It's On!

Choose sides. Right now. Either you're with us or you're against us. And if you're against us, we're not fucking around anymore. We're out for blood. You've been warned.

I fully endorse the Todd Burns Pazz and Jop essay. I think the point Todd's trying really hard to make is that with the emergence of acts like Justice (and let's face facts, they're going to be around for a while) there's a NEED to differentiate between "true, balls-to-bone dance" music and pop (which I'm defining as on the one side of the spectrum Hilary Duff [has anyone else listened to "With Love"? That song was almost something] to Metallica/Linkin Park on the other) you can dance to. I also think you're an idiot if you think that Todd doesn't think it's possible for good dance pop to exist. The guy listed Miss Diamond To You as his favorite record of the year.

"Dance" music, however, is all about prolonged builds, builds that elicit a bacchic and physical response other than fist pumping. I think what Todd's trying to say is that the survival of "dance" music, e.g. Dinosaur L's "Kiss Me Again" to Reese & Santonio "How To Play Our Music" to Villalobos is being threatened by the need-for-immediate-consumption society we live in. Which brings me to drugs-- drugs seem to me the mechanism driving Justice's success-- "yo dude, when you do twenty lines of cocaine, you have to listen to this." Has anyone gone to a Justice show sober? That would be the true test. What's really in control, the music or the drugs? That's my thing about drugs: are they really setting you free? Maybe up to a certain point, but then they just become another type of control. Hey, I just finished Brave New World. Reading a lot into it, I think Todd also might be worried that it's the drugs. What Justice really try to do is will themselves on the listener-- all of the songs start out so aggressively. How can you not feel the violence, the intrusion, if you're not already numb? I don't think it's a sentiment at all, Mr. Wilkes, but an entire lack thereof.

It makes me again turn to LCD Soundsystem's "Yeah" (Pretentious). When I listen to that track, I hear James Murphy putting in time to get his audience to freak out. Moreover, I think he's requiring us to put in our time. Your string must be stretched to its limit. I wholly believe the first ten minutes of the song are the ten most schizo minutes in all of music, you're ready to burst, and when the acid line comes in at the end, it's there for only twenty seconds, not 5 minutes. If it's done right, that's all the acid it takes. I'm never going to do cocaine because I don't have to-- how can it possibly be any different from listening to this song?

But I digress. It all comes down to the music. Chris and I have been talking a lot recently about how so much of the music produced these days will be going along just fine and then will fall completely flat on its face. Lots of Justice songs do just that. Thinking about it, it's indicative of the fact that it's too easy to make a record these days, that people who really don't know what they're doing make music, and way too much of it. It's all too forced. These people don't care about making good records, mostly because, like DJCB says in the post linked in the sidebar, no bloggers/critics blast music anymore, I'm talking about the Forkcast section in particular, which endorses everybody who coughs up the goods that keep the section going, but also Fluxblog. Just keep belting out the catchiness, we'll come up the words to back it somehow. Just crank out the music. Liking something because of its marketability is a bad idea, and it scares the shit out of me because it seems like we have become such consumers, especially of music, since most of us are getting it for free, that everything has a market. Well, we at TPO still love to hate fuck Capitalism, it's just absurd that with the way things now are, it appears that the best way to do it would be to stop listening to everything, to stop reading Pitchfork and Fluxblog and support financially only those bands you've chosen to truly love. Oh yes, the battle lines have been drawn!