The Blueprint of This Observation Can Be Applied to Many Things in Life

A fan of 1977 Genesis might dislike the music of 1977 Wire, whose fans in turn might dislike 1977 ABBA; these determinations of dislike based on tangibles (such as a comparison of complexity of melody and the dexterity demonstrated in the playing of the instruments; or, in the lyrics, the proportion of flighty imagination to the level of confessional nakedness on display, further pitted against the presence [or lack thereof] of socio-political observations; or the rawness of one group's sound versus the polished gloss of another's), all of which blind each band’s committed followers to the one extraordinary quality that these artists had in common: their excellence.

For American nu Italo Disco Fans, Past and Future

American iTunes has recently acquired an astonishing collection of nu Italo disco releases from a decade ago. These songs were my favorites to spin during the early "Eurotrash or Eurotreasure?" days, so my jaw literally dropped, like this --> :-O when I saw the incredible collection of singles (with ALL THE REMIXES) now available. I used to pay a small fortune for imports of this stuff (when I could get my hands on the releases at all; more often than not I couldn't). Italy had terrible international music distribution at that time. Adding to the obscurity factor, I never met an Italian who was aware of the tremendous dance music scene going on within their country's borders.

Some favorites of mine that are now available on American iTunes:

Danijay (feat. Hellen) - Il gioco dell'amore (Extended Smat Mix)
Big boom-boom tune that perfectly captures that romantic/bombastic nu Italo disco spirit.

Quiki (feat. Lisa) - Together (Extended Mix) (the first of the unlabeled mixes offered here)
One of the coolest, sexiest dance songs I have ever heard.

Banshis - Day By Day (Banshiskipedia album version)
Not disco, but an especially gorgeous song from a group that had previously kicked out some dancefloor pumpers, vastly superior in its full running time and in the group's native Italian to the previously available shortened English-language version.

T42 feat. Sharp - Find Time (Fargetta Mix) (first of the unlabeled mixes on offer here)
My favorite feel-good nu Italo song from that era.

Supasonic - Love Again (Love Mix)
Emotional, romantic yearning appealingly hitched to the boom-boom sound.

Carolina Marquez - Pleasure Ground (Original Pleasure Extended)
This is my favorite of Ms. Marquez's catchy/trashy tunes because it sounds genuinely eerie, then turns weirdly beautiful at around the four minute mark. Only the Italians made songs that sounded anything like this--NOBODY ELSE. What a wonderfully weird fucked-up thing this is. The entire back catalog of the Colombian-born Italian seems to be available.

2 People - Holiday Ride (Piparo'S Main Mix)
Slighter than the other recommendations, but nonetheless an extremely cute and appealing representative of the nu Italo sound.

Prezioso feat. Marvin - Let Me Stay
Sort of silly sounding, but the melody of the sweeping-arm-gestures chorus is a killer. It looks like the entire Prezioso catalog is now available.

Levy 9 - I'm Not Scared (Hard Tunes Mix
Trash cover of an obscure 80s tune with huge synth riffs and boom boom beats.

Datura - Will Be One (Todo en Todos Extended)
A very theatrical tune.

Neja - Time Flies (Original Mix) (third of the mixes listed here)
I happily paid $20 for the CD single, but now you can have it for much less. ;-)

And a non-Italian bonus:

Jazmine - Makes Me Go (Mmm...) (Radio)
Sugar-overload track that acquired near-mythic status in the underground trash circles due to its scarcity. The whole single is now available.

You have to admire the nu Italo disco scene for its uniqueness. I feel it demonstrated greater originality and ambition than that displayed in most of the more fashonable dance music of the time. Now is a good time to find that out for yourself.

Weed Patches

Every day I like to go up on top of the GA Tech/Technology Square parking deck in order to gaze at the city skyline and survey the traffic on the interstate below. This gives my eyes a break from long periods spent staring at a computer screen.

Today I found myself gazing down at a GA Tech facilities guy cutting back weeds. These weeds have grown almost as tall as a person, and they have swallowed up the trunks of the ornamental trees planted in a row between the building and the sidewalk.

The guy used a hedge trimmer to carve the weeds back from the sidewalk they had been partially blocking, much as one might carve topiary. His actions resulted in a smooth, five foot high wall of weed by the sidewalk.

This was ridiculous, because the weeds obviously should have been pulled outright long ago. But somehow the opportunity for doing that had slipped by, and one day it was decided to simply trim them back. It struck me as being akin to using a laser to carve a malignant tumor into a beautiful, miniature Venus de Milo while leaving the tumor in place.

Since my mind runs away with itself very easily, the actions of the Facilities guy struck me a metaphor for the way society deals with many problems. Rather than pulling the weeds at the start, it seems to be human nature to let them grow until the problem cannot be ignored--when the sidewalk becomes impassable. By then the effort required to completely solve the problem is too much to contemplate, so we simply cut the weeds back.

Since this is (purportedly) a European-themed blog, in order to justify this musing I'll add a metaphor offered to me by my Slovakian former roommate Luboš to describe how America deals with its problems:

"America began its history like a quilt. But then the quilt got torn. So you sewed patches on the tears. And then the patches get tears. So you sewed patches on patches. And soon the entire quilt became patches on patches on patches..."

Charles Dana Gibson, Rudolf Eickemeyer, Jr., Evelyn Nesbit, and "The Eternal Question"

[September 27, 2010 - Changes made to this blog entry per ADDENDUM below]

This is a "Eurotrash or Eurotreasure?" departure, but since it's become my blog in general, and I've used plenty of Gibson girls to illustrate my Eurodance DJ set flyers, I feel I can indulge myself this one time.

Charles Dana Gibson's "The Eternal Question" [link] has long been believed to be a portrait of Evelyn Nesbit, the chorus girl and model who, a few years after Gibson's drawing was completed, found herself the center of a crime of passion that led to what is generally regarded as the first "Trial of the [20th] Century."

I think I have made a discovery. Last night, while looking through the Corbis website, a 1901/1902 image of Evelyn Nesbit jumped out at me [link]. I believe Gibson used this image as the basis for "The Eternal Question." I present my analysis below. No proportions were altered in any of the photographic images.


The eyelid is the most startling clue; the lighting and fold lines are nearly identical in the two images.


The interior of the ear forms a distinctive key-shape.


The lips and chin are nearly identical.


The two photos above are identically sized and angled. Increasing the size of Nesbit's hairdo along with the changed tilt of her head would have been changes made in order to emphasize Gibson's question mark. Although apparently doubled in size, that amazing sea of hair retains the same proportions and forms throughout.


The photos in the image above are also identically sized and angled. The facial features generally line up; there is a slight waver for the eyebrow and eye in my sizings (perhaps with more care I could align even those), but all else is a perfect match.

I think that the idea of Gibson working from a photo makes him an even better artist. He would have had stunning artistic insight to look at the photo, see that question mark potential there, and then fully realize that vision in his drawing. This is far more interesting to me than if he had sat Nesbit down in front of him and said, "OK, now make your hair into a question mark." :-D

So am I only the latest person to see this, or is this a new piece of insight into "The Eternal Question"?

---

ADDENDUM - September 27 - Paula Uruburu, who literally wrote the book on Evelyn Nesbit (the excellent American Eve [link]), kindly wrote back to me on this issue and offered something I could not bring to the table: real scholarship. :-D

First off, she informed me that the photograph was taken by Rudolf Eickemeyer, Jr. Eickemeyer took most of Nesbit's most famous shots, including "Tired Butterfly." [link]

Second, she agrees that Gibson must have seen this particular Eickemeyer photo, and complimented me on my "brilliant detective work." (I blush. Thank you, Paula!)

Third, there are not many profile shots of Nesbit to (literally) draw from.

But she also noted that Nesbit had also sat for Gibson in the flesh (thus I have deleted the lines in this blog entry where I had expressed doubts about this).

So, at this stage it seems to me that it went down like this: having been acquainted with her already, Nesbit came readily to Gibson's mind as he conceived of "The Eternal Question," and at some point in the creation of that drawing he turned to the Eickemeyer photograph to help fill in the details.

Buggles Sample Ruins Two Songs in One Summer

Orbital were one of the leading electronic music groups of the 1990s. Then they lost their way, and after that they threw in the towel.

In June 2010 they came back from the dead with a new single, called "Don't Stop Me," which featured a sample of a chick from the Buggles' song "Video Killed the Radio Star." It's quite irritating.*



A couple weeks ago, will.i.am rolled out a tune with Nicki Minaj called "Check It Out." It features that same Buggles sample, but this time it's run into the ground, making "Check It Out" one of the most unlistenable pop songs of the last several years. Lyrics consist of performers boasting about their awesomeness and an oft-repeated plea to "check it out."** Orbital's take is not sounding so bad now, is it?



Of course, it's unlikely that the sample's reappearance on "Check It Out" only a couple of months after Orbital's tune came out was a coincidence. But why steal an idea that was bad to begin with and turn it into something so much worse?

The original Buggles song:



* Their "The Gun is Good" is better.
** The reason these sorts of lyrics reappear like roaches is suggested in the verse:

Step up in the party like my name was that bitch
All these haters mad because I'm so established
They know I'm a beast yeah I'm a fucking fab bitch
Haters you can kill yourself

...which suggests that any complaints about the tiresomeness of hearing such clichéd lyrics (which would no doubt come from "haters") will fall on deaf ears.

Life Goes On

In the same way one might worry that no phone call or email for a few weeks from one's elderly father might mean elderly father is lying injured at the bottom of a flight of stairs, his cell phone inches out of reach, perhaps readers sometimes worry that my failure to update this blog means I have met some similarly unhappy fate.

The lack of updates simply comes down to this: this blog focuses on Europe, with an emphasis on my own direct interactions with that continent. Since I haven't been in Europe for many months, updates have been few.

For regular updates on European music, I encourage you to join my lately bouncing "Eurotrash or Eurotreasure?" Facebook group, which I have been posting to several times each week.

For more thoroughly digested music matters, please visit ye olde Kingpigeon.com website, where one will find DJ sets, music reviews, and other fine items.

When I find myself preparing to depart for Europe again, this blog will spring back to life. There's no need to call the paramedics at this time. ;-)

Prison Break Season 2: Sequel

I offer another personal blog entry, since the personal will impact the future, less-personal reportage you'll find here.

My mind is in two places. It will come as no surprise to anyone who knows me, if anybody really does*, that neither of those places is Atlanta, the city where my body shuffles around while its owner drifts along in a perpetual dream state.

One place I find my mind is in the past--way in the past--researching the 1890-1910 period of American history. I might make some sort of a book out of all that research one day, or maybe not, but I'm smitten by the period and am trying to absorb everything I can about it.

The second place I find my mind is the future, contemplating and laying a tentative foundation for a return to Europe, which may or may not happen (in case anyone from my office is worrying about making a contingency plan). This will, by extension, mean a return to the sorts of blog entries you read here from January to April, which was really what this blog was all about in the first place. As I strove to do on that earlier trip, I hope to keep the "travel blog" tone to a minimum and focus more on reporting specifically on the things I see, particularly as related to the European pop and dance music scenes.

The most appealing plan so far looks to be the Baltic states first, followed by a dive down through Belarus, then Ukraine, then Romania, then Bulgaria, then Turkey, then up and around to Georgia (since the Armenian-Turkish border remains closed), and then down to Armenia. Fortunately, I have contacts in many of these places. But I also want to visit friends in the Balkans, which is the one drawback to this currently Balkanless plan, so it will likely be revised (of course, some revision will occur at the spur of the moment).

As for the present, I'm just a body earning money at his job right now. If I return to Europe I will have to quit the job, which is why earning money now is of paramount importance. Not that I'm quitting my job. Just saying these are all the angles I am looking at right now.

* You don't.

Epically Flawed Analogies

For the benefit of those not living in the United States, I will explain that there is a proposal to build a Muslim cultural center two blocks from the "Ground Zero" site of the 11 September attacks. Those opposed to the center say that it is insensitive to build anything related to Islam near Ground Zero. Others argue that opposition to the construction of the center demonstrates an abandonment of our constitutional values.

It's worth writing about on this blog, since many of the analogies used by opponents to the plan focus on events that transpired in recent European history.

In making their arguments, opponents of the so-called "mosque" (actually, it sounds more like a mall) often talk about the "misappropriating" of a tragic historical event, but then misappropriate other historic tragedies to draw analogies to support their position.

I have noticed that all the analogies brought up by opponents to the plan fail on exactly the same point. Here are some the comparisons that have been made and why they all fail in the same way.

1) "Nazis don’t have the right to put up a sign next to the Holocaust Museum in Washington." -- Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich
Analogy: Muslims = Nazis, NYC = Holocaust Museum.
Fail: Nazis as a political entity planned and orchestrated the slaughter of Jews, whereas Muslims as a whole did not plan and orchestrate the 9/11 attacks.

2) "We would never accept the Japanese putting up a site next to Pearl Harbor." -- Newt Gingrich, again
Analogy: Muslims = Japan, NYC = Pearl Harbor.
Fail: Japan as a political entity planned and orchestrated the attack on Pearl Harbor, whereas Muslims as a whole did not plan and orchestrate the 9/11 attacks.

3) "The Atlantic's Michael Kinsley was typical in arguing that the only possible grounds for opposing the Ground Zero mosque are bigotry or demagoguery. Well then, what about Pope John Paul II's ordering the closing of the Carmelite convent just outside Auschwitz? (Surely there can be no one more innocent of that crime than those devout nuns.)" -- Charles Krauthammer, conservative columnist
Analogy: Muslims = The Catholic Church, NYC = Auschwitz.
Fail: The Catholic Church (a religious and, effectively, a political entity [both in method of operation and in the Vatican's sovereignty]), was complicit in the destruction of the Jews during World War II, whereas Muslims as a whole did not plan and orchestrate the 9/11 attacks.

4) “9/11 mosque=act of fitna, “equivalent to bldg Serbian Orthodox church@Srebrenica killing fields where Muslims were slaughtered” -- Sarah Palin, former Alaska governor and former Republican vice presidential candidate
Analogy: Muslims = Serbian Orthodox Church, NYC = Srebrenica.
Fail: The Serbian Orthodox church as a religious entity prominently and directly supported the Serbian government's actions during the Balkan Wars of the 1990s, whereas Muslims as a whole did not plan and orchestrate the 9/11 attacks.

To me, reasonable hatred (e.g., our feelings toward the 9/11 plotters and executors) evolves into unforgivable racism when one impresses one's negative impressions about a few individuals upon a much larger number of people (I suppose this is a wordy way of describing negative stereotyping). The analogies above all attempt to pull off this trick, attempting in each instance to equate 1.5 billion Muslim people to various political and religious entities who, either generally or, in the cases of the specific injustices cited, are worthy of censure. This is why the Atlantic writer Mr. Krauthammer attempts to refute was right all along: "the only possible grounds for opposing the Ground Zero mosque are bigotry or demagoguery."

Europe and America

Began writing this five months ago somewhere between visiting Croatia and Slovenia. Tweaked it a few times since. It probably isn't going to get any better, so I am giving up, posting it, and walking away! :-D

Europe, a continent the size of the United States, boasts myriad languages, faiths, and cultures. Some countries there were fighting wars with one another as recently as the 1990s, and other forms of cultural wars continue to divide Europeans today. Thus, it would be silly to generalize about Europeans as a whole. But I'm silly, so let's do it!

Europeans seem to be more pragmatic and susceptible to logic than Americans, perhaps to a fault, as pragmatism sometimes leads to pessimism, and pessimism leads to inaction ("The odds are I will fail, so I will not attempt"). But I can relate better to this form of logic than to American optimism, and the longer this economy drags the more American realists I think there will be.

Europe contends with a Babel effect; even with English as a fallback business language there is a large, disenfranchised portion of the population that cannot so easily participate in the international market. America is fortunate in that its citizens by and large speak the same language.

The Muslim issue seems to be roiling Europe, whereas America's analogous Mexican immigrant issue is not so big a deal (the U.S. immigration debate does not represent an all-out "culture war" on a par with Europe's Muslim one; and regarding our own recent Muslim issue, the "Ground Zero" "Mosque" [both terms need to be scare-quoted], this appears to be a trifle compared to the all-out European cultural battle).

Europe has a deserved reputation for paying more attention to detail, and generally is known to produce a higher quality of product (from clothes to furniture to cars to women*) than Americans, though sometimes at unreasonable cost.

Even if we are to trust the gloomy international standardized test scores, the United States' 300 million-strong population guarantees that a large number of smart and clever people will continue to drive the markets and innovation. Lack of hyper-pragmatism means greater ingenuity and innovation--the best entrepreneurs expect to fail sometimes and are not easily dissuaded by failure. That means we sometimes fail epically, but we also enjoy epic success (McDonald's, Microsoft, etc.).

All that said, I often think I would rather live in Europe. I identify more with its culture and lifestyle. America can become great, but if my life isn't, then why stick around cheerleading the richest 1%? There are plenty of European democracies I could choose to live in. And did I mention the girls?

* ;-D

Something iTunes Does That is Probably Illegal

For years iTunes begs me to update it, and afterward, if I see any change at all, it seems all I can do is flip through my album covers in some new way. More substantive, logical suggestions for improving iTunes have been ignored for years, so today it's still too easy to accidentally delete a playlist, the program cannot automatically find de-linked songs, and (despite there being simple freeware programs that can do it with mp3s) no BPM calculator has been installed.

But that's nothing compared to iTunes' most glaring flaw, which probably breaks the law. iTunes needs to introduce an option to view album covers and liner notes in greater detail.

Last Friday, my friend Goce Alice recommended a 1969 musical starring Lee Marvin and Clint Eastwood. I said, "a musical starring Lee Marvin and Clint Eastwood." It's called Paint Your Wagon, and those tough guys, God bless them, did their own singing. How awesome is that?

Goce steered me to this YouTube clip, which features a marvelous rendition of the song "Wan'drin' Star" by Lee Marvin (whose deep and gravely voice recalls Leonard Cohen's).

I rushed to iTunes in order to buy the song, but a few Paint Your Wagon soundtracks exist on iTunes, all of them suspect. I tried to study the fine print in order to pick out the correct one, but there was no reading of fine print. That's because iTunes doesn't allow one to study the album sleeves closely. Album covers are reproduced at a size of about 175 x 175 pixels, which is pretty tiny. Clicking such an image does not take you to a larger version.

I settled on an album that read, "Music from the Paramount Motion Picture." I am shrewd enough to know that this might have just been a very lawyerly way of saying that, while the record featured performances of songs "from the movie," the songs in fact were not the original movie versions, but rather versions by "sound alike" artists. But really, would the people behind this be such pricks?* It did not escape my notice that iTunes credited the singing to the "Rita Williams Singers." But maybe the Rita Williams Singers did the majority of the movie performances, and Lee and Clint stepped in now and then to accompany them. Who knows? It was the best I could come up with.

I bought "Wand'rin' Star" played it, and sure enough I'd been had. I felt stupid and ashamed, like you do when a con man successfully extracts a dollar from you. In fact, the original movie soundtrack version is not available on iTunes at all. Once again, they wonder why we file share.

Had I been more patient, I might have gone to Amazon.com and found this much larger version of the album cover, which made it clear via the absence of Lee Marvin's and Clint Eastwood's names that this was a "Countdown Singers" sort of affair. Oh well.

We all know it's ethically wrong to do shit like this. Nobody wants a sound-alike cover of an original song, and nobody who buys the version of "Wand'rin' Star" that I did does so for any reason other than having been tricked. Nobody. Adding the words "Music from the Paramount Motion Picture" to the album cover deliberately creates this confusion.

There is a special place in hell for the geniuses behind this. But the practice is not illegal. No doubt, the lawyers signed off on everything and Paramount was happy to collect licensing fees.

Where I think iTunes is breaking a law, however, returns us to the issue of the album cover. Back when the lawyers signed off on the original Paint Your Wagon arrangements, nobody at Paramount would have actually wanted somebody to hand money over to the sound-alike band instead of spending that money on Paramount's own "Original Motion Picture Soundtrack" version. It would be logical to assume that the lawyers for Paramount therefore demanded that information be present on the copy-cat's album cover in order to make it clear to the consumer that the record in hand was not the real version.

But in the iTunes world I cannot hold that record in hand and study its fine print. Not only is the cover shrunk down to an unreadable size, but no back cover is provided at all. This cannot have been what the lawyers for Paramount intended.

Even more amazing is the lack of data provided on iTunes m4a music files regarding engineers' names, session musicians, and producer credits. How would one know about David Gilmour's backing vocals on Kate Bush's "Pull Out the Pin"? What of Kate Bush's backing vocals on Peter Gabriel's "No Self Control"? What of Peter Gabriel's lead vocals for Lamb Lies Down on Broadway-era Genesis? Do we get any of that information from iTunes? It does not appear so, judging from what little I find when I click the "Get Info" option on my iTunes m4as. You wouldn't be able to learn from an iTunes m4a that Robert Plant and Jimmy Page were in Led Zeppelin; that John Lennon once sang for a band called The Beatles; that--good God--Justin Timberlake was once in 'N-sync!

Is this why so many hip-hop producers are nowadays into the irritating habit of yelling out their names throughout the songs they produce, like paranoid dogs marking their territory? In light of this, it seems they have a point; so forgive me, Jay-Z and Timbaland, for criticizing you for employing this practice. In the future, perhaps all the session musicians will get to do a self-promotional shout-out on every track as well. Songs can just be shouted out lists of names.

So keep your stagecoach clear of them sound-alike varmints, aided and abetted by iTunes' current policies. In the United States the only place you can hear Lee Marvin croaking the original version of "Wand'rin' Star" (outside of renting the poorly-reviewed movie) is by moseying on over to that YouTube clip--at least until Paramount's lawyers have it taken down, which will probably be soon. Then we'll all forget that Lee Marvin's unusual performance ever happened. That's 21st century entertainment law for you.


* Oh God why do I even ask anymore?

Gay or Eurotrash: Thoughts on Disco After the Proposition 8 Overturn

Here in the United States, the ban on gay marriage has been ruled unconstitutional once again, and so the long debate continues--astonishingly, since the arguments against gay marriage are among the most irrational, illogical, and (despite arguers' insistence to the contrary) obviously bigoted I have ever seen in print.

Of course, there has been a long and sorry tradition of homophobia in America. One aspect of that worth exploring is the relationship between gay and dance music culture.

Over the last year or two, the BPMs of American R&B have risen. This might be the result of a larger cycle; R&B and hip-hop beats were faster in the mid-to-late 1980s, then slowed down to appropriately dirge-like rhythms during the depressing 1990s when MCs were getting killed left and right. Lady Gaga's success with her Euro-influenced pop-dance sound deserves some credit for encouraging Americans to hit the dancefloor, but the growth of U.S. Latin culture over the last decade is perhaps of more significance (Hispanics became America's largest minority in 2003, and faster dance beats have long been a part of Latin pop music tradition).

Whatever the causes, it seems we are becoming a dance nation at last. Our new-found fondness for the 130 BPM song is the latest in a long line of Euro-pop-culture injections that (like the reality TV shows we have cloned from Dutch, Swedish, and UK ones) have taken hold of America over the last decade.

It's about time. After all, Americans invented disco, house, and techno music. But as soon as disco took off we crowned a European champion: Giorgio Moroder, the "Munich Machine" who produced all of Donna Summer's 1970s hits. Ever since, dance music has traditionally enjoyed a far higher level of popularity in Europe, both chart-wise and culturally, than it has in the United States.

Why? Well, you know why, because you know I began this essay with the subject of homophobia.

Disco music emerged from America's gay club scene. "During the late 1960s various male counterculture groups, most notably gay, but also heterosexual black and Latino, created an alternative to rock'n'roll, which was dominated by white — and presumably heterosexual — men. This alternative was disco," states Kelly Boyer Sager's in her general treatment of The 1970s. And so in its very conception disco was associated with sexual, as well as ethnic, minorities. And while a perhaps overly self-aware straightness prevailed over the popular 1977 movie hit Saturday Night Fever, that film explored a minority scene of its own--New York City's Italian-American culture, as the New York magazine article the film was inspired by demonstrates.

So despite its general popularity, disco remained a scene strongly associated with gays (Village People), gay blacks (Sylvester), Italian-Americans (Saturday Night Fever), and other American minority groups.

In 1979, a "Disco Demolition Night" was hosted by a radio station at Chicago's Comiskey Park during a baseball game. The publicity stunt called for disgruntled rock fans to bring disco records to the stadium; the records were to be blown up on the field. A crowd chant of "disco sucks" led up to the explosion. Afterward, rock fans took to the field and a surreal riot (of sorts; no one was injured) followed.

Wrote the New York Times in a reflective piece, "[Chicago DJ Steve Dahl] and his followers resented how disco threatened rock ’n’ roll." That thought is left undeveloped. How did disco in any way threaten rock 'n' roll? How does any genre of music threaten another? Craig Werner, in his book A Change is Gonna Come (as quoted in this Independent article) summed it up: "The Anti-disco movement represented an unholy alliance of funkateers and feminists, progressives and puritans, rockers and reactionaries. None the less, the attacks on disco gave respectable voice to the ugliest kinds of unacknowledged racism, sexism and homophobia."

In other words, disco was logically as much a threat to rock 'n' roll as gay marriage is a threat to the institution of marriage.

Disco remained popular for a few more years in Europe before it gave way to other sub genres of electronic dance music. But in America, the stigma of disco as a gay- and other minority-based counter-cultural movement warped and distorted white America's perception of the club sound for three decades. While America's gay scene rallied around house music, and more underground-minded sorts sniffed out warehouse raves, average Americans missed out on a lot of the fun enjoyed in the UK--no acid house summers of love, no sight of worried television reporters bemoaning the dangers of the drug-infused hardcore techno rave scene, no Gatecrasher style Euro-trance explosion in 1999. But if the latest crop of U.S. dance pop singles are any indication, perhaps we are finally putting that bigotry behind us. Put on your dancing shoes, America.

Vote for DJ King Pigeon

Voting has opened for the DJ Magazine top DJs poll. Please vote for me, DJ King Pigeon.

I certainly need more help than DJ "I'm not Dead" Tiësto does. But neediness is not a good enough reason to solicit your support, so let me do something novel and list my qualifications:

1) Ambitious mixes like this one, which promote the whole of the European music scene (and beyond).

2) Articles written to draw attention to music acts that rarely receive English-language promotion, such as this one and this one.

3) A decade-long history of supporting and spreading the word about under-represented music scenes through blogs, parties, and social networking websites.

4) I'm kinda cute. I mean, check out my beautiful red eyes in the picture above.

I don't have the impeccable fashion sense, the globe-trotting lifestyle, or the fancy cars enjoyed by the top DJs, but isn't that really the point in voting for me? It's time to upset the status quo!

Vote for DJ King Pigeon. :-)

Selena Gomez

Another item to add onto the long list of things Selena Gomez and I have in common: we've both been to Budapest.

Mark Ronson & The Business Intl feat. Q-Tip - Bang Bang Bang

This is the second Mark Ronson song I've heard in the last few weeks that I like, and it's my favorite of the two. Plus, a terrific video to go with.

Set 32: From Midnight to 3:30 AM

At long last, my latest DJ set featuring songs representing many different voices in Europe (and some other places) is finished. You can download it from here.

I began to write an essay about what goes into making such a set, but several paragraphs later I abandoned the effort, largely because the more I went on about my "philosophy of dj'ing" the more I sounded like a total twat.

Bottom line: 66 songs in 3 hours 40 minutes, enough to keep a party moving from, as the title says, midnight to 3:30 am--and then a little bit more, because I always love to give just a little bit more.

Edward Maya's "Stereo Love" Gets a Second (At Least) Cover Treatment

Edward Maya's "Stereo Love" (feat. Vika Jigulina) appeared on the Romanian charts in May 2009. When I visited Kiev, Ukraine in January 2010 the song was blasted everywhere. The tune steadily conquered dance charts throughout Western Europe (for more on the Romanian roll-out strategy, check out this interesting recent Reuters article). Now it's being covered for at least the second time.

Here is the original version:



Dancelovers (feat. Dominika) released a version which I first heard in April 2010. It is a nearly note-for-note clone of the original, but performed in the Hungarian language. It sort of makes sense to redo it in another language if one imagines that there is an audience that would appreciate that.



But this week, on the Radio One charts, I find this useless remake charting. It's done in the same style as the original, and in the English language, also like the original. The English is stronger and more front-and-center, and I will always have a spot in my heart for Velvet ever since hearing her trashtastic take on "Rock Down To (Electric Avenue)," but this is just not worth the effort, in my opinion.



If you know of more covers of "Stereo Love," please post links in the comments area.

Eurodancehits.com is Closed

25 July 2010 -- The website, which seems to have nine lives, has been restored.



As I was preparing to add (another) link to the website from my own, I discovered that Eurodancehits.com had closed in June. I don't know the details; the most I have read about the subject came from this bulletin board. The poster, who had worked extensively on the Eurodancehits.com site, advances the idea that the site's webmaster, Kris, was exhausted and disheartened after battling a barrage of homophobic comments posted to the discussion forums (a lot of HiNRG compilations were promoted on the site, including the unabashedly gay-marketed Let's Hear it for the Boy comps).

On other forums, some suggested that the site had simply withered away, rendered increasingly irrelevant as sites such as MySpace and YouTube emerged. Kris's message reads "It is time to move forward," perhaps an acknowledgement that the web site had become mired in the past. I can only speculate.

What I do know is that it was a great website. I discovered Eurodancehits.com for myself back in 2001, shortly after I had become addicted to streaming Romanian top 40 radio on the internet (which had been the gateway into my whole Euro music fixation). I was delighted by the massive body of reviews and music samples the site provided for a sound that was, at the time, brand new and extremely exciting to me.

After finding the site, I spent a giddy and extraordinarily happy couple of weeks digging through its archives. It was then that I was introduced to some of my all-time favorite songs, such as Mauro Picotto's "Like This Like That" and Angelic's "It's My Turn." It was where I first heard Scooter, those gleefully unapologetic village-idiots of hardcore dance whose music continues to damage my eardrums today. It also gave me my first taste of Infernal (the song was "Sunrise," a big trance tune quite unlike the more Eurodancy stuff that would follow from them). The site also taught me about pop obscurities of dubious talent such as fem@le, whose cover of J. Geils Band's "Centerfold" is...something else. The music video archives gave one a then-rare opportunity to see how European dance music was being marketed to its overseas audience. I still have several of those Real Media files burned to DVD.

I don't know him, but Kris was clearly a very accommodating person. When in 2003 I wrote in to inform him (just because I thought, hey, he might be interested) that one Scooter song on a recently-reviewed album was a reworking of Liquid's "Liquid is Liquid," he swiftly inserted my comment into the review and thanked me by name.

My favorite aspect of the site was its reviews of singles, but as time went on fewer and fewer of these were posted, until eventually, sometime in the mid-2000s I believe, the singles section ceased to be updated. This struck me as odd because dance music is a singles-driven market. That was the first time I worried about the site's future and wondered what was going on behind the scenes.

Review focus by 2006 had shifted towards compilations, and generally things there were limited to a few series: the aforementioned Let's Hear it for the Boy HiNRG series, which, to be honest, was often a little too, well, gay for my tastes, but clearly served its audience well, as shown by the series' many, many volumes. And then there were reviews of some epic Euro-trance comps. These appealed to me more. It was here, for example, that I was exposed to such awesome tracks as Dynni's "City Of Moving Waters (Robert Gitelman Remix)."

For many, the discussion forums were the site's biggest draw, but for me, after the singles reviews ceased, my favorite reason for visiting became the Euro mini mixes, which I greatly looked forward to each month. Sometimes the mixes featured classics, and other times they featured a ton of new acts I had never heard of before. The obscurity of some acts could be frustrating for a music fan; it was extremely difficult to find some of these tunes. On the other hand, successfully tracking down a Human Athletic Dance CD single after having heard it on Eurodancehits.com was, as they say, priceless.

The mixes were frantic, with songs blazing past after a couple of minutes apiece, often laced with a barrage of original samples (usually of the motivational shouted variety). This was the sort of place where (and I can't remember if it was actually featured, but it may as well have been) one would hear Dancing DJs' fantastic reworking of Roxette's "Like a Flower." That is to say (if you're not already looking for that song on YouTube), each mix was a sugar rush of pure pounding joy.

Admittedly, I found myself visiting less and less. I spent more time listening to streaming internet radio and checking the pop charts against YouTube video postings. The emergence of Web 2.0 took a toll on the site. Consider Eurodancehits.com's once-mesmerizing video archives of pixely Real Media files. These were abruptly marginalized by the rise of YouTube--a whole section of the site rendered obsolete in a single blow! As television and movie production houses are discovering, the world's attention is becoming increasingly divided. But every few months, right up until today when I found the site closed, I continued to check in on what was going on there, because the site was that important.

It's a huge loss.

I am hoping that Mr. Davis, the poster I linked to above, is not correct, that an entire website of such great musicological value (and dumb fun, which is a compliment) would be shuttered because of a single homophobe's comments.

So I would like to say, Kris, your work as both music archivist and promoter seems too important to be derailed by one hater's (or even a few haters') stupidity.

But if you have moved on because it just wasn't fun anymore, I hear you and I support that. Maybe that's our loss, but you have to live your own life for yourself. And hopefully your gain will become ours as well, if music continues to lead your heart to an even bigger and bolder venture.

In any case, huge, huge thanks for what you gave the world. The passing of Eurodancehits.com is something I will mourn like the passing of a friend. Haha, my friends will probably shudder at that! But no kidding. The site is irreplaceable.

Thanks to everyone who worked on Eurodancehits.com for a great ride.

-----


An interesting addendum, worth pondering if the site really is finished: CubeStat.com values Eurodancehits.com at $20,896.98. So, for any doubters out there, the site possesses more than mere sentimental value!

"Eurotrash or Eurotreasure?" DJ Set 32 Available Next Week

I haven't been posting much to this blog, my kingpigeon.com site has been in a state of suspended animation, and my journalistic endeavors have been temporarily put on hold as I have been investing hundreds of hours into the creation of a three hour and forty minute long Euro-themed DJ set which will be made available to you next week. I "test drove" it last night in order to sort out various glitches and volume issues, and having just taken that epic ride I can promise you this: it will be worth the wait.

There's nothing like a little marketing to whet your appetite. Here is the (probably) finalized flyer.

Congrats to Slovakia!

One of the better football songs, from Katka Knechtová (who has sung some other pretty good stuff). Comes with requisite African tribal drums and chorus, which seem to play a role in 78% of World Cup songs (no vuvuzelas, though, I'm not sorry to report). ;-)

Best Music Video of the Week

Poland is figuring out their election results right now, but they have already won my approval for top video of the last week. :-)