Yeah, man, I know just how you feel! (Not!)

Kodwo Eshun does a handy job beginning his series of articles of elucidating the subtle differences between the varieties of electronic music that has evolved over the past 20 years, starting from the so-called Last Days of Disco (as it were) with Donna Summers’ seemingly endless mix of “I Feel Love” and ranging up through the scales to the, uh, Born-Again Days of Disco with the sweet groove of Thomas Bangalter’s “Music Sounds Better With You,” which just goes to show that disco, in fact, never sucked, and those of us that held on to the flame were at the very least secretly cool.
The folks that claimed disco sucked were likely those that just couldn’t keep dancing through the wee hours—at least not without the white powder fuel of cocaine and speed, and round about 1983, they burned out, cut their hair, got real jobs, and headed for suburbia to start familes.
Ironically, at around the same time the inner cities of Detroit and Chicago also headed off to yuppie-dom, led by the Belleville Three: Juan Atkins (a.k.a. Model 500), Derrick May (a.k.a. Rhythm is Rhythm), and Kevin Saunderson, who started to forge a new, hip “futuristic” brand of house music—so named by legions of club-goers surrounding Frankie Knuckles’ Warehouse nightclub.
Though these two followings marched to the beat of subtly different drums—in that the Detroit, electro-house and acid-house inspired legions of sober dancers to get up and “jack it” as compared to the Chicago deep house, which was clearly much more chemically altered—both came around to converge at the onset of the 90’s in a darker, harder style of music. Scary stuff for the suburbanites, whose suspicions and worries about their kids were pumped up by acid house producer Bam-Bam’s “Where’s Your Child?” and brought to a full scale panic in 1995 with Green Velvet’s “Flash”—the prototypical rave track—evoking strobe-lit basements and warehouses jam packed with little kiddies sucking on laughing gas or worse.
I suppose the parents’ fears were not misplaced.
I’ll be the first to admit that there are more than a few pictures circulating out in cyber-space of yours truly sucking on a balloon. Indeed, it’s something that rather warms my heart to think about those manic, choking guffaws; blood rushing through my ears; a high pitched ringing blasting through my head, and I, myself, snapshotting my cluster of friends with flash after flash from a disposable camera.
Fun times.
Quite coincidentally, on the other side of the Atlantic, a U.K. producer also named Dan Tyler was injecting house music with a Samba flare, along with the other half of the Idjut Boys, Conrad McDonnell. Actually, I had never heard of them until about 5 years ago when I had first moved to Los Angeles, and they were spinning one of the last truly underground warehouse parties downtown—that is—(dare I say it?)—an old skool rave—the kind you had to find about on the down-low; back when ecstasy was still hip, and had not quite been eclipsed by crystal meth and GHB.
That said, however, I will acknowledge the days of glowsticks and matching Manic Panic neon-dyed hair were quickly fading. Armand Van Helden’s dark garage in the U.K. was teeter-tottering with the gay circuit’s jungle into very black, very grim, very scary places indeed—as evinced by the many raids and eventual closures of even the swankiest clubs in NYC—the Limelight, the Tunnel, and TWILO. One too many overdosed, under-aged bodies forced the police to shut them down, despite the huge influences of master DJ/producers Junior Vasquez, Danny Tenaglia, and Victor Calderone (who, strangely, goes unmentioned in Eshun’s article) all of whom would collaborate with the biggest names in mainstream pop music like Madonna and Whitney Houston to produce the extended re-mix singles, which often outsold the radio-edited full-length albums.
I found it also odd to note that Eshun doesn’t mention quite possibly the most famous DJ of all: Boston’s Moby, who managed to straddle both the world of club tracks as well as produce his own songs as an artist. “Play” would go on to reap multi-platinum sales figures, and Moby would also scratch his own initials in the history of dance music with the most beats per minute in a song.
Speaking of scratching, Eshun’s next article covering breakbeats and Drum ‘N Bass, touches on some of the pioneers of scratchidilea, as he call it, but again, I heard the notes he wasn’t playing, so to speak—where was San Francisco’s Q-Bert, who claimed a title of the Fastest Scratcher in the industry? Where was Bad Boy Bill, who, similarly, awed fans and executives alike with his mastery of not two, but four turntables at once?
Truth be told, much of that article would have come off as unintelligible gibberish—that is: if I didn’t know what Eshun was talking about, I wouldn’t know what he was talking about.
Eliding words like robovocallization or rhythmatecian might seem kitschy to those of us whose club experience encompasses enough points of reference to make some sort of sense of his lingo, but I would also postulate that it is a that much smaller audience who can comprehend the symbolism of a Cartesian prison in terms of dance music.
I feel my beliefs about the overly pretentious and obscure terminology are valid, particularly in Eshun’s last article, in which he attempts to deconstruct, then reconstruct, and vice-versa, ad nauseum the language and very alphabet of so-called Black music with vague references to French author, Arthur Rimbaud, quintessential 80’s horror director John Carpenter, and even WWII German Panzer tanks.
Any way you read it; it’s a mess—sort of like how Alicia Silverstone’s character in 1995’s “Clueless” describes one girl, but while Eshun manages to fumble through the last decade of dance, never does he manage as succinctly as she.