An Essay and Thought Experiment on the Major Touchstones of 00s Music (Part 2)

In this section I continue to explore the musical connections of the 00′s through the DNA of its antecedents. Here is the link to Part 1.

Kraftwerk

This article would not be complete without mentioning the Godfathers of electro: Kraftwerk. The influence that Kraftwerk has had on music is reaching monolithic proportions at this stage in history, not only are they not diminishing in stature over time, in fact it seems their influence continues to grow. With the 80′s, there was hip-hop, electro and synth-pop, all dominant strains of music in that decade and all deeply indebted to the forward futurism of Kraftwerk. In the 90′s their influence diminished in America in the mainstream (grunge and pop), but in Europe acid house and techno were at a fever pitch, all heirs to the Kraftwerk throne. And in the 00′s, its borderline obscene how much Kraftwerk’s invisible electro hand guided the music producer.

Electro in all of its variant forms was ubiquitous in the 00′s; whereas before the 00′s the term electro mostly meant break dancing music ala Man Parrish and Afrika Bambaata, now it has permeated music discourse in a very different way where it can apply to a variety of approaches.

There was electro-clash, a short lived trend that took the squelching 303′s of techno and the bass kicks of a TR-808 and added an early 80′s Gary Numan coked up aesthetic with a dash of glam. Ultimately its superficiality was its own undoing, this trend lasted 1 maybe 2 years ? From a fashion perspective, Lady Gaga, La Roux and other commercial pop music artists have taken some of the more draggy and druggy aspects of electro clash and integrated them into their aesthetic.

Electro also has a connection within the hip-hop/urban scheme of things. Cool Kids took the fundamental elements of electro; (at least how it was conceived in the 80′s) a Roland 808 and vintage synthesizers and seduced audiences with their schoolyard rhymes and boom-bap electro beats. Flosstradamus can also be seen as doing a similar dance, although their approach was more aggresive and less funky in its execution. Fool’s Gold would fall closer in spirit to Cool Kids but whereas Cool Kids opted for a leaner less synth driven music, Fool’s Gold was more forthcoming in this respect. Much has been written on Kanye in the last decade (an important artist in his own right), and I will not spill more ink than necessary here, but Kanye definitely ties together electro-hip-hop-urban-pop-dance- and did this all with one stroke of an album; Heartbreak.

On this front of mixing hip-hop and electro, we can now add “world music” to the list which really started to open things up in the 00′s. Diplo and MIA are the figureheads in such a discussion and must be mentioned here, a duo whose collaboration opened up musical doors hitherto unseen. MIA a sort of faux-ethnic electro icon (born in Sri Lanka raised in London), is a formidable artist who owns her ethnic roots (sonically and thematically) and whose political appeal  (her agressive stance on human rights is constantly being noted in the press) helped catapult her to pop stardom. Diplo deserves his own space here, as he works as a DJ/producer/promoter for countless artists who are termed “electro”, but in reality are mixing everything from dancehall to baile funk, to booty bass, and this confirms how much the term electro has morphed from its early roots and has become somewhat of an etymological blur.

Gang of Four

A late 70′s post-punk group from Leeds whose politically charged lyrics drew comparisons to The Clash cropped up in unlikely places in the 00′s. The tightly wound disco-funk basslines of Dave Allen along with the chicken scratch guitar work of Andy Gill are all over so many records of the last decade that it would be an interesting exercise to see how many times the name “Gang of Four” came up in music reviews during 2000-05. Funk, punk, minimalism, and the dichotomy of shouty/ennui driven vocal-isms infused the The New York Sound palette with no real sense of where it would stop. We can still hear some of those tropes in play with many of the bands that the NME promotes, a good barometer for rockism’s diminishing returns.

Bands in evidence would include the Television/Go4/VU hybridization of the Strokes first record, Radio 4 which aped the GO4 sound with no sense of shame, and from a club perspective The Rapture’s 12 inch “House of Jealous Lovers”, a massive slab of dance-funk-punk that crystallized those elements into something that created a ripple on the pop continuum. Remixes immediately sprouted, The Rapture was playing late night shows and many other bands that were already tilling similar soil began to get A&R attention. Franz Ferdinand, Bloc Party and Arctic Monkeys, all groups who continue to enjoy popularity in the UK and abroad but whose popularity in the states has ebbed to some degree all owe much to GO4 ‘s innovations.

An interesting aside in speaking of Go4′s influence within the underground rock realm (“underground” as tongue in cheek) is how much Go4 might have influenced some truly horrific corporate rock of the 00′s, albeit unconsciously. This mixture of funk and rock, something that we can trace back to the Red Hot Chili Peppers -Flea’s comment on Go4′s Entertainment record is an apt one in this context- “it completely changed the way I looked at rock music and sent me on my trip as a bass player”. That the Red Hot Chili Peppers influenced rap-metal of the 00′s is of no doubt to anyone, but if we take it further it was Go4 who are the true hidden god-fathers of such a genre, although I doubt Fred Durst has a copy of “Entertainment” on his IPOD. Nonetheless, Go4 were conscious or unconsciously a massive boon to rock and dance music of the 00′s.

Daft Punk

On September 12, 1997 Daft Punk performed at the El Rey Theatre in Los Angeles on their first US tour and I was in attendance. At the time the only thing that was rocking dance floors was “Da Funk”, an infectious cut of 4 to the floor modern funk with a hypnotic bassline and guitar hook that stood out from everything else at the time. At the risk of sounding hyperbolic, it is one of the best live shows I’ve ever been witness to, a manic wild ride into the minds of two tremendously talented producers. And although their prowess at rocking the dance floor was built into their DNA and was on full display that night, it was harder to say whether they were going to be an act that would be considered ” classic” over a decade later; well they have become that and more.

Their debut “Homework” presaged much of the pop/rock/indie/underground music of the 00′s, and I will slightly break the rules here to include their 2001 album Discovery to illustrate a larger point. Both of these records and the thrust of Daft Punk’s vision in general is one that values a retro-futuristic naivete, a utopic investment in the future – one that came from a blending of rave and 70′s dance futurism- (see Moroder in my part 1). This includes synths, body suits, space-pop paraphernalia, all sealed with a disco-minimal-sheen. In retrospect this “minimalism” or “plastic popism” to quote Simon Reynolds, was a brilliant marketing move on their part, however the focus here is not only the “mystery” of two faceless guys behind synths and drum machines, an element that has elevated their mythos in pop discourse no doubt but that had already been done by Orbital and by Space in the 70′s, the true godfathers to Daft Punk.

“I was the first guy playing Daft Punk to the rock kids” sayeth James Murphy in his satirical tome “Losing My Edge”. This lyric brings to light a critical point in understanding where the genius of Daft Punk lies and also in seeing where the line between electronic dance music and rock were beginning to blur; that James chose to use Daft Punk instead of say Juan Atkins in that song is no accident. Recalling that first Daft Punk tour in 1997 there were very few rock kids at that show and looking back on it now its understandable. Most people there were either industry types or part of underground rave culture, a term that has lost most of its pejorative bite (in no small part due to Daft Punk) but during that time meant to most mainstream or even indie types; ridiculous Disney’fied candy land attire and boring repetitive music.

What I alluded to above is that aside from Daft Punk’s music and mystery, there was something else that allowed for the “cross-over” to happen. Namely, stripping rave of all the ornate and gauche symbolism in favor of a more sophisticated and sleek minimalism that was both futuristic (something that rave tried to do disastrously in the 90′s) and ironically also embraced many of the emotional tropes that had populated indie music for the last 20 years. In my piece on the Beach Boys I mentioned how they served as an anchor for much of the chill-wave/hypnagogic pop/indie/folk of the last couple years (Julian Lynch, Animal Collective/Ducktails. al) “an emotionalism that is rooted in a nostalgia for a mythical adolescence”.

Daft Punk fulfilled that same goal but through different means, “One More Time” probably their most well known track uses a vocoder to a very similar effect. In fact, I would say its this ability to make electronic music “emotional” in the indie sense of the term, (childlike, beatific, slightly solipsistic) that paved the way for many rock kids/bands to feel OK in liking and making music of a similar strain. These are not value judgments on the part of rock kids, just statements of observation that have more to do with the influence of Daft Punk not only in the indie circles of the 00′s but whose reach extended to hip-hop i.e. Kanye West. It’s odd and telling that when Kanye decided to go “emo”, he chose not an emo band but Daft Punk as an influence.

By necessity when a group that comes out of an under-ground sub-genre and transcends it as Daft Punk did, many of the natural allies in that scene will move in a different direction or cease most of the discourse with such an entity. It’s a knee jerk reaction by many of those involved that choose to assert the boundaries in such a way so as to prevent artistic dilution. After 2001′s Discovery monumental success, most involved in the electronic music scene begrudgingly admit Daft Punk’s talent but did not imitate their sound, where the influence of Daft Punk was the most ubiquitous was in the rock/indie/pop realm.

Part 3 (The Producers). Jump to Part 1 here.