Thursday, June 11, 2009

The great cultural entropy: as prophesised by Bis



Are we reaching a deceleratory endpoint, in terms of cultural productivity? Are we 'running on empty'? Mark Fisher/K-Punk thinks we are - in the New Statesman a few weeks back he followed up Alex Williams' thought-provoking blog post with the same gloomily menopausal dismissal of contemporary dance music we heard at the nuum debate. (On which subject: I wrote a Buffoon Empiricist Manifesto on Lower End Spasm, putting the apparently controversial case that dancing is preferable to RSI.)

While jokingly mooting a riot grrl-Europop-grime club night on Dissensus, I was reminded of 'Eurodisco' by Bis, and looked it up on YouTube. Well I'll be damned if the Scottish trio haven't accounted for so many aspects of the hardcore continuum debate, years ahead of time. In a minimal, looped lyric - it is disco, after all - they deal with genre taxonomy and the 'wot do you call it' moment ("a style is named and it's dead"), and quite succinctly account for the idea of post-modern cultural entropy ("there is no latest trend / the party's at its end / i thought music was dead") and the terrible persistence of information in the web 2.0 era ("i'm just so sick of listening"). It's really quite extraordinary:

Bis - Eurodisco
the party's at its end
a style is named and it's dead
there is no latest trend
the party's at its end
if it's a new beginning, then i don't want to know
if it's not worth pretending, then i don't want to know
i'm just so sick of listening, why should i want to know
i lost my 15 minutes on eurodisco
the music's in my head
i thought music was dead
give me the words i'll sing
but i can't feel a thing...i'm singing
pump it up pump it up pump it up...
just don't stop just don't stop just don't stop...
the party's at its end
a style is named it's dead
there is no latest trend
eurodisco
you're so disco

J'accuse K-Punk: biting your ideas off an 11-year-old Bis single? I'm surprised.

3 Comments:

Blogger Unknown said...

hah, nice one. doesn't quite capture the sanctimonious grumpitude tho

11:42 AM  
Blogger Unknown said...

Can we set Steven Wells on K-Punk now?

1:42 PM  
Anonymous Grievous angel said...

Just want to play new tunes and old tunes and make people dance...

3:02 PM  

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