Two trivial but entertaining items:
1) Ian Frazier’s NYRB review (archived) of Common Phantoms: An American History of Psychic Science by Alicia Puglionesi, an account of the American Society for Psychical Research, includes this piquant bit:
The society also set up such Borgesian-sounding entities as the Committee on Phantasms and Presentiments, the Census of Hallucinations, and the Committee on Thought Transference.
Unfortunately, the archives of the ASPR turn out to be incredibly boring: “As the hours went by, Puglionesi found herself confronting a tedium requiring a ‘devotion to something beyond the self, something so vast that it can only be glimpsed through the labor of many human lifetimes.’”
2) Our old friend Conrad sent me this Guardian link with the comment that he “felt this was one for you”; after discussing the phenomenon of the apparently near-universal opinion in the UK that “Keir Starmer’s a wanker” (commonly sung at sporting events to the tune of the riff of the White Stripes’ 2003 “Seven Nation Army,” with which I was completely unfamiliar even though not only did it receive “widespread critical acclaim” but it is “arguably… the world’s most popular sports anthem” — I have to agree that the riff is catchy as hell), Jonathan Liew provides a semantic analysis that makes it Hattic material:
Let’s start with the word choice, which feels subtly telling in this case. If Boris Johnson was, as the darts crowd sang in late 2021 at the height of the Partygate scandal, a “cunt”, then somehow calling Starmer a “wanker” is altogether more piteously dismissive – insinuating not just degeneracy but a kind of bashful cowardice. The first word imputes a straightforward roguishness, perhaps even a grudging regard; the wanker, by contrast, is essentially beneath contempt.
Thanks, Conrad!
What would be the technical term for Farage, then?
“As the hours went by, Puglionesi found herself confronting a tedium requiring a ‘devotion to something beyond the self, something so vast that it can only be glimpsed through the labor of many human lifetimes.’”
Medium tedium!
What would be the technical term for Farage, then?
Quisling.
@de
If NF is Quisling, who do you see as his Führer? Also, I think the comparison may be unfair to Q. If Q had died in, say 1930, he might have been remembered for his successful humanitarian efforts.
I would love to hear what Crown would have said.
I was hoping for a charming colloquialism, along the wanker/cunt line.
I would love to hear what Crown would have said.
You and me both.
@lh
Note also in my post –may be contrasting with might have been, avoiding one of your sore points…
Bless you for that.
@PP, Y:
It is true that humanitarian efforts do not feature prominently in the NF CV. OK, “shitweasel”, then.
This is where I add the little known fact that Quisling was minister of defence for Bondepartiet (the Farmers’ Party) when Norway decided to annex East Greenland.
What is it with fascists and Greenland? Maybe it’s something to do with the
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Welteislehre
Welteislehre
I think rather not. Florida is not known for its ice. (Except in its cocktails, but the referenced fascist doesn’t drink them, and seems to prefer tepid Coke. The referenced shitweasel prefers warm English beer.)
annex East Greenland
It seems the mot juste is ‘Eastern Greenland’ aka ‘Eric the Red’s Land’. Whereas East Greenland = ‘Tunu’, Denmark’s Administrative Division.
I remember Corbinistas were chanting “Oh, Jeremy Corbin” on the same riff.
What is it with fascists and Greenland?
one set of answers actually connects to the American Society for Psychical Research! as well as being impressive in its influence over the development of all manner of psychical, parapsychological, New Age, and otherwise woo-woo ideas in the u.s. – with vast, if i think unexamined, effects on our vernacular – it was also a fascinating node of the emerging 20thC far right. it’s part of the common soil out of which grew both u.s. government parapsychology programs (from MKUltra to the really weird stuff) and u.s. forms of esoteric fascism. many of the latter are committed to assorted versions of the Hyperborean pseudohistorical narrative*, in which the polar region is the homeland of (depending on which variant) white people, “aryans”, indo-europeans, or the original, perfect, humans. for at least some people in the current administration, greenland’s petrochemicals and the northwest passage are just the sweeteners in a plan that’s really about Securing the Homeland in a much deeper timeframe than these temporarily united states.
.
* blavatsky, evola, and guénon all offer versions of this, but their u.s. inheritors, as usual, make up all kinds of new ones.
For an Indian take on the ‘Aryans at the North Pole’, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Arctic_Home_in_the_Vedas . It would appear that selective Vedic quotes can prove all sorts of things… In view of this, should the BJP consider Greenland ‘India irredenta’?
Like Greenland, Norway itself had long chafed under the yoke of Danish imperialism, so it is not that surprising that Norwegian nationalists (whether savory or unsavory) might seek to liberate the Greenlanders from that yoke. Just recently a Famous Icelandic Celebrity made some very negative comments about how the Danes have treated Greenland (while carefully not endorsing a US takeover as such), presumably motivated in part by the Icelanders’ own historical resentment of Danish overlordship.
A bunch of prominent early Nazis were associated with the Thule-Gesellschaft,* which (as might be guessed from its name) proposed that Germanic peoples had originally come from the ultimate North. Rich group associates were important to the funding of (proto-)Nazi party.
* The group was previously called the Studiengruppe für germanisches Altertum. The far-right esoterics of the Weimar era were prone to feuds and splits, and groups like the Thule Society could change their names, affiliations, and specific focuses multiple times.
I often mix up “Seven Nation Army” with “Song 2”. Here is a mashup of both with “Smells Like Teen Spirit”.
For the sake of musicological completeness, the same crowd sang “Stand up if you hate Boris” to the tune of Village People’s “Go West” and “Boris is a cunt” to the tune of KC and the Sunshine Band’s “Give It Up” (as did other sporting crowds at the time).
I don’t myself see anything “subtly telling” in the word choice nor detect the same note of “grudging regard” in the Boris insults that Jonathan Liew does. Here is evidence of the same insults being used the other way around: England cricket fans chanting that Boris Johnson is a “wanker” at the England-India test in Edgbaston in 2022 and England football fans chanting that Keir Starmer is a “cunt” at the England-Andorra game in Barcelona in 2025.
one set of answers actually connects to the American Society for Psychical Research! as well as being impressive in its influence over the development of all manner of psychical, parapsychological, New Age, and otherwise woo-woo ideas in the u.s. – with vast, if i think unexamined, effects on our vernacular – it was also a fascinating node of the emerging 20thC far right.
I hadn’t really thought about it, but I suspect my allergy to all forms of woo is heightened by a feeling that once you start ignoring consensus reality and buying into seances, alien visitations, and the like, it’s just a short shuffle to racial hierarchies and Jews-run-the-world ideas. I am not saying that anyone who believes in ghosts is a fascist (I hope that’s clear to this crowd, but just to be sure), only that a weakened immune system is susceptible to further infection, and I prefer to keep well clear of the infected area.
I don’t myself see anything “subtly telling” in the word choice nor detect the same note of “grudging regard” in the Boris insults that Jonathan Liew does.
Come now, it’s not a sober politico-linguistic analysis, it’s a lighthearted Grauniad essay meant to charm you while making a point. He could just have well have reversed the polarities as you do at the end of your comment; that doesn’t mean he has nothing to say, just that newspaper columns are not philosophy papers. Rhetoric is fun!
I, for one, appreciate Ian Preston providing additional data that falsified the bogus claim of a set hierarchy of terms of abuse or a fixed mapping of particular terms to particular politicians.
I’ve encountered the tune at a protest – with the lyrics Oh, rettet das Klima.
Crank magnetism.
[Pet Shop Boys, not the Village People]
I am not familiar with the Pet Shop Boys’ “Go West,” which was reportedly a big hit in places that were not the United States in 1993,* but the internet advises me that it was a remake of the Village People’s original 1979 “Go West,” which I do vaguely remember. I’m not sure how one would evaluate which version is being chanted by a large crowd w/o professional musical backing, although maybe it’s just more empirically likely that a 21st century English crowd would be more familiar with the PSB remake?
*In the US it apparently did well on Billboard’s separate “Dance” chart but did not quite break into the “regular” Hot 100, although it was at one point, as they say, “bubbling under.”
The Pet Shop Boys’ “Go West” is possibly the most generic 1990s dance number imaginable.
@JWB: I don’t know about England, but in Germany, the PBS version is by far better known than the Village People version. The PBS version still gets regular airplay on oldie and general listening stations, while I can’t remember ever having heard the VP original.
I would associate the tune, as a British sporting chant, primarily with “One-Nil to the Arsenal”. This blog and this one claim that that may have been first sung “at the European Cup Winners’ Cup semi-final against Paris Saint-Germain at the Parc des Princes on March 29, 1994” in response to the Pet Shop Boys version being played in the stadium and the opposition adopting the tune as “Allez, Paris-Saint Germain”. So, to the extent that any of this speculation is accurate, maybe the Pet Shop Boys version does deserve credit. It may be that other clubs were singing chants to it earlier and possibly before the Pet Shop Boys but this does suggest their version at the very least was significant to its spread. Getting even more anecdotal, however, I do clearly recall asking a colleague in a pub during a match in the 90s what tune it was and being told it was from Village People.
I’m not sure how one would evaluate which version is being chanted by a large crowd
Google site:theguardian.com “go west” football singing find credit divided between VP and PSB, with special mention for the 2018 article Arsenal fans sing “1-0 to the Arsenal” to the tune of the Village People’s (Pet Shops Boys’ covered) Go West.
I probably don’t know either version, but this TV Tropes article is probably pertinent.
(I haven’t read it myself because it has a very fast adblock detector and I haven’t bothered trying to find and install an adblock detector blocker – but I know such things exist.)
I have never heard the PBS version; while there was a time when you couldn’t escape the Village People version, horrible as it was.
I think TV Tropes is getting a little bit afield of its areas of expertise. That the real David Hasselhoff was mysteriously and massively popular in the real Germany is just a real fact about the real world, not a stock fictional plot device. If you want a canonical example of a stock fictional plot device, use a fictional one!
My favourite true-life example of the Big in Japan phenomenon is
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norman_Wisdom#Popularity_in_Albania
Pet Shop Boys’ “Go West” is possibly the most generic 1990s dance number imaginable
true, i suppose, but to me, not in a bad way. and it diverges from the early-90s baseline in several interesting ways: (a) the arrangement/rewrite leans in hard on the Pachelbel’s Canon ultimate melodic source*, and (b) the video is a fantastic piece of New Queer Cinema avantgarde filmmaking, with nods to everything from soviet constructivism to marlon riggs’ Anthem to the finale of Little Shop of Horrors**.
.
* and adds a touch of alexandrov’s national anthem of the u.s.s.r.
** i think the video’s director must have seen frank oz’s original ending for the 1986 film version.
Huh! TIL. Thanks J.W.!
Back in ’79 the U.S. music biz had not yet embraced purpose-made promotional videos made by people who’d learned about soviet constructivism in a film studies class, so for the Original Thing all we have is the lads lip-synching on some television show without any fancy camera angles or a pretend plotline. Not sure of what show – one internet source says maybe this was Canadian but I haven’t verified. Differences of set and costuming mean it’s not the legendary 1979 Bob Hope tv special where they performed on an aircraft carrier w/ the 76-year-old Bob himself hamming it up with them (which I remember seeing at the time …), nor is it their 1979 visit to Musikladen in West Germany.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1wc-AQJ2MYo
To back up to the OP, the name “American Society for Psychical Research” sounds decidedly old-fashioned because one might have expected the shorter “Psychic” if it had been named more recently. And indeed the google books ngram viewer shows a decided drop in “psychical” from 1895 to 1945. But also a modest resurgance in the last 2-3 decades, and I don’t know what that’s about. “Psychical” does seem to have been used in senses where “psychic” might not be an ideal synonym, but I don’t think that’s what’s going on with the ASfPR?
In my mind (heh), “psychic” is associated with mind-readers and future-diviners. “Psychical” implies telekinesis and such, possibly attempted to be used for sinister purposes by shady Cold War agencies.
I don’t know where that association came from and if others share it.
Ah, I have actually heard the post-Soviet version.
The original video reminds me once again of the mercy of late birth. Die Siebzigerjahre, eine Epoche, die von brutaler Hässlichkeit geprägt war…
I have never heard the PBS version; while there was a time when you couldn’t escape the Village People version, horrible as it was.
That makes you sound like you stopped listening to general listening pop radio about the mid-90s and also don’t listen to oldie stations…
And after looking at the video of the VP version, I think it’s possible that I heard that back then and that it just got totally erased in my mind by the PSB version.
I am not much younger than JW and I only remember the PSB version, to the extent I wasn’t even aware it was a cover. It seemed to me that song was everywhere in the 90s but to be fair I spent much of that decade outside the US.
I assume everyone at least remembers Right Said Fred and “I’m too sexy for my shirt”.
I do, but only because of The West Wing.
@Hans: That makes you sound like you stopped listening to general listening pop radio about the mid-90s
Earlier would have been better.
@Vanya: I am not much younger than JW and I only remember the PSB version, to the extent I wasn’t even aware it was a cover. […]
Ditto, except that I’m not much older than J.W. I believe the only VP songs I was ever subjected to were “Macho Man”, “In the Navy”, and (far too often) “Y.M.C.A.”
I assume everyone at least remembers Right Said Fred and “I’m too sexy for my shirt”.
I’ve seen references to the phrase (trigram?) “Right Said Fred”, and “I’m too sexy for my shirt” rings a faint bell.
Earlier would have been better.
Indeed. I stopped in the mid-’80s and have never regretted it.
“Go West” was from the same VP album as “In the Navy,” but the latter was certainly the bigger hit. There was a brief period at the very end of the Seventies where they were by some metrics the biggest-selling recording artists in North America before the bubble inevitably burst (either before or as a result of the ill-starred 1980 attempt to turn them into movie stars, which led to a film that was both critically panned and a huge money-losing flop at the box office). It was a weird and kooky time, although also in hindsight maybe a charmingly innocent-to-naive time. And your more serious-artist rock musicians were at the time dying via self-indulgence (Moon) or homicide (Lennon) right and left, or so it seemed.
As for the bubble inevitably bursting, I don’t think the factors you mention are nearly as important as the racist and homophobic “disco sucks” movement that erupted at that time. When straight white Americans had it called to their attention that those sweet Village People weren’t the harmless tunesters they had seemed (I vividly remember my family awkwardly bopping around to “YMCA” back when it was just a catchy pop song), they rejected the suddenly tainted offerings.
@lh
Did I register the tiniest bit of anarchist joy in your last post? I remember also a high-ranking U.S. Naval Officer had to be gently told by a subordinate why “In the Navy” would not be a suitable recruiting song.
You did indeed!
To be fair, a lot of people hated disco on its own merits. The Bee Gees were white and straight. Even Doonesbury got into disco-hating (Aug. 26, 1979, here, I hope the link works and is readable.)
I don’t know that the back-story of disco was well-known back then, which I suppose is why people were surprised that those cartoony wacky Village People turned out to be the dreaded G*y.
Reminds me of the surprisingly affecting movie
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_Days_of_Disco
I seem to recall reading somewhere the disturbing information that the original Village People were in fact mostly straight. Another childhood illusion shattered …
The VP sold so many records at their peak precisely because they sold them simultaneously BOTH to the hipsters who totally *got* the blatant-in-hindsight homosexual subtext AND the normies who really really totally didn’t get it at all, and did not in fact suddenly get it one fine day in 1980. That my younger brother’s elementary school chorus performed (he would have been in maybe 4th grade?) YMCA to an audience of beaming parents is pretty strong evidence of the latter.
FWIW mainstream disco-apologist conventional wisdom back then largely claimed (to the extent it trafficked in accusations of animus) that the disco-disdainers were motivated by dislike of or at least lack of respect for black people and/or females. The supposed anti-gay angle has boomed in more recent years but I think this is in large part retrojection except perhaps as applied to fairly niche groups of disco-disdainers. Trust me, we white suburban junior high school kids back then didn’t even yet understand that opera and Broadway show tunes were supposed to be stereotypically gay. In hindsight, I will freely admit that our disco-disdain was often colored by an excessively high view of the Serious Artist credentials of yer Jethro Tulls and Pink Floyds etc. and our incomprehension about other plsuaible approaches to pop music.
If you’ve got a spare three minutes, check out the over-the-top trailer for the Village People’s 1980 bomb/stinkeroo movie. It was “The Musical Extravaganza That Launches the Eighties,” and it’s really quite something. (The movie does feature lots of seemingly heterosexual plot points, although no doubt post-modernist scholars could detect some internal tensions in the narrative.)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LGp3yiffgzk
TIL VP are anarthrous.
FWIW mainstream disco-apologist conventional wisdom back then largely claimed (to the extent it trafficked in accusations of animus) that the disco-disdainers were motivated by dislike of or at least lack of respect for black people and/or females. The supposed anti-gay angle has boomed in more recent years but I think this is in large part retrojection except perhaps as applied to fairly niche groups of disco-disdainers.
I think you’re generalizing from your own experience. Mine was very different, but I had gay friends and family members and so was more aware of that aspect of the pushback.
I’ve been informed that, oddly enough, the almost openly gay “Y.M.C.A.” was and may still be one of the longest-surviving disco songs. In about 2010, when a young woman of my acquaintance was about to become a Resident Adviser* at her college, I sent her the lyrics to “Where’s My R.A.?” by Mike Schiano, and she said probably everyone at the college would know the tune and many would be able to do the spelling-out dance.
(The song is one of many parodies at this page.** If you weren’t an undergrad at Princeton in the late ’70s or early ’80s, you’ll miss a few references in that song and a lot of references in some of the others, and even if you were, you may miss some unless you lived at Princeton Inn. Also, you may find some things offensive, including a line or two in “Where’s My R.A?” For instance, the attitude toward dating is dated. However, to my taste there’s lots of funny stuff and neat contrafactum. If you know the tunes, the songs are more fun if you sing them, at least in your head.)
*You don’t have those in your country, or you use a different word for them? An older undergrad who lives in a dormitory hall (corridor) with freshmen, has a meeting with them at the beginning of the year to give them advice, and is supposed to be available to give further advice for the rest of the year. In return the R.A. gets free lodging. Every freshperson is supposed to be in an R.A. group. I have no complaints about my R.A. and I don’t remember any complaints about him.
**The title of the page is just Bob’s little joke.
Does that mean “most of them were straight”, or does it mean “they were < 6 on the Kinsey scale”?
Judging from the trailer, it’s the 70s keeling over backwards and exploding.
Ha! Neither of my almae matres had a single bed on campus… and one of them didn’t have a campus, just a bunch of buildings scattered over the entire city. (Half an hour on the subway to get from the biology building to the molecular-biology building.)
Does that mean “most of them were straight”, or does it mean “they were < 6 on the Kinsey scale”?
An excellent question. Assuming that sexual orientation is quantizable*, and thus expressable by integers, this clearly calls for an application of the
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pigeonhole_principle
The details are left as an exercise for the reader.
* There are some who claim that the variation is continuous, and thus requires to be expressed by real numbers. With such Cultural Marxism we will have nothing to do; and one is reluctant even to mention the depravity of those who assert that complex numbers are called for …
Quaternions are right out.
To be fair, a lot of people hated disco on its own merits. The Bee Gees …
If “disco” is to include Motown, I loved it for its musical merits. The British ripoffs (female songstresses, mostly) seemed OK, musically.
The Bee Gees was the end of the end. So I quit disco mid-70’s. Certainly for me this was “colored by an excessively high view of the Serious Artist credentials of yer Jethro Tulls and Pink Floyds etc.”, not to mention the Rolling Stones, David Bowie, … (Thanks to that timing, I was spared Bowie’s ‘Plastic Soul’.)
Whatever social-sexual undertone was going on, it passed me by entirely. I was paying no attention whatsoever.
Brit pop-ish culture has a long tradition of sexual ambiguity (Danny LaRue, Widow Twankie/Pantomime Dames, Dick Emery, Round the Horne/Kenneth Williams, the Carry On movies, Are You Being Served?). Whatever the VP were trying to convey was too subtle for someone paying no attention. The Bee Gees were camp-as-a-marquee, but without that wink to the audience I was looking out for.
Frankie Howerd deserves a place of honour on your list. In fact, a cut above all of them, except perhaps Kenneth Williams.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=IryFIXuY9RM
I would patriotically (in my Glaswegian aspect) nominate Stanley Baxter, too, though he would not have appreciated my endorsement in this context during the repressive time of his floruit.
Indeed. Up Pompeii!. Classical references, volcanoes even. (My list was nothing like comprehensive.)
i would argue that the overtly racist and anti-gay types who threw events like the notorious Disco Demolition Night actually understood the genre substantially better than most people, especially those whose exposure to it came only through late, dilute versions that got a lot of airplay (in particular studio-created operations like the Village People and trend-followers like the Bee-Gees). i think that’s dynamic generally holds true with popular music*: the anti-rock-and-roll fanatics of the 1950s understood the genre’s relationship to black music and to sexual liberation much more clearly than the people who were turned off by the likes of the Carpenters (or, for that matter, the Beatles).
stepping a little afield, but in a lexicographic (toponomastic?) vein: it’s notable to me how many of the original disco and post-disco clubs had names that are about genres of space/architecture: the Loft, the Warehouse, the Gallery, the [Paradise] Garage…
.
* at least up to the point where musicians in genres that were starting to be attacked began to preempt the haters and set the terms for the backlash themselves – as with the Sex Pistols (another producer-driven venture) and some of the musical targets of the Satanic Panic.
I can add myself to the people who disdained disco when it flourished because it was ridiculous and wacky and not for serious young people who liked their music challenging and sophisticated. And I didn’t get the connection with gay culture (from what I remember, like many other normies) until far into the 80s, when AIDS and a lot of coming-outs made homosexuality*) a talked-about topic and the stereotypes about camp a part of the wider popular culture. By that time, disco was so yesterday…
*) It’s not that I didn’t know that homosexuality existed before that, but I didn’t have a lot of information beyond that it existed (like vague comments from my dad that someone was vom anderen Ufer “from the other shore”) and didn’t even know that there was a set of stereotypes associated with it.
It seems a little odd in retrospect to accuse people who despised disco but loved Freddie Mercury and David Bowie (or Judas Priest) as “homophobic”. The racist angle also seems questionable when you remember that disco to a lot of us suburban disco hating white tweens meant the Bee Gees, Travolta and KC and the Sunshine Band. And perhaps more importantly a lot of disco hating kids happily listened to reggae and adopted rap music a few years later.
Certainly racism and homophobia played a role, but I tend to think that misogyny was actually at the root of disco hatred. Disco favored “female” skills like dancing, dressing up, and being social. Not a comfortable scene for a lot of insecure American boys in the late 1970s. Rock and rap favored “masculine” skills like aggression, virtuosity, and male-bonding. We wanted girls to admire our flashy guitar solos, we didn’t want to learn awkward dance moves.
despised disco but loved Freddie Mercury
For the avoidance of doubt, I despise Freddie Mercury as much as disco (mid-1970’s on), and for the same reason: the music is crap. The over-the-top camp (which may or may not be gay-adjacent) has no bearing on the matter. (Arguably Keef & Mick’s male-bonding is pretty gay-adjacent. And Mick can dance.) Reggae (Desmond Dekker/the early forms) was quality music. Rap is not music, whatever other cultural interest it might have.
Most of Vanya’s comparisons I find … bizarre/disconnected from the Brit scene. Putting Mercury and Bowie in the same sentence seems some sort of category error. I can report I’ve managed to live in Britain through the ’80’s and early ’90’s without ever hearing or hearing of Judas Priest.
Rap is not music
I feel like this on grumpy days, but then I remind myself that this is how the old farts thought about rock and jazz before that, and about Stravinsky, and Spengler about Classical music after Bach (Beethoven’s music was Gestammel “stammering”), so on my non-grumpy days I can listen to it and there is even stuff I like.
i would argue that the overtly racist and anti-gay types who threw events like the notorious Disco Demolition Night actually understood the genre substantially better than most people, especially those whose exposure to it came only through late, dilute versions that got a lot of airplay
I would strongly agree.
I can add myself to the people who disdained disco when it flourished because it was ridiculous and wacky and not for serious young people who liked their music challenging and sophisticated.
Of course “it was ridiculous and wacky” is a statement devoid of content other than “I didn’t like it,” and the reason you (and millions of others, including me — see below) disliked it is because you were subjected to a massive wave of overt and covert condemnation from virtually the entire culture-making establishment, and the ultimate reason for this condemnation was, as I said, racism and homophobia (look at the slogan “disco sucks” as an example of open-but-deniable homophobia). You (and millions of others) didn’t have to be racist/homophobic yourself to succumb to the cultural pressure. I can speak with authority on this because I myself felt the same way circa 1979-80, and I would have rejected with indignation any suggestion that my feelings had anything to do with those awful prejudices — it was just that disco was ridiculous and wacky! But then I moved to NYC and got to know gay people and black people (and in general an infinitely wider range of people with an infinite variety of tastes), and I was exposed willy-nilly to both disco and rap, and I discovered that, you know what, they were excellent forms of music, they just weren’t the kind I was used to. Not being a dancer, I had had no use for music whose main function was to impel people to ecstatic dancing (which is what disco was), but once I opened my ears I could not only appreciate but love it. A similar evolution happened with rap (like so many white people, I was caught by “Rapper’s Delight” and went from there to Grandmaster Flash and Afrika Bambaataa and DJ Kool Herc and the rest).
but then I remind myself that this is how the old farts thought about rock and jazz before that, and about Stravinsky, and Spengler about Classical music after Bach
This is an extraordinarily important thing to keep in mind, and not only with regard to music. Every time I find myself rebelling against some new thing The Youth have got up to I remind myself of it. Old-fartism is to be avoided.
Of course “it was ridiculous and wacky” is a statement devoid of content other than “I didn’t like it”
Sorry, but no. These are very specific reasons; there were other things back then I disliked for different ressons. I don’t know about America, but I come from a square culture (back then much more than today) that generally distrusts flashiness and showing off, and to compensate for that, there needed to be a reason, like the relevance of the message or the awesomeness of the music. Disco seemed to offer neither. Disco for me (and many of my peers) was in the same category as Deutscher Schlager – shallow, fake, and commercial, the same way I assume you back then thought about polka-and-country-music, only that disco covered up the shallowness with fake glamor.
I’ve long lost that adolescent snobbish attitude and mellowed with regards to a lot of music that back then I wouldn’t have wanted to be found dead near to, like ABBA or some deutsche Schlager or Nena, which nowadays wake nostalgia in me instead of snobbish disdain, and disco is one of these things. But the snobbery against certain forms of popular music was based on real value criteria (even if those seem ridiculous or pretentious today), and while it may have been hijacked by racists and homophones, it existed independent of them.
I don’t understand how if you got over your snobbery (congratulations!) you still think it was “based on real value criteria.” Humans are very good at rationalization, and that’s all those “real value criteria” were.
@hat
I think the criteria can be real, but one’s sensitivity to them can change over time, or one can think later of other criteria which one ignored at the time and make a different overall evaluation.
Well, I’m not sure what you mean by “the criteria can be real.” Sure, they can reference elements of reality, but “criteria” implies good grounds for judgment, doesn’t it? I mean, from the point of view of someone who cares only for classical music, rock lacks all sorts of elements that they are used to and value. And yes, those lacks are real, but no, they don’t have anything to do with the value of the music, so in my view to call them “criteria” is an illegitimate smuggling of personal experience/knowledge/preference into the world of objective judgment. (Obviously no human judgment can be “objective” in the strict sense, but it’s important to strive for some sort of objectivity rather than smugly accepting one’s own limits.)
Turn it around and imagine a devotee of Chinese classical opera complaining that Western music was lacking in all the essential elements of music. How would you respond?
You’d think I would have learned from my change of heart on rap and disco, but I didn’t definitively learn my lesson until sometime in the late ’90s, when I got into an argument with a Cecil Taylor fan and pulled out all the cliches about how it wasn’t music, just banging on the keyboard, etc. Then I actually investigated CT, allowed myself to listen with open ears, went from the early records (before he got really wild) to the later ones, discovered I actually liked him a lot, bought a bunch of CDs, and went to hear him live. Since then I am careful to say, even to myself, “I may not care for that, but it’s probably just because I don’t know enough about it, and in any case who am I to judge? If people love it, good for them!” And I mean it. Thus do we learn, even late in life.
@hat
I suppose what I mean is, maybe hans can correct me:
Young Hans criteria: Phoniness: -5 , Brashness: -2, Mass Appeal: -1, Melody: 0, Percussion: +1, Bass: +2, Anger: +3,
Schlager: -5-2-1 +1 = -6
Nena: -2-1 = -3
Bowie: -2+1+2+3 = +4
Older Hans criteria: Phoniness: -5 , Brashness: 0, Mass Appeal: 0, Melody: +2, Percussion: +1, Bass: +2, Anger: 0,
Schlager: -5+2 = -3
Nena: +2
Bowie: +1+2 = 3
Sure, I get that, I’m just saying that treating that sort of thing as objective criteria rather than “stuff I happen to like at the moment” enables smugness and contempt for other people’s preferences. I’m not attributing those things to Hans, of course, just talking in general, and taking into account my memory of my own feelings before I achieved Enlightenment. Once again I quote the locus classicus: “He can’t be a man ’cause he doesn’t smoke the same cigarettes as me.”
I broadly endorse Vanya’s points re disco and girls, which indeed leads us via Travolta, in particular, to a further complexity, namely that disco as presented to a mass national audience via the smash success of _Saturday Night Fever_ had a specifically heterosexual valence. And in particular it had the valence of the sort of confident swaggering guy who was gonna put on that white leisure suit and go out to the sort of nightclubs where he might hope to find young ladies up for a one-night-stand. That indeed became an easy-to-parody social type, as witness decades later the “Disco Stu” recurrent minor character on _The Simpsons_. If you were at the time in the throes of adolescence, that sort of confident swagger was both enviable and sort of alien/terrifying, but it came with a disco soundtrack. It was in a way a logical extension of what we were learning at the time by trial and error, viz. that if you wanted to talk to girls about music more for the sake of talking to girls than the sake of talking about music it might behoove you to feign some interest in e.g. Billy Joel and suppress the urge to mansplain e.g. the finer points of Frank Zappa’s discography.
And Travolta presents yet a further complexity, of ethnicity and social class rather than race. At the same time disco was fashionable in the Manhattan demimonde with which hat was familiar it also became hugely popular in the remotest outer-borough ethnic-white parts of NYC (the movie itself was based on a supposedly non-fiction* bit of ethnography said to have been researched by the UK writer Nik Cohn out in Bay Ridge). The residents of those neighborhoods were stereotyped as unprogressive on issues of race and sexual orientation, and they were deprecated by your more upscale suburban whites, although the lexicographers appear unsure as to whether the slur “guido”** was yet current.* And indeed I suspect if you roll the odometer forward a decade from 1978 to 1988 or so you would find that a certain percentage of the pseudo-bohemian white kids who really liked e.g. the Pixies and really disdained e.g. Bon Jovi were not entirely free of anti-guido attitudes.
*As with many long-form magazine pieces it is credibly alleged in hindsight that it was not quite so non-fictional as it purported to be in matters of fine detail.
**Wiki says maybe back to ’80’s or even ’70’s ,and I can personally attest to hearing it by ’84 or ’85 and I certainly don’t infer from the fact that I hadn’t heard it yet in ’78 that it wasn’t extant closer to NYC than I then lived. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guido_(slang)
A side question for Hans. I would (as an outsider) have pegged Nena as more sociologically adjacent to the Neue Deutsche Welle thing than the Schlagers thing. Sure Nena lacked the traditional mainstream tough-rocker-chick persona of a Helen Schneider, but the dudes in Trio lacked the traditional mainstream tough-rocker-dude persona of an Udo Lindenberg. So I would be interested in understanding why I had her conceptually misplaced in BRD-music-fan-sociology terms.
(a) I don’t like disco but that’s just me
(b) I don’t like disco because it is objectively inferior to rock/jazz/classical
(c) I don’t like disco because it is gay black music
Perhaps Hans is arguing that attitude (b), while worse than attitude (a), is not as bad as attitude (c). It may be that attitude (b) derives from uncritically ingesting a conventional wisdom that has been polluted by attitude (c); but that’s not the same attitude problem: it’s an attitude meta-problem or meta-attitude problem.
I would (as an outsider) have pegged Nena as more sociologically adjacent to the Neue Deutsche Welle thing than the Schlagers thing.
I also, as someone who went to Gymnasium in Germany 1981-83, saw Nena at the time as 100% NDW and certainly not Schlager. Of course not all NDW was as artsy as Trio or as cool as Fehlfarben, so I read Hans as simply saying he didn’t like her, quite popular, music. I felt the same way at the time about Peter Schilling. NDW was not niche underground music. Trio was also extremely popular at the time.
Wiki says maybe back to ’80’s or even ’70’s ,and I can personally attest to hearing it by ’84 or ’85
The OED has (yes!) an entry (from 2004) on guido, and it dates it to 1985 (“Russo proudly calls himself a ‘Guido’, a term used in local discos to describe a guy who is flashy, macho, and cool,” Record [New Jersey] 24 March f1). Their etymology says “< the Italian male forename Guido, perhaps with punning allusion to the correspondence between Guy, the equivalent forename in English, and guy n.².”
that’s not the same attitude problem: it’s an attitude meta-problem or meta-attitude problem.
Absolutely! I’m just saying that (b), unlike (c), reduces to (a) when examined with the tools of modern science.
Hmm. I wonder if “perhaps with punning allusion to the correspondence” misunderestimates how opaque the sort of etymological connections known to OED folks might have been to the average New Jersey disco-goer of the time.
I recall once having a conversation with a quite well-educated Italian-American who turned out not to know that the given name “Ruggero” is a variant of our “Roger,” apparently due to the Other Norman Invasion (the one of Sicily rather than England). But why should he have known that unless he had a quirky niche interest in etymology?
the reason you (and millions of others, including me — see below) disliked it is because you were subjected to a massive wave of overt and covert condemnation from virtually the entire culture-making establishment,
Certainly not. First, there was a massive wave of pushing disco from a big part of the culture-making establishment, starting with heavy airplay and including celebrities, white rock musicians, and the first nightclub I ever heard of. Second, all this alleged racism and homophobia may have hurt the sales of black performers and Elton John and pre-disco David Bowie and Queen (when Freddie Mercury grew a mustache, according to Wikipedia) in the U.S., but it did not destroy them the way disco was destroyed, and it must have greatly shrunk during the three years after Disco Demolition Night when lots of very un-masculine white New Wave bands, the black and very un-masculine Michael Jackson, and the black and openly bisexual Prince hit the charts.
I was in high school during the disco period, and unlike most of my peers I didn’t like rock and pop except for the mellowest and sweetest (but not too much from the string section), but I particularly disliked disco because it was even more repetitive, melodically limited, and pounding, and I heard it more than I wanted. That is all. I liked some black singers (Ella Fitzgerald, for example), and like almost everyone else here, I was surprised to learn some years later that disco was associated with gay culture. If you think I was getting subliminal messages about it starting from K. C. and the Sunshine Band, maybe you can provide examples.
I don’t doubt that you and your friends and family members heard homophobic and racist comments about disco, though I never did. But the people I knew in college, after disco was mostly over, who didn’t like disco liked various black musicians and the few openly gay musicians who I mentioned. I don’t think you can say most people who hated disco, or even most people who went to Disco Demolition Night, hated it because of homophobia or racism or both, unless you know what was in their record collections.
Hmm. I wonder if “perhaps with punning allusion to the correspondence” misunderestimates how opaque the sort of etymological connections known to OED folks might have been to the average New Jersey disco-goer of the time.
Maybe the Oxonians should have added “similarly spelled”.
Here in New Mexico, there are people who will answer to either of two corresponding names, one English and one Spanish. Some of the pairs are etymologically related, such as Ralph and Raúl, and some are only similar in sound and/or spelling, such as Alvin and Albino.
Once again, I’m not saying the individual people who bought into the “disco sucks” five-minutes-of-hate were themselves homophobic or racist; that would be absurd. I’m saying the opposition to disco was fueled not only by the standard hate-the-new-thing reaction (which tends to pass fairly quickly) but by the deep-seated cultural racism which also lurked underneath the bitter resistance to rock-and-roll, and in this case also by the fear and loathing of anything perceived as “gay” which was so characteristic of that era. Obviously the people hating on disco didn’t need to even have heard of its gay roots and popularity to hate it, they just needed to be exposed to other people who hated it. Hate is contagious. If you don’t think cultural resistance can manifest without individuals being aware of its roots, I probably can’t convince you, but history has many examples.
I have no desire to offend anyone, and I’m certainly not claiming to know The Truth. I just call ’em as I see ’em, and I have a particular allergy to claims that disco and/or rap are objectively bad or “not music.”
@Hat: OK, you did say that individuals who were part of “disco sucks” might not be racist or homophobic, but I still think your story leaves a lot out. It seems to me that the people who were in that movement could easily have disliked disco from the start for intrinsic reasons (I should have mentioned criticism of the lyrics as well as the music) and for extrinsic ones, some mentioned already (not wanting to dance or to have one’s dancing judged) and some not (flashy clothes, not being allowed into Studio 54). Those dislikes are just as contagious as dislikes based on race or sexual orientation, and if you take them all into account, you can see why other styles associated with black people or gay people or both did not arouse the same kind of mass hate movement as disco.
Two other points: The Wikiparticle discusses the musical characteristics of disco, but it never mentions that almost all of the songs were at the same tempo, suitable for extended ecstatic dancing but not so much for listening against one’s will.
It also lists “Sir Duke” by Stevie Wonder, as a disco song, but doesn’t mention the Pointer Sisters’ version of “Fire” (which I like). I’d have gone the other way. Comments?
@Jerry F.: one of the noteworthy and distinctive characteristics of disco when compared to prior iterations of American R&B, and other styles of 20th century vernacular American black music as well, is how rhythmically steady-to-monotonous it is. Very little syncopation and very little swing. You can call the rhythm “hypnotic” and/or suitable for “ecstatic dancing” if you like it (perhaps especially if you had taken the right drugs before hitting the dance floor), or “robotic” if you don’t care for it. Calling “Sir Duke” disco really is treating it as nothing but a crudely racial classifier rather than a stylistic classifier.*
The robotic simplification of rhythm didn’t come from nowhere. One of the places it came from, in fact, was West Germany – it’s the same thing Kraftwerk had been innovating over there. Behind the scenes, not at the level of the singers whose photos were on the cover but the level of the songwriters and producers and arrangers who were creatively responsible for most of how the records actually sounded, the disco craze marked a notable incursion into (or “invasion” or “colonization” of) the American R&B charts by white men from Continental Europe (Giorgio Moroder, Sylvester Lavay, the VP’s own Svengali Jacques Morali, and many others – some gay but others not**). Moroder, in particular, was undoubtedly very talented, but for those who like polemical narratives of racialized and/or patriarchal exploitation, it’s really not very hard to tell a story like that about Moroder’s dealings with the young Donna Summer. (Maybe it would be a somewhat unfair and slanted story, but the internet is full of those to the extent they suit the teller’s agenda.)
I personally think that one of the more consequential long-term developments in popular music over my own lifetime has been the growing replacement of human musicians by machines and that this has not been an unmixed blessing, although I understand that hat believes it is impossible in principle to “objectively” criticize our robot overlords. The disco records of the original disco era almost all were still recorded with live human drummers, and it actually took a fair amount of skill to simulate a robot so well with your own hands and feet in real time with the tape rolling, but that was an important step down the slippery slope because that style was easier for the first generation of fairly well-designed drum machines to handle.
*I have vivid memories from the mid-Seventies of hearing a white suburban high school marching band try to work up a version of “Sir Duke” without being able to swing or even handle syncopation that had been carefully written out on the sheet music.
**Since robots have no sexual orientation it’s probably a category error to characterize the Kraftwerk guys either way.
And speaking as we were (well, I was) of live human drummers, now I’m curious as to whether when hat finally saw Cecil Taylor he was playing with or without a drummer and, if with, who it was. Maybe a decade ago I saw a show by the now-aged free-jazz drummer Andrew Cyrille, who had first come to prominence as a young man playing with Cecil, and it was very enjoyable. It is harder to get the robots to simulate the full free-jazz style convincingly, but alas there isn’t much money in it for being an irreplaceable human player.
It seems to me that the people who were in that movement could easily have disliked disco from the start for intrinsic reasons (I should have mentioned criticism of the lyrics as well as the music) and for extrinsic ones
Sure, all of that is true, and obviously it’s impossible to come to any scientific conclusions. My personal judgment is that if it were just that it would not have occasioned the virulent and focused hate that it in fact did. I mean, I didn’t care for Cecil Taylor and was prepared to diss him when the occasion arose, but it would never have occurred to me to organize a “smash CT records” night or holler in the streets about how he symbolized everything that was wrong with America. And sure, disco was inescapable and that would have heightened the resistance anyway, but… well, compare popular Christmas music (I’m not talking about Renaissance tunes but the stuff you hear in stores). That’s inescapable too, and lots of people (including me) hate it, but you don’t see the kind of mass campaign disco evoked. I dunno, I don’t see how it can be explained simply on the basis of a boring beat and weird lyrics.
> treating it as nothing but a crudely racial classifier rather than a stylistic classifier
I get your point JB, but the question is amusing to me because for me the quintessential disco artists of the time were the BeeGees and Abba. I think I’d have classified Rod Stewart there too.
But I was only about 10 yo at the peak. As a 12 year old I thought Steve Dahl’s Disco Demolition event was funny and didn’t get till later that it was more of a fiasco.
It was later than that when I began to realize there was an element of homophobia and racism in it, or at least an element of unopenness to influences outside our comfort zone. But I would still say that the biggest strain for me was normal adolescent resentment of the boys who were cool because they could dance. I don’t know that any of them were gay – we wouldn’t have known that at the time. And given the dynamics of my high school, none of the ones I resented were black. That was a separate social scene and only a few girls had crossover power.
That hat never publicly inveighed (pre-enlightenment) against Cecil Taylor is simply due to his mild-mannered personality. Snobby-dork classical music’s history is full of raucous public negativity directed toward innovators, with some instances (maybe not all-well selected) catalogued here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_classical_music_concerts_with_an_unruly_audience_response
I particularly like the one about the young Steve Reich’s “hypnotic” and/or “boring” piece _Four Organs_: ‘At a [1973] Carnegie Hall performance of the work, the conservative audience tried yelling and sarcastically applauding to hasten the end of the piece, which received both boos and cheers during the ovation. One of the performers, Michael Tilson Thomas, recalls: “One woman walked down the aisle and repeatedly banged her head on the front of the stage, wailing ‘Stop, stop, I confess.'”‘ Presumably the woman found the repetitive aspect of Reich’s style oppressive rather than hypnotic.
a supposedly non-fiction* bit of ethnography said to have been researched by the UK writer Nik Cohn out in Bay Ridge … *As with many long-form magazine pieces it is credibly alleged in hindsight that it was not quite so non-fictional as it purported to be in matters of fine detail.
That’s an arch way of saying “confessed by the author to be almost entirely fictional”. Lexicographic note: Cohn used “Face” in the mod sense heavily in the story, shamelessly pretending that it was current slang in 1976 Brooklyn. Green was not fooled, I wonder if anyone else was, besides the magazine editor?
Another lexicographic note: the OED has numerous quotations from both Nik Cohn and his father, historian Norman Cohn, but attributes some of the father’s books to the son (not vice versa). Maybe that’s because OED2’s bibliography included Nik but left out Norman, even though both were quoted.
Just compare Chic’s Good Times with Defunkt’s (radically different) version.
Sure, I get that, I’m just saying that treating that sort of thing as objective criteria
I think you are introducing a category error here. If I didn’t like the color red, and I disliked a car because it’s red, I disliked it for a real and objective (= intersubjectively verifiable) reason. This reason may not apply to you, and it may be a bad reason to dislike a car, and I may have changed my mind about the color red in general or red cars specifically over time, but it was still a real criterion at that time.
Perhaps Hans is arguing that attitude (b), while worse than attitude (a), is not as bad as attitude (c). It may be that attitude (b) derives from uncritically ingesting a conventional wisdom that has been polluted by attitude (c);
Somewhat right, except that it’s not about better or worse (although attitude (c) is simply bad in my opinion), it’s more that, coming from where I came from, I didn’t need any input from (c) to arrive at attitude (b).
@JWB: Yes, Nena was NDW, but NDW was a very broad label, and when the first excitement about there being German stuff on the radio that didn’t sound like music for your grandparents was over, people started to differentiate. The sound of Nena’s music was ok, but I found her texts and her public persona cheesy, and she had a whiff of that new-age wooishness I disliked.
@Vanya: yes, exactly. I didn’t mind Peter Schillling, but I also wasn’t a big fan. I found Trio’s minimalism interesting. I quite liked Ideal. But at that time I was on my own musical trajectory away from what was going on in contemporary popular music (although I sufficiently listened to radio to still have a general feeling of what was going on); I was rather immersed in the early catalogs of the Stones, Dylan, and whatever records by Duke Ellington I could get my hands on.
I was rather immersed in the early catalogs of the Stones, Dylan, and whatever records by Duke Ellington I could get my hands on.
Good man!
NDW, before the term was highjacked by the record industry, was this. Or this. Not Nena.
I still remember S.Y.P.H. opening for The Gang of Four in Cologne. And then there was the hidden track on their debut album.
Other than my brother and me, is there anyone who doesn’t want to dance?
I mean that literally. It seems like a one-in-a-billion thing to me. Afraid of dancing in public, sure, but not wanting to dance in the first place?
OK, that I couldn’t help but appreciate even if I were the performer or the composer.
It is. Here’s an example*: the lyrics are rendered in a grand total of two very close pitches, so it can hardly be called singing; but these pitches are nonetheless arranged to accompany the background music. It’s not reading a poem with background music on.
* English subtitles available. Unfortunately it’s 3 years old – “this time” was last time.
“Video no longer available”, but I think I get it…
Copy/Paste error. This should work.
IN DAFE meets my “cultural interest”, and all power to the Iranian counter-counter-counter-revolution. The intro might be music. Thereafter, there’s no rhythmic variation; there’s no thematic development; there’s no chord changes[**]. Even disco and certainly rock and Jazz manages that. (There’s no ‘Bridge’/contrasting section if you want the muso crit term.)
A shame, really. That part of the world has some amazingly complex and inventive rhythms. Which inform (for example) Brubeck’s ‘Blue Rondo à la Turk’.
Those criteria also reject as music the current Spotify top ten-ish, see Rick Beato’s review of a couple of days ago. (With confusingly an image of Taylor Swift, who doesn’t appear.)
It surprises me you want to count «Herrenreiter» as rap, I wouldn’t.
For music with one note droning/repeating throughout, try this.
[**] It’s not that a piece has to meet all those criteria to count as music. But if it’s not going to meet one, it had better have plenty going on with the others. For example, Shostakovich’s Fugue 7 A Major has no chord modulations.
NDW, before the term was highjacked by the record industry, was this. Or this.
Both those bands are labeled „punk“ by German Wikipedia, and in my recollection they would have been considered „punk“ at the time, but maybe by 1982 NDW had been reappropriated for bands that sounded more like „New Wave“ in the British scene.
Peter Hein is actually a neighbor of mine, if I run into him I will ask him.
@AntC: That Prokofiev Toccata (which I don’t know that I had heard before) put in mind of something Beethoven might have written if he had lived one hundred years later.
If I didn’t like the color red, and I disliked a car because it’s red, I disliked it for a real and objective (= intersubjectively verifiable) reason
The fact that we perhaps agree about whether something is red does not entail that dislike of redness is itself “objective” (though I would of course accept your statement that your dislike was “real”, as opposed to feigned or illusory.) Calling your dislike “objective” is surely to draw the invalid inference that, because we agree on the nature of the stimulus which evokes this dislike, that the dislike itself is also part of our shared set of interpersonal agreements.
Moreover, what is being said here about the non-musicness of rap corresponds, not to disliking red cars for being red, but to saying “I like cars, but not red cars, which are not actually cars at all.”
It may be, that red so-called “cars” are not, in fact, cars, and do indeed fail in some way to fulfil the proper criteria for cardom. However, it will be incumbent on those asserting this proposition to offer other arguments than their own personal dislike of red “cars” if they want us to accede to this limitation of the acceptable scope of the word “car.” We who do not share this dislike will be unwilling to accord it axiomatic status.
As a true acolyte of St Ludwig, I also doubt whether this attempt to delimit cardom by tweaking of definitions can succeed even in principle. We are surely dealing with overlapping family resemblances among vehicles here.
Who does? The only two claims about it in this thread are that it’s within the original meaning of Neue Deutsche Welle, and that it’s punk instead.
As a true acolyte of St Ludwig, I also doubt whether this attempt to delimit cardom by tweaking of definitions can succeed even in principle. We are surely dealing with overlapping family resemblances among vehicles here.
My rubric of musicness made no mention of whether I like rap [**]. My evaluation (of other genres/performers) as “crap” earlier did not deny such crap is music.
Catch yourselves on. (Yorkshire for ‘listen to yourselves’.) We’re on a language blog. Every damn human speaks language(s). That doesn’t mean any damn human’s definition of what constitutes a language should be treated with equal weight. This is wokeism gone mad. We’d be looking for some sort of pattern and higher-level organisation. Repeating ‘buffalo’ some finite number of times doesn’t in itself mean you’re speaking a language. (Or ‘muthafucka’ doesn’t make it music.)
Any damn human can grab a stick and a dustbin lid and ululate over a backbeat. That doesn’t make it music. More subtlely, any damn human can grab a guitar and strum a chord repeatedly; or spread their fingers and plonk them down on a keyboard, rearrange the fingers to a more euphonious (to them) ‘harmony’ then roll their hands up and down to make arpeggios. Still not music.
Performance/recording with instruments and voice might have all sorts of social interest, dancing even. Still not sufficient for music. (Neither Linton Kwesi Johnson nor John Cooper Clarke want to call their stuff music, but rather poetry with a back beat, though either’s backbeat has better credentials to be music than rap. Only alternating a couple of chords, no rhythmic variation, sometimes a verse and chorus but no ‘bridge’.)
Certainly we need appeal to ‘family resemblance’ to get from Bach to Stockhausen or to Sungazer (one for DM to dance to). But the resemblance doesn’t extend to ‘Four minutes 33 seconds’ [***], because the external accoutrements of performance doesn’t suffice for music, any more than sounds produced through the mouth suffices to be language.
[**] Yes that was deliberate.
[***] I’m happy to acknowledge that as ‘art’, in the tradition of taking the piss out of ‘classical’ concert-hall stuffiness.
Catch yourselves on.
Eh, lad. Ma grandad were coal miner. (Though not one of they poncy Yorkshire miners.)
If percussion ensembles should be considered music, no reason rap shouldn’t be. Some rap is not just music, it’s downright pretty. Likewise percussion ensembles.
If you are not into a genre of popular music, chances are all you’ll run into will be Top 40 exemplars of same. They will be awful, and will confirm and reinforce your sentiment. They, however, do not represent the range of the genre as a whole. That can certainly hold for rap.
@DE: I get it that keeping up with who said what in a thread like this gets difficult after a while, but I never said that rap isn’t music for objective reasons, only that I sometimes feel like this on a grumpy day, and I normally don’t feel like that and actually have come to like some rap numbers.
My claim was that I disliked (in my youth) disco for real reasons, and Hat denied the reality of those reasons. That’s where my analogy came in. Likes and dislikes themselves never are objective, but the reasons for them can be verified and therefore can be objective (NB at least for me, objective doesn’t mean “I’m right”, it just means that it’s something people can look at and both agree it’s there. So, I don’t say “a red car isn’t a car”, I say I don’t like this car because it’s red. You can look at the car and see whether it’s red or not. If it isn’t red, you can point that out and maybe conclude that I’m colorblind or lying / being in denial about my reasons. If it’s red, you can try to convince me that color is a bad reason for not liking a car or red is actually a nice color or that I should ignore the redness because it has other redeeming qualities, but you have to take that real and objectively verifiable reason into account. At least in my opinion, there cannot be objectivity in aesthetic judgments beyond that.
@ulr: Thanks for the Herrenreiter link. I actually had been looking for that; I recently came across this version and thought of listening to the original again, but couldn’t find it; now I know why – I somehow had thought it was by Ton, Steine, Scherben. (And I admit I didn’t look very thoroughly, otherwise I probably would have noticed my error.)
@Y, certainly some percussion ensembles count as music. I’ve paid good money over the years to attend Gareth Farr‘s various ensembles and compositions. From the Depths Sound the Great Sea Gongs doesn’t even compare with the droning that comes out of souped-up vehicles going down our main streets — for the structural reasons I’ve already laid out.
do not represent the range of the genre as a whole
Well ok then, suggest some rap that demonstrates a change of key, or a ‘bridge’, or a variation in the monotony. I was wholly unconvinced by DM’s example.
(To continue the Linguistics parallel, one of Sally Thomason’s minor interests is debunking claims of xenoglossy. I wouldn’t rate the public-in-general’s abilities to evaluate whether someone is speaking in tongues. Neither would I rate somebody who identifies with rap culture/support for oppressed minorities/yada yada, to assess musical qualities. Rap being deliberately performative to piss-off plastic pop aficionados doesn’t make it music any more than 4’33”. Particularly when it now seems to have joined the plastic pop mainstream. )
@Hans, @DE, to riff on this colour-of-car analogy:
even if the one on wikipedia is in tasteful Burnt Umber. And even if some families enjoyed their road trips in them. It will never become a classic in the same way as the Morris Minor — that it was aimed to replace.
Similarly, in 40/50 years’ time, will people still be talking about rap (which performers? which numbers? which concerts?) in the way this thread is remembering pop or rock? (This is the point Rick Beato makes in the recent vid.)
alls i can say is that i am kinda concerned about anyone who thinks disco – actual disco, as opposed to (for example) the Bee-Gees* – is rhythmically monotonous.
and that anyone who thinks people are not currently talking at great length and in great detail about the hiphop of 40 to 50 years ago could find out about some of the more formal conversations through programs at the New York Public Library over the past few years, which were certainly recorded and hopefully made available online. or just by looking at literally any marginally competent generalist popular music journalistic or academic periodical of the last decade or two. or even one of the many publications dedicated specifically to hiphop as a genre. this stuff isn’t hard to find. i mean, i’m not really a hiphop head in even a lowkey way, and i’m in the middle of a series of articles on the history of memphis hiphop that i encountered with no intention of finding any such thing.
and, perhaps most importantly, that there’s no point trying to give concrete examples to address a position that’s entirely based on an a priori rejection of the value of any example**.
.
* i mean, you might as well judge calypso by the kingston trio.
** which is, almost invariably, a position that’s about the people who produce the examples in question, flattened into a homogenous category.
rhythmically monotonous
There’s a recent movie examining the obsessive rhythm of Boléro; also drawing in Ravel’s rhythmically obsessive La Valse (so unrelenting Nijinsky refused to choreograph despite Diaghilev commissioning it); and the G major Piano Concerto slow movement — in slow waltz time. YMMV as to whether all this unrelenting three-time amounts to monotonous, or whether the varying subdivisions of the bars [**] and varying orchestration and increasingly chromatic harmonies avoids the charge.
Building up tension by repetition is legitimate (as in a pedal point), providing there is a dramatic release.
Ice-T “6 in the Mornin'” rhythm constant (no bridge), but a reasonable level of variation. No harmony. It’s poetry with a backbeat, not music.
Schoolly D – P.S.K. ‘What Does It Mean’? rhythmically monotonous. No harmony. No release, it just stops (no coda/no cadence because no harmony).
I suppose neither as monotonous as today’s droning I mentioned.
[**] [wikip]
I must say it never occurred to me anyone could have such a narrow definition of music. It not just has to have a rhythm, it has to have a change of rhythm?
Nothing is for me to dance to. I don’t dance. Et humanum est, et a me alienum puto.
I dance; but the world is not yet ready for my dancing.
That doesn’t make it music. […] Still not music. […] Still not sufficient for music.
Presumably you have a final, objective, and all-encompassing definition of music that will settle all arguments forever; is it still not time to share it with the world? Because otherwise it sure sounds like you’re saying “whatever I don’t think is music isn’t music.”
My sixth-grade teacher introduced us to classical music by playing “Boléro.” I guess it was supposed to be “accessible.” In actual fact it prejudiced me against classical music for a while.
I can’t think of a piece of music I hate more. If I could pay a reasonable fee to never be exposed to it again, I would.
alls i can say is that i am kinda concerned about anyone who thinks disco – actual disco, as opposed to (for example) the Bee-Gees* – is rhythmically monotonous.
Here you put it differently, and in my opinion, more sensibly:
i would argue that the overtly racist and anti-gay types who threw events like the notorious Disco Demolition Night actually understood the genre substantially better than most people, especially those whose exposure to it came only through late, dilute versions that got a lot of airplay (in particular studio-created operations like the Village People and trend-followers like the Bee-Gees).
I agree that even given that (the) Village People and the Bee Gees recorded a late, dilute version of disco, they still recorded actual disco.
What are some early, rhythmically complex and varied versions? Anything I might have heard on Top 40 and R&B stations? But they’ll show only that I should have said most disco was rhythmically monotonous.
Calling “Sir Duke” disco really is treating it as nothing but a crudely racial classifier rather than a stylistic classifier.*
That’s what I think, but from what rozele said, maybe “Sir Duke” is an atavism reflecting disco’s origins?
On the other hand, maybe I was wrong in thinking of “Fire” as a disco song. Maybe I should have called it soul or R&B (also racial classifiers).
Same here, unexpectedly.
At the end of the lesson, the teacher even wanted us to write an essay on how great it is. (That would have been the only such essay, in any subject throughout 12 years, that I was ever supposed to write.) Fortunately there was almost no time left, and by the time of the next lesson (two per week) she had apparently forgotten; she never followed up. I still chose art over music the (I think) next year.
Since “In the Navy” was brought up, I must share its wonderful misheard-on-purpose name recorded by Tislam in their 1979 absolute banger תנו לי רוקנרול “Give me Rock’n’roll”: the exact lyric is here but I recommend the entire anti-Disco anthem.
הושבת אותי בחדר
אתמול עד מאוחר
לשמוע אינדונזי של אנשי הכפר
You(f.sg) sat me in your room
Yesterday ’til late
To listen to Indonesi (“Indonesian.m.sg”)
By the Village People
Weird. I’m using uBlock Origin 1.68.0 on a browser forked from Firefox, and not seeing any adblock detector popup. I suspect that that might be because the adblock detector is itself a script that can be blocked by the adblocker. Maybe check your filter lists, and make sure that they’re updated?
debunking claims of xenoglossy
Glossolalia, which is what yer Pentecostals etc actually mean by
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speaking_in_tongues
is a quite different phenomenon (though not all practioners thereof are actually clear on this point.) It’s also what Paul’s letters refer to, and plainly not the thing described in Acts 2:4.
There’s an interesting study of glossolalia by the Africanist William Samarin, partly based on his own experiences, as a Molokan. A short paper of his on this theme is
https://utoronto.scholaris.ca/server/api/core/bitstreams/19db3e97-ac60-4556-b6b8-d6b981d2aec9/content
Ah, I don’t have uBlock because I do, AFAIK, need to run scripts on rare occasions. I should look into this…
uBlock doesn’t block all scripts, I’m pretty sure it’s just ad-related ones.
It doesn’t even block paywall scripts.
uBlock also has a “turn off for this site” button, if you think it’s blocking something that you need to see.
I love “Bolero,” personally. And the “Bolero” part of Allegro non Troppo is my favorite part of that film.
uMatrix gives you detailed control over which (if any) scripts you let run per-site. It’s also got a nice straightforward interface, considering how flexible it is.
https://github.com/gorhill/uMatrix
I was once treated to some glossolalia by a man who was annoyed that I wouldn’t let him copy his church flier on a copier belonging to my employer. It was like “Sa na ta…” fitting Samarin’s description nicely. Incidentally, having learned about Robert Lowie here, I wasn’t expecting him to show up again so soon.
And the Society for Psychical Research, too.
definition of music …; is it still not time to share it with the world?
I did already, upthread. Later discussion is applying the definition to examples.
It not just has to have a rhythm, it has to have a change of rhythm?
A steam engine has rhythm. Not music. (Although you might layer music over the backbeat — Pacific 231, yet the composer denies it.)
I can’t think of a piece of music I hate more.
Fair enough. But are you denying it’s music? If so, why?
The movie was in fairly equal parts invigorating and annoying. It’s boiled down from a recent biography — too much incidental lives-and-loves stuff. It could have done with more musical examination of not-Boléro.
In hindsight “monotonous” may have been an ill-chosen word because it muddles up description of the external sound with description of its effect on the listener’s internal state, which perhaps may vary. A better phrasing (thanks wikipedia) might be “steady, [and] uniformly-accented.” In the relevant disco context this rhythm is manifested in the “floor-on-the-four” pattern where the kick drum is sounded exactly four times per measure, every measure, and each time right on the beat rather than even a teensy bit off of it. Other instruments in the ensemble may sometimes be playing things that are rhythmically more interesting considered in isolation, but at least to my ear (and maybe different listeners have different psychoacoustic reactions, for all I know) it all gets assimilated to the monotony – oops I meant steadiness – of the kick drum pattern.
If you listen to non-disco styles of American R&B from either just before or just after the disco craze and focus on the kick drum you can usually hear the difference. Consider, for example, the magnificent rhythmic complexity of the drums-and-other-percussion on Trouble Funk’s masterful 1982 “Drop the Bomb,” an important early example of the go-go subgenre which for most of the Eighties was (within the R&B context) the last large and well-organized stand of human percussionists resisting replacement by the machines.*
You can have the same same “stady, uniformly-accented” pulse and have it not sound much like disco if it isn’t carried by the kick drum. I just listened a few days ago to Philip Glass’ 1986 _Songs for Liquid Days_ album, and it has the same sort of extremely steady uniformly-accented burbling of the pulse and I find it monotonous for the same reasons. OTOH I suspect (I haven’t gone back to check) that the same is true of his Koyaanisqatsi soundtrack but he nonetheless manages to achieve a certain trippy grandeur there anyway.
*There were obviously substantial differences between replacement-by-drum-machine and replacement-by-sampling, which I won’t digress into.
I was once treated to some glossolalia
I’ve encountered it fairly often in the course of working for a determinedly non-sectarian Christian organisation. Samarin’s account seems pretty much spot-on (unsurprisingly, as he was both a member of a Christian movement where it’s valued, and a proper linguist.)
I like his point that the fact that it is not actual language does not mean that it can’t have real spiritual value for its practitioners; my own second-hand experience has suggested that it’s perfectly possible for people to feel this without being under the misapprehension that what they are doing is actually xenoglossia, even though others are deluded about this. Also his point that studying its actual real paralinguistic properties may be of some value in understanding human language abilities.
I am reminded of reading a screed by Billy Childish on the back of an album, going on and on on the musical poverty of Rock ’n’ Roll and its three-chord music — and then it got to the point that anything more than two chords is decadent and unnecessary. Good one.
anything more than two chords is decadent and unnecessary
Ah, so rap is Unitarian: at most one chord.
If you really want to get an understanding of the ecstatic religious behavior that glossolalia is a part of, I would recommend reading Salvation on Sand Mountain and watching Holy Ghost People. It’s probably better to read the book first (and it goes pretty fast), to get some background about the Pentecostal Holiness churches before watching the documentary, which shows extracts from a couple of their services.
One of the points Samarin makes is that glossolalia is not now necessarily associated with states of high emotion (though it may historically have become common in such contexts.) This, too, I can confirm from my own observations.
Modern mainstream Pentecostal services can actually be disappointingly sedate affairs. Little snake-handling is in evidence.
I’ve been told by some that glossolalia is (or can be) a knack that you can deliberately acquire (like riding a bicycle.) I suspect many of those who grow up in churches where glossolalia is highly valued (and/or regarded as a key sign of being truly a Christian) do pretty much exactly that. That need not be hypocritical in any way: it’s not feigning anything, but just acting in accordance with what everyone in your circle expects and regards as natural.
The mainstream Pentecostals are pretty careful not to make unorthodox claims for the theological status and significance of glossolalia nowadays, though undoubtedly that has often happened in the past, and often still happens in contemporary less stodgy/more wacky groups.
Badger badger badger …
I was once cursed* in glossolalia by a “pagan” Kusaasi man. Sadly, I was not in a position to record his imprecation at that time, but it did seem to conform to Kusaal phonology as far as I recall, in accord with Samarin’s observations.
I haven’t found any record of anything similar in traditional Kusaasi culture, so it may have been just him.** He didn’t strike me as particularly well balanced, but I may have been biased. We didn’t hit it off.
The Assemblies of God are one of the two main groups of Christian Kusaasi (the other being Roman Catholics); it would be interesting to see what their glossolalia was like.
* At least, that was my impression of the speaker’s intention, but nobody was on hand to give a definitive interpretation.
** Perhaps he was actually a militant Pentecostal with a grudge against Presbyterians. In that case, he should have realised that his curse would be ineffective, as God is of course Presbyterian (as Calvin has proved.)
I wonder if anyone has ever investigated parallels between religious-style glossolalia and
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scat_singing
Or, indeed, actual historical connections? (Though I suspect that this is more a case of a common human paralinguistic creative ability turning up in rather different milieux.)
I notice an incorrect definition of “glossolalia” in the notes at the end of the article, but otherwise there is no mention of it as a parallel.
When I was in high school, one of the smaller musical groups that the choir teacher worked with after school was a four-person doo-wop group. I got really tired of hearing the exact same faux-improvisational scat from them time after time.
Scat singing by AmEng speakers generally seems subject to stricter phonotactic constraints than ordinary spoken AmEng, e.g. fewer allowable consonant clusters. I suspect but am not certain there may either be a smaller inventory of vowels, or at least a limited set of “popular” vowels has a higher aggregate market share than in ordinary speech.
That actually seems to have parallels in glossolalia too.
Apologies to the WP “Scat” article: it actually does mention “speaking in tongues” as a parallel, though it doesn’t expand on this at all.
It’s beginning to look to me as if there really may be actual formal parallels. You could perhaps also make an argument for semantic parallels: in neither genre is there the kind of Saussurean signifier/signified thing you see in actual language, but it’s nevertheless not impossible to attach meanings more loosely, such as pious devotion and a kind of open-ended desire for transcendent communication in the case of religious glossolalia, or the conveying of a kind of wordless joke in scatting.
Volume II of my definitive monograph on all this will explore the parallels with ideophones and phonaesthetic words ….
The first order of business would be to find out who put the bomp in the bomp-ba-bomp-ba-bomp.
From limited experience and memory, mostly Ella Fitzgerald and Sarah Vaughn, American jazz scat-singing has few or no /θ/s/ð/, /ʒ/s, /h~ŋ/s (joke), initial consonant clusters not beginning with /s/, initial three-consonant clusters, and final consonant clusters. Actually I don’t think there’s much /r/. Bring on the refutations. As my first sentence suggests, the phonotactics of early rock wordless vocals are different.
And near the beginning of the article there’s “open vowels” (with a link!) where “closed vowels” is meant.
Brett: That section of Allegro Non Troppo is the perfect visualization for “Boléro.” It captures the endless doggedness.