RIFF MARKET

Aging Has Never Been His Friend
Riff Market vs. Cerrone

Download: "Supernature"

There's no sense for me to backpedal and act like I'd heard of Cerrone before, like I didn't pronounce the "c" a la "cha" or make a singsong-style joke about "my cerrone" in a previous effort to backpedal at Other Music when I bought the guy's first four albums used. The guy was huge obviously, a Disco Grammy winner and a multimillion-copy album seller and a well-known provocateur as far as racy cover art was concerned, a musical history sub-field I apparently know less about than I thought I did. There is one cover that has this blond chick backbent over the top of a refridgerator, and her back is so muscular it looks like she has boobs on both sides of her rib cage. Several people have told me I look like Cerrone and I vehemently deny the resemblance.

Anyway two things, two starting points really. First, I don't think I've ever heard disco so stylized as "disco." A lot of awesome disco songs I've liked just sorta happen to be disco songs, to my ears, like it makes sense to sound like a disco song in one way or another, be it instrumentation or orchestration or ornamentation or tempo. Other times songs that really want to be disco songs sorta screw up, and become better-than-disco songs by consequence. I'm speaking generally and doing a terrible job with this but Cerrone has not aged well at all and I wonder why. With a few exceptions--the italofied horror-disco track "Supernature" off the top of my head, plus "Cerrone's Paradise," which sounds like "Disco Inferno" plus "Oye Como Va," and some others--most of these songs play more like "disco" than music, like it's all the right affectations and loveboat strings and horn stabs and chicken scratch guitar and goofy synthesizer sounds, but the music itself exists strictly for the glitter. Seems.

Next, and the reason for writing: Why the hell didn't I know about Cerrone? Let's take the hipster pseudo bogus fuck you Sylvester dilettantism for granted and actually have some fun with this. I had thought about the internet and internet music rewriting history, displacing importances, readjusting the canon--I mean it always made sense to me as an inevitability and something possibly great and interesting. If you learned about disco through checking namechecks and RIYLs and internet websites--if you weren't there--obviously what you thought must have been Biggest Thing Ever was probably not be BTE. But it just seems really really weird to me that I knew about Arthur Russell, who sold far fewer records, before I knew about the man that one internet site says was second only to Giorgio Moroder on the European disco producer totem pole. Granted I'm not trying to go page by page through a Guided Tour of Disco-type book, but I'm surprised that in even my semi-rigorous interest in the stuff I've never encountered Cerrone, in reissues, in podcasts, in reviews, in RIYLs, in SLSK folders, in expensive compilations, etc. I do have like six compilations with that Cristina song though.

I would laugh this off for rock, when people who wrote for me would write something like that Teddybears song was *obviously* influenced by Interpol or She Wants Revenge before they cite, I don't know, Joy Division. But being on the other side of this I'm once again reminded of my big problem with the wikipediazation of the internet, which is de facto authority by consensus (itself manipulable; for another riff). From a creative angle this is really awesome, since technically speaking some band like Deerhoof could potentially have more of an effect on the music of tomorrow, simply because more people have Deerhoof files on their p2p'd hard drives, etc. But it's scary from a critical/passive perspective because it means we lose all touch with historical-contemporary realities, i.e. when the music was conceived and how it was received. And a lot of pop music still relies on context for its cachet, i.e. its dimension of referentiality. And referentiality is meaningless without an actual something to reference. Anyway I could see this being some people's idea of a wet dream but it's increasingly not mine; I'm just not digging how the internet is somehow excluded from the whole "matter can be neither created nor destroyed" thing that really made my life a lot easier.

71 RIFFS

Labels: dilettantism, disco, internet music people, wikipedia