts that stand for artists, but a series of waves that come and go but are spiritual successors to each other. Of course, all kinds of music contain both of these metaphors, but dance music is unique in emphasizing the wave aspect and also unique in emphasizing dancing, a physical activity as opposed to a cognitive one, i.e. not viewing music logocentrically, as a kind of language or speech, but something “primitive” that moves the body.
Some fans attempt to “normalize” dance music and downplay its critique of traditional assumptions. This is a doomed enterprise, because as many parents have said, it’s bad music. And they are right. By which I mean that when we judge dance music by the normative standards that are embedded in the mainstream concept of music, it fails. It can only succeed by pointing out that there are other standards that apply, and individuals who attempt to legitimize it according to mainstream criteria are actually hurting it, because they are re-inscribing the universality of mainstream criteria instead promoting a truly alternative perspective.”
Posted in de-dans on September 27th, 2007 by de-dans | 0 Comments
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