Dangerous & Lazy

Some time ago, Owen suggested that Snoop Dogg’s “Sensual Seduction” was “wierdly desolate,” which is right. Part of what’s wierd about it is that it’s not obvious (at least to me) how much of that desolation is intentional. I’ve read a few people praising Snoop Dogg for the braveness of taking a disco direction; but the electro-disco revival has been bubbling under at least since Daft Punk’s Discovery. I wonder if the emotional tone of “Sensual Seduction” is simply a formal requirement of the genre; the doyenne of the revival, Sally Shapiro, makes records so icy I have to skip them if they happen to come up on my MP3 player on a winter day. I recently happened upon another participant, Sébastien Tellier, who, being French rather than Swedish, goes for more of a post-coital tristesse.

Which reminds me, without really being relevant, of k-punk’s description of (not actually that) new dubstep offshoot wonky as “occupying the tipping point where dubstep’s loping lugubriousness (d)evolves into a UK crunkstep” (which tells me more about the genre than an entire article k-punk links to—is the debate between defenders and opponents of the hardcore continuum a debate about whether or not one can actually write about music, rather than merely gesturing in its direction?). Anyway, reading k-punk encouraged me to check some out. First I listened to Flying Lotus’s “Los Angeles” album, which sounds like the techstep/broken beat stuff Giles Peterson used to play (and, for all I know, still does—the extraordinary, and in its own way impressive, boringness of this kind of stuff does suggest that it will last forever). YouTube has some more interesting tracks of his, and also stuff by Rustie and Zomby, of which this collaboration is my favorite. There’s a strange scrambling of time periods, mixing mid-90s hip-hop, early-90s darkcore and mid-80s Nintendo.