Just Don't Call it Trip Hop: Reconciling the Bristol sound style with the trip hop genre (original) (raw)
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Tracing the Roots of Trip Hop: How One City’s History Influenced a Global Genre
Trip Hop exploded onto the popular music scene in the early 1990s, its unique blend of hip hop, reggae, funk and soul conquering the airwaves of England before attaining worldwide popularity. Before becoming a global phenomenon trip hop was born and developed in the underground music scene of Bristol, England, crafted by artists such as Smith and Mighty, Massive Attack, Portishead and Tricky, and the city itself has played a part in shaping the music it produces. Two seminal events in Bristol’s history have helped to define trip hop music, contributing to its development in three important areas. Bristol was a leading port in the international slave trade and the city has an equivocal relationship with its own history, a city with a proud sense of its own identity that also struggles with its nefarious heritage. This cultural uneasiness nurtures a dark undercurrent that is outputted through the city’s music and art, creating a melancholy sound that reflects the locality’s discomfort. Bristol also experienced mass waves of post-war migration from the Caribbean, an event that impacted the future of the city’s music in two distinct ways. The black and Caribbean populations, established during the trading years, grew exponentially in number and migrants from Jamaica brought reggae music with them where it was disseminated into the wider community. These communities also provided a point of access for the invasion of American hip hop in the 1980s, which, together with reggae, would play an integral part in developing the Bristol sound. Many children born to black and island migrants were forced to deal with issues of identity, what it meant to be black and British. This struggle has been played out in the creation of trip hop music as artists attempt to pay homage to the American originators while still developing their own brand of British hip hop music that speaks to their own cultural identity.
Techno and Raves - Hungry for Expressivity
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The research on techno music history especially in Germany and the United States has shown extensive results and chronology. Scholars have also done studies on raves as a strong subculture of techno. But not many have shown techno and raves' materiality and expressivity. The blurry line between sound art and music fuel in techno has often been debated. On an ontological level, this essay aims to discuss techno music's materiality to assess as a musical being that traditional musicology has failed to do. To add to the examination, this paper also engages with expressivity within techno music that surpasses mere musical composition onto other elements such as modalities that are present in raves in sustaining the subculture. In reminiscing early forms of techno raves we would like to see to what extent early techno raves introduce "exploration" or in music expressivity. In this essay, such expressivity will expand from musicology to other social modalities in discerning the affect on the general society or rather the subculture and pertaining figures that it creates. This essay frames the connection between techno as a stylistic marking and rave as the subculture techno produces alongside. The first section traces techno's journey from Germany to the United States that are initially socioeconomically motivated and encouraging, from countering capitalism to new, low cost technology. The following section discusses techno's placement within academic debates and recent theories to support sonic analysis. I will also attempt to illuminate employed musical forces within techno music and propose engagement modalities in tracing rave interactions.
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Situating Popular Musics: IASPM 16th International Conference Proceedings, 2012
The acid, a museme, is the unstable element in acid house. It is arguably both the spiritual and hedonistic apex of psychedelic music, enabling a shift in perception. In electronic dance music, the journey of the acid museme seems to have developed from Phuture's "Acid tracks" during the mid-1980s in Chicago club the Muzic Box. The new sound of acid house, as well as acid's implicit reference to the psychedelic drug LSD, inspired a moral panic in the UK during the late 1980s. By the early 1990s, acid house further influenced the development of trance music in Germany and elsewhere. Yet, a similar musical figure can be recognised in earlier electronic acid rock experiments of Tangerine Dream. The discussion first maps out the development of this museme by placing key-moments geographically. However, this paper concludes that musical memory seems to operate rhizomically, in a deterritorialised 2 (displaced) manner.
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American Musicological Society 2015 Annual Meeting, Louisville, 2015
Much current work (e.g. Lena) understands popular genres as emerging from communities congregating around stylistic practices in music, emphasizing that such practices “are only there to the extent that, as competent listening subjects, we have learnt to put them there” (Moore). This sociological approach avoids the absolut-ist pitfalls that hound early writings on musical aesthetics, but recent scholarship (e.g. Ngai, London) reminds us that texts themselves can intersubjectively or psy-chologically highlight specific features. This paper places sociological and aesthetic approaches to genre and style in new dialogue, specifically arguing that songs exhib-iting identifiably new gestures can teach their audience to recognize such gestures as stylistic innovations around which to imagine potential genres. The central contribution of this paper is the “genre demo”: a work that foregrounds a new musical gesture (e.g. rapping, dubstep rhythms) not chiefly to convey a song’s particular content, but to invite listeners proleptically to imagine the gesture’s future uses, including the rise of genre communities around it. This paper introduces to popular music studies media theorist Sandifer’s notion of “shininess”—that is, the degree to which new media (or in this case, new stylistic gestures) invite audiences to envision themselves as future users. Centering on a radical reading of the Sugar Hill Gang’s “Rapper’s Delight” and the parodies its shininess instigated, this paper situates early rap records as case studies of the genre demo. While previous work on first-wave hip hop focuses on its negotiations of community (Chang) and/or music technology (Kajikawa), here it illustrates the meeting of what Peterson calls the “production of culture” (which “allow[s] opportunities for innovators to emerge”) with a directed aesthetics of “shiny” newness in musical practice. Finally, the perpendicular axes of a style’s aesthetic clarity and of its would-be genre community’s sociological readiness suggest a new way to plot genres in their shininess. This paper concludes with a lively mapping of popular genres onto such a grid, affording a new and productive typology that advances the style/genre dialogue within (and perhaps beyond) musicology
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This article charts the convergence of post-punk/post-settler logics in the techno-punk development in Australia. Exploring how punk would become implicated in the cultural politics of a settler society struggling for legitimacy, it maps the ground out of which Labrats sound system (and their hybrid outfit Combat Wombat) arose. It provides an entry to punk through an analysis of the concept of hardcore in the context of cultural mobilisations which, following more than two centuries of European colonisation, evince desires to make reparations and forge alliances with Indigenous people and landscape. To achieve this, the article traces the contours and investigates the implications of Sydney’s techno-punk emergence (as seen in The Jellyheads, Non Bossy Posse, Vibe Tribe and Ohms not Bombs), tracking the mobile and media savvy exploits of 1990s DIY sound systems and techno terra-ists>, aesthetes and activists adopting intimate and tactical media technologies, committing to independent and decentralised EDM creativity, and implicated in a movement for legitimate presence.
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