Heretofore to the Floor
Nominally, I’m an indie rock guy. I look the part. I play in the local bands. It’s the most accessible, albeit still tiny, non-wedding music scene in my hometown of Des Moines. I’m also big into electronic music and edm, but in Iowa, that interest becomes more of an eclecticism. Not a lot of gritty warehouse shows going down here in the soybean hinterlands of North America.
When I’m not listening to Cease Upon the Capitol, I often find myself spelunking in Soundcloud’s constrained, circuitous algorithms. Within the last few months, a number of Irish producers have grasped my attention, not just because of their chops as composers, but because their dedication to popping scenes in cities 90% smaller than my own.
Now, it does need to be said that, generally speaking, Europe has a more conspicuous fondness for dancey, ravey music. House and techno may have been birthed in the American Rustbelt, but it has found a perennial grounding across the European continent, even in regions not mentioned in “North American Scum.” To be more blunt, no one in Sheboygan, Wisconsin (population 40k) is going ham to underground house music. There’s a different energy in Kilkenny, Ireland (population 20k) apparently.
Berlin, Ibiza, London, these are places that even American hicks like me vaguely know are club-centric. If that has changed, please don’t get mad at me cause movies here still present it as true and I didn’t have the means to study abroad.
When I see a DJ from Silgo is producing absolute bangers, damn, that’s a dopamine surge.
https://soundcloud.com/clancyysound/clancy-site
I do want to survey my tone here. I don’t intend to come off as impressed, but condescendingly so. I’m genuinely inspirited by the prospect of talent fostering itself beyond commonly understood bounds of what has to be what, based on what fluxes of media say is what.
To explain, let me refer back to Jean.
Baudrillard’s prescient nihilism apprehended the domineering outcomes of mass narrative prior to the internet even becoming a ubiquitous household network: “What else do the media dream of besides creating the event simply by their presence? Everyone decries it, but everyone is secretly fascinated by this eventuality. Such is the logic of simulacra, it is no longer that of divine predestination, it is that of the precession of models” (38). If you google “top club scenes in Europe,” you will get 315 million hits in .68 seconds. The first several links all disseminate the same infotainment, the same cities, the same travel brochure marketing, and this is rehashed millions of times over. Perhaps you search “up and coming club scenes in Europe” and find yourself with 700 million more hits, most of which reiterate your first search, maybe with slight deviations and alternate suggestions.
The most pronounced and accessible functions of the current internet do not produce meaning or reflect the world as it is, it perpetually concretizes our perceptions into “an uninterrupted thread of signs,” a domain of advertising where even art scenes are reduced into their own rankable brands (Baudrillard 63). I don’t know if it’s realistic to regionally remove oneself from this encompassing hypermarket, the world wide web is more of a world wide thrall at this point, but I still think it’s vital that artists at the nominal fringe oppose these dominant, mass-circulated narratives.
https://soundcloud.com/marcus-olaoire/tracks
House and techno have a distinctive focus on mobility, reorientation, evasion. Unlike most subgenres, formulaic composition isn’t necessarily a sign of amateurishness, it’s a means for cathartic escape. Repetitive cycles, the four-to-the-floor — the breakdown — the drop back — the mix into the next cohesive song, serve as a footing for both self-comprehension and brief extrication from our alienated dystopia-lite. Marx claims that the human person “sets in motion the natural forces which belong to his own body, his arms, legs, head and hands…Through this movement he acts upon external nature and changes it, and in this way he simultaneously changes his own nature” (qtd in Floyd 72). Obviously, Marx was referring to conventional work, but it would not be unreasonable to suggest the expression of going fkn black forest ham to house bangers is also bodily toil that furthers the development of oneself.
While edm is defs a sweaty, pulsing artform, I don’t want to reduce it to mere exercise. A rave is not just the individualized flexing of multiple bodies within a dank club. When one hears the cavernous wallop of the kick drum, the rippling synth leads, the prolonged exhibition of a buildup, intrepidity and reverie meld together. Losing it, even if you’re shit at dancing, can temporarily release oneself.
Christian Parenti’s The Soft Cage, a thorough study on governmental surveillance in America, describes the mythic quality of travel. His observations mainly pertain to the conflict between the eyes of the Koch’s and the bodies of proles, but I also found his words to resonate with the aesthetic potential of house music:
Within the trope of geographic mobility rides a whole cosmology of real and imagined possibilities: to move away is the American surrogate for rebellion. Physical mobility is the palliative for the frustrations of social immobility; it is the promise of a better horizon; the proverbial backdoor, always open, awaiting one’s escape (122).
But what if journeying is not an option? Or, what if the world has become so digitally interconnected, so bureaucratically inspected, that even moving to a megalopolis isn’t actually movement, more of a presumption?
https://soundcloud.com/kettamabro/tracks
When I reflect on becoming an adult in Iowa, fond nostalgia is always matched by a carceral ambience. When you live far from the centers of capital and don’t have the means to genuinely experience them, you’re taught to both consider yourself a cultural exile and to avidly embody that interpersonally and digitally. Parenti notes that in the contemporary, our presences are continually recorded and summarized by electronic networks, job badges, social media, atms, Amazon: “We are not ‘being watched’ so much as we are voluntarily ‘checking in’ with authorities” (79). Be it Silgo, or South Chicago, or wherever within the Western panopticon, one learns how to smile for the camera, essentialistically.
The greater Irish house scene enthralls because it maneuvers at a parallel to the obvious currents of the culture industry. Separate, but proximate, Irish djs are expressing a distinctive proletarian fervor and intimacy. This is real shit, a real deviation from the overclass leer.
https://soundcloud.com/mark_laird/tracks
The present day has been confined by diminishing paychecks and the omnimalevolent gaze of big tech. Escapism itself has become the pandect; and so, it’s vital we rouse are fellows through an alternative sociability. The internet circus has momentarily stupefied us, but I hear an overture in these slappers, an unchaining both dreamlike and palpable.
The aesthetic indocility of Irish house can be better understood by mercifully paraphrasing Freud:
Freud’s approach to art is not in the least motivated by a desire to demystify the sublimities of poetry and art and reduce them to the sexual economy of the drives. His goal is not to exhibit the dirty (or stupid) little secret behind the grand myth of creation. Rather, Freud calls on art and poetry to bear positive witness on behalf of the profound rationality of “fantasy” (Ranciere 49).
When I think of the workers around the world, be it in Ireland or Ghana or Siberia, places at the supposed edge, coming together to rage, I feel a personally uncharacteristic optimism. The ecstasy of house and techno, the surreal flow of interminable rhythm, it’s a reasonable, collective response to the estrangement of right now. And unlike letting Hulu engulf you or memorizing the timeline of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, it goes beyond mere pleasant elusion. The music itself becomes the rational fantasy and the gathering of people in the club, in the warehouse, in the basement, becomes its tangible realization.
There are two important caveats that I need to address:
1. The proletarian togetherness I’m describing has absolutely existed in centers of entertainment capital, in the Berlins and Barcelonas. I don’t applaud these Irish djs because I think they’re achieving some status of romantic edm authenticity. I’m giving them particular attention in this article because they demonstrate that emboldened subculture can be fostered anywhere, even places deemed by monoliths of media as the sticks. You don’t necessarily have to be an urbane scenester to participate in “the work of ‘fantasy’ and the labor of its deciphering” (Ranciere 86).
2. It also needs to be recognized that even ostensibly inscrutable subcultures often intersect with reactionary aesthetic regimes, see: punk, dubstep, eminem fans. People in Letterkenny likely still check into Facebook when they go out to party. As crucial as iconoclastic art/music scenes are, one can’t substitute political organizing with a raucous weekly mosh. There is an extremely rigid limit to the class consciousness that can be raised by art alone.
I have hope, a hope informed by musicians that live about 4,000 miles from me, that perhaps a more vibrant dance culture can be cultivated in my Midwestern home. In the past 20 years, a good chunk of the rural youth, not just in Iowa, have had to move to metro areas for work. This is the hopeless reality of post-farm crises, post-NAFTA heartland America.
That being said, when I play a HESTER track, I begin to imagine it possible to resist this burdensome alienation of our undeniably shitty postmodernity.
https://soundcloud.com/thomas-hester-679955453/tracks
Works Cited:
Baudrillard, Jean, and Sheila Faria. Glaser. Simulacra and Simulation. University of Michigan Press, 2018.
Floyd, Kevin. The Reification of Desire: Toward a Queer Marxism. University of Minnesota Press, 2009.
Parenti, Christian. The Soft Cage: Surveillance in America, from Slavery to the War on Terror. BasicBooks, 2005.
Rancière Jacques. The Aesthetic Unconscious. Polity, 2010.
