Music reflects the times

[busta nuttz]

Dubstep ruled the bush years. Dark, dystopian, distrustful tunes reflected the times perfectly.

So will Funky with its upbeat multi ethnic roots reflect the obama years ?

[pidge]

Bush years? don't you mean Blair years being thaat its English. Bush has nothing to do with it.

[glottis5]

obama isn't even in office yet...

[busta nuttz]

I mean bush years and it seems the music and mood changed with the realisation that he was on his way out. Suddenly underground music got upbeat and funky again.

Then again shit seems to be getting worse before it gets better so will we see dubstep doing the same?

[3275]

yeah because economic recessions are so funky..

[seckle]

music is very dangerous when it's practised as social commentary. not many people choose that route. most choose escapism.

[skrewface]

Soukouss or Congolese Rhumba, popular dance music comes from a very bloody country filled with internal conflicts involving rapes, cutting off limbs, tribal violence etc is very happy and upbeat. Does it reflect the times?

"Escapism" as Seckle stated imho.

Ps. is that Peter Sellers or a young Henry "The butcher" Kissinger you have on your avatar, Seckle?

[deft]

music is very dangerous when it's practised as social commentary. not many people choose that route. most choose escapism.

word

[doomstep]

...a micro-genre like dubstep hardly reflects wider social / economic trends.

Croydon has been a rather drab place for well over 100 years

Most clubs where banging out day-glo, over compressed Electro House for most of the 'Bush' years.

To further skrewface s comment. One of the longest, continuously running civil wars in Africa gave birth to Kuduro in Angola & South Africa has celebrated its new found freedoms to exploit / abuse itself in the dwindling shadow of its old world masters with over the top, exuberant, joyous House music.

I think that Dubstep was escapism from the (relatively) good times of the 1st decade of this century; it is a collective feeling of guilt amongst the well off, well intentioned youth of the 1st World.

[seckle]

...a micro-genre like dubstep hardly reflects wider social / economic trends.

Croydon has been a rather drab place for well over 100 years

Most clubs where banging out day-glo, over compressed Electro House for most of the 'Bush' years.

To further skrewface s comment. One of the longest, continuously running civil wars in Africa gave birth to Kuduro in Angola & South Africa has celebrated its new found freedoms to exploit / abuse itself in the dwindling shadow of its old world masters with over the top, exuberant, joyous House music.

I think that Dubstep was escapism from the (relatively) good times of the 1st decade of this century; it is a collective feeling of guilt amongst the well off, well intentioned youth of the 1st World.

escapism has a long long tradition in music, going back hundreds of years in africa and the middle east. in morocco they have a branch of sufi mystic music called hadra or jilala (jilat). the music is meant to put you into a trance / healing state. in one sense this is purist form of escapism as it's built to take you out of this reality into another. check this...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VfTRskpKEeE

this james brown tune became a civil rights anthem.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2VRSAVDlpDI

politics and music is so important, and if its done right it can have gigantic influence. antiwar dub...stand...etc

[intoccabile]

This is an interesting thread.

I have a few thoughts to share.

. What do you mean, exactly, when we say that music is a " reflection " of our times ?

. My belief is that musicians should not make political statements or try to " express " themselves on political matters through music. But even when they " say nothing ", even when they don't try to express themselves on political matters, they do say something, or perhaps I should write : their music " says " something, since music ( of course, this point could be debated ) is intrinsically political / is of a political nature. I will go as far as saying that the less we try to say things of a political nature through music, the more eloquent our music becomes.

. Escapism, in certain instances, is a studied refusal of reality, and as a refusal of reality, it is a discourse on the reality that is refused. Therefore, it appears, at least to me, quite problematic to put music that specializes in social and political commentary on one side, and escapism on the other side since escapism is in itself a socio-political statement, even when it leads to hedonism.

Keep this thread alive !

[dubble]

Have you ever seen an Iraqi throw a shoe a Pokes?

[powerpill]

Have you ever seen an Iraqi throw a shoe a Pokes?

didnt someone throw an empty evian bottle at loefah at the last dmz??? sign of the times??

[dubble]

Have you ever seen an Iraqi throw a shoe a Pokes?

didnt someone throw an empty evian bottle at loefah at the last dmz??? sign of the times??

That's true. I guess someone didn't want to lose one of their creps.

[LEQ]

Certainly does, all I hear is fucking Slade or Chris Rea everywhere I go at the moment.

[Littlefoot]

eh Dubstep and Funky are both UK (london specific even) born musics.... doesnt have much to do with us government...


plus who says Obama is actually any good at his job, we dont know yet

[doomstep]

escapism has a long long tradition in music, going back hundreds of years in africa and the middle east. in morocco they have a branch of sufi mystic music called hadra or jilala (jilat). the music is meant to put you into a trance / healing state. in one sense this is purist form of escapism as it's built to take you out of this reality into another. check this...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VfTRskpKEeE

The assumption here is that this world, the realm of utility & function is real & that we escape into another reality as a break from the real. My experiance with mysticism is that this reality, 'the real world' is the temporary state and thru music & dance we connect to something deeper, older, more permanent. This is far more important than artists jumping on board party politics.

You know the Bolsheviks used Kandinsky paintings as billboards / posters outside factories before the revolution...

this james brown tune became a civil rights anthem.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2VRSAVDlpDI

& as is evident in some of the comments as relevant today as it was then

politics and music is so important, and if its done right it can have gigantic influence. antiwar dub...stand...etc

... Bob Geldof... Bono... etc. (not to mention Sir Pauls recent attempts to re-write history) Not saying you arn't right, just that its very shakey ground, this kind of politics is really a moot point.

Escapism, in certain instances, is a studied refusal of reality, and as a refusal of reality, it is a discourse on the reality that is refused.

While I agree that creating a binary division between Party & party music is the wrong way to go, this is basically theory for the sake of theory. In practice following this line ends in politicing & partying, activism & addiction all being becoming parts of an inexorable whole... the modern potlatch of throwing stuff away, of insatiable waste in search of something that transcends use value.

plus who says Obama is actually any good at his job, we dont know yet

This is a very good point & will Funky turn out to be the soundtrack of the emperors new clothes, of the old parading as the new but slightly differant

[corpsey]

In a sense I think you can describe the growth of funky as a social phenomenon in that it has been in part a response to the death of grime raves in London, the violence associated with grime etc...

I have been wondering recently what effect the recession might have on music. Also, although it might be partly a media concoction, there is this feeling that people are frightened of other people, distrust other people and so on... It just makes me think of the connection you always see drawn in articles/books about the birth of rave between ecstacy/acid house/raves and Thatcher's ''No society'' rhetoric and the money-grabbing individualism of the time. It seems to be a bit of a cliche to say that hard times make for good music but is it? After all, look at the social conditions that the Blues, Hip-Hop, reggae all arose from (of course I'm not trying to directly compare a recession in the UK with hundreds of years of slavery and repression!). I think it will be interesting to see what effect Obama's election might have on Hip-Hop - I don't know if its the same with UK dance music?

In 'Energy Flash' Simon Reynolds writes about the rise of dark hardcore and later industrial/tech DNB and talks about them in terms of people coming down from the plateau of ecstacy, taking other drugs to bring back the high, smoking huge amounts of skunk. Dubstep has obviously been connected with weed from the start, and it would be interesting to think about what effect the smoking ban has had on dubstep (since its primarily club music, after all)... although again thats a complicated issue because perhaps dubstep has become less skunk-orientated as a consequence of its general growth.

I suppose you could say that there might be this political connection as in the years leading up to and immediately following Blair's election garage was very upbeat party music and obviously grime and dubstep came about around the time when people were really disillusioned with New Labour (and Bush was elected 2001).

Music is so fractured and broken up nowadays that it seems especially hard to prove these sorts of connections. Has popular music been particularly dark or harrowed in the years since Bush was elected?

[busta nuttz]

Without trying to "prove" a connection, it just seems more than coincidental that dubstep, as forward thinking, underground, electronic music came to prominence in a time of great mistrust and abuse of power and is it really possible to compare musics that reflect hard times in other lands to dubstep ?

I would think they have more to do with culture and tradition than simple economic hardship but thats a whole nother can of worms. Then again i dont know what the culture of Croyden is.

Whether it be conscious or otherwise, music reacts to the times and perhaps none more so than cutting edge electronica. It seems the more contrived the attempt to reflect times though, the more laughable it becomes and the more it gets assimilated into mainstream to eventually become irrelevent.

[pete_bubonic]

I have been thinking about this, I think it does in certain respects, but I'm not sure if the example of Bush is really the one. I can imagine, when the UK changed the laws for the big raves, that Hardcore and indeed the multigenre approach to nights, production and alike, started to die off. And to replace the happy upbeat vibes of hardcore, jungle etc, came the dark techstep of dnb.

Maybe dubstep and grime can be seen in a similar light, once Garage and specifically UKG started to get hammered by the authorities and reached that critical mainstream threshold, it started to die off again. And in place of the generally more upbeat sounds, came payg and so solid and grime evolved. Alongside with the dark/breaky garage that FWD>> pioneered?

And again things always move in cycles, so now, we have the return of the upbeat and commercially viable vibes of uk funky, the re-emergence of UKG to my ears.

SO maybe it's not so much a reflection of the economic or political systems, but rather that of the generations of youngsters and they're efforts to find thier efforts to find something new and build out of the ashes of something burnt down?

There are definitely musical genres that comment on the political/economic situations of the times, the vietnam rock era, the black freedom motown years and so on. But I don't know how much electronic dance music does this, because as Seckle says, it's a form of escapism. We go to a club to have a few drinks, see our friends and loose ouselves in the music, forget everything outside that club for a few hours. At least that's how I feel.