Jul 18, 2011 1:10 AM

Musica Globalista: Simon Reynolds, 'Party Like It's Nineteen Ninety Three'

PARTY LIKE IT’S NINETEEN NINETY THREE

In my New York Times piece from yesterday

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/17/arts/music/new-pop-music-sounds-like-its-predecessors.html

you’ll find a nod to my mein host : a citation of Bruce’s concept of “atemporality”. (((That's very nice of Simon, but I purloined that highly useful concept from noted clothing designer William Gibson.)))

As discussed in the piece, the prime example of pop atemporality at work today is the fact that when you turn on Top 40 radio you hear a nonstop onslaught of crassly euphoric, ruthlessly uplifting dance pop that sounds just like club sounds from the Nineties. Every other song on the radio seems to feature the exhortation “put your hands in the air”.

I’m not the only one to have noted this bizarre recrudescence of cheese-trance and Eurohouse right at the heart of the charts (see Further Reading links at end of this post). 90s club trax, fused with vocal/melodic elements from R&B and rap = the Sound of Pop 2011.

Pitbull's #1 hit “Give Me Everything” is the perfect example of the banging and bingeing party-hard sound that’s got 2011 in a strangehold. “I might drink a little more than I should/tonight.”, “grab somebody sexy/tell them ‘hey!/Give me everything tonight’,” “I can't promise you tomorrow/But I can promise tonight”, “etc etc. But the sleazy come-ons are draped over pop-trance, the most sexless, sterile, Teletubbies-innocuous form of dance music.

It’s like rave if it had been fuelled not by MDMA but by Viagra. And hatched out of Las Vegas, not Ibiza.

These past several months, so often I’ve heard a song on the radio and thought “this could be a 1993 Jam and Spoon tune”. Then I learn that that AraabMUZIK’s “Golden Touch” is actually based around a chunk of “Right in the Night (Fall In Love With Music)” by Jam & Spoon.

That’s just one of a number of tracks on the critically-smiled-upon AraabMUSIK’s album Electronic Dream that lifts licks from club tunes from the Nineties.

Then there’s the David Guetta remix of Snoop Dogg’s “Sweat”, which recycles the riff from Felix’s 1992 anthem “Don’t You Want Me.”

I can remember dancing to “Don’t You Want Me” at the gay club Trade in London, which opened at 4 AM on Saturday Night/Sunday Morning and went on until the mid-afternoon. The Felix tune was one of the templates for the sound later called Nu-NRG (basically the Eighties gay club sound of hi-NRG merged with hard house and techno).

And then—coming from the San Francisco area, where perhaps these sounds are simply part of the musical water-table–there’s Kreayshawn’s “Online Fantasy”, which sounds a bit like something by Rabbit On the Moon, or Hardkiss. Even her look is a kind of composite of candy-raver and gangsta chick.

The question that I didn’t really get to in the NY Times piece is why, exactly, have all these Nineties sounds, originally designed for rolling and tripping, reemerged right in the epicenter of pop music?

Various theories could be mooted
1/ Gaga-ization
Lady Gaga’s monstrous success has overhauled the sound of pop in the second decade of the 21st Century, virtually making its adoption the terms of entry.
Supporting evidence for this might be Rihanna’s “S&M”—a bizarre example of a major R&B star, with a characterful voice, pretty much turning herself into another artist on just about every level–lyrically, vocally, melodically, sonically, presentationally.

But I’m not sure Gaga singlehandedly caused this sonic/rhythmic shift from Afro to Euro.... I think she anticipated and rode the wave.... it involves a whole bunch of near-simultaneous star trajectories, from Ke$ha to Black Eyed Peas to Flo Rida with “Right Round”... a whole heap of producers reaching the same conclusions...

2/ Escapism
Times are tough. Everyone wants to get away, ergo everything sounds like Haddaway.

3/ Economics
Domestic sales alone can’t provide the kind of profits that rap/R&B performers and producers are looking for, they can’t appeal to American tastes exclusively like they did once, they need worldwide appeal, and the sound of the transglobal overground is generic club a/k/a Eurohouse, which sells not just in Europe but in Latin America, Asia, everywhere on the planet.

I think theory #3 is the most convincing and also intellectually appealing, since it’s the most cynical and structural-determinist, in the sense that circumstances have dictated these choices for the top echelon of producers.

But this still leaves a further mystery, one that’s germane to Retromania: why does “Euro” have to stay stuck in the Nineties?

Is it simply not possible to take this style any further than it had reached by about 1997? Was this kind of functional-yet-anthemic trancepop simply perfected, finished off as a style?

Certainly my sense of what happened within the non-hip mainstream of dance culture is that the style has been reiterated, with minor adjustments and barely-perceptible shifts, ever since the late Nineties (when trance had a kind of Second Coming with Gatecrasher and the Mitshubishi Sound). For the most part, the same DJs who were in the premier league in the late 90s are still the world’s most popular deejays, Tiesto and that ilk.

Adding to the sense of pop time going in strange loops, within hip hop/R&B itself there was already that big “B boys on E” moment around the cusp of the new millennium: Missy Elliott and Ja Rule and Jay Z making blatantly techno-y, flagrantly XTC-referencing tunes.

So it’s really like the idea of “futuristic dance” got frozen at a certain point....

And yet, for all my retromaniac bemusement, I do find some of this stuff exciting.

Particularly the exertions of this young lady...

“We R Who We R” is a fine riposte to ageing ravers – a defiantly ignorant, prettily vacant stance that says “don’t know much about no end-of-history... and we don’t care”.

“Tonight we're going hard
“Just like the world is ours
“We're tearing it apart
“You know we're superstars
“We're dancing like we're dumb
“Our bodies going numb
“We'll be forever young”