Guardians of the faith
I’m surprised there hasn’t been more discussion of Alex McPherson’s piece on minimal in the Guardian newspaper. Though there has been some over at Test.
Anyone who posts on ILM will be familiar with Alex and his many quirks as a writer, so some of the curveballs in the piece (Estroe, the Kylie reference) will be less surprising. How then to condense these for those who don’t read ILM? Well, I guess you have to go there and search for “The Lex” to truly get a handle on him!
I thought the piece was well written and a pretty good introduction to “minimal” (whatever the hell it is) for the uninitiated. It’s no small achievement to get a piece like this into a national newspaper and the bottom line is plenty of people may seek out some interesting house and techno as a result. There must be an acceptable point where the underground goes overground, even a little, and in my opinion “minimal” (more on the word later) is it.
I didn’t really agree with the 5 tracks chosen, but then it’s not possible to pick 5 tracks to sum up any genre. 5 labels might have worked more convincingly, but nonetheless people would say “what about this label” or “what about that label”. I’m also really surprised nobody has mentioned that “Rej” was listed as coming out on Defected (as per a big bucks re-release) and not Innervisions/Sonar Kollektiv. I thought that would cause the piece to be discounted, even if it was a small error.
But nobody can ever agree about something like a chart, and it speaks strongly of what a tricky task it is to write these kind of all encompassing pieces about techno, and perhaps explains why so few people, not least the critics, ever try.
I’ve been asking myself a lot lately, what is the value of one person’s opinion over another? It’s a difficult question to answer, especially as regards music. Why is one thing “minimal” and another not? If someone decides a record is one thing, then all anyone else can do is say “I think it’s something else”.
But there is never any opinion that is conclusively right or wrong. Lately, for me, this has given music writing a really meaningless feeling, hence the dwindling posts here (but don’t worry, I’m not going anywhere!). I do think sometimes that I might as well be discussing the wind.
This is despite being at a point where I’m making a healthy amount of money writing about the music I love for the first time. The fact that I’m doing well with it and more disillusioned than when I wasn’t doing any work makes me wonder a little more. And when there are the inevitable accompanying hassles to the actual writing process, well, that doesn’t help either. It’s easy to imagine oneself becoming bitter and jaded and angry (or worse, thinking this is an interesting rhetorical position and not just the aging process) especially when you look around at other music writers.
The flipside to this is that I am really excited by a lot of the actual music lately, Oslo, the Romanians, Deepvibes, the new Lerosa single on Enclave, and tons more stuff. But to return to Alex’s article, for me, none of these things are really in any way “minimal” anymore, either by the purist definition or the 00s one.
I think that minimal really has just buckled under the pressure of all the arguments and discussions and articles and now means less than ever (no pun). It sometimes feels like the only purpose left for the word “minimal” is for people to argue about a type of music that has moved far away from it.
When I look at the music that’s exciting me at the moment, a lot of it is on the labels associated with minimal, but I just think of it as house and techno. In a way, perhaps the very fact that you can pin down a genre and say “this is minimal, here is its story” for a newspaper article, probably is indicative of that genre being over. Similarly, I look at the records I’ve bought recently, and I can’t pin them down to any one thing really.
But I am loathe to say “minimal is dead”, if only because to say that would drag this post back into the mire of an argument that’s too partisan and has ceased to have whatever relevance to what’s actually happening in music a long time ago. EG “minimal isn’t dead!”, “minimal isn’t minimal”, “minimal never lived” (I’m going to delete any posts like this. Okay not really, but you’ve been warned!)
Similarly people are bound to misinterpret the idea of a genre “dying”, and assume that it means the labels and producers just shut up shop and it all ends. If it is dead, then it’s simply become something else, and most of the followers have moved on to that too. But I think right now it’s very hard to pin down one dominant sound in house or techno, which makes things quite interesting really.
I will also say that personally I stopped thinking about the word as one that matters almost as soon as I did the first RA column. I got a strong sense personally as I wrote that that being able to document this recent definition of minimal in any way was the final discussion I wanted to have about it all.
I think naturally following my instinct since then has led me to music that feels a little different too, for the most part. And I also think you can see this sort of gradual shift happening with plenty of labels and DJs. I am still waiting for new labels to lead things a little bit though. It’ll be interesting to see what happens.
» The Guardian on Minimal on 20 Oct 2007 at 12:59 pm
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