While other UW students have been out battling killer ladybugs and trying to land a place on the commercial wasteland that is MTV, I’ve been immersed in the newest-of-new dance music.
With his latest Perfecto release, Paul Oakenfold succeeds in taking the Superstar DJ image way beyond what rationality allows by playing the first-ever gig at the Great Wall of China. The only man-made monument that is visible from outer space (and a gathered crowd of 15,000) was treated to a two-hour set of monotony and pouring rain. Maybe I’m just painting myself as mortally American here, but there are only so many live-mix albums I can handle.
Sure, this double disc has a few choice cuts from Ian Brown, Blackwatch, Bjork and Layo & Bushwacka, but Oakie’s purposed journey from “trance to progressive to breaks to house” failed to jive my elbows and get me dancing in an epileptic boogie.
But just because the superstar DJ failed the funk doesn’t signal a decline in dance music. Three albums (so new that you’ll have to buy them as imports if you want to see them this year) are keeping dance music experimental and interesting.
Two comps, Soul Jazz Records’ New York Noise and Rough Trade’s Post Punk Vol. 01 chronicle some of the most influential underground music ever released.
The Rough Trade release examines the recent phenomenon of electroclash (everybody’s doing it) and retro-sounding dance music. Their selection follows the death disco and crispy, funk-junk rock that blossomed after the death of punk in the late ’70s, compiling 26 years’ worth of should-have-been hits.
Gang of Four’s unstoppable “I Found That Essence Rare,” Wire’s “Ex Lion Tamer” and Public Image Limited’s “Careering” stand out as the more successful tunes, but tracks by Blurt, Liliput, Scritti Politti, Gramme, The Pop Group and Young Marble Giants hold up the criminally under-heard (especially in the States) majority.
The Raincoats’ off-kilter cover of The Kinks’ “Lola” defines the imploding sound of Rough Trade’s post-punk. James White and the Blacks’ “Contort Yourself (Original Version)” funkifies the (at the time) newly dead punk genre with exquisite flare. And newcomers like Erase Errata, Chicks on Speed and New York City phenom The Rapture allow listeners to actually understand and hear the influence of the older material on today’s bands.
New York Noise will find you drowning in vinyl beats and drowsy melody. Rahmelzee vs. K.Rob’s “Beat Bop” displays the early bliss of underground hip-hop. DNA’s “5:30” reveals a sliver-of-a-genius band that would have a heavy influence on the art-rock of bands like Sonic Youth and Giant Sand. The Contortions, Defunkt and the insanely talented Liquid Liquid lend some spazz-funk gems to the mix, complete with squawking sax and tilting bass lines.
The Blood’s fragmented “Button Up” retains an inhuman flow while toppling all over itself. And Glenn Branca’s “Lesson No. 1” creates an eight-minute crescendo of guitar licks and chimes setting course to melt dance music.
Hang All DJs, the second volume from Radio Soulwax, showcases the outer limits of pop-dance music. This follow-up release to 2002’s 2 Many DJs creates a mixological head rush by systematically combining every danceable musical genre into a single clusterbomb basement-party package.
Senor Coconut’s Latin robotica falls away into Sonic Youth’s “Kool Thing,” which fades into a remixed version of Jackson 5’s “Ain’t No Sunshine,” where a young Michael’s schoolboy yearnings are blasted apart by erogenous metallic beats and a deeper-than-deep bass hook. The rest of the mix will sever the ears from your head as The Rolling Stones, The Prodigy, Devo, The Chemical Brothers, Eliott Smith, Air, B52s, 2 Live Crew, Spiller, James Brown and Adam and the Ants meld into a digital orgy of face-crushing dance fornication.
Remixes of Madonna, Chaka Khan and Inner City dismember any formal dance-music science and enable the tracks to rejoice in their own unique, hydraulic, beat-crushing symmetry. While a demo version of “Billy Jean” seems uncharacteristically fragile among the surrounding waves of beat demolition, Michael requesting higher levels in his headphones and opting for nonsensical noises when he forgets the song’s words lends evident humanity to the Soulwax mix.
The music of Soulwax, Rough Trade and “New York Noise” will never play to the masses from a festival in the Grand Canyon or a 7-Up-sponsored rave at the base of the Pyramids, but they can slice the fader fingers from an army of poseur superstar-DJ zombies trying to gig shows that are more dull than their dusty Sasha and Digweed records.
