yeh ... it was a real facetious one .... I could have called it Peanut
Butter and it would have accomplished the same thing ....
>
>Beats is Beats, but you cant just call everything Beats unless you are
>trying to communicate that everything sounds the same to you.
No ... see, listening to this sort of stuff to me holds its interest into
how it changes over time.
I was taping DB once, and I'm in the pit of this large auditorium behind
the barricades watching the levels on my gear and making sure I'm getting a
good take ... Everyone's dancing and the fog machine's going (it got my DAT
-- natch -- digital and anti-freeze don't mix), but DB is switching styles
left and right ... he must have gone through 20 styles in a 2 hour set.
Everything from "Funk Train" to "Rocket Man" to a couple of exclusives I
got white labels of .... people came up to me constantly saying "who's the
dj? who's the dj that was playing jungle a few minutes ago? what do you
mean it's the same dj that's been playing for the past hour and a half?"
And all I could do was just grin.
Here's the deal ....
When you go out to eat (let's assume you're not vegetarian like I am), say
you order chicken vindaloo. Now with that, you don't want chicken
vindaloo, chicken vindaloo, chicken vindaloo, chicken vindaloo, chicken
vindaloo, and chicken vindaloo. That would be kinda heavy, wouldn't it?
Hey, it's the culinary top-40! Instead you'd want a salad here, a leafy
thing there, some starchy thing there, and so on, and I don't know about
you but when I go out to eat I have my potency, my coffee, and my glass of
water with a lemon in it. Variety is the key, man .... The minute you
start defining it is the minute you have to steer away from it to keep
pushing further and keeping it interesting.
There is such a thing as stylistic diversity and keeping a dancefloor
moving ... without regard as to what style you're playing. A great example
of another DJ who is very good at doing this is Double D from Calgary,
Alberta. She's absolutely stunning to me .... she mixes a bunch of things
together that my ears identify as goa, illbient, jungle, breakbeat, and
gabber, and it's just furious ... and she gets jazzy too .... DJ's like
here are the ones that I really look up to .... and she tackles every style
you can think of and just pins it to the wall ....
But back to definitions ... I think that the less definable the music is,
the more interesting the genre is in the long run, and I try to keep my
listening tastes as varied as possible ....