At the end of 2009, dance music as a whole is far from being ‘in trouble’. However, as noted in the previous entry on Underworld’s ‘Two Months Off’, a certain kind of tradition in British electronica of popular experimentalism has dwindled with the unfolding of the decade. What I term a significant minority act – in this genre, people like Underworld, Leftfield, Aphex Twin, artists communicating broadly underground/avant-garde values to a just-large-enough popular constituency – this sort of act is pretty much a thing of the past on these shores (though Burial springs readily to mind as a notable exception).
Fortunately, the bifurcation of British dance music into middlebrow stadium-massiveness (Basement Jaxx, Groove Armada, Calvin Harris) on the one hand and microcosmic obscurity (…) on the other, seemed to provide an ideal opportunity for other geographical regions to flourish.
Scandinavia, of course, was one of the major hotspots for left-of-centre noughties electronica (see TotD entries on Robyn’s ‘With Every Heartbeat’ and Royksopp’s ‘What Else Is There?’). But the US also distinguished itself in the field, as acts like Gang Gang Dance, Crystal Castles, Animal Collective, and Flying Lotus proved that America was a place where broad-appeal dance music was still firmly rooted in a progressive alternative culture that kept a critical margin between itself and the corporate mainstream.
And perhaps the most promising American artist of the last couple of years, the one most likely to nail the avant-garde/populist balancing act and become dance music’s greatest significant minority, is New York-via-Baltimore producer Dan Deacon, a man who seemingly gets everything right …
Communal, anti-rock poseur performing ethos: check.
Neo-primitive, gabba-redolent viscerality: check.
Genuinely innovative, classic-minimalism-influenced sound: check.
Tunes you can dance to, sing, whistle, for Christ’s sake: check, check, check.
All in all, Deacon is the kind of artist that makes me giddy about the prospect of the forthcoming decade.
Check out what is probably his best track to date (though album-wise I encourage to download this year’s Bromst without further delay). If ‘Wham City’ doesn’t grab you by the yarblockos and make you optimistic about the future of electronica, then frankly, there must be something very wrong with you.
AN
[...] When I think of this pre-09/11 world (read post-1989 as well), my mind focuses on things that will likely never occur again; foremost is a certain sense of naïve optimism. Optimism about the world and culture. An excitement of variety and possibility, which may just have been a by-product of my youth, or might have been a genuine reflection of a different time; I really can’t tell. In musical/popular culture terms Radiohead’s Kid A is certainly from this old world order, thus I find it inseparable from these emotions. From my current viewpoint in this post 09/11 era, Kid A is one of the final landmarks of that time – and it is a landmark – and a perfect exemplar of that indefinable feeling that will never quite be recaptured, the high water mark of a lost culture. Radiohead, off the back of two albums with commercial and critical success in equal and increasing amounts (one of which managed to transcend its Brit-pop surroundings, whilst the other just transcended) refused to repeat the formula that had created this success and decided to rebuild themselves, and even with the distinctly progressive sounds of OK Computer achieving a level of commercial success that now looks a little baffling, this felt like a bold step. A ‘change in direction’, to put it in the terms of cliché this sort of poor writing demands, might not be a seem particular newsworthy, but with the benefit of hindsight nothing will quite match this because no one this challenging will reach such a unifying size or be able to get to such a critical mainstream mass with music this disconcerting and simultaneously awe inspiring. (See recent discussion by the likes of Simon Reynolds on the death of consensus and the internet age and #8). [...]