Todo en la música se repite. Pero cuando uno tiene 20 años, todo parece nuevo. Cuando tiene 30, todo parece estancarse creativamente, porque los de 20 apenas están descubriendo la misma cosa, pero con actores distintos. Cuando tiene 40, puede desmenuzar todo nuevo movimiento en pequeñas piezas hechas de cosas que ya pasaron como un relojero. A los 50 ya uno ha escuchado la misma música, reciclada, 4 veces seguidas en la vida.
Take Blue Monday as an example. The entire songs is a copy-paste of things that had taken place shortly before Joy division decided to become new order. If you splice blue Monday open and identify every single piece, you’ll realize every vital organ of that song has been transplanted from another body of work. Sylvester’s you make me feel, Donna summer and Giorgio moroder’s I feel love, Kraftwerk’s dark ambience IDM.
Now: what REALLY matters isn’t how those elements are reassembled. It is WHAT HAPPENS TO PEOPLE AFTER they hear the new song. A few original elements will be required for change to take place, such as Peter Hook’s always brilliant bass lines and Bernard Sumner’s humanoid like voice. In this case, it is said all throughout researches, documentaries and other resources, that blue Monday stared EDM.
And this, in itself, carries along a heavy load of bias. Because those who regard Blue Monday as a genuine, superior song, hate to admit that it is the song that made electronic music fit for dancing. And even though dancing is a powerful ideology in and of itself, electronic music experts hate to associate the culture with its inevitable transformation into pop culture through dancing. But that’s precisely what Blue Monday did: it took out the exclusive elements of electrónica and gave the masses permission to dance to it, much to the chagrin of the musically enlightened listeners who arrived first.
Blue Monday wasn’t only a big, massive song. It was also big, massive business. That’s why Quincy Jones bought it and decided to “remix” it. Because in spite of its sticky and contagious structure, it was necessary to take it out of its habitat and turn it into a cultural export, which couldn’t be done without someone with the acumen, both artístic and entrepreneurial, to make sure it became a hit. Factory Records had failed trying by to turning Blue Monday into a financial success by sacrificing its bottom line for the sake of artistic vision. But such vision wasn’t in the music so much as it was in the aesthetics projected, and particularly in the creation of album covers as yet another fetish of the music aficionados. Much like Hipgnosis for Pink Floyd, Peter Saville turned New Order covers into design icons, which to this day, are praised for their attention to detail, symmetry and color. Yet Blue Monday’s cover was so expensive to manufacture, it brought whatever earnings to its knees, forcing Tony Wilson and his partners to carry the overheads.
In the end, when a song has the power to make people sing AND dance at the same time, you could say it has the power to change the world.
Im not a fan of this philosophy. I completely disagreee with idealists who recite it. I’ve been in the business of music for long enough to understands that songs do NOT change the world; the biggest they can be is become anthems or define a movement, and I don’t know which of all those things is worse. Porque por más que la colectividad e la música sea una cosa muy hermosa, también hay algo tétrico en la homogeneización de los sentimientos. Pero así es como son las cosas. Sin embargo, y aunque estoy convencido de que las canciones no cambian al mundo, si pueden ayudar a hacer bebés. Y por lo que he visto, nada ayuda a hacer bebés más fácilmente que una bailadita.
O por lo menos nada ayuda a soltar más la timidez que bailar. Nile Rodgers una vez me dijo en una entrevista que la única razón por la que el disco se acabó a finales de los años setenta había sido porque unos cuantos resentidos que no sabían bailar decidiera hacerles la guerra. Pero más allá del resentimiento, todo músico que se respetara sabía que el mejor camino hacia los oídos de la gente era aplicando una dosis importante de baile en la música que hacía, sin importar el género. En la charla, Rodgers - probablemente uno de los hombres más adinerados en la actualidad de la música -, repasaba dos o tres canciones que eran una copia de su famosa “Good Times”: desde “Rapper’s Delight”, supuesta primera canción de rap de la historia, hasta “another one bites the dust” de queen, es evidente que todas las canciones posteriores a la aparición de la canción de CHIC quisieron replicar ese camino.
Pero el baile es tan espiritual como satánico, y tan importante como infame.
