I’ve been spending a lot of time digging up disco and electro records from India in the early 1980s. I was inspired by Ten Ragas to a Disco Beat– which I wrote about here and here — and figured that there must be a whole hidden cache of these records, a treasure trove of proto-techno sounds. The Charanjit Singh record, I argued, wasn’t a total anomaly; it was part of a zeitgeist. Disco was still a raging concern in India in the ’80s, long after it had peaked in popularity in the US and UK, and the idea of an acid house record coming out of India in ‘83 didn’t seem so far out of the question. So I set off trying to find that zeitgeist — a time in India when disco reigned supreme.

I found plenty of examples of rich, symphonic disco tunes from Bollywood in the early ’80s. Here’s one of my favorites in that vein, from a movie I’ve written about before — Disco Dancer (1982), a film that was campy to the extreme, with a plot that was utterly ridiculous even by Bollywood standards. The soundtrack included some sublime slabs of peak-time disco, including the hit song “Yaad Aa Raha Hai,” produced by Bollywood disco/funk legend Bappi Lahiri. A disco anthem for the ages, and one of the best songs Lahiri ever did. Check out how Mithun, the disco dancer, is rocking a blazin’ guitar solo with an electric guitar that isn’t even plugged in!

But I was more interested in finding more examples of minimalist disco, the sort of thing that, like Charanjit, was more on a techno wavelength. While nothing quite approached the techno tempo of Ten Ragas to a Disco Beat –- the tracks on that record clock in somewhere between 120 and 130 bpm — there were plenty of tunes from Bollywood in the early ‘80s that had a very futuristic electro feel to them. Here’s “Dil Lena Khel Hai Dildar Ka” by R.D. Burman, from the movie Zamane Ko Dikhana Hai (1981):

Here’s another song, “Poocho Na Yaar Kya Hua,” from the same movie. This is more of a conventional disco tune (complete with a light-up dancefloor and a Saturday Night Fever-inspired dance number), but there are a lot of interesting close-up shots of people jamming on synthesizers, including a shot of a woman making electronic sounds with a strange-looking synth, with a stack of vinyl and a turntable next to her:

Because of Bollywood’s surreal collision of influences, and preponderance of vocals, songs were rarely as ‘techno’ as they could potentially have been, even if they were pointing in a techno direction. The psychedelic grab-bag mentality of Bollywood film music reminds me of an article I wrote some years ago for the German magazine Groove on Yellow Magic Orchestra. When I interviewed Ryuichi Sakamoto, he told me that YMO was like a “bento box,” with a little bit of everything, while Kraftwerk was “conceptual, kind of theoretical, very focused”:

“Even in the beginning of that time when we were doing YMO, of course we knew Kraftwerk, and we thought their music was so German,” says Sakamoto. “It was conceptual, kind of theoretical, very focused, simple and minimal and strong. And even the timbre, the sound of their sense of sound, is German to us. It’s very strong and kind of heavy and solid. We wanted to make something very Japanese, in contrast. It’s a very good contrast, Kraftwerk and YMO. YMO had a mixture of everything–American music influence, European music influence, classical influence, pop–so many. It’s like a bento box. And we thought that was very Japanese.”



In 1981, Kraftwerk played two back-to-back concerts in one night in Bombay as part of the Computer World tour. The concept of Kraftwerk playing in India fascinated me. What was it like to be at that show? How easy was it to get a Kraftwerk record in India in 1981? In the memoir I Was A Robot, Kraftwerk’s erstwhile percussionist Wolfgang Flür recalls finding Kraftwerk bootleg cassettes in a market in Bombay in ‘81:

We found another shop that sold cassettes, and we even found some by Kraftwerk there. We couldn’t believe it. This was totally illegal, because our record company had no representation in India. There were no official imports at that time, either, so these were either bootlegged recordings or contraband, and apart from that the sound quality was miserable…

Even though it wasn’t so easy to come by Kraftwerk records in India, the two concerts in Bombay were well-attended. The shows took place at Shanmukhananda Hall, a venue best known for hosting marathon Indian classical music performances (Florian Schneider apparently stopped by one of these, and was mesmerized.) Flür remembered that the “audience was exclusively comprised of men…[at] the end of the performance, we walked off to thunderous applause. I hadn’t expected so much energy…” Kraftwerk didn’t play an encore in Bombay–they hopped on a plane back to Europe immediately following the concert–but Ralf Hütter apparently set the sequencer to run continuously during the last song of the set, “It’s More Fun to Compute,” and left it playing as they left the stage, to raucous applause.

1981 was also the year that the chart-topping album Disco Deewane, a collaboration between the late Pakistani pop singer Nazia Hassan and the Indian disco producer Biddu, was released. My favorite Nazia tune, though, which I linked to earlier, is “Boom Boom” (1982), with its sublime rip of the Moroder “I Feel Love” bassline and haunting vocals. Here it is again to refresh your memory:

There was a whole string of disco movies in Bollywood in the 1980s; several of them were directed by Babbar Subhash, the director of Disco Dancer. Here’s another disco movie, also starring Mithun Chakraborty, from 1984 — Kasam Paida Karne Wale Ki. The movie includes a heated disco dancing scene that takes place in a joint called “Studio 84.” Here’s the sign from the club in the movie, in case you don’t believe me. “Studio 84″ encapsulates the whole idea of disco in India in the ’80s, to me:

This is what it’s like inside of Studio 84:

Here’s the title track from the movie, another Bappi Lahiri production. Another disco anthem, but this one gets bogged down with too many flourishes. At 4:22 there’s a very techno-sounding interlude:

The movie also includes this out-and-out rip — er, homage — to Michael Jackson (for more on Michael Jackson and Bollywood, check out my essay in the book The Resistible Demise of Michael Jackson):

The blog Beat Electric points to a few more Indian disco tunes from the early ’80s worth listening to here. And here’s a Todd Terje re-edit of “Jimmy Jimmy Aja,” another song from 1982’s Disco Dancer which got a recent popularity boost from M.I.A., who did a pretty straight-up cover of the song a few years back.

More later!

It’s hard to believe that the summer is almost over.

A piece I wrote for Frieze on the intriguing videos of Oneohtrix Point Never.

In the August issue of The Wire there’s a piece by me on the tenth anniversary of the Detroit electronic music festival.

Writing a lot; thinking a lot. Stay tuned for: A review of the Brion Gysin exhibition at the New Museum of Contemporary Art for The Wire, an essay about a new John Zorn-edited anthology on music and mysticism for Rhizome, some features and reviews for FACT, features on Type Records and the Sonar festival in Chicago for the Spanish magazine Playground, a curated “box” on the history of house music for Sound and Music, a new essay for Loops, book reviews for Bookforum and Current Musicology, and some other stuff I can’t remember off the top of my head.

A review I wrote for Frieze on Carsten Nicolai’s recent Moiré exhibition in New York.

If you’re in the Boston area, I’ll be doing a talk at the DeCordova Sculpture Park and Museum on July 25th, with the sound artist Halsey Burgund. From the DeCordova’s website:

PLATFORM Discussion Series
2 pm, FREE with admission

A PLATFORM-exclusive event—join artist Halsey Burgund and Geeta Dayal, music and arts critic and author of the recent book on Brian Eno, Another Green World, as they engage in a conversation about some of the larger issues in Burgund’s interactive sound piece, Scapes. Topics will include the role of sound and technology in art, issues in alternative music, and the way Burgund’s installation engages with these ideas.

San Francisco, Los Angeles, Seattle, New York. Now I’m back in Boston, in this crazy house full of mirrors. For the time being, at least.

A few weeks ago, I was asked to write an opinion piece for the German daily newspaper Die Tageszeitung (taz) — the eighth installment in a lengthy “Future of Music Criticism” debate the paper was having. The debate had been touched off by the news that Spex — the most famous music magazine in Germany, sort of the German version of Spin — was axing its reviews section. This is the English version of the article, which originally ran in German last week, here. It also got discussed over at Der Spiegel’s culture desk, here.

A few notes: I wrote this piece for a German audience, not an American one, so some of the references to German things might not make sense, and some references to American things may seem too simplistic if you’re from the US. I also wrote the piece in a way that’s different from the way I normally write for English publications. If my style seems a bit different, that’s because I tried to write the article in a way that could be easily translated, word for word, into German. I know German pretty well, but not well enough to write fluently, for publication, in it; the next best thing was to write the piece in English, but in a way that it would translate well into German text.

The Future of Music Criticism, Part 8
Die Tageszeitung (Germany), June 15, 2010

by Geeta Dayal

As an American music critic, I find the debate about Spex fascinating. The fascinating thing to me is that there is a debate. In the United States, there would not be much of a discussion. The current situation with print magazines and newspapers is far worse in the United States than it is in Germany. Whole music magazines have died here. And few people seem to care.

I’ve been visiting Germany on a regular basis for ten years. I was always impressed with how strong and vibrant the media scene in Germany seemed to be. For a country of Germany’s relatively small size, it was amazing to me that there were so many good newspapers: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Suddeutsche Zeitung, Die Zeit, taz, and so on. In addition, there were large, successful magazines like Der Spiegel, and lots of music magazines, including several specialist magazines that covered electronic music, such as Groove and De:Bug. Just looking at the typical newsstand in Berlin would make my head spin; there were so many choices, so many papers. I was also impressed that people seemed to really read and respond to print media. I remember visiting Cologne a few years ago and seeing people queue up for the newsstand in the morning, waiting to buy a newspaper. I don’t see that much anymore in the United States.

I also noticed a difference in the way that criticism was treated in a German newspaper. There was more emphasis on commentary in the newspaper in Germany. In the US, a lot of importance is attached to “journalistic objectivity,” and reportage. There are, of course, well-reported news stories in every major newspaper in Germany. But it’s more understood in Germany that commentary, and opinion, has a place in the newspaper too. And the whole concept of the “feuilleton” section simply doesn’t exist in the United States the way it does in Europe. Even in the arts section of the typical American newspaper, the emphasis is mostly on news and reporting, and less on criticism and commentary. I was also impressed with the larger cultural conversation in Germany -– the rapid-fire ways in which different publications in Germany would respond to each other in the papers. In the United States, this seems to happen more in blogging than it does in the mainstream press.

My favorite German city was always Berlin. For me, in a lot of ways, Berlin was like paradise –- a total fantasy world. But on my last visit to Berlin, a few months ago, I realized that the German media was going through the same painful changes that the American media went through five years ago. It’s just happening more slowly. In New York, print media is collapsing quickly, but in Berlin, it’s a slow-motion collapse. And that is why the news that Spex is closing its reviews section is not much of a surprise. In ten years, there might not be a Spex at all.

For better or for worse, most music criticism in the United States has moved online. For a band these days, a good review in Pitchfork is more important than a good review in Spin. Blogs and websites are massively popular. A band can become famous without ever being on the cover of a magazine. The hype happens via Facebook, Twitter, and other online channels. Music magazines are becoming more and more irrelevant in the United States. The record label system is collapsing; the record stores are collapsing. And the magazines are collapsing too.

I’m not saying that Pitchfork is the future of music criticism. But it’s not surprising to me that mp3 blogs and websites are so popular. People want to download the record right away. And people like a voice, a personality. If they read something, they want to see the person behind the writing. Many people I know rely on their friends for information on a new record — not on a magazine. They go to Facebook or to Twitter and they find out what albums their friends are downloading. Why do they trust their friends more than they trust critics? It makes sense to me. The whole principle behind Facebook is that people want to connect with other people. It’s the same thing with criticism. With a good piece of criticism, you feel a deep, personal connection to the writer, even if you’ve never met the writer before. In the first article in taz in this “Future of Music Criticism” debate, “Acht Stunden sind kein Tag,” Wolfgang Fromberg talked about the impact that Diedrich Diederichsen’s reviews had on his life. How Diederichsen’s writing inspired him to be a writer, too. The reason I’m a music critic today is because of a review I read when I was 20 years old, which inspired me to be a writer. The review was by Mark Sinker, who was the editor-in-chief of the UK magazine The Wire in the early 1990s. Simon Reynolds was also an early inspiration to me, and a good friend as well.

These days, with fewer outlets for critical writing in the press, there are fewer opportunities to make a connection with critics. And so my inspirations now come from blogging. If Lester Bangs was still alive today, he would be a blogger. I can’t think of a major print magazine today that would publish his articles on a regular basis.

Think back to all of the great print publications of the past. Look at how great NME was in the 1970s and 1980s, before it became the bad joke it is now. Rolling Stone in the 1970s, back in the days of Hunter S. Thompson and Tom Wolfe. Creem in the 1970s. Melody Maker and Spin in the 1980s and 1990s. Perhaps the most depressing decline of all was The Village Voice, which lost more than 70 percent of its staff in 2005, the victim of a horrific corporate buyout.

What did all of these publications have in common, in their golden era? Each of them had a strong, critical perspective and a distinct point of view. They weren’t afraid to broadcast an opinion. They weren’t afraid to have a voice. That’s what is missing with many print publications now. They became too afraid of their audience, too motivated by advertising revenue. They became huge, top-down organizations, with the inability to experiment and try something new and exciting. Album reviews kept getting cut in length, until they became so short that they were practically meaningless. The magazines kept getting more conservative in their coverage. In the UK, you have magazines like Mojo, whose whole purpose is to write about the past, again and again. No one I know in the US reads Rolling Stone on a regular basis anymore. To save money, many corporations are trying to run the same magazine with half as many people. They keep the business and marketing departments, but they cut editors, art directors, and writers. They cut the number of pages in the magazine; they pay the writers less money, and they cut their budget for freelance articles. They think that their readers don’t notice. But the readers do notice. And so these magazines ended up losing their credibility. Readers are smarter than they think. Eventually, if the quality keeps going down, they stop buying magazines.

The other problem with many music magazines is that they started trying to copy the style of the Web — filling the magazine with short news articles, photos, celebrity gossip, Top 10 lists, and so on — instead of concentrating on what magazines do best: well-researched feature stories and long reviews and commentary pieces. There’s a common misperception that people don’t want to read long articles anymore. But several magazines that still have cultural influence in the United States, like The New Yorker, specialize in long, thoughtful commentary. If I write a long essay for my blog about music, I know that a few thousand people will read it. If you try to do good work, people will see the effort.

There are print magazines in the United States that are doing well — magazines that everyone knows. Consider, for example, the American edition of Vogue. Most people don’t know who the editor of Spin is, but everyone knows that Anna Wintour is the editor of Vogue. It’s a magazine that is not afraid to set a cultural agenda.

Fashion and art magazines are, on the whole, doing better than music magazines. There are, of course, many popular fashion and art blogs. But for art magazines and fashion magazines, paper is still the medium of choice. Fashion photographs and reproductions of paintings both look better in big, glossy paper magazines than they do on the Web, though that will probably change in the future, as display technology improves.

These magazines also still have advertising revenue, because they rely on luxury commodities that cannot be made digital. People will always want advice on what to wear, and they will always need to buy new clothes. You can’t download clothes for free like you can download an MP3 — at least not right now. Rich art buyers need to know what artists are hip, what the cool gallery shows are, what paintings to buy. And so these magazines are more resistant to collapse than music magazines are. They can still set an agenda.

For the past ten years, I have been making a living as a music critic in the United States, but it has been a constant struggle, especially as more and more writing moves online. Websites like Pitchfork pay very little. It is nearly impossible to live in a city like New York and be a music critic. I don’t know how I managed to do it for the past ten years. German magazines don’t pay that much either, but the cost of living in a city like Berlin is much lower. Those of us with other skills are turning to different forms of writing — we write about science and technology, for example, or about art or fashion. Some of the most talented music critics I know have left for other professions, such as law or business. There should be a way to support these critical voices. There should be a way to make music criticism viable again.

Me the other day, lost in my crazy house.

Today, I finished a project I’ve been putting off for ages — to properly archive The Original Soundtrack. I started this blog in 2003, and over the past seven years, I’ve written nearly a thousand blog posts about electronic music, culture, and cities. Many of these posts are long essays. On the right hand side of this page, you can now see archives stretching back to 2003. Over the next few months, I’ll be wheeling out some of my favorite posts from the early days of this blog. Just looking at the old blog posts brings back the memories. A few of them make me cringe; others I’m still really proud of to this day. This archive project is also an interesting one for me, because I get to see my own evolution as a writer through the years — as told through the history of this blog.

Also, pick up the excellent summer issue of Frieze, which includes two pieces by me — a big essay on music and a review of the ‘Landscapes of Quarantine’ exhibition in New York.

Three quotes I’ve been thinking about this morning. They’re all connected in my head.

“James Turrell, the light artist, once told me that after seeing the slides of paintings in the courses he had taken, he was disappointed by the actual paintings. What he had really loved was the light, and in a sense then vowed to make sure his art, consisting of light, would never lose its magic.”

-Arthur Danto

“I see TV as a picture medium rather than a narrative medium. Video for me is a way of configuring light, just as painting is a way of configuring paint….I’ve always said that the most important control on your TV is the color control; it’s usually a much bigger difference than changing the channel.”

-Brian Eno

“In sound design programs now, you can literally sculpt the sound on visual graphs. Sometimes the visual programs are even more interesting than the music that’s making them…”

-Doug Aitken, in conversation with Carsten Nicolai

The mascots for London’s Olympics were unveiled earlier today. I haven’t been able to shake this image out of my head since I saw it this afternoon. It’s an epic nightmare, the sort that makes you break out in a cold sweat.

Meet Wenlock and Mandeville. That’s right — Wenlock and Mandeville. Wenlock is named after a town known as Much Wenlock, and Mandeville is named for Stoke Mandeville — English towns that bear some significance in the Olympic games. As names for towns, sure. As names for mascots? These are the sorts of names you’d give to the villains in a Harry Potter novel. Goblins, perhaps.

What message do these mascots send to the world about London in 2012? Picture it: A dystopian, post-industrial city still reeling from the effects of early ’90s rave. A rainbow cuts through a drab brick building, blinding everyone within range. These cyborgs have their hands in the air. They’re waving ‘em like they just don’t care. They’re posing in front of the rainbow, ready to pounce, standing in front of what looks like hopscotch circles. They each have one eye; the blog Deadspin helpfully describes them as “Cyclopean eyes representing England’s Big Brother police state.” The Guardian takes it a step further, noting that the eyes actually are cameras: “With a metallic finish, a single large eye made out of a camera lens, a London taxi light on their heads and the Olympic rings represented as friendship bracelets on their wrists, they resemble characters dreamed up for a Pixar animation.”

Characters dreamed up for a Pixar animation? That seems a little bit generous. The LA Times notes that they look like cell phones. The design critic Stephen Bayley, quoted in the Telegraph, calls them “appalling computerized Smurfs for the iPhone generation.” I think they look like really tragic ravers — characters dreamed up for the logical conclusion of Adonis’ ominous Chicago house classic “No Way Back.” Wenlock and Mandeville are too far gone, and there’s no way back. I know what music these mascots were listening to when it happened: Happy hardcore (obviously) and really brutal gabba — real thrashing 170-bpm stuff. Then they suddenly froze. The beats kept flying at them, faster and faster, ricocheting off the walls like shotgun shells. They were moving faster and faster, and then…nothing. Wenlock and Mandeville’s last journey into sound was in ‘95.

For the sake of comparison, let’s wheel out the Vancouver mascots from 2010:

They’re creepy as well, in that wide-eyed, Sanrio way, but they look positively cuddly in comparison. The Guardian, again: “Organizers hope Wenlock and Mandeville will rank alongside the more fondly remembered mascots, such as Waldi the dachshund from the 1972 Munich games and Misha the bear from the 1980 Moscow Olympics – rather than the much maligned Izzy of Atlanta 1996.”

Let’s take a look at Waldi and Misha, shall we?

Here’s Waldi the dachshund from Munich:

Waldi is really German. You can tell. Just look at him. (Look, I’m saying this because I love Waldi. And Germany.) He looks a bit Bauhaus, Waldi. He has the clean lines of a classic chair designed by Mies van der Rohe. Look how perfectly horizontal his back is! And the top of his head is parallel with his back! His face is practically a right triangle. The colors are muted, nothing garish; the mushy-peas green stripe next to the forest green stripe is a daring contrast, even.

Then there’s Misha the lovable, androgynous bear from Moscow, circa 1980:

Who doesn’t love Misha? Misha was so popular, in fact, that he even inspired a Bear Cub Misha Lover’s Association in Japan. And check out this psychedelic and utterly nonsensical Japanese Misha cartoon:

Right. Back to Wenlock and Mandeville. Watch out, world. They’re comin’ at you. Hands in the air.

Continuing on the vintage cameras theme from a few posts ago. Here’s a Polaroid test shot of me, in my apartment last night. Taken by my good friend Matt.