not all that exciting or new, but it shows that some big medias and corps are now recognizing the changes in the mainstream...
They talk about DJ Assault from Detroit a bit... Music Festival Shows That Many Bands No Longer Need Mainstream's Pull http://www.nytimes.com/2000/10/24/arts/24NOTE.html October 24, 2000 CRITIC'S NOTEBOOK By JON PARELES There has never been a better time for rumors. Deployed right, they can hop around the world in minutes on the Internet; they can shake up giant companies or summon international attention. The four-day CMJ Music Marathon, which ended late Sunday with the final tunes from about 1,000 bands, solo acts and disc jockeys, is primarily an exercise in rumor propagation. The musicians who performed at 60 clubs around the city, and during daily convention sessions at the Hilton New York, generally aspire not to conquer the Top 10 or to fill arenas, but to become more potent rumors. It's not as glamorous as a sweepstakes for pop's next big thing, and few of the performers would be likely to turn down serious offers to be heard on commercial radio stations or to headline concert halls. But these performers have learned to operate with a cult following based not on national marketing but on college radio airplay, press attention, friends' recommendations and Internet tips. It's a realm where a band like the Promise Ring which is barely a blip in the commercial precincts tabulated by Billboard magazine means more than 'N Sync ever will. Chuck D, who gave the convention's keynote speech Friday, described the music business circa 2000 as working on three levels: exploitative, Titanic- size major labels; more adaptable independent labels, or indies; and still experimental Internet outlets that he calls "inties," potentially millions of them. He predicted that with the inties, the entire music business will grow, but not as fast as the number of hands in the pot. He urged an audience of budding musicians and moguls to learn to get things done cheaply. That realism was no news to many of the marathon's performers. They have scaled their expectations to the college circuit, which has become a domain unto itself: smaller, more stable and less trendy than the pop mainstream. It's a zone in which bands seem content to reach only listeners who make an effort to find them, while those listeners pride themselves on their elite tastes, not wanting to share with the uncouth masses. "It's kind of obvious but I still like it," an audience member said, slightly defensively, after one band's set at Brownies. Many bands come to CMJ to expand their audiences but not to change them qualitatively. As in any niche, the music has evolved to serve ever more specialized needs, polishing up subgenres that don't reach much further off-campus than a 10- watt station. Collegiate bands have become like personal Web pages, hoping to attract some traffic to their particular assortment of eccentricities. I club-surfed through the music marathon, hearing about 3 percent of the available shows; many other performers were already familiar, and the marathon's program guide assigned genres to most of the bands I missed. Even allowing for some sampling error, it was clear that much of the collegiate domain represented by CMJ has become a stubborn backwater. College radio stations once prided themselves on being ahead of the public; now, they and their listeners have entrenched themselves on the sidelines. On those margins, they have come to prize craftsmanship and nuance, and they have a strong preservationist streak. In collegiate rock, bands are given time to improve, and some use it well. Hip-hop, the musical revolution that current college students have grown up with, makes collegiate rock nervous; at a time when hip-hop has seized the pop mainstream, it showed up in only a handful of CMJ shows. Upper-middle-class college students treat hip-hop as a self-conscious put-on. Kleenex Girl Wonder, which mostly played crisp but off- center power-pop songs with polysyllabic lyrics, introduced them with exaggerated b-boy grunts and slang. MC Paul Barman played up his suburban nerdiness, wondering in one lyric if his attempts at hip-hop were as culturally disrespectful as Taco Bell's Chihuahua. The guitar-centric 1980's were still in progress during the CMJ marathon. P. J. Harvey, introducing songs from her new album, summoned Sonic Youth's dense guitar drone while she sang like Patti Smith. David Gedge of the Wedding Present, with his other group, Cinerama, brought back straightforward new wave tunefulness in songs about wounded love. A Dutch band, Bettie Serveert, laced tuneful midtempo folk-rock with collegiate feedback and an occasional punk-rock speedup. Throughout the marathon, bands unleashed feedback and reverb, setting off elaborate drones and screeches that suggested plenty of practice-room tinkering. One of the most striking performances was by Broadcast, which moved between cool, 1960's-flavored pop and gargantuan, sustained drones that were by turns celestial and menacing. Other bands, including the Spoozys and Causey Way, set out to rediscover the giddy, parodic cheer of the B- 52's, thus reviving a warped 1980's revival of 1960's garage-rock and surf-rock. The collegiate circuit is also the home of alternative country, which prides itself on the virtues of old honky-tonk music while coming up with lyrics like one that Kelly Hogan sang with her band, the Pine Valley Cosmonauts: "I like your twisted point of view." One staple collegiate style claimed by dozens of bands in the CMJ lineup is emo, a pensive, guitar-centered, emotionally turbulent music that harks back to 1980's and early 1990's college-radio favorites like Husker Du and Fugazi. The music broods and turns in on itself, with guitar riffs folded like origami and lyrics full of troubles, hesitations, poetic obliquities and an occasional flicker of anger. It's music that thinks too much about thinking too much, while gazing nervously into a post-graduation wilderness. Dismemberment Plan sang, "No light leads you onwards, no signs point you on your way." While Dismemberment Plan opens up emo with touches of manic humor and outright funk, emo is more likely to brood like the band Karate, a trio that played somber, measured guitar riffs and jazz- tinged leads behind sentiments like "This is how young ideas die." The style can also reach for oceanic surges and grandeur like Cave In, which was so steeped in arty 1970's rock that it played Led Zeppelin's "Dazed and Confused." Another recurring style was what's sometimes called slo-core: quiet but not necessarily placid songs that refuse to rush. It's an approach that extends back to Velvet Underground ballads by way of Mazzy Star and the Cowboy Junkies, seeking a simplicity that is both a refuge and a bottoming out of despair, and it can strive for folky simplicity, as Damon and Naomi did, or reach a lapidary complexity, as with the ghostly, complex harmonies of Ida. Both emo and slo-core look resolutely inward, with lyrics about tortured relationships and private uncertainties. There was extroversion from a handful of hard rock and heavy metal bands like Glassjaw and Disturbed, groups aiming not for the cloistered college market but for a broader audience. Collegiate hard rockers preferred to deliver the big riffs self-consciously, with a knowing sense of parody. There was also girl-bonding exuberance from Le Tigre, the bouncy new band led by the riot grrrl ringleader and punk feminist Kathleen Hanna; over electronic drumbeats and handclaps, she and her band members chirped lines like "Let me hear you depoliticize my rhyme." The Micranots, a rap group from Atlanta that zigzags between boasts and consciousness-raising, asked its audience to suggest subjects for free- style (improvised) rhymes; the crowd offered police brutality, ganja and "the third eye." Even college students can't mope all the time. The marathon also had some dance-music shows. BT (the initials of Brian Transeau) emerged from his studio with a full band. He had songs that harked back to the 1980's goth style of Siouxsie and the Banshees and Depeche Mode; then he added power-chord guitars to booming house- and trance-music crescendos, making a full house at the Roxy raise their hands and cheer. DJ Assault, from Detroit, used primitive but propulsive drum-machine beats and repetitive bass lines behind relentlessly raunchy chants. (In a way, Assault's music wasn't that different from its absolute rhetorical opposite in Le Tigre.) On the dance floor, the CMJ crowd stopped worrying about existential questions and lovers' quarrels. And for the moment, the division between refined collegiate tastes and the wider world was broken down by the power of the beat. darw_n "create, demonstrate, toneshift..." http://www.mp3.com/stations/clevelandunderground http://www.mp3.com/darw_n http://www.sphereproductions.com/topic/Darwin.html http://www.mannequinodd.com
