THE PRICE FOR FREEDOM : LONG TRAIN RUNNIN'

jjl · Site Admin Joined: Jan 07, 2004 Posts: 130

You may say I'm a dreamer but what do speak better for themselves than facts as opposed to talks. A lot has been said about the will of the acceptance of house music and its derivated by a bigger audience, but what has been effectively done so far apart from the usual blah blah blahs ? The revolution, as we've mentioned on this column earlier isn't only a question of technology. It's first and foremost a question of change of view and subsequently behaviour if not mentality and it begins with the relation that all of us have with music…

The system as it is nowadays has widely tended to make all of us forgetting who we are, and when I say "we", I'm thinking about everyone (DJ's, journalists, radio programmers, label execs) dealing with music, getting to a point where we've sort of made things less and less understandable by the crowd. It can be DJ's charting more and more unreleased stuff, journalists using more and more terms that they often are the only ones to understand, radio programmers selling their souls to advertising companies and label execs obsessed by instant profit and not necessary primary talent. But what's all this if not hype, pseudo intellectualisation, perversion and name dropping and what for at the end of the day ?
C'mon, folks… Let's all get back to the reality. Living our passion is no doubt a privilege as compared to the millions of alter egos of ours condamned to survive in miserable conditions, but who are we all supposed to be at the end of the day if not the ambassadors playing different roles of an art supposedly reaching our minds, bodies and souls ? C'mon, what can we normally expect after all these years spent primarly considering music as a vehicle to shake asses on the dancefloors the way we do ? Just what we've ended up getting at the end of the day : in other words, almost nuts ! And that's what we've got. As already said on these pages, life is what we individually make of it. And what have we done over the last decades ? Loosing almost everything when not destroying, as most notoriously seen each summer in Ibiza for instance, not to mention Miami and its famous Conference where no one says anymore a single word about… house music and the more ironical thing at the end of the day is that we've ended up having different definitions about the word itself. So how could the hell we unite around a so called genre when not even agreeing about what it's supposed to be ???
You wouldn't get this sorts of confusion regarding hip hop and R&B and it's one of the main reasons why these forms of expression work. But once again what may Kerri Chandler, Paul Oakenfold, Ben Sims, DJ Sneak, Tall Paul, David Guetta and say Benny Benassi have in common ? Nuttin', nada, nichts, rien…

Seen the results of the House Music Awards ??? Okay, we've had a tribute to Frankie Knuckles, alright Defected was the Label Of The Year, Buzzin' Fly took the place as the upcoming one, DJ Gregory was greated too. But apart from that, frankly speaking… What would you reckon ??? Doesn't it seem like once again the fruit of those same manœuvres based upon commercial instead or purely artistic perspectives ??? Anyway, I guess some of you would be tempted to wonder why such a surprise as this is nothing but the strict application of the way things occur everywhere in our societies. Another brilliant demonstration of the mainstream trying to take control on whatever may be taken as a potential threat. Differently said, on all kinds of alternative expression forms on its will to uniformize the world.
Let us never be the servants of such a system as long as we want to keep on being able to think freely, but be ourselves by any means necessary even though it may take time to achieve such a thing. This is the price we all have to pay to gain freedom as, as said by the late Malcolm X, we cannot think of being acceptable to others until we have first proven acceptable for ourselves… MFSB

sarf · Posted: 22/11/2004 13:43 Post subject:

love this new politics of dancing article

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can you dance to my beat ?

mfsb · Posted: 22/11/2004 18:50 Post subject:

Whenever you, our beloved visitors feel like the will to express what you thing, then don't hesitate to drop us a line as this site has been conceived as a space of free expression for the community.
Thank for the feedback bro,
F