Posts filed under ‘Dance Music’
Do lyrics matter?
I was listening to iDanceRadio.fm as I made my morning coffee today, and the new song from The Killers came on. It’s titled Spaceman, and while hearing it on radio, and during DJ sets, I’ve listened to the lyrics.
Quick digression; as I’ve blogged before, I listen to lyrics. A lot of it is the fact that I tend to sing along with songs I DJ, when I’m in the car, or just listening casually at home. I also pay attention because I enjoy finding songs with meaning and emotion, songs that say something to me, make me feel, think or identify with.
So the occasional song comes along, like Spaceman, where I just sorta say to myself, “What the heck?” The song makes no sense on the surface, other than sounding like a diary of somebody’s drug trip or dream. I’m hard-pressed to divine any metaphorical meaning either. The words are just… Weird.
That said, the way Brandon Flowers sings the song, and the music around the lyrics, is compelling and enjoyable enough that the song works, I like it, and I obviously play it. But I’m left wondering what the heck it’s about.
Of course, wondering about the meaning of lyrics is hardly new. Bruce Springsteen’s songwriting has been the subject of a lot of public wondering over the years, for example. The Springsteen-penned epic Blinded by the Light, one of the most notable songs of the 1970s, is still causing debate and speculation about its meaning almost four decades after it was written.
And perhaps in the most extreme example I can think of, the infamous Cocteau Twins recorded songs that lyrically made absolutely no sense at all (except, perhaps, to Elizabeth Fraser, who sang them), but the songs were no less compelling.
So do lyrics matter? Well, apparently not. But I’ll still keep trying to find the meaning as I try to sing along. 
What’s dance music, and what isn’t?
The title of this posting is something I’ve pondered a lot over time, and it’s been on my mind a bit more lately.
The primary reason for this is that as PD for iDanceRadio.fm, as our audience grows and awareness of us builds, I find myself being the target of more promoters and record labels who are presenting product to us for consideration. That’s a good thing, of course, as it lets me hear an even broader array of music. But it does tend to make this particular question pop-up a bit more frequently.
One example from a few months ago was Creamer & K’s remix of Tom Geiger’s Can One Day Change Your Life. We played it on the station, and I even used it in some DJ sets. It was apparently a big club hit in South America, but was it dance music? Well, I don’t know. It had dance music producers doing a remix. The tempo was in the range of dance music. But the song still had a very laid back, very AOR feel to it.
I just added a track this week from Hey Champ titled Cold Dust Girl. I really struggled with this one. There’s a remix available, but I felt the remix was a bit dull to put into rotation on the station, plus it wasn’t all that much more “dancey” than the main mix. Is the main mix dance? I still don’t know. I would consider the track to be more synthpop, but then, where’s the line between synthpop and dance? Both tend to use obvious four-on-the-floor beats, and both are “electronica.”
Another recent example along the same lines is The Best Revenge from Fischerspooner. A good friend of mine has been a huge Fischerspooner fan for years, and despite his pleading, they’ve just not even done that much for me. But Revenge is a fantastic track that’s amazingly well-produced. I took to it pretty much immediately. Is it dance? Well, I always ask myself, “Can I picture myself dancing to this?” Yeah, I could, so I added it. But here too, the song is not the usual club-style dance music, it’s more broadly electronica, and certainly after listening to more Fischerspooner lately, I’m not sure how I’d categorize their music other than “experimental.”
Just this week, I received a promo CD from Angela Latti, which was expressly being promoted as “dance.” When I listened to it, I don’t hear “dance” at all. On the contrary, it’s reggae in my view. Can you dance to reggae? Well, yes, people do it all the time. Does it make it “dance music?” You could certainly make a case for that. But unlike Fischerspooner, or the Tom Geiger track, I don’t think it works in the context of the rest of the music that I play as a DJ, or that we program for the station. So as much as I liked some of the songs on Angela’s CD, I won’t be adding the focus track to the station.
What I struggle with sometimes is that I have a pretty broad definition of dance music, and I like a lot of sub-genres, from filter house to techno. And with the radio station, our mission is to deliver the broadest array of “dance music” possible, while still having a cohesive, listenable end result. Hopefully it works, but I suspect I’ll always question where the boundaries are located. And from time to time, I’ll look to push them a bit.
Is it a booger?
I have no idea where I first heard the term, but back from my days doing print and advertising design, or perhaps it came from my writing endeavors, I learned that there’s almost always an error lurking someplace that, despite your best efforts, is discovered only after it’s too late. A typo is the most common example, of course. For example, you design a business card… Everyone checks it… And it’s only after you have 1,000 of them printed does someone notice the person’s name is misspelled. Even the guy whose name appears on the card didn’t see it.
Anyway, the term I learned for this is booger.
There are boogers in music, too, although most of the time they’re only noticeable by the artist or producer who let it through without doing that one last tweak or whatever. This past week, however, I thought I found a booger in a new track that I found a bit surprising, but also, frankly, humorous. The more I listen to the track, the more convinced it’s just the vocalist voicing the part in a slightly sloppy way, but my ears just can’t keep from hearing it the wrong way. (The track originated in Germany, so perhaps some of this is the probability that the singer isn’t a native English speaker.)
In any case, the track Stay from Plasco, a cover of the country song from Sugarland, is the source. Just past the 5:00 mark on the main extended mix, the vocalist (credited only as “Natalie”) seems to sing, “Why don’t you stay? Blah blah blah knees.” I love this track, so when I got it, I listened to it several times, and every time, that’s what I heard.
The lyric at that point should read, “back off my knees,” and given how clearly the vocalist enunciates the rest of the lyrics, I just couldn’t believe it wasn’t a booger.
Just yesterday, I received a promo CD single from Radikal Records, the label behind the track. Among the mixes is a “ballade” mix that’s quite mellow, and the vocals are quite clear. I listened again. You can barely make out “back off my knees” even in this mix, and then, only if you know what you’re listening for.
So, booger or no booger? Probably no booger, but I have to confess it made the song even more interesting than it was for its musical qualities alone. Regardless, as I said, it’s a great track; check it out.
I still don’t want to open Pandora’s box
Shortly after it launched a few years ago, I signed-up for Pandora. What’s not to like about a service that purports to know more about the music you like than you do?
The concept is actually pretty cool (on paper). Using their “Music Genome Project,” individual songs are analyzed by a musician for a specific list of attributes, such that each song attains its own “gene” that embodies all those attributes in a coded, computer-digestible manner. Algorithms can then be used to feed you, the listener, music that is “genetically compatible” with a specific song or songs that you tell Pandora when you sign-up for an account.
The problem is—it just doesn’t work very well, at least not for dance music.
I’m uncertain whether it’s an issue of the Music Genome Project not having enough of the right attributes to properly and thoroughly assess dance and electronia, or if it’s an issue of Pandora, as a service, having sufficient inventory of dance music that’s been analyzed.
But when I tried Pandora a few years ago, I found that the music it provided me was one dimensional (I don’t think I heard a single male vocalist), old (many tracks are quite old), and… This is hard to articulate… Very narrow in sound, pretty much all 135 BPM or higher which is where most trance and techno tends to sit. While it wasn’t all trance and techno, it was all vocal (probably “right” for me), and had “inspiration” from techno and/or trance, let’s say. Artist examples include Cascada (LOTS of Casada; ugh) and Ian Van Dahl; there’s nothing wrong with the music, it’s just that I don’t want to hear only that type of dance music, all, day, long…
The other problem is that the mixes programmed struck me as very odd choices, and were often quite incompatible with one another. While I understand it’s not a non-stop mixshow, if Pandora is supposed to be genius about song picks, it should probably know better than to pair a dark, edgy, harsh mix of one song next to a more mainstream, pop-friendly mix of another. You don’t see goths and jocks hanging out with each other at the average high school, and it doesn’t work any better with dance music.
So, earlier this week, I received an e-mail from Pandora announcing that they had just released a mobile version for BlackBerry. (Why should iPhone have all the fun?) It had been months since I’d logged into Pandora, so I figured I’d check it out anew and see if anything had improved. I promptly downloaded the application, logged-in, and listened for a bit while driving around yesterday.
Let’s just say that it’s the same old Pandora that I found wanting in so many ways the first time I used it. Nothing has changed. It still sounds like somebody’s marginal, and overly small dance music collection stuffed into an iPod and set to shuffle. You’ve heard it all before a hundred times. Your friends have heard it a hundred times when you’ve provided music for the party. Someone desperately needs to hand you an iTunes gift card so you can get something good. Something new. And hurry. Please.
My nephew Ted is a trance-head. We talk about music all the time, and I asked him if he’d ever tried it. Let me just cut to the chase and say his impression of Pandora was the same as mine… Too narrow, too old, too uninspired. Neither Ted, nor I, listen to dance music this way, or for this reason.
I’ve often wondered if there can’t be something like a Music Genome Project for dance music so I can objectively assess one song vs. another; know for sure that this track is “tribal house” and not “progressive house,” for example,and be able to do better, more compatible choices when mixing a set. But alas, at least with dance music, I’m honestly thinking it’s best to leave the analysis and choosing to the humans, whether that’s yourself (and what you put on your iPod), or the PD’s or DJ’s at radio stations (who certainly aren’t perfect either, but at least have access to new music).
Do I have to like Hannah Montana?
I’ve said in this blog on several occasions that I’m a sucker for pretty songs. I think I’ve mentioned that while I love dance music, I also love music, period. And what constitutes a “pretty song” can vary between things that are aesthetically pleasing in some way, to those that touch me on some level.
Last night, a good friend of mine sent me a link to a YouTube video with some lyrics to accompany the song being performed. No, it wasn’t Internet sensation Susan Boyle, it was, of all things, a video of Miley Cyrus’ latest song from the Hannah Montana movie. Honestly, I groaned for a moment or two. Just long enough for her to get the first line or so of lyric out of her mouth, and then I think I started tearing-up a little bit.
The song is titled The Climb, and the reason my good friend sent me the link is that he thought of me when he heard it, and sure enough, the lyrics absolutely speak to me.
The theme is practically universal; maintaining perspective in the pursuit of life, and trying to remember the point that it’s about the journey, not the destination. Suffice it to say that it’s a message I could use to hear right now, which is why it resonated so much for me.
It’s an extremely well-written song on pretty much every single level, and the fact that Cyrus performs it in a pop-friendly, semi-country style takes nothing away from it.
The song was written by veteran songwriters Jon Mabe and Jessi Alexander, both of whom have been very prolific, and while I don’t realize it, I’ve probably heard their respective material before. I didn’t bother to try and find out who wrote which part (music vs. lyrics), but that doesn’t matter either; it’s the whole that counts, and what an amazing job they did putting this one together.
I sort of resent being sucked-in by the Disney entertainment machine and all their factory-produced pap. But just like good food can come both from factories and from small one-man restaurants, Cyrus deserves credit for picking a great song from some great songwriters, performing it well, and touching someone. And isn’t that what music is supposed to be all about?
You can watch the official video on Hollywood Records YouTube channel.
Losing your originality (or over-extending it)
I was having a chat the other day with my buddy DJ Romeo in Kansas City. I always enjoy talking to him about dance music, because he has a different focus and a slightly different set of musical interests than I do, and as such, he’s often got a different point of view that forces me to think about things.
Which was precisely the case the other day. I’ll leave the names out of this because it’s not even relevant, but we were talking about a new song that had come out recently, and I mentioned I’d liked a particular mix by a particular remixer. I’m pretty sure Romeo threw-up in his mouth a little the moment I got the producer’s name out of mine.
He proceeded to explain that the producer I’d named had lost his originality; that all his mixes sounded the same. No sooner than Romeo got that out of his mouth than another new song came on my iPod (I was reviewing new music), from an entirely different remixer, and I was struck immediately that two of the elements were identical—not just similar, but identical—to another popular song the guy had remixed before, as if he had just dropped the vocal stems from the new song into the software project he’d used for the song I was remembering, and then called it done.
The effect is sort of like photographing someone against a particularly stunning backdrop, and then another person wants a really nice photo of themselves, so you just Photoshop them on top of the original photo. The person is different, and the background is perhaps only slightly less beautiful than it was the first time. But it’s disingenuous, in my view, and when I see that same backdrop start to show-up in a remixer’s body of work time and again, it starts to lose its beauty (not to mention sticking out like a sore thumb).
I’m not suggesting that big-name remixer/producers all do this, or that they lack passion. But I can agree with Romeo, as someone who listens to a lot of dance music, that there is both a lot of room for originality in this game, and there are a fair number of remixers out there who seem to have lost their edge and just crank-out mixes through some sort of template.
Of course, there are business realities at play here. Some of the biggest names in the business right now seem to crank-out remixes at a pace that must surely be in the neighborhood of once a week. At what point do you cease being an artist, and start being a music factory? (I don’t know the answer, but there probably is one.) And I also know what most of these guys make to create a remix, and let’s just say it’s not a great way to make a living. If you’re gonna do a lot of remixes, and you’re gonna try and make a living doing it, spending weeks on each one is just not gonna work.
There’s also a fine line in my view between having a style, and using a cookie cutter. I will name one name here: Scotty K. This LA-based DJ/producer stands out in my mind as someone who has managed to find a style, an identifiable sound of his own, without having every single remix sound the same. His projects stand out in my mind as nearly always having a swirling sound that I refer to as “the calliope.” The actual synth patch used for it changes a little song-to-song, but it’s nearly always there, and it’s trademark Scotty K. But at least the tracks I’ve heard from him don’t suffer from sounding like the came from the same formulaic template.
The wait was worth it
The #1 song on my top 50 dance songs of 2008 is Filo & Peri’s Anthem, a renowned and hugely successful track that worked in large part because of Eric Lumiere singing the brief yet inspiring lyrics.
Lumiere’s MySpace bio has indicated he’s been working withFilo & Peri on additional dance tracks; Lumiere is ordinarily the folksy, rocky, guitar-toting singer/songwriter type. In any event, we knew something would be coming, and it just has.
Shine On is the song, and while I’m not sure it’s as powerful or emotionally-charged as Anthem, it’s no slacker by any means. As was the case with the latter song, the lyric of Shine On is one of inspiration, almost spiritual in nature, that gives it a nice emotional element that I really enjoy in music… As rare as it might be that you hear a song and your head and heart just go someplace, it’s awesome when it happens.
I wish the guys had picked a different name, although it is pulled from a central theme of the lyric. There are probably six other completely different songs in my Traktor library with the name Shine On. Apparently shining and moving forward are popular themes for songs.
I also wish that the remix package I was provided had more variety. One of the things that I liked about Anthem is that each remix treatment was pretty different… Fast trancey to slower progressive, and each one had a slightly different use of the vocal (although some trimmed out too much of it in my view).
The three mixes I have of Shine On are just not very different from each other. They’re all about the same length. They all use the same basic template (in terms of how the vocal is used and arranged). I would label all of them “vocal trance.” There’s just not any variety to them. But perhaps additional mixes are in the works, or perhaps they’re available and I just don’t have them. I hope so.
Be that as it may, the Club Mix (presumably Filo & Peri’s own production work) sounds best to me, and the well-engineered use of breakdowns highlight Lumiere’s vocal nicely, while contributing pretty much entirely to the fact that the song takes you on that emotional journey I mentioned.
It’s great stuff, and I suspect this track will be as big (or at least nearly so) as Anthem was.
Can you hear me running?
One of my favorite new songs received in the past couple of weeks happens to be a remake, and it’s of a song I wish I’d thought to cover, Silent Running, the 80s megahit originally from Mike and the Mechanics.
I always liked the song. The original vocal always had this warmth about it, and it had a nice melody that sorta stuck in your head.
Well, it sorta stuck there again the moment I heard Oliver deVille’s take on it. The Vienna-based deVille is a new name to me. While his MySpace page indicates he’s produced/remixed some big name material, I’m at a loss to find any hard references to anything. Not that it matters; Silent Running is pretty good stuff, and besides… deVille has hair that looks like something on a Second Life avatar, and that’s worth something too, right?
Not surprising considering his Austrian roots, but deVille’s version of Silent Running has a nice, crisp, edgy sound that depending on the mix, is or borders on techno. Germany and Austria seem to be at the epicenter of techno, which has yet to mainstream here in the US for whatever reason, but nonetheless has a huge following here.
Techno remakes like this, and like a lot of those released by CAPP Records, seem to work for a lot of different reasons. For a lot of techno fans, they don’t even know the original song, so as far as they’re concerned, it’s great new music. For those of us who are so used to mellower house sounds we grew-up with, the familiarity with the songs serves as a sort of “bridge” to the hands-up techno sound, which has turned me and a lot of others my age into techno fans. And finally, hands-up techno, as a style of cover, takes a song into new territory that other styles of remake just couldn’t make happen.
I know a lot of DJs and radio programmers have something against cover songs, and I too often find the cover song to be an overused model in the dance music industry. But as I’ve written before, I think the simple truth is that well-produced music and good songwriting matter more than where the song happened to come from. Bad covers of good songs, or good covers of lousy ones, are where things fall apart here, but it’s not a reason to dismiss an entire category, and deVille’s new track is neither a bad cover, nor a bad song to choose for a cover. Check out his MySpace page (link above), give it a listen, and see what you think.
Idol isn’t the only way
Auditioning for American Idol (or one of its siblings worldwide) may be one way for people with singing talent to get discovered, as I blogged earlier this week. In fact, just tinkering with one’s video camera and posting the results on YouTube has proven to be another way some people get to the spotlight.
One of those people came to my attention on Monday while updating the music on iDanceRadio.fm, and that person is The Netherlands’ Esmée Denters. Just three years ago, Esmée was videotaping herself singing popular songs, Idol audition style, and posting them on YouTube. Apparently the results were impressive enough for someone in the industry to notice.
Denters was eventually introduced to Justin Timberlake, who in addition to signing her to his new Tennman Records label, had her open for his European concerts in 2007. She’s been hanging out with Timberlake since, as a sort of protégé. Fast-forward to today, and she’s preparing for the release of her first album. Not bad for a kid who just a couple of years ago was merely goofing around with Internet video.
Her debut single, which is what I added to the station on Monday, is titled Outta Here. It’s probably exactly what one might expect from someone associated with Timberlake: a nice, pleasant, radio-friendly, pop song infused with R&B, that sits nicely in an iPod playlist next to Beyoncé, Rihanna, or any number of otherwise largely soundalike female pop artists today. I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with that, only that it’s commercial pop music that follows the rules and sticks to the formula that’s proven to work as well as anything does these days in the music industry.
I’ve not seen or heard any extended remixes of the song yet; I hope they’re coming. But the album single works for me. Listen for it on the station and see if you agree.
It’ll be interesting to see where things go next for Denters.
The global Idol machine
I have to hand it to the folks at Fremantle Media (owned by the media giant Bertelsmann AG): coming-up with the Idol franchise was a stroke of brilliance. While American Idol might be getting a little tired at this point, it’s hardly in danger of cancellation with its millions-strong following, and Idol worldwide continues to chug along very nicely, thank you.
Say what you will about Idol, it brings to the spotlight talent we might not have heard otherwise, and while I’ve written plenty about the stars cranked out by the American version of the show, truth is, there are plenty of artists on the global stage that also have Idol roots, and as we’ve seen in the U.S., you don’t have to win the competition to get benefit of the “Idol effect.”
Take Danny Saucedo. Back in 2006, he appeared on Swedish Idol. While his Wikipedia entry suggests he wowed the judges, apparently his talent wasn’t quite sufficient to get him beyond the top 6 contestants on the show.
Apparently that was perfectly adequate, however, since Sony signed him in 2007, and he’s enjoyed a few #1 songs in Sweden since. Apparently he’s a bit of a sensation in Poland as well, but in any case, I just saw his name for the first time within the past few weeks when I got a promo of his track All on You.
It’s one of those tracks that was sort of, “yeah, this is good” on the first listen, and it’s been growing on me (thankfully not like a fungus in this case) since. As one might expect, it’s your basic polished remix of a basic polished pop song. Nothing wrong with that. And while I might feel a wee bit guilty for embracing another example of the vanilla ice cream of music (I normally prefer a little flavor and texture, figuratively speaking), good vanilla ice cream is still fun to eat, right?
It will be interesting to see if Sony are successful in getting Danny Saucedo to gain traction in North America. His “cute factor” should go a long way to help, but as I said, the music’s not bad either.
Check out his web site (if you read Swedish, anyway) at www.danny.nu.
