From: ebestrom@mac.cc.macalstr.edu
Newsgroups: alt.emusic
Subject: new strains to dominate
Date: 11 Apr 92 21:47:11 GMT
Article-I.D.: mac.1992Apr11.154711.2419
Organization: Macalester College

hello folks! d'you ever feel reeeeally bored with the whole musical smorgasbord
that once gave you such spasms of ecstatic transcendent pleasure? I used to not
understand and feel irritated with people who complained that they were getting
bored with their radio shows on the college freeform station.  Now I've had
shows on the station pretty continuously since 1988 and I understand somewhat
what they mean.  Records are misfiled or stolen with a fearsome regularity.But
the main problem is the garbage that comes into the station in te first place.
	I used to love Hardcore: Minor Threat, Circle Jerks, Fang, DK, etc.
That was back in the early 8O's when I was a strong healthy youngster. My mom
had been pushing at me to "get into rock and roll" because "you're going to
become a teenager soon and teenagers need to be conversant in rock."  My mom is
a teacher and talks that way. Anyway, I tried to force myself to like top 4O
shit and it didn't work.  I tried to like J.Geils band and I ended up liking
Falco, which lead me to Kraftwerk and Monsoon and then to the Circle Jerks.  I
had found the left of the dial.  Then, because i was a junior high geek and I
had to get self-esteem from something, I began hardening my inner ear.  I
wouldn't listen to music about love (there's this author Klaus Theweleit,
whose works about males hardening themselves and avoiding love, union with
other people's bodies and emotional sympathy, as well as mush in
favor of violence,stiffness, dryness, hardness) and only listened to harder and
HARDER hardcore with violent, political, or depressive/hateful lyrics. Since I
believed hardcore was the stripped down avantgarde of rock and roll, I began to
listen to the avantgarde of classical music- the tape loops and treated sounds
excerpted from nature of concrete music as well as the weird sounds of
serialist, 12-tone, or aleatoric music, especially when rendered with primitive
 unwarm synthesizers, made me feel badass and icy in my room with the lights
out. When I would run into the Buzzcocks by accident on the radio, I would
listen furtively and restrain myself from taping them because they made me feel 
MUSHY. Then a few years later I was talking to this really good hiphop DJ. from
time to time I liked hiphop and electro-funk like George Clinton because
throughout the pre-Beastie Boys era hiphop seemed to me like a disenfranchised
neverplayedonthemainstreamradio rebel music, even if at that time only a few
things were overtly poltical, lyricwise. I had mixed feelings about how
avantgarde-originated thingamabobs like Vocoder-treated voices had gone from
the classical avantgarde to Laurie Anderson to various funk and hiphop folks
(e.g. ZAPP) and finally to the Transformers cartoon shows.
Anyway, this DJ was describing to me how he thought rap/hiphop was selling out and getting too
big and how he was losing interest in it, we compared that to how I thought
Hardcore was on the edge of rock-based music but that since the mid-80's all
these hardcore bands were either retreating from this edge and going speedmetal
and apolitical, going pop, or breaking up.  We settled on belief in a creative
glass ceiling above our two parallel music forms, from which cheesy artists
were retreating and selling out, either creatively or commercially or both. But
this DJ also turned me on to the idea of Acid House as an avantgarde music for
m in its own right.  While ornate artrockymetally 7O's rockshit was stripped of its guitar
solos and even readily intelligible lyrics into fast elemental Hardcore, a
parallel movement was happening that lead to House.  In the inner city in the
70's, bands could not always be afforded for parties, so DJ's would play
records (this lead to all forms of Disco. Gays also turned away
from bands to records for parties at this time, because of not being able to
afford bands for every party, and also because many bands would descriminate
against them and look askance at them when they danced together and refuse to
play at their gigs. Records were the obvious solution.) At any rate, rappers
would do their exhortations over records and hiphop was born.  The strict verse
/chorus/verse/chorus/bridge/verse/chorus/fadeout pattern of typical popsongs
was often shattered by the rappers. Then, with House in the early 8o's, the
beat became the only constant. DJ's would play two or three records at once and
randomly, pschedelically dip nonsensical snippets of words or melodies into the  
freeform mix. The DJ also taught me to think of dance music or sticky pop like
Abba as mind and booty control.  Good pop will stay with you whether you like
or not. Good dance music will make you start to shake without intending to.
THis is power! And it takes skill to fashion the beats and hooks that will do
this to people.
	At any rate I digress myself something fierce.  What my endpoint is, is
that I hope to see a use of loud guitars, samples taken from unconventional
sources and digitally screwed-up, and rhythm tracks of unconventional samples
played in superfast polyrhythms that are impossible for human drummers to play.
I want to see a merging of industrial dance with hardcore and maybe hiphop and
bits of death/grindcore.  I
want to hear not just kraftwerk sampled, but tom waits and nick drake and the
cro mags, and i want to hear these samples fucked with to barely recognizable
states.GRRR! yes Ministry's new stuff is fun, and Consolidated is fun
(eventhough I believe in all their causes, HOO boy are they preachy) and Lords
of Acid is fun as well as some really fucked up "techno/hardcore/new beat
underground European rave music" which I'm not very knowledgeable on but I
think points the way toward cracking the ceiling of creativity and ascending to 
new musical forms, not just pastisching or ironically reviving old ones.
	Well, there it is.  I've excreted a massive load of material. I hope
you aren't dead yet of boredom by the time you reach this point. Please write
me if you think I'm full up with shit or if you agree with me and want to tell
me of new bands that kick buttox. My adress is ebestrom@macalstr.edu and if you
want to contact me in the real world and send me tapes of your freaky bands
which I will play on my radio show, my adress is 3821 Washburn Ave So.
Minneapolis, MN 5541O, USA  
	love and octopi, Erich
p.s. I like mush and the buzzcocks and abba now, sincerely.    
Newsgroups: alt.emusic