WHY IS MODERN DANCE SCENE SO ( OVER )SEGMENTED

[ALBATROS]

Hi,
Before I start this I have to tell that I love good House music, but
I am really BIG fan of 70's disco!
My age is 35 and I was a professional D.J. during mid 80,s.
Couple Years ago I have started organizing "old school disco" parties here in my hometown. Occasionaly I play in local dance-bars and my sets usually includes good groovie
house tracks ( new & old ),funk,soul,old groove and of course- disco.
I have been whitnessed the evolution of modern dance music since 1978 or so, and I must tell, that in last years
the segmentation of all dance music is become really annoying. If you go to some xy party elsewhere, you are always exposed to very specialistic selection of music, and D.J.-s really playing to appeal to their peers or D.J.coleagues and less or nothing to dancers. Especially on house parties they are really working hard to sound very "underground" ( which is not bad per se...) and playing
lots of music which is really a litlle bit more than just plain drum machine. I think that in lots of cases they are just kids who wanna look cool, but don't really understand what really groovy music is. On the other side we have a bunch of producers who are in the same category as previously mentioned D.J.'s , or they only want to cash in this self -generated scene. The most of people who are going on such parties, do not have any specifical demand on music
and are just programmed that this is the best what they
can get! I think this kills the music!Those people are more on fashion, drugs or anything that is "in" than music!
Whenever I play in clubs "my stuff" there is always massive
feedback which is much different than on previously mentioned parties. The feeling is usually much happier, uplifting and they can very well dance on much slower tempo than they usually do. And yes, dance they do...
So my question is , why D.J.'s of today so bitterly persist to
play anything else but the same annoying beat all long night trough. I think this is really narrow minded - music in my opinion can be only good or bad, or better- some tracks you
like and some not, but what happens recently is already some kind of ideology or plain ignorance...
ALBATROS

[Art Figueroa]

Hi,
I think that in lots of cases they are just kids who wanna look cool, but don't really understand what really groovy music is.

You hit the nail on the head with that sentence. Before I started mixing, I most of all, loved to dance. I have always danced, it was not something that I learned to do just to hang out and get laid...

You have to "feel" the music and what it does to you before you can attempt to convey those feelings to a group of srangers on the dance floor.

Just my opinion.

Art

[QUINNY]

I just see the fragmentation in today's scene as an obvious consequence of the cheapness of recording equipment and the general rise in the me culture. People on these boards may hate the big record companies, but at least they made stars out of people and most of those stars had the talent to be something special. It really does take something extraordinary (be it really brilliant or really crap, but commercially appealing) to sell multi million records. Almost anyone can make a living now by selling a few thousand records each year, appealing to a very narrow cult following and that's exactly what they do. I suspect there's a band out there making records that I'd go apeshit over and once we become acquainted with each other, why would I dare look elsewhere and take a chance on being disappointed? I might do, but most people like safety, don't they?
That's exactly why you get DJs playing a very particular type of music now. They play to a niche. In return the niche feel safe and confident that their little scene is the best. It feels comfortable. This is nothing new, especially on the dance scene. It's been going on for decades, if not centuries.
It's the same in almost any part of modern society that you care to name. The need for ever cheaper products has opened up markets to more and more dross. No one really cares about quality anymore. The masses all shout in unison "give us your best price". We're all to blame, eh?

[efunk_adelic]

Hi,
Before I start this I have to tell that I love good House music, but
I am really BIG fan of 70's disco!
My age is 35 and I was a professional D.J. during mid 80,s.
Couple Years ago I have started organizing "old school disco" parties here in my hometown. Occasionaly I play in local dance-bars and my sets usually includes good groovie
house tracks ( new & old ),funk,soul,old groove and of course- disco.
I have been whitnessed the evolution of modern dance music since 1978 or so, and I must tell, that in last years
the segmentation of all dance music is become really annoying. If you go to some xy party elsewhere, you are always exposed to very specialistic selection of music, and D.J.-s really playing to appeal to their peers or D.J.coleagues and less or nothing to dancers. Especially on house parties they are really working hard to sound very "underground" ( which is not bad per se...) and playing
lots of music which is really a litlle bit more than just plain drum machine. I think that in lots of cases they are just kids who wanna look cool, but don't really understand what really groovy music is.

First of all Albatros, welcome to the board :)

It looks like you got lucky to play for a select few who like a variety of music and appreciate all types of music new & old.
In fact this weekend I'll be playing very similar to you... but the birthday couple (celebrating their 50th wedding anniversary) are gonna like oldies (of course) and I'll be able to throw in some 50's and i'm gonna be able to play some 60's (stax/atlantic/motown) jams ... I love to play this way. I'm gonna play a little bit of 70's disco & 80's dance jams to go along with the above... I won't have to play any of the techno which would get some complaints anyways...

Thanks for sharing your story & and your current gig... I like knowing that their is someone out there that still plays a little bit of everything to please the crowd & with them also liking it... and yourself not getting bored playing just house/techno stuff all night long

[Forrrce]

Too many people are conditioned to like rubbish, anyway. I recently attended a function where no one was dancing, 'til the host handed the DJ (a good DJ, at that) a Ministry/Ibiza - type CD to play. The jam came alive! What I couldn't understand was that the crowd were all in my age group (30-40, but I'd guess mainly late 30s) and the pounding, brainless nonsense was doing it for them. Younger partygoers? I can get to that, but..?

Maybe I'm wrong, but I've always felt that today's younger people aren't necessarily receptive to music in the same way as previous generations. Most of what's been coming out for the past 20 years, popular-wise, is programmed, computerised and in many cases, pretty tuneless. Subtleties and nuances - in fact - anything vaguely human, must sound so old fashioned to them.

[Paulo]

I experience that early on this year:

I have 3 young cousins who are around their early 20s. To celebrate their birthdays we went to 3 different night clubs in 3 different parts of town in 3 different months.

The first one was only played cutting edge techo. The "audience" was on their late teens to early 20s and they were crazy jumping to the BPM, but the "music" was unlistenable to me (being in my early 40s, I was complete out of place there... anyway, I was with the family).

In another month we went to a club that was playing a kind of music that someone there told me it was called "industrial". I couldn't tell the diffrence to techno except that it was even more noisy. To me, it was the same crap. This time the dance-floor was empty all night long. This club was located in a much more poor area of Rio and I think the people wanted radio music or even samba. I don't know why the DJ insisted on that.

The other birthday was in Barra da Tijuca (a beach) which is a very rich area and the club played much more conventional and commercial house-music... the audience was wild. To much drinking flowing around (not to mention cocaine).

Two weaks ago we went to celebrate the anniversary of another cousin who is 39 and we went to CARIOCA 54 which is a night club five minutes across town that plays religiously only 70's and aerly 80's disco-music, every friday and saturday night. The audience is around 30s to 50s years old.

My younger cousins also came with us and said they liked the music.

[ALBATROS]

:) Oh yes, "conditioned" ; that's the word that describes very precisely what happen to folks today.
There is great new dance music made novadays, but also tons of unbelievable crap, produced from people which obviously do not have feel for groove and music in general.
On our parties there is lots of young people which you can see dancing on deepest raves( where they dance on minimal techno...). So I don't think this is an age problem. I have lots of much younger D.J. friends ( in theirs early 20,s...),
wich have admitted on several occasions that they would much rather play more soulful and groovie music, but they are afraid from other D.J.'s from that "niche" that they would become "stamped" for sounding too commercial.
Too commercial ???!!! Hey, whole dance scene is soooo comercialised that you can see this even from dark side of the moon! Check the fashion only...
In my opinion, part of the problem can be related with "hystory amnesia" of young D.J,'s, who simply are too narrow-minded and don't know older music or are so ignorant and don't care for this vintage stuff - "who listens this old crap anyway, grannies???- That's this way of thinking and putting "ME" on the top of everything. I bet that lots of this kids even think that house for example was
"invented" with their generation ! But I know one thing; old masters of groove just knew how to transform emotions into sound, and even so "conditioned" individual cannot resist when the groove starts to take over... And that's the real secret of all old gems who we all so much like to play on our parties... We got the groove!
Just keep those mirror balls rolling...

ALBATROS[/b]

[Com King]

Hi everybody,

I find the statement made in this topic really pessimist.
I agree that there's a lot of crap that has been issued lately but that doesn't mean that everything is crap.

There are still a lot of good parties nowadays, and the main thing to make a crowd dance, I think, is the quality of the DJ.

Pick 100 people in a rave, and give them Danny Krivit or Timmy Regisford, there's not a single doubt that they will dance. The fact that the DJs play garage or disco is not important.

This wednesday, I heard Danny Mills mixing for the first time. In a two hours set, he played Garage, tech house, big house classics like Lil Louis' French Kiss, and disco.

In ten minutes, he started with Loose Joints' Is it all over my face, then came a tech house song, then came an instrumental version of The Striker's Body Music, then James Brown.

From tech house to James Brown in 3 tracks. Nobody was wondering why they were dancing, but everybody danced during the 3 tracks.

It's still possible to have fun today. :D

[Paulo]

I wonder how these guys who produce and record new dance-music can make a living in a so fragmented scene like that ?

They don't have any radio, TV, paper, media or MTV exposure.
They don't have any majors to back up them. Majors aren't interested.
Most of them are complete unknown.
Probably very few people buy their records (which, by the way, are only 12"? Albums?)
The scene is fragmented to the point in which a DJ who plays this doesn't play that, because it is "commercial" or whatever. This means that the artist can't reach a larger crowd and his "promotion" is restricted to the rave or night-club where he is played!

So, how can they make a living? (I am not talking about the big ones like Moby,... but the thousand others who work in fragmented scene as modern dance music)

[Sami M]

I think with real instruments and orchestrations other kind of creativity was needed. It was important to get people to perform and produce a certain sound. The human touch was involved in so many ways. More technical skills are reguired to make a machine to perform. People who like live instruments make other than club music. So maybe it's just that, people who love machines are apt to think more technically and are liable to categorize more. Maybe thats why there just sometimes isn't any feeling involved. And of course dance music with live instruments and pitch changes isn't normal from an over technical point of wiew. A question of controll?

Luckily one can be creative with machines aswell, there are good examples of that.