[Sidebar] June 26 - July 3, 1997
[Music Reviews]
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House rockers

The brave new world of pentium pop

by Michael Freedberg

[Daft Punk] A pop audience for computerized music has existed since the disco years. Giorgio Moroder, using a sequencer to accompany his muse Donna Summer on 1977's "I Feel Love" and thereafter, was hit music's original "man in the machine."

Yet not until now, 20 years later, has pentium pop, as I'll call it, become a newsworthy topic. A new wave of programmed music, rhythmically hard and dirtier in tone than Moroder's icy-smooth sexsongs, has caught the attention of FM radio's alterna-rockers. The new electronica -- stitched together by soundroom DJs and keyboard twosomes who rarely show their faces on a stage -- uses lots of sampling, in streaks and strips, to develop a crisp and dry sound, almost non-melodic, in a manner redolent of the thrash rock and noise music made by the guitarists in traditional rock bands.

Although pentium pop seems to have affected largely the playlists of alternative radio, the style it most closely resembles is kick-ass AOR. Unlike alternative rock, pentium pop is almost exclusively the work of young males; the genre has yet to find its Ani DiFranco, Courtney Love, or Sleater-Kinney. Who are the genre's big names? Orbital, Underworld, Aphex Twin, Laurent Garnier, Josh Wink, Goldie, DJ Keoki, Prodigy, the guy who calls himself "bt," Tom Rowlands and Ed Simons of the Chemical Brothers. Also in common with kick-ass -- but not alternative -- the stars of pentium pop depend upon rhythm to make their point. For all its metallic density -- and the knotted-up soundballs of programmer acts like Underworld and Prodigy are dense snags indeed -- computerized pop is a riff-driven music, slogan-like in its attraction to brief, repeated hooks. Like disco, it is a surface sound, and chiefly instrumental, in the symphonic manner of Eurodance. To parse its sonic syntaxes one must move the body. In patterns. Over and over again. Which brings the music all the way back to disco, especially when, as in Prodigy's Music for the Jilted Generation (Mute), it gets campy, striking up all kinds of unrealistic poses, like an outlandish runway model.

Prodigy's camp has few followers in what I'll call "chip pop," an electronica subgenre mapped out by the 13 tracks on the CD compilation Amp (Astralwerks), an offshoot of MTV's Amp video show. The mood of most songs on Amp, which features almost all the genre's big names (Chemical Brothers, Underworld, Aphex Twin, Orbital, Prodigy, Josh Wink, the Crystal Method), is melancholy. The texture of it is dreamlike, recalling Joy Division, the Human League (who ended up working with Giorgio Moroder!), even David Bowie in a maudlin moment. Except that the music does not brood or linger. Most of it -- the Chemicals' "Block Rockin' Beats," Underworld's "Pearl's Girl," Goldie's "Inner City Life" -- adopts the rhythm of funk, a beat utterly opposed to self-pity.

Funk's go-to-work message disappeared from the scene 15 years ago, driven off by the holiday hangovers of European dream pop. But with the rise of pentium-pop acts like Paris's Daft Punk and Miami's Funky Green Dogs -- and with the development of a new, hard style of house music by DJs like Junior Vasquez and Todd Terry -- the vigor of funk has made its point anew. The best computer-chip rhythm music -- Daft Punk's Homework (Virgin) in particular, as well as the tracks on Amp -- lifts 'em up and puts 'em down, just the way move-your-ass bands like Earth Wind & Fire, Cameo, Kool & the Gang, the Isley Brothers, and Zapp used to do. When it gets to a level higher than knee, leg, and foot, chip music seems to digress and obfuscate, contending with confusion and reshaping the structure of things. But the straight-ahead, house-styled rhythms and thrusting funk make it clear that very purposeful work is being done therein (one should take as fact the title of the Daft Punk CD). As Thomas Bangalter and Guy-Manuel de Homem Christo of Daft Punk tell us in "Daftendirekt": "The funk back to the time tunnel, the funk back to the time tunnel."

The funk beat of pentium pop has forced house music to make itself over almost completely. In its early incarnations house married the ecstasy of gospel and soul to a gothic-like dark spacy-ness that reflected the milieu of AIDS and urban crime in which the music grew. And from the ecstatic component of house came the diva style, with its flights of fancy and uplift. These emotions no longer apply. Urban crime has receded; AIDS seems to be meeting its match.

The audience for pentium pop has its feet on the ground and its hands on the wheel. Although the genre still pursues ideal things -- what else could account for the success of Robert Miles's Dreamland, Laurent Garnier's 30, and La Bouche's Sweet Dreams? -- its everyday routine is work, work, work. Spurred on by chip music, and in competition with emblematic CDs like Daft Punk's Homework, the Chemical Brothers' Dig Your Own Hole, and Tranquillity Bass's Let the Freak Flag Fly (Astralwerks), house evolved a form called "hardhouse," in which ecstasy gives way, in large part, to effort and atmosphere to aim.

In CDs like Touche Artists' A Touche of Class, Portugal Totally Mixed, and the Funky Green Dogs' Fired Up! (all on Twisted), the beat rises up an octave or so from the bottom notes universal to house as it moves solidly to the target, leaving voices and sound effects to catch up if they can. Which is not to say that the sculptors of these CDs, no matter how thick their textures, don't still employ the supple shapes and the melodic looseness characteristic of all house. Even the all-instrumental A Touche of Class, heavy with repetitious riff tracks like R Factors' "Endogenous Rhythms," Booka Shade's "Silk" and "Work You," and 51 Days' "Traktion," never approaches the grimness of Daft Punk or the heavy-metal punch of a Chemical Brothers' song. The cold metal rhythms of Fired Up! work hard to match the harsh face of chip rock, but hi-hat drum sounds brighten "theway" and "firedup!," and the red-hot gals and good-time guys who sing "somekindoflove," "sogood," and "icametostomp" in soul-mama and salsa-boy styles make it clear that work-your-ass-off means in the bedroom as well as in the sound lab.

Except that to alterna-rock radio program directors it isn't clear at all. You won't find the hot glow of Fired Up! or the mellow buzz of A Touche of Class on the new modern-rock playlists, a medium in which there is not now, nor ever has been, room for sumptuous sexual ecstasies to express themselves. The world of pentium pop (at least here in the US; as always, European tastes are far more generous) is as bifurcated as hit music was during the era of the disco-versus-new-wave standoff. Fans of Tranquillity Bass, Aphex Twin, and the Chemical Brothers do not get to hear Fired Up! and A Touche of Class (not to mention Robert Miles or Laurent Garnier) and vice versa.

One act that does seem to have a sonic foot in each camp is England's Underworld. The nine tracks of Pearl's Girl (Wax Trax/TVT) take a great many pop styles, from European dream music and the robot burlesques of Kraftwerk and their imitators to David Bowie's recitatives, into their world of melodic allusion and time-tunnel quotation. Underworld's songs sound like many things, all familiar, all too brief to cling to.

It's hard to pick one genre only out of their closely embroidered sound -- borne up by thin rhythms, shallow like the airs of European movie music (listen to "Cherry Pie" and "Mosaic") -- to the exclusion of those that stitch into it, because all too swiftly the allusions change. These rapid shifts of melody, in cuts like "Oich Oich," "Mosaic," and the CD's several mixes of "Pearl's Girl," unsettle you at the same time that the music's rhythmic constancy offers comfort. And if every sound is familiar, the combinations of sounds aren't at all. Which means that an Underworld composition partly fits all playlists but mostly none. Pearl's Girl cannot give succor to one pop-music camp and no succor to another. In Underworld's beautiful patchwork, pentium pop's dissolution of the band-performance format reaches its confounding apogee.

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