Friday, July 12, 2013

NOW! NOW! NOW! or STUCK! STUCK! STUCK! ?

Adam Curtis, in that FACT interview about the stuckness of pop, on Skrillex and by extension, EDM:

It’s extreme music which is kind of entertaining but it doesn’t tell you a story. It’s a mood, and to be rude it’s a zombie mood. Things like Skrillex are the remnants of the old music carrying on in a kind of zombie-like exaggerated way. It’s stuck, it’s not going anywhere.”

Rather like my point about the "arrested futurism" / "frozen future" of Black Eyed Peas/ Flo Rida / Taio Cruz / et al in the conclusion to Retromania

"the state-of-the-(ch)art is an omnipop that pulls every trick in the book of Eighties and Nineties club music, meshing together elements from R&B, electro, house, "Euro",  and trance to create a high-fructose sound of  brash, blaring excitement. This super-compressed, MP3-ready, almost pre-degraded sound is engineered to cut through on iPods, smartphones, and computer speakers. This is the way that pop history ends, not with a whimper but a BANG BANG BANG BANG."

Or indeed rather like the NOW!-ism of EDM.

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