Indie Rock Meets Techno

An article from the L.A. Times' entertainment site, Calendarlive, titled "Turning the beat around again" speaks of the Indie Rockers' patterns on their rediscovery of dancing. Here are some of my favorite quotes:

"There's this periodic rediscovery by indie rockers that dancing is fun," said Simon Reynolds, author of the rave and post-punk histories "Generation Ecstasy" and "Rip It Up and Start Again." "Lots of these bands are going back to the punk-funk thing. . . . Kids hearing it now maybe don't realize that in the '70s, for instance, every white band wanted that Chic guitar sound."

In the early to mid-'90s, dance music was considered intellectually vacuous and critically inferior to authenticity-obsessed grunge and indie rock. A few dance acts such as Chemical Brothers, Daft Punk and Prodigy were able to squeeze through the critical vise and score covers at rockist institutions like Spin magazine.

"Anything can happen in dance music. You have gay people, white, black people. It doesn't really have a face. It's experimental constantly."

Gone are the days of genre tagging with only 20 or so different choices. American radio stations usually tag all electronic music as either "bpm" "techno" "electronica" or "dance" when there is a world of diversity within "techno".

The concept has grown beyond music and into multifaceted cultural movements as diverse in their sounds as the people from all over the world that make them.