rolling back to the future garage/post-dubstep/alt-funkstep/intelli-2step etc thread
Thread starter gumdrops
air your grievances here! beardstep feminist sausagefest garage conversion i am a defender of simon reynolds' face i am skrillex insidious gentrification muppet show gallery post joe muggs' post pubstep time travel too many man transvestite vocals well i think it's still interesting wot do u call it uurrrban
chow11
that article made me think of that picture that is used on every shitty dubstep video of the girl with the headphones covering her boobs. however i think mainstream dance music has always been sexualized when promoted, and i felt like the examples of julio bashmore and that other album were a bit of a stretch...they seemed much more like an "artistic" portrayal...also any form of dance music that is more hard and agro can be percieved as being mysogynistic...like the whole apeal for a lot of men to go to dances is sexual inhibition of women n such
pattycakes
sex sells!
SecondLine
cheers for posting this e/y. glad you thought it was relevant.
chow11 said:
that headphone boobs picture was a candidate for the header image...it's been pissing me off for months.
I think the 'artistic' angle is too often just a lazy excuse though, it's this Vice/American Apparel approach to what is basically soft porn which I talk about in the article. I mean that Eliphino artwork is pure teenage boy bait int it.
I don't think you could argue agro music is inherently anti-women - I know plenty of girls who are into their gabba and suchlike. Obviously the social dynamic of a given club or scene can be misogynistic - but it seems unfair to blame it on the music itself.
Also if anything the whole 'post-dubstep' scene is in a very feminine phase at the moment - if you wanna use the Reynoldsian binary.
e/y said:
may be a bit off-topic, but I think it's connected this this 'scene'
http://thequietus.com/articles/07384-dance-music-misogyny
Well, that was pretty preachy for an article that was extrapolated from a couple of tweets. But it did provide us with some shocking evidence to suggest that some guys on Youtube like tits and the readers of DJ Mag have terrible taste.
I really hope the kristanjcaryl quote was supposed to be a joke though. Because if not....wow.
I tried not to be preachy but you can't please everyone eh.
He was pretty unrepentant and rude when Ben UFO originally pulled him up on it so I'd say not.
Phaedo
Wasn't the movement away from dubstep partly to "put swing" back into tunes, and make it less agro? When i have seen "post dubstep" artists recently seems to be no shortage of women enjoying themselves (not hassled usually either). Whole thing seems to be blown out of proportion due to a few YouTube rippers.
That said, raising the issue probably isnt going to harm anyone.
SecondLine said:
I imagine it could be annoying for producers the way an image can become synonymous with your music because of the masturbatory tastes of some random guy uploading rips to youtube.
Some of the sources you use to underpin your argument seem like a massive stretch though. Its hard to argue the artistic merit of the Julio Bashmore cover because its pretty rubbish but I dont see how it represents some form of prevalent misogyny. I mean 'let me see what u workin with' has misogynistic undertones so are we therefore to assume that Pearson Sound goes around aggressively demanding girls shake their booty for him? Theres a really important point to be made about the way women are portrayed in the electronic music world but it needs to be set in the right context or it will come across as a bit preachy.
I just thought it was a bit of an overreaction. A well written and well intentioned one, but an overreaction nonetheless. It's really late here so I'll probably explain myself better tomorrow, but it reminded me of some writer suggesting Andy Stott was being racist/exploitative because the cover of Passed By Me had an African tribesman on it. It was a loaded accusation based on very little evidence. Of course, while that accusation was levelled at just one person, this is more of an indictment on an entire scene...which fair enough, but to base it around one single tremendously stupid and offensive tweet seems a bit presumptuous to me. Edit - Plus, what Esp just said.
Who knows though. Maybe this article will prove to be prescient sixth months from now when Ramadanman and Joy O release Fuck Dat Bitch Vol 4.
@Phaedo - I don't think the article suggested that the content of the music itself had anything to do with the misogyny (which is what I initially thought the article would be about). It's the people involved in dance music, both artists and fans, that are the apparent problem.
echevarian
Am I the only one in here that assumes that pretty much all dubstep/not dubstep youtube rips are created by and for an audience of 16 year old boys?
I think its a testament to the skill of the moderators that the dubstep forum isn't on Something Awful or 4chan levels of racism and misogyny. I consider socially awkward boys in their teens to have the least amount of empathy out of any group aside from hardcore racists and people in prison, maybe that's just me. I know that despite all my efforts to the contrary I was at the very least extremely homophobic when I was a teen.
Corpsey
bandz ahoy
''What's wrong with being sexy?''
Slothrop
Tight but Polite
But "a feminine phase" is kind of about getting back to a friday night, good looking ladies on the dancefloor kind of vibe rather than asexual / pansexual countercapitalist rave utopianism... I mean it's taking a lot of its 'feminine' cues from funky and RnB, which are hardly free from pictures of scantily clad ladies used to sell releases or nights...
warp drive
the article seems to conflate 'women' and 'feminists' (and as such, disagreeing with feminism becomes 'misogyny'), even when the scuba tweet specifically points out the discrepancy.
what a bit of tits & arse has to do with any of this is beyond me. if butthurt feminist-minded women aren't comfortable with it, they're free to create their own culture. it seems they're more interested in having a whinge about it in their blog-bubble, though.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=reHGIYHAR2Q
If the article was about dubstep proper, well, point taken.
simon silverdollar
Ory said:
if one takes feminism to be a political/social movement that argues for equal rights and opportunities across genders (and this seems to be plausible definition to me), then i'd say being anti-feminist is indeed to be anti-women, and misogynistic.
if I believe in/frown upon this apparent misogyny in dance music, but i listen to/enjoy lots of rap music, am I a hypocrite?
slackk
I think post dubstep is definitely mysogynistic because it pitches down any vocal samples to make girls sound like weird transvestites on ketamine
simon silverdollar said:
Thanks Simon, you said it more succinctly that I was going to.
If people think it's an overreaction, fine - although I don't, obviously. I think it's better that people are acutely aware of the issue before it's a massive thing rather than after. I can see why you might think the proof in the article is a bit scanty. I've got a big ole list of youtube rippers but they didn't get put in the article. e.g.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8sar-dDbRRU&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z6iXEjPTlOM&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zCpOGnfhedY&feature=related
A lot of the responses on here seem to be based on the fact that 'just a few youtube rips' don't really matter. But when that's increasingly the primary source of upfront music for people involved in the scene (maybe not for you lot on here, being a bit older...is that presumptuous of me?) it becomes quite a big problem. I mean if someone checks out 90% of the new hessle shit on youtube, then it's the equivalent of every hessle record having tattooed tits on the sleeve. If you were coming new to this stuff you'd build a pretty negative image of the scene. And if you were a woman you'd probably find it quite offputting.
Trillhouse
I'm sorry but how can anyone try and make such serious points based off of things they garnered from Youtube & Twitter, which anyone who's used the internet for any length of time will know seem to encourage the cesspool of humanity to spew it's inanities, in an effort to bring the world down to their level. I swear common unfiltered usage has the potential to lower ones IQ. Even national treasure Stephen Fry got called for making a misguidedly sexist comment on twitter. But I don't think that anyone would then extrapolate that to mean he and everyone he's involved with must therefore be somehow bigoted.
Unfortunately the internet in general can be an incredibly sexist and demeaning place for women. But the post-dubstep scene, unlike it's gruffer more working class precursor, seems to be largely populated by nice middle class boys, who are either way too well mannered, or mousey, to be overtly sexist. In fact, of all genres you could pick on to call out for this ish, they would be near the very bottom of the list. But maybe that's why.
what kind of mass communication now isn't mediated through the internet? You want me to go to the library and get out some books?
also you're on shaky ground with the class thing given that rave was a largely working class phenomenon