I’m probably not the right age or in the right place to really get New Rave; but still, it seems like a remarkably pointless movement. Hadouken range from alright to quite good, I guess, though “Liquid Lives” seems a bit like a poor man’s Audio Bullys.
More baffling are The Klaxons. “From Atlantis to Interzone” starts of like a pleasant enough rave revival, then turns into fucking Franz Ferdinand for no clear reason. Well, the reason becomes a bit clearer on listening to their awful cover of “Not Over Yet,” which appears to be an attempt to produce a dance record for people who don’t like, or perhaps have never heard, dance music. “We loved that song, and wanted to play it on guitars,” they said, apparently. Well, OK, I guess; but why on earth would anyone want to do that?
A day when the Spice Girls are rumored to be reforming seems like an appropriate time to mention my surprise that, according to Google, no-one has made the obvious “zig-a-zig objet petit a” joke. Or maybe ten years ago it didn’t occur to anyone to use a global computer network to disseminate such a mediocre gag.
In other Spice Girls news, I was interested to find an article on Girl Power that says a lot of what I had vaguely imagined might go into a theory of Marxism-Britneyism.
I must admit, I found the short lived outbreak of 90s-pop hostilities a little depressing. Not because the songs were terrible, although some of them certainly were, indeed the opposite; the music of the early 90s was often so good, current pop music can’t really stand up. I realize there’s a danger of nostalgia, but this isn’t just a matter of subjective taste. The diffusion of acid house and hardcore into chart music that was such a big feature of the early 90s is, in hindsight, kind of amazing, and a positive development that I can’t see much to equal today. Marky Mark is a particularly good example. When I remembered his existence, I had no memory of what the song sounded like; certainly, it didn’t occur to me that a manufactured pop idol would was launched with a song that owes so much to an Italo-house classic. If you want to be depressed, just compare Marky Mark’s amazing track with the contemporary equivalents (James Blunt, maybe, or Daniel Powter).
Well, there are a couple of contemporary trends that give some hope. One would be Timbaland’s remarkable queering of R&B, particularly on the Justin Timberlake album. Pleasingly, this is being picked up by other R&B and hip-hop artists, particularly in the Bay Area, as I discovered from this great hyphy mixtape (mix-podcast?). Particular good is Berkeley group The Pack’s track, “At the Club,” which, unexpectedly, sounds like nothing so much as Belgian New Beat.
This may not fit infinite thought’s strict criteria, as it was never technically a hit, but it was, for a confusing couple of weeks, regularly played in the Coffee Shop in Neighbours…