blissblog on "faceless techno bollocks"--

"The thing about this stuff, the reason I can see it might actually gain ground on the pirates and with the massive, is a/ the danceability and uptempo NRG b/ the dependability. See, stuff that has vocal and lyrical content, when it's mediocre, it's a helluva lot more aggravating than mediocre instrumental/tracky stuff. Something about average MCing with samey lyric content (that overdose of guntalk/misogyny thing simon silverdollar was complaining about a while back), it's really fucking grating in the way that samey sublow/croydon sound just isn't. somehow the verbal element really rams the impoverishment of imagination right in your face. At the same time--and everybody knows this, don't they?--when you compare each style's highest heights and absolute peak exponents, the MC stuff (proper grime, as commonly understood in other words) is just a whole level above the tracky stuff. "Hard Graft" (here excellently reversioned as "industrial graft") was one of my faves last year but you compare it with "boys love girls" or "birds in the sky" and it's like... nah. The return of vocals (songs, song-fragment, MCs, whatever) is THE defining post-rave paradigm shift from circa 1998 on -from 2step to folktronica to green velvet to electro/nu-wave to (some) microhouse to grime to... -- and I don't seem much sign that's about to change any time soon. "