Infiniti (Juan Atkins) :: Game One
everyone’s got secrets, you know. and who doesn’t love to hear about the next man’s? (to live vicariously though him or rather just to calculate our moral standing in this world). well, sure as hell, i’ve got one; and it’s a little dirty alright.
but, no. i’m not ashamed.
say it loud.
UH-HUH.
say it proud.
THAT’S RIGHT
you know what i like? i like Dance Music.
now before you go and choke yourself into a state—all indignant scowls, furrowed brows and moistened murmurs—over the fact that, like, DUH, it’s eight into the aughts and even your hillbilly uncle in Pasipuchammuck, Rhode Island picked up the latest Gorillaz album. cause i’m here to talk about the capital-D Dance, not its bastard children. i might even be inclined to invoke the dreaded C-word despite the bad taste it leaves in my mouth; cause as much as this could be the soundtrack to one chapter of your appropriately bohemian midnight boudoir dance parties, it’s really meant for the Club.
i’ll spare you a rigorous history but supply a few tidbits of crudely oversimplified context instead. soul, funk and r&b begot disco; and disco begot house; and house and funk begot techno; and Eliud begot Eleazar; and the Lord said “this is good.” contrary to popular perception, techno wasn’t always the icy, teutonic clamor of sports car commercials and Polish discotheques. it was smart, soulful, and progressive—and, at the time, the latest in the long, distinguished tradition of innovative Black American musical genres. pioneered by a group of three Detroit teens (Juan Atkins, Derrick May, Kevin Saunderson) who were greatly influenced by a motley mélange of P-Funk, futurism, and Detroit’s slow urban decay, techno first emerged from the bedroom in 1981 with Atkin’s Alleys of Your Mind. perhaps no one has yet better captured the sound and genesis of this music in print better than May who once described techno as “just like Detroit, a complete mistake. It’s like George Clinton and Kraftwerk stuck in an elevator.”
admittedly, i was hesitant to post this song, or a dance track of any kind. taken out of context—the club, the dance, the mix—its simplicity and monotony, while both essential to the track’s purpose, may strike you as liabilities rather than strengths. but it’s a mistake to evaluate dance music by the metrics of pop and rock. free yourselves from the tyranny of verse chorus verse, if just for a moment. there is an arc rather than a rhythm to the structure. a glacial unfolding. rhythm here is all micro, and swingin; the skittering, clipped skips of the hi-hat and gloriously reverbed, hollow stabs of keyboard compel my feet and hips to feats unhip but primal and natural and culturally unmolested. this is the secret of Dance Music, and mine, too. dirty, indeed.
Game One (7.9MB MP3)
Infiniti (Juan Atkins) (myspace, more info, and more)
the Effigies :: Security
sporting a look halfway between skinhead and steelworker, The Effigies were emblematic of Chicago’s rough and tumble origins and its culturally dominant working class and a harbinger of the look and attitude that would command the local punk and hardcore scene for years to come.* musically**, they cast the die as well, weaving muscular guitars with deftly crafted hooks and melodies that might even have you humming if you weren’t so busy ducking punches. their sound was big and brawny like the city that spawned them. this is the foundation, and a solid one at that; hefty enough in and of itself to have guaranteed the Effigies a prominent place in the local punk pantheon. but something else is going on here: just listen.
though not without precedent elsewhere in the world, the Effigies no less boldly grafted select phonemes of dub and disco onto a regionally distinct but unequivocally American punk syntax, producing a musical creole unseen before or since. British dub-punk hybrids (The Clash, The Ruts) were mostly a success, but on occasion toothless, and certainly more pop that our boys from Chicago could ever hope to be. PIL probably trod the more righteous path first, with a nod to (if not a warm embrace of) the galloping hi-hat and steady 4/4 of 70s Manhattan clubland. i won’t delude myself into thinking that the scores of post-Rapture dance-punk neophytes lay any claim to this ragged, midwestern troupe or that their novel experiment had much significance to Music at large; but it was honest and—dare I say—a little bit courageous, and that means the world to me. architect and designer Charles Rennie Mackintosh once wrote “there is hope in honest error, none in the icy perfections of the mere stylist.” yeah, I like that.
* to contrast, the dominant punk scenes in the US in 1981 were the decidedly middle class, straight edge Washington DC scene (‘Georgetown punks’), the blue collar jock-punks of the militantly straight edge Boston scene and all of those misfits out in LA. the beer-swilling sons of Polish laborers were unmistakably odd men out.
** the Haunted Town five-track EP was released on Autumn Records in 1981. it was later re-released in 1984 in Ruthless Records with Security as an added track. the Bodybag / Security 7” single was originally released on Ruthless Records in 1982.
Security (6.3MB MP3)
the Effigies (homepage, more info)
G.I.S.M. :: Endless Blockads For the Pussyfooter
i wouldn’t normally decide to post a hardcore song in a venue like this; hardcore’s very obviously already a niche market at our age. for some, it’s probably just a nasty little reminder of a time long past. remember that show, that basement, that boy, that girl? this won’t be a sermon on the virtues of it, either. we don’t need any more converts, thanks. those waters are muddy enough as it is. ‘then why is he posting a hardcore song?’ you ask. because, hopefully, this one will make you laugh. and that, my friends, is a rare and beautiful thing.
that’s not to say that i don’t take this song seriously; this isn’t the laughter of slapstick or comic relief i speak of (though i do find the song both ridiculous and sublime). i laugh because i think it’s beautifully naivé. or should i say ‘natural’? like other cultural exports, hardcore was witnessed, mimiced and adapted to new milieus all over the world. now, i’m not suggesting that punks in Tokyo weren’t aware of the context from which this music originated. i suspect that they were at least as well-studied as their western counterparts, if not more so. rather, i think that from their unique cultural vantage point—this intersection of east and west—that the rigid subgenre boundaries of rock music so deeply embedded in western scenes just seemed irrelevant. and so they enjoyed a freedom rarely encountered in the US or UK.
just listen: a fuzz tone to put the entire Crypt Records roster to shame; metal histrionics ripped from your favorite NWOBHM band; grotesque lyrics, vomited (or belched) distastefully enough to make even the most seasoned hardcore aficionado stop and take notice. G.I.S.M.—known alternately as Guerrilla Incendiary Sabotage Mutineer, Grand Imperialism Social Murder, or God In the Schizoid Mind—are perhaps the most revered and elusive of early 80s Japanese hardcore bands. Put your thoughts about hardcore aside for a moment, and give ‘em a listen and perhaps you might hear why.
Endless Blockads For the Pussyfooter
G.I.S.M. (fansite, discography)
Jesu :: Conqueror
there are some things that i’ve just never been able to take sides on. but since there’s nothing quite as offensive as the fence sitter, my tastes have sought out—since as early as i can remember, really—that which lives in the margins. now don’t you worry there; this is no ode to obscurity (though maybe one to extremes). i don’t for a moment doubt that many of you rest your black metal epics nonchalantly next to twee sixties bubblegum romps and hallucinogenic teutonic dirges. but how often do you hear your musical worlds collide on one record, and so perfectly? friends, i’d like to introduce to you: Jesu.
it’s really quite simple. so much so in fact, that i almost can’t believe it wasn’t done before. sure we’ve had the LOUD and the *beautiful* before, but were Codeine or My Bloody Valentine ever quite so brutal? ah, to have been privy to this eureka moment! disciples of the heavy-slow and the fast-fast will surely genuflect at the name Justin Broadrick (Godflesh, Napalm Death), but that needn’t put anyone else off. because who hasn’t before felt at once so radiant and yet, oppressed? music for the fiendish and forlorn. but for man or for monster? i think we are both.
Conqueror
Jesu (homepage)