This is my first attempt at posting a blog, you know… putting your opinion out there for everybody to grammar check and insult your intelligence with. So please, use KY when posting comments.
I have never attempted to hide the fact that I hate indie rock. However, I find my reasons for hating it to be quite valid. Listening to the crap makes me cringe… actually, it made an entire crowd of us at Lollapalooza ‘94 collectively cringe as Pavement played their set. Some people thought the music was so crappy that they wanted it to end ASAP. They communicated this to the band in a way that words like “Boo” and “You suck” just can’t… more specifically, by throwing piles of mud and garbage at the stage. The deluge was so great that Pavement was forced to flee the stage, cutting their set short to the relief of everybody who wasn’t tone deaf. Oh sure, Pavement will play it up now as if the collective crowd anger had something to do with their fued with the Smashing Pumpkins at the time. Most anybody who was there and forced to listen to that crap will tell you otherwise.
If electronic music causes that same gut-cringe reaction in you, I have no problem with that. What gets me is the people who list reasons for hating the genre, none of which are real. They are made up, regurgitated arguments that really have no bearing in reality. I’ll list a few:
1. I like music with real instruments.
A girl I knew at college once said this to me. Shortly thereafter, Tupac Shakur came up on her random playlist. WTF? Electronic music has fake instruments, but rap/hip-hop is legit? I could maybe, possibly understand this reasoning had she been a fan of music with guitars, drums, bass, violins, etc., but hip-hop and electronic music use pretty much the same equipment! Samplers for beats and sound effects, editing tools for production effects… hell, even turntables are prominent in both styles.
Even this argument coming from a die-hard rock fan makes no sense. How is a keyboard, theremin, synthesizer, sample-driven drum pad, even a set of human vocal chords not a real instrument? Anybody care to define a fake instrument? This kinda sorta leads into the next one:
2. Why would I want to see somebody press a button on a keyboard?
Somebody lied once. Somebody told hundreds of people that electronic music shows consist basically of someone coming out on stage and pressing a button on a keyboard then walking away as the song is pumped out of the speakers. Apparently they all believed him and propagated the myth and we ended up with millions of people who think that a computer automagically produces the music while the composer sits on stage and eats a sandwich. I’m not exaggerating. Well, ok… I am about the sandwich part, but the rest I’ve heard. Where do people get this?!
I’ve been going to electronic music shows for years (not to be confused with DJ sets) and I’ve never seen a show that even remotely resembles the scene described above that has been regurgitated to me countless times with slight variations. It’s very obvious to me that anybody who says this has never been to a show put on by an electronic music artist. In many cases, the number of instruments on stage is far, far greater than bands with “real instruments”. The last electronic show I went to was Massive Attack, and they had 2 drummers (because you need that many to accurately reproduce the complex beats their music contains), a guitarist, bassist, and four different singers that would sing during different songs, their voices run through an effects machine that the main singer would operate in real-time to add the right effects at the right time. Actually, thanks to electronic musicians’ superior understanding of production, the sound of electronic music’s live shows more closely resembles the original sound on the albums due to all the effects machines and skill of the operators using them live, in real time, right in front of your eyes. Sure some samples are pre-recorded and played back during the show, but the majority of the music is played live. Somebody please explain to me again how this even remotely resembles somebody telling a comupter to “play song for ppl plz, tnx”.
For all the doubters…
Goldfrapp: entire band on stage (singer, drums, synth, bass… some other stuff too). This video here is pretty much what it was like when I saw her live:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oU8chUpmhUY
Juno Reactor: Look at what it takes to recreate this electronic music live:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZiSsBY-ehvU
More to add later, or post comments with links and I’ll add them here.
