Delivering some jolts of their own
Seth Troxler and Chuck D’s lively talk was but one highlight at IMS Engage.
On the 12th floor of the W Hotel in Hollywood, during an afternoon talk at the dance music conference IMS Engage this week, Seth Troxler explained the nuances of contemporary dance music for Chuck D.
Troxler, a feisty and witty house and techno producer, is a famed critic of contemporary EDM culture, which he pillories for its crasser tendencies and ways of erasing people of color from dance music’s history. So when Chuck D, the founding member of Public Enemy and a Troxler hero, casually used the acronym as shorthand for all modern dance music, Troxler flinched, saying “I’m not really a representative of that EDM culture at all.... I’ll give you some music later, Chuck.”
“Everything today is electronic music,” Chuck D replied. “Unless you’re Joni Mitchell strumming a guitar, if the power goes out, we’re all ....”
IMS, a South by Southwest-style panel series based out of the dance music hub of Ibiza, started its L.A. edition in 2013 and has grown into a rangy conversation between dance figures such as Troxler, Kaskade and Zhu manager Jake Udell with more mainline music business figures like Def Jam and Warner leader Lyor Cohen and producer Quincy Jones.
Kaskade, fresh of his Coachella Main Stage appearance last weekend, spoke with Stuart Price, the producer and engineer behind crossover dance hits like Madonna, Kylie Minogue and the Killers.
They had a fun back-andforth about the changing composition of a dance music hit. “Are we getting down to the point where someone’s just going to take a kick drum and a woodblock and it’ll be the biggest record of the year?” Price asked, but not in a rhetorical sense — he actually sounded kind of excited by the prospect.
Troxler and Chuck D’s discussion was the politically charged highlight of the day. The two were booked for a reason: Chuck D’s activism and résumé leading Public Enemy and beyond speak for themselves, and Troxler is something of an heir to that mantle with his frequent criticisms of EDM and his label Tuskegee, founded to introduce more artists of color into dance music.
Chuck D’s charismatic indictments of the music business’ “corp-plantations” and malevolent “Negro-tiating” tactics were rousing, and Troxler, for perhaps the first time, took a bit of a back seat in a discussion about race, music and ethics. But the Detroit native got passionate about taking house and techno back to the urban core and people of color, and away from an EDM mainstream that was gathered in that very room. “People come up to me and are like, ‘Oh, you’re a DJ? Like …’ Um, I don’t know. I’m not going to say any names because I’ll get in trouble…” he said.
Later, he kept at that feeling of exclusion, even as he plays many of dance music’s biggest events: “There are so few people of color in dance music today, and there’s a certain perspective that comes from growing up ethnic. House music came from blacks and Latinos speeding up disco records and throwing parties.
“Black culture’s just not going to be into Avicii, so it’s about exposing young, urban people” to meaningful alternatives that reflect their lives.
Quincy Jones, he of “Thriller” and Motown and a huge portion of dance music’s DNA, had a similar repudiation of the dominant dance music of his time. “One thing we wanted to do was to move disco out of the way,” he said, speaking of his indomitable cuts with Michael Jackson that still light up dance floors.
His interviewer, the BBC fixture and current WME exec Pete Tong, was a bit incredulous, as Jones’ productions with Jackson — four-on-the-floor kick/snare, creeping funk bassline, big strings and crisp guitars — were some of the finest disco records made. But point taken. Part of Jones’ job was to wipe off the bad residue of that day’s dance music and usher a new aesthetic using the same musical tools.
Contemporary DJs and producers would do well to follow up on that.