House rockers
The brave new world of pentium pop
by Michael Freedberg
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.