Thursday,
January 17,
Disco Italian Style... In
The
ANNOTICO Report
This
is ONLY for the very Young and Hip. I was in the Music Business at one time,
and I have no idea what the author is talking about, but it is intriguing.
For instance.......
Italo, is a chuckle-worthy
misnomer. Italo is a ridiculous--listening from this
side of the ocean, anyway--Italian interpretation of disco that took
everything cheeselike and upped it by a factor
of 10 and Eurofied it in kind of
the same way our president ups his Americanism with a cowboy hat and trips to
the family farm. Italo is Italian pop music, in
the boy band/American Idol sense, not
the three-square-meals, all-your-fruits-and-vegetables, Alicia Keys sense. "If
it was real Italo, people wouldn't listen to
it," Simonetti says with a tinge of
incredulousness.
I
think it's saying it's an Italian styled mocking parody of American disco. !!
:) :)
Disco Italian Style...
As
Made and Envisioned by a Group of Young Americans From
The
by Michael Byrne
January
16, 2008
Glass Candy
You
get the feeling that the only club in existence that would make any sense for
Glass Candy exists in a post-apocalyptic disco dimension. With its sultry
detachment, group-suicide love poetry, and Ziggy
Stardust glam, you can't help but feel lucky being in the same room with the
Our phantom club
isn't far from the truth. Glass Candy haunts in the duo's longtime
That was until Italians
Do It Better--which is provisionally interchangeable with Glass Candy: GC beatsmith Johnny Jewel does production for many of the IDIB
bands--became very, very hip. That was before it became as much a slogan for
those who wanted more than Day-Glo indie-techno fare,
or wanted the next thing beyond it--and there are many of those people--as it
is a record label. Glass Candy now sells out the same venue in
And the duo's labelmates--notably Chromatics, Mirage, and Farah--aren't
many tiers down. Chromatics' somnolent dance noir "In the City" is an
oddball crate staple, as recognizable now on a dance floor as half the stuff in
the Ed Banger catalog, and with the sort of creeping, subtle groove that makes
us think that the attention spans of the swelling techno-loving
masses--"it's the new indie-rock," Italians
co-owner and DJ Mike Simonetti stated simply from
a Jersey City diner last week--aren't totally f*****d, that dance music has
hope beyond the heavy, easiness/obviousness of the Simian Justice Noize "blog-house" microgenre.
This is, after
all, disco music. The blog posse--and beyond into
should-know-better print criticism--insists on tagging all of it, blanket
style, as Italo. The word itself gives off a sort
of attractive aura of the exotic and, thus, the exclusive (see also: M.I.A.),
and, we suspect, that foreignness makes it much more palatable than saying disco.
It will be a long time before that is hip again to associate with in the United
States (if Spectral/Ghostly moved to Paris, it could take over the world).
Don't forget disco's perma-associations with the Bee
Gees and other assorted late-'70s cheeses.
So, it's Italo, a chuckle-worthy misnomer. Italo
is a ridiculous--listening from this side of the ocean, anyway--Italian
interpretation of disco that took everything cheeselike
and upped it by a factor of 10 and Eurofied it in
kind of the same way our president ups his Americanism with a cowboy hat and trips
to the family farm. Italo is Italian pop music, in
the boy band/American Idol sense, not the
three-square-meals, all-your-fruits-and-vegetables, Alicia Keys sense. "If
it was real Italo, people wouldn't listen to
it," Simonetti says with a tinge of incredulousness.
Simonetti has been watching the
momentum of both his label and disco in general build from behind a computer
screen. "[I] can see what's hip by looking on eBay," he says.
"When prices go down, it means people are flooding the market. I see people
in shops now all the time buying up [12-inch singles]."
So, if the market's flooded, what's next? Cynics that have watched the
ascension (again) of techno into the indie ranks--and
will certainly watch it tumble back into the surf after the hype crests--have
to wonder if this wave of interest isn't just the next in a line. Simonetti recalls running into an old associate--once
"a total indie-rock kid"--a few weeks ago
at a
"Every
movement is doomed from the start," Simonetti
says without much regret. "People just want to release records and be involved in
some kind of scene."
And there's the
matter of who can even make disco music any more. "You can't have a whole
horn section, a whole string section, a drummer, a whole band to make a proper
disco album," Simonetti says. "It's
impossible in this day and age, especially with a bunch of privileged
And few producers
even understand the mechanics of disco: The slick arpeggios, vocoders, and 4/4 beats are mainly what hit our ears as
disco signifiers, but the guts of it are microrhythms
so complex that they took Glass Candy's Johnny Jewel almost the lifetime of the
band, 11 years now, to get. In 1996, GC came out as a kind of Contortions/DNA
no-wave with disco twitches--"the first disco-punk band" Simonetti boasts--and now it's icy, disturbingly intricate,
postmodern disco, the apex of something, trend or not.
A trend, however,
is never the whole--or even close to the whole--of a music.
Simonetti knows this music isn't leaving
because it never really left, whether it's being parodied by Italo or hanging on in deep house music, where it survived
the '80s. Hipsters are fickle, yes. But, music's always survived
hipsters. And Italians Do It Better will be no exception.
The
ANNOTICO Reports Can be Viewed (and are Archived) on:
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Annotico
Email: annotico@earthlink.net