Todd Smith wrote: > I truly want to believe that what you just wrote is just a big joke.
Todd, chill out. If you would've read Christina's post properly before firing from the hip (and especially the part I requoted below) you would've realised that she is not saying what you claim she is saying. Instead, she is confronting us with the rhetorics and unvoiced or implicit opinions that sometimes seem to underlie attitudes about techno. (btw, apologies to Christina if I misrepresented her) --------------------- > > True, but this flies in the face of the dearly held notion that techno is > > intellectually, if not morally, superior to other genres of dance music. > > Now, > > before i'm impaled, I'm not saying it is or isn't. --------------------- > Dearly held? Like it or not, and justified or not, but techno has always been surrounded by an air of (pseudo-)intellectualism, much more so than house, drum 'n bass, trance and what have you. To non-techno people this can quite easily come across as an air of superiority. Have you ever noticed that in a crowd with varying dance music tastes, (Detroit) techno people rarely have to defend themselves, whereas, say trance people, usually do. Sometimes even without being prompted: "I love trance...but I like other stuff too" or "I love trance, but only as party music" type of replies. More generally speaking, we (i.e. the 313 crowd) have to go through a lot more trouble to experience the music we like, compared to someone who's perfectly happy with MTV and the Billboard chart. Because of that, we tend to experience our music much more intensely and that way it becomes a small, sometimes large, part of our identity. And as a sense of identity is extremely important to a human being, we try to defend that identity as much as we can, hence the implicitly implied superiority (if it wasn't better, then why buy it?). And usually this defending happens by making a mountain out a molehill as far as differences with other, but closely related 'identities' are concerned. For instance, most people on this list do not hate trash metal with nearly the same passion with which they hate trance, even though musically speaking it's much closer to techno. This is not a phenomenon particular to techno btw: ask a Slayer fan about Whitesnake, a Rachmaninov fan about Nigel Kennedy, a Charles Mingus fan about Wynton Marsalis and see what responses you get... (note how I've just nicely confirmed the aura of pseudo-intellectualism surrounding techno...*sigh*) > Hopelessly biased? Are you saying you're not biased about techno? You are completely neutral and open-minded? You take, say Paul Oakenfold or Fatboy Slim, equally serious as your average Detroit artist? > Revolutionary? http://www.ele-mental.org/ele_ment/said&did/mike.banks.speaks.html Finally: > This is musical racism, and you might as well be Hitler. Cue Godwin's Law: "As a Usenet discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one." or more appriopriately here, its most common mutation: "when such a reference or comparison occurs, *meaningful* discussion is over." See: http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/2.10/godwin.if.html http://www.faqs.org/faqs/usenet/legends/godwin/ http://www.xent.com/mar98/0250.html Otto PS Here's my own corollary of Godwin's Law: "The probability of a Nazi comparison is proportional to the speed of replying"
