Musical Snobbery

[Ian Cashman]

theres a lot of it in here at the mo and i wanted to try and calm it down... or bring it to a thread where it can be discussed without hijacking threads....

 

this was my reply to another post... youll prolly see it... but it took me so long to write and i didnt actually want to aim it at a particular person, so ive made it its own post... please reply in this one...

 

when i first got into dance music Sven Vath was my top man.. at the time he was playing the early EYE-Q trance stuff (original cafe del mar/brainchild/cygnus x). i used to go to the orbit which was THE FIRST uk trance mecca... In 92/93!!!!

 

it inspired me to take up djing.. i played loads of local free partys playing my top trance tracks, blowing away other dj's who were playing loads of hand bag style house at the time.. no one had heard of these wikid (mainly german) tunes i was spinning..

 

the club the orbit started taking on a new techno direction when all the psy trance stuff started taking over.. i didnt like the direction trance was heading in and went with the new (to me)techno thing with wikid dj's such as jeff mills ritchie hawtin and joey beltram taking up the top slots in my opinion.. non club tracks by aphex twin and warp records stuff i was also heavily into..

 

i loved it so much i moved from peterborough to leeds to be closer to this wicked place!!

 

i also started producing tracks in this time of technodom... the first demo i ever di i handed to US DJ damon wild in the orbit and he signed 3 of my tracks to an offshoot of his synewave new york (geometric)... looking back on these tracks they are utter [censored], but im still proud of my first release cos it gave me the confidence that i had some sort of talent in my tune making! hearing the aforementioned joey beltram playing one of my tracks in the orbit... well... words can never say...

 

my new signing gained me the respect of other leeds techno producers and soon i got to work with Mark Bell(LFO/Bjork), Jon and Mike H (Cold Dust) and a nother Leeds based outfit The Vonn Trapps who kindly put more of my stuff out on their label....

 

I LOVED TECHNO!!!!!

 

learning more and more on the production and synth sides of things i started to bore of making the kind of regis/blueprint/hawtin type stuff that i was churning out by the bucketload the scene im my opinion was becoming a bit stale with too many mills/surgeon clones to mention and i was getting tired of the cliquey attitude everyone i was around was having with this 'special' music we were all into..

 

i was getting more into my Plaid/Black dog style stuff.. and going out clubbing less cos these long nights of 'nails in a washing machine' tunes and techno bores were starting to grate... i wasnt enjoying djing any more... i was never getting that special crowd reaction of people genuinely loving it that used to make it all worth it anymore..

i was never a 3 decks and 909 wizard, but if you need that to make the records more interesting.. theres something wrong somewhere....

 

 

i sold my decks bought a few bit of music kit and moved back to peterborough (a [censored] stale musical enviroment if ever there was one!!!)

 

i got real depressed cos of leaving it all behind but there was nothing more i could give of myself to it.. it just didnt do it for me anymore....

 

i fell into a real [censored] time of things... (some of you may know of what im [not] speaking about here)

 

then i started hearing some stuff ... some new remixes of some of the trance tunes that i used to know (cafe del mar anyone?)

i thought.. fook this is as good as it ever was... theyve just hardened the drums up!!!

it was the 98 99 trance explosion... and i wanted back in...

i wanted to go clubbing again and this up for it (call it cheesy, i dont give a flying [censored]) music from my past pulled me right out of the early grave i had begun to dig for myself...

 

Music really did save my life...

 

i was out.. having fun.. producing with heart.. meeting kool new peeps who wernt stuck up there own arse.. enjoying life (even got a couple of tunes out on london prog label Automatic with a m8).. without drugs or attitude.. just on the music (started doing E's again since then, but [censored] it...hehe) started dj'ing again... met u lot!

 

 

the point this has all been about is that ive been heavily into all sorts of tunes for 10 years... ive seen genres come and go stale.. these things always come round in circles.. but true musicality always shines through... tastes change, but something that moves you and makes you feel wicked can never be slated because somebody thinks that what they listen to is more intelligent...

 

i have a laugh and make comments on here about hard house being [censored] i know... but im only light hearted jesting... to get a reaction...lol... and it does..

i could give all the reasons in the world why i think its not as good as my lovely trance, but im not gonna start turning into that big headed jumped up cliquey music bore that i used to be...

 

after all.. this is club music.. it lives an breaths in clubs... and in my opinion... any record that makes you get on the dancefloor and feel like 'it doesnt get any fooking better than this' must be better than a tune that makes you stand in the corner scratching yer chin going 'oh... the complexity!... the intellect!!'...

 

if you want to be clever put on a penderecki cd (look him up...or ill send you a copy)

 

ive prolly contradicted loads of my other music rant posts with this but...

 

'this is my truth... whats yours...?'

 

Ian Cashman (ex-clever bastard)

 

[LiamStyles]

I have to say mate that i have beem trying for a couple of weeks now to put into words how i feel about all this, as you call it, "music snobbery". I have struggled everytime trying to post a reaction to it, based on my life experiences within all things musical.

 

You most certainly have succeeded where i failed.

[Mr Happy]

i may have given u stick about this post - but its a damn good post - well said (altho i would disagree witht he comment about music requiring 3 decks and a fx - but thats a personal preferance thing)

[Ian Cashman]

Mr_Happy said:

i may have given u stick about this post - but its a damn good post - well said (altho i would disagree witht he comment about music requiring 3 decks and a fx - but thats a personal preferance thing)

 

how did i know you would find some minor point....lol

 

i stand by my post.. it adds nothing to the music... ive seen ritchie hawtin do it at bugged out and it bored me...

the album he did was ok tho..

 

its just gonna turn into a big one-upmanship style thing..

 

ooh ooh.. so and so plays with 4decks a drum machine and fx

but.. so and so plays with 23 decks a spoon and on hot air balloon with a flag up his arse...

 

detracts from what its all about...

[Mr Happy]

modular1 said:

Mr_Happy said:

i may have given u stick about this post - but its a damn good post - well said (altho i would disagree witht he comment about music requiring 3 decks and a fx - but thats a personal preferance thing)

 

how did i know you would find some minor point....lol

 

i stand by my post.. it adds nothing to the music... ive seen ritchie hawtin do it at bugged out and it bored me...

the album he did was ok tho..

 

its just gonna turn into a big one-upmanship style thing..

 

ooh ooh.. so and so plays with 4decks a drum machine and fx

but.. so and so plays with 23 decks a spoon and on hot air balloon with a flag up his arse...

 

detracts from what its all about...

 

in sum wheres ur right, but i always thought the idea of techno being so dull on its own was that the records were instruments u play rather then tunes u play - if that makes sence?

[LiquidEyes]

Modular1: I know where you are coming from and agree with most of what you say.

 

If you think I am a music snob for saying I have "grown out of" certain styles of music, then you are reading too much into what I originally said. I've got loads of quality records that are not "clever" on any critically acclaimable level, but they are still quality tunes! But in the main, it takes something a bit special and different to keep my interest these days. I tend to favour more underground music but not without exception!

 

I also got into trance about the same time as yourself and I never said I had "grown out" of all trance (or hard house or whatever).

 

I simply dislike mediocre, derivative music, and don't see what is snobbish about that. I like good music whether it's truly underground or in the top 40.

[Guyster]

Exactly.

 

I've been into dance music and clubbing for over 10 years, and my tastes have changed miles, and back again, but I don't regret any of the stuff I was into. I have some records that some people may laugh at, but I love my music and if it's good and I like it, then that's good enough for me.

 

I'm not really down on any music "cos it's [censored]", it's more that there are individual reasons that I like some genres more than others. I'm not a huge fan of HH but there are some DJs/tracks that I think are fantastic, same with DnB, and Techno, and if I don't understand a genre (eg. Happy Hardcore) or if I'm not into it, that doesn't mean I'm going to slag it. Each to thier own.

 

I love a lively debate and I'm prepared to stand up for whatever I'm passionate about, but at the end of the day, it's only music and not a matter of life and death (tho close ).

 

THere'll always be snobbery but that's life. I'm not fussed about it, people are entitled to thier opinions, (even if they're wrong ).

 

As long as people are into something and are willing to justify it and love what they're into, then I'm a happy man

[Ian Cashman]

my post wasnt aimed directly at you liquid....

ive enjoyed reading your posts. it was reading these posts that actually made me want to do a big post cos its these topics that i find interesting... i just wanted people to understand where im actually coming from before i join in on any type of debate that i actually do have an opinion on...lol

[IAHH1562627749]

lovely post mate - found it by searching for sven vath, as thats what i got into first around the same time as you :-) i'm mainly into hardhouse at the moment mainly because of fate and ending up with a lot of hardhouse people.

 

i've heard enough snippets of trance, funk and non-dance music to know i could get into those just as much - i really wished the techno room was on at vibelite so i could see what the scene sounded like these days...

 

as for musical snobbery......people might as well say Red is the best colour. nuffin wrong with taking the piss out of ourselves and each other, but god i used to get so sick of the trance vs hardhouse 'wars'.

 

always so ironic seeing hardhouse people doing the 'elbow dance' at trance people, and trance people doing the chicken dance at hardhouse people. hehehe

 

[Littlemissclubbindiva]

[TomD]

modular1 said:

I LOVED TECHNO!!!!!

 

way i see it, right, personal opinion - the techno you loved morphed, evolved and broke away into a more trancey sound and started its own genre which, as it became more accessible, commercialised into the late 90s trance sound of the continent.

 

and just as the trance sound broke away, so the more wonky edge of techno broke and became almost warp's defining sound, with the likes of autechre and aphex. electro made a name for itself, especially recently, and did its own thing which The Face seized on, made temporarily fashionable and mainstream, and in the process managed to almost kill it, ruin its chances of longevity and permanently tar it with the name "electrocla$h".

 

what i am saying is, i don't think techno ever just turned into a bag-of-nails, scraping-on-a-blackboard amalgamation of noise as a whole. it's still the collective sum of its parts. as a genre it evolved and sub-branched out itself, and these days when i say i'm off out to a "techno night", in many uneducated people's minds they still think it's going to be an ear-blistering, ugly, dirty experience, but in actual fact i expect to be hearing some of the most absorbing, mind-altering, creative and intelligent music that i've ever heard in my life -- anything from hypnotic synth stabs and ethereal pads through to dirty electro beats, messed-up broken drum loops to tunes with full-on housey funk.

 

i think your lost love of techno can be put down to simply not finding the right clubs and tunes. admittedly techno's almost approaching some kind of popularity "peak" right now, but i think that's mainly the hard end (d.a.v.e the drummer, etc), and partly because of the current fashion for finding something "harder and faster" to get rubbered to, and to stick in HH sets.

 

the snobbery that exists out there is simply not because people believe one music type is "better" than another, it's because certain music genres are going nowhere. these genres branched out themselves and carved their own restrictive niche, and that's where they seem to have stayed, being unable to break out, remaining stale. the creative drive that gave birth to them in the first place was lost to commercialism and, as those who were pushing things forward abandoned ship or moved on, things like trance and hard house stopped dead in their tracks and now seem to me like a tired rehash of the same sample sets, only with the melodies in different order. i would think that if i go to a night marked down as "techno" this year, three years down the line the same night will be playing something quite different, as the genre evolves and changes, having no real boundary and therefore no limit on creativity.

 

that's where i could be classed as snobbish because i simply don't want to be hearing the same music three or four years down the line. what many people's tastes (particularly in hard house and trance) are defined as, also seem to be their outer limit, as these narrow-minded people merely won't give anything else the time of day and seem to be quite happy to stick within their genre, uninterested by so much of the new music that exists out there.

 

my tuppence worth, please correct as appropriate.

 

[LiquidEyes]

Tom, I couldn't have put it better myself.

 

TomD said:

i expect to be hearing some of the most absorbing, mind-altering, creative and intelligent music that i've ever heard in my life -- anything from hypnotic synth stabs and ethereal pads through to dirty electro beats, messed-up broken drum loops to tunes with full-on housey funk.

 

Thank you! The problem isn't that people just don't "get" techno, or that it is an elitist genre. It just appeals to the sort of people who LIKE diversity and creativity, whose minds are not closed to music which is not "banging" or "anthemic".

 

Techno is widely misunderstood. As you say, thanks to the more mindless offshoot of techno - essentially a variation on hard house / hardcore / gabba - techno is stereotyped as ear-bleeding minimal shash. However my techno collection varies from quirky/funky/lo-fi cut-up house, through stripped-down minimal trance, to dark, gritty, driving nastiness!

[Ian Cashman]

TomD said:

However my techno collection varies from quirky/funky/lo-fi cut-up house, through stripped-down minimal trance, to dark, gritty, driving nastiness!

 

same as mine was...

[Ian Cashman]

TomD said:

modular1 said:

I LOVED TECHNO!!!!!

 

1]way i see it, right, personal opinion - the techno you loved morphed, evolved and broke away into a more trancey sound and started its own genre which, as it became more accessible, commercialised into the late 90s trance sound of the continent.

 

2]i think your lost love of techno can be put down to simply not finding the right clubs and tunes.

 

1> no.. i just gave up on it completely and switched back to trance... there was no evolving

 

2>no... i was going to the top clubs (orbit/lost), and getting to hear the latest (good) stuff as it came out

 

[TomD]

modular1 said:

there was no evolving

 

whit? techno hasn't evolved at all then? i don't agree with that. is it not just the case that Orbit and Lost weren't playing much of the old trancey-type techno that you liked any more.

 

i'm not trying to tell you your music tastes here by the way; i'm just trying to defend techno as a genre because as it changes i would say it's always going to lose some passengers along the way, and at the same time pick up some new ones.