The Electronic Era
My dad and I have usually seen pretty much eye to eye when it comes to music. Whether it’s Talking Heads or Tame Impala, there’s generally few complaints to be heard with regards to my road trip records of choice as designated DJ. With that in mind, this is not a criticism of someone stuck to the big haired flair-wearing wonders of his time who believes that good songwriting ended with Bob Dylan or that no one else can muster up a melody like Johnny Cash. What I want to get into is a certain side of modern music; the electronic era, and the stigma that surrounds it. It’s no secret that we are currently living in a throwaway society constantly being plugged with new hits, where everyday one-hit-wonders are pushed through the system and subsequently shat out in a shower of Dom Perignon. That being said, I would argue that, although it’s particularly potent amongst the princess-pop of 2018, this is not a recent thing. Looking back through the decades of shows from late BBC series TOP OF THE POPS, we can see that the top 40s weren’t just a sea of Beatles, Bowie and the Bad Seeds. Good or bad, there’s no denying that the majority of the plugged in population are in it for the hits; the catchy songs that we can pick up, over-play and then put down once sufficiently ‘over-it’, safe in the knowledge that a new one will come along tomorrow concocted using the familiar comforts of a I-V-Vi-IV chord progression, with a couple of ‘millennial whoops’ thrown in for good measure. What I’m getting at here is that there is a load of modern music being produced every day, gaining a great deal of popularity and shaping the mould for this ‘post-norties’ era, that will probably never set foot on the Cristal covered horizons of the top 40. I will admit, for someone as generally open minded such as my father, his reaction to electronic music annoyed me a bit. I can’t remember exactly what it was that I was playing, but the bass-y techno tones coming from my bedroom must have filtered down to the kitchen, probing disgruntled said parent to stomp up the stairs demanding what on earth I was playing, that he ‘thought I had good music taste’ and ‘where had it all gone so wrong’. I shrugged it off and told him to stop being such a grumpy old fart, or something along those lines, but his comments stuck. So, in an effort to enlighten, I brought it up with him later and made him listen to a few more tracks to ‘at least give it a chance’ before writing off a whole genre. His opinion didn’t budge, however, his defence being that it was ‘overly repetitive’ and ‘not real music’. After that, I let it go. But more and more I hear the same criticism of electronic music as being somehow ‘not real music’, and honestly, for a comment largely made by the intelligent and educated, it seems like a bit of a copout. To me, a song is still a song, still ‘real’, even if it isn’t produced using a tangible musical instrument. Saying electronic music isn’t real music because it doesn’t use live instruments is like saying a piece of modern art isn’t art because it didn’t use a paintbrush and it isn’t in a frame. Yes, music, like everything in life, is constantly changing and involving, and thank god… how boring things would be if everything stayed the same. We still have rock and we still have pop, but now we also have a whole microcosm of genres and sub-genres from ectofolk to abbstracto, freakbeat to fidget house - the list is endless. I’m not saying for a second that anyone who dislikes electronic genres is in some way wrong, my point is towards those who dismiss it as something that is in some way ‘less valid’. The time, musical theory and skill – chord progressions, drum fills, melody and harmony, are still just as prominent a requirement for a piece of music made on a screen. Although it is unrealistic to imagine a day when I walk in on my Dad kicking back to Pete Tongs Ibiza classics on Radio 1, I hope that maybe him and other technophobes alike will take a second to educate themselves on the complexities of the electronic genre, and perhaps at the very least, consider it to be ‘real music’ after all.