8Sided Blog

a celebration of sound, culture, and the punk rock dream

That Word Doesn’t Mean Anything Anymore

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Philip Sherburne Loves to Write About Records
a.k.a. An interview with one of electronic music’s most respected journalists.
Philip Sherburne Loves to Write About Records
a.k.a. An interview with one of electronic music’s most respected journalists.

SR: During the past decade, there’s been a larger reevaluation of pop music and its merits—what many refer to as poptimism—and it’s prompted a major shift in music journalism, especially at outlets like Pitchfork. Do you think that’s been a good thing?

PS: I do in the sense that people are taking seriously styles of music that for a long time were just written off. It’s caused journalists and readers to rethink a lot of assumptions about what constitutes value, and it’s undone a lot of prejudices about women and people of color making music and what styles are valid for critical appraisal. At the same time, when it comes to contemporary pop, what I find frustrating as a reader and a listener is that I sometimes find the discourse to be far more interesting than the music. For many records, there’s not a lot of substance there beyond the fame of the artist, and I don’t think that the critical discourse acknowledges that. Still, it’s hard to generalize, and my opinion probably reflects my own tastes, which are quite experimental and idiosyncratic.

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PS: … if we’re using the word underground to talk about dance music that’s made primarily to fill nightclubs where the business model is based on alcohol sales, then that word doesn’t really mean anything anymore.

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PS: … as the scene has become more diversified, not just in terms of demographics but also in terms of geography and styles of music, I think it’s become harder to do an electronic music publication that represents the breadth of everything and still feels central. There’s been an explosion of musicians, DJ and venues; maybe the answer is to go back to more locally focused publications. That might be a better way to represent what’s actually happening in electronic music.

A few of my favorite takeaways from Shawn Reynaldo’s in-depth interview with veteran music journalist and reviewer Philip Sherburne. All instances of emphasis are mine. The full piece goes up behind a paywall tomorrow so read it while you can (if you’re a paid subscriber to Shawn’s excellent First Floor newsletter then you’ll continue to have access).

Watch: Good Looking Records Documentary from 1996

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Here’s a fantastic find that hopefully won’t get pulled offline anytime soon … it’s a BBC documentary from 1996 focusing on Good Looking Records and LTJ Bukem, right on the cusp of their peak.

Reminisce: People smoking in clubs! All the DJs playing vinyl! Excited that you can make a track in the studio and play it out a week later, but only after the dubplate is pressed! Worried that your record sales will suffer because a shop in Japan is selling cassette tapes of radio sets! One of the hottest DJs in Britain getting “as much as £1000” per gig!

In addition to all that, the doc is a brilliant glimpse into the international DJ and independent dance label scenes in the heyday of the mid-1990s. Many things are different, many things are the same. And business manager Tony Fordham’s adventures in Asia could be a documentary series of their own. Certainly worthy of an hour of your time.


Modern Times – LTJ Bukem Documentary (1996) by junglednbdocumentary

EDM After The Drop

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I’m not one to complain about EDM – it’s sort of like complaining about the weather on Mars to me – and SFX’s troubles just give me a headache, so I usually avoid posting here about either. But this article on NPR regarding the intertwined futures of the two is a great read.

This section gave me a giggle, and seriously makes some sense:

Few acts today stand with one foot in SFX’s world and another in the underground, says Marea Stamper, who DJs and produces music as the Black Madonna and works as a creative director and talent buyer at Chicago club Smart Bar. “It’s like comparing Kiss to the Clash,” she observes. “They’re just not related.”



[Music journalist Philip] Sherburne agrees with Stamper’s comparison between SFX-scale acts and vintage pop-metal bands. “Just sonically, Avicii or mainstream EDM sounds to me like Van Halen’s ‘Jump,'” Sherburne says. “It’s the same synthesizers; it’s the same pleasure centers. You could say that Alesso is Bon Jovi. Bon Jovi took metal or hard rock and aimed it squarely at a very mainstream, middle-American public. That’s exactly the same thing: These artists have taken what was once a subculture and redesigned it along a pop format. I don’t know the economics of hair metal, but it seems to me pretty clear that [with EDM] we’re in the era of the Wingers and the Whitesnakes.”


Drew Daniel of Matmos and Soft Pink Truth is also perceptive and a bit nostalgic:

“There were always limits and doubts that I had about the utopian ambitions of the rave era, but there was still a feeling that raving could mean cutting ties to business as usual,” Daniel says. “It’s epitomized in that kind of hilarious gatefold drawing inside one of those early Prodigy LPs.”



The artwork for the 1994 album Music for the Jilted Generation shows a long-haired raver cutting a bridge that connects the toxic, heavily policed city to an idyllic meadow.



“That exemplifies this idea that radical forms of dance music could also lead to radical forms of creating community,” Daniel says. “There’s always been a spectrum, so I don’t want to say there used to be a good thing and now there’s a terrible thing — that’s overly simplified.”


Be sure to check out the full article.

Sample Clearance With Steve Albini

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The Quietus:

Seeking clearance for the vocal sample, Powell emailed Albini, saying how much the music of Big Black had meant to him and explaining what he did. Mr Albini subsequently replied that though it seemed that “you’ve got a cool thing set up for yourself” he was hardly partial to the sort of fruity EBM that Powell makes. “I am absolutely the wrong audience for this kind of music. I’ve always detested mechanized dance music, its stupid simplicity, the clubs where it was played, the people who went to those clubs, the drugs they took, the shit they liked to talk about, the clothes they wore, the battles they fought amongst each other… basically all of it, 100 percent hated every scrap.”



Oh dear. Albini continued: “The electronic music I liked was radical and different, shit like the White Noise, Xenakis, Suicide, Kraftwerk, and the earliest stuff form Cabaret Voltaire, SPK and DAF. When that scene and those people got co-opted by dance/club music I felt like we’d lost a war. I detest club culture as deeply as I detest anything on earth. So I am against what you’re into, and an enemy of where you come from”.



Despite this, Albini was quite happy to let Powell use the vocal sample: “I have no problem with what you’re doing,” he wrote. “I haven’t bothered listening to the links, mainly because I’m in a hotel with crappy internet at the moment but also because it probably wouldn’t be to my taste and that wouldn’t help either of us. In other words, you’re welcome to do whatever you like with whatever of mine you’ve gotten your hands on. Don’t care. Enjoy yourself.”


Update: Steve Albini vs. Dance Music: A Timeline