Nile Rodgers vs Giorgio Moroder

You may or may not know who either of these two are, they are not people instantly recognisable in the way, Che Guevara or Jesus Christ might be. Reading Pushing ahead of the dame - a meticulously researched and poetically written blog methodically charting every David Bowie song - it pitts two of the greats of modern dance music against each other. Bowie's song 'Cat People' was produced by both. Moroder wrote the music to the original version and Bowie the lyrics and vocal melody, a song which was later used in Tarrantino's 'Inglorious Basterds' to great effect. It was originally from the soundtrack to what was ultimately a lightweight flop of a film by the same name. For contractual reasons, the version of Cat People from the soundtrack wasn't allowed to be put on Bowie's 'Let's Dance' album, which is a shame because the original version featured on the soundtrack was a solid spacey synthy track which well deserves its recent reassesment as a bowie classic... The Nile Rodgers remake, paled in comparison; the suspense building intro replaced by a jagged spikey guitar riff which deleted most of the essence of the track.

                                                                     

Nile Rodgers was the producer of the version of Cat People which ended up on Let's Dance, and it was nowhere near as good as the soundtrack version. This is where I put Giorgio Moroder, superproducer with a thousand hits to his name, in the ring with Nile Rodgers, guitarist, producer and the king of disco. He was the brains (and songwriter) behind Chic, Sister Sledge as well as being a producer for Diana Ross, Bowie, Mick Jagger, Grace Jones, Debbie Harry and the B52's amongst others. Judging by that CV you would think its a TKO for Rodgers against Georgio, But Moroder's CV packs its own punch: Bowie, Blondie, Freddie Mercury, B52's among them But most famously probably was his work with Donna Summer. Moroder (along with Vangelis and forgetting Ennio Morricone) was also among the first artists to really get a stranglehold on the film soundtrack. At a point where the cinema's were packed and VHS was bringing cinema to the homes of millions of people worldwide; Moroder found another method of getting his music to the masses. Top Gun, Scarface, American Gigolo, Neverending Story and Superman III were all scored by or had major contributions from Giorgio. It becomes clear when you see the tracks that these two were involved with, that they were the two biggest musical superpowers of the late 70s and early 80s, Europe versus America. Their phones didn't stop ringing they chose who to work with, they were both, the man. Rodgers was the king of disco and Moroder was the mastermind of synthpop (and also, sad to say, the powerballad.)

If we're going to watch Moroder and Rodgers fight to the death then we might as well start it at the point where this hypothetical fight was concieved; between two different versions of a Bowie song.

Nile Rodgers version- With Stevie Ray Vaughan spikey guitar part introduction.

And the Moroder version, with the moody introduction, that was used in Inglorious Basterds.

It's a definate 1-0 Moroder for me, although it is all subjective, so you are allowed to like the album version if you like, but if you do you are a massive twat and you will probably have leave my house, if that is you hiding under my bed.

This is probably the best known of the Moroder tracks, it pops up in adverts, it was to of the charts in the UK and America when it came out and it is constantly used in adverts. It is not a personal favourite of mine if I am being honest but the ones with the biggest populist appeal never seem to be anymore. As I am saying something negative about the way one of his songs sound then I can probably take this opportunity to say his image was also a problem.

A problem that Moroder faces in general is that he has both a look and a sound that is 'of its time' whereas it still remains difficult to hear the next track and not forget you are listening to a product of the 70s.

Rodgers looks cooler, more timeless than Moroder too, it has to be said, I think that Le Freak and the image gives Rodgers a 3-1 lead.

Both of these artists were broadly working at the same tame, creating similar kinds of music, but there is a monumental difference in the way the music was produced: Moroder's focus was definately on production techniques, synth sounds and embracing the latest technology of the time and Rodgers, on groove. The mixing desk was still important but the sounds were more analogue, the guitar, the bass, the drum and the piano were the bread and butter of the Nile Rodgers sound. His sound was the noise of the nightclub:

"I've had insomnia since I was five years old. I just don't require much sleep. I'm never tired. I can pay attention and I have great memory. Every now and then I'll sleep for five hours, but I'm reasonably healthy. At least for an ex-hippie-drug addict-party guy. I'm no saint now and probably wouldn't be happy living like one, but I try and look for balance."- Nile Rodgers.

Ignoring the influence of drugs on the music of these Rodgers or Moroder, would be naaive at best, Studio 54 and Paradise Garage were the first places in New York where MDMA began being taken, starting out as a prescribed drug used by couples councilors to help induce empathy, it left the councilors couch and found its way onto the dancefloor. Equally notable was Moroder's music and its association with cocaine. Moroder's work on the Scarface soundtrack make it virtually impossible not to hear 'Push it to the Limit' and not to be listening out for the sound of white powder falling through the gaps between the beat.

But that was just an excuse for me to write a paragraph about drugs. 3-3.

The more I write, the more I realize that I am not the person to objectively look at Moroder and Rodgers, I have so much admiration for both of them. Neither were 100% prolific, but that just makes them human. At the moments where inspiration took hold of them they were unbeatable... take, for instance, Bowie's Let's Dance. It would be difficult to pick a bad track off it, but who better to produce a track called Let's Dance, than Rodgers himself.

Moroder's tracks are probably more well known worldwide simply because he positioned himself in the homes of millions of people worldwide, he had a captive audience and an audience that would associate his music, firstly with films that children would watch over and over again, and secondly with the experience of being in a place and time, that this repetition would leave in the memory banks of people... does that make sense? If not then just put on the flashdance soundtrack in a room full of ladies, they all revert to being 8 years old.






Perhaps the reason I see the two artists in the same sphere is because of the impact their songs had on me growing up. There are literally hundreds of songs I could choose from their catalogue that I would enjoy, but I am going to choose 5 of each, as per, and in no particular order. Nile's

And 5 from Moroder...








(simply for the synth solo!)

An uneasy guide to Underground Resistance

When you think of Detroit, you might think of Motown, you may think of the White Stripes or Eminem. You may not think of music at all, you might think of its decimated motor industry, its reputation for a having a huge murder rate, or even the film Robocop which was set there in the not too distant future. At the end of the 80s a series of factory closures all but destroyed Detroit, most of the skilled workers moved to Chicago and wherever the work was, leaving ghettos, closed down shopping centres, rows and rows of derelict houses and the heartbeat of what was once a major city, ripped out.

Detroit's Underground Resistance, represents one of the most interesting responses to Reagan era politics. Jeff Mills and 'Mad' Mike Banks banded together to form a group that would grow in members and stature. Unlike Derreck May and Kevin Saunderson, UR shunned the limelight, opting to wear masks at the warehouse parties they played at.




The group have toyed with several different genres of music, from hip hop to drum & bass but the staple of the Underground Resistance sound was and remains Techno, to this day.

Although they opted to place the music ahead of the cult of personality, they created (whether or not by accident) a distinct image of what UR represented, a brand, if you like. According to Banks they were as inspired by the album covers and music of Bands like Rush, as they were of the comicbooks of Marvel. The militant standoff-ish look attracted and repelled in equal measure, with accusations of black supremacist views because they would often dress up like the Black Panthers at gigs; this accusation is refuted by Banks and Mills who claim that the whole point was to make sure the music came first. Equally influential to the UR sound was Kraftwerk, who Banks often refers to as a defining influence on the scene, in terms of sound and in terms of image. Members of UR would collaborate with Kraftwerk on Expo 2000.


 As new members joined the music took different directions. Out of all the Underground Resistance family Jeff Mills has probably been the most successful but the biggest track to come out on the label is UR049, better known as 'Knights of the Jaguar' by DJ Rolando. A track that still gets played all over the world when the lights go up from Berlin to Tokyo.

The track is consistantly in artists top 5's, consistantly played by the likes of Pete Tong, Laurent Garnier, Francois K, Jeff Mills, Richie Hawtin, Josh Wink and anyone else who is worth their salt in the dance music community.

Asking a DJ to name their favourite Underground Resistance track is like asking your parents what their favourite Beatles album is. DJ, Producer and remixer Ewan Pearson opts for 'the whole of the Galaxy to galaxy ep' as his favourite release... and it is easy to see why, there is a track on there for every mood. My favourite of the bunch is Astral Apache, with its tribal sounding vocals, snares, bubbly appregios and the constant sense that it is building into the monster it becomes in the second half of the track. It would fit in easily on Surrender by the Chemical brothers, or Second Toughest in the Infants by Underworld.



Ewans favourite: anything off the Galaxy 2 Galaxy EP




Tom Middleton, Jedi Master, DJ, Producer and all round good egg, also struggles to choose when asked about his favourite UR record, but also opts for a track from the Galaxy to Galaxy EP: "so many! High-TechJazz.Timeless spine-tingling Sax-Techno masterpiece in my box/top 10 for ever."











Tom's favourite: Hi Tech Jazz.




The Beauty of UR is that although they stay within the realms of electronic music, they can be as soft and soulful as they can be hard, with decks, 303's, 909's, and even the saxophone. But they are often brutal, as Tronic boss and legendary techno DJ, Christian Smith's choice attests to...



Christian Smith's favourite: Seawolf.



Liberation Radio (from the Gyroscopic EP) is one of the tracks worked on by Banks, Jeff Mills and Robert Hood, it highlights the harder edge that Robert Hood brought to the tracks that he worked on with UR. The fact that all the producers worked under the umberella of 'Vision' shows a socialist approach to how Underground Resistance put out tracks. No arguments about royalties, no messing, no ego, just uncompromising futurist techno music.

Sometimes the artists on UR tracks would be so secretive they would just go under an alias and no one outside the studio would really know who actually produced it, "I don't go in front of the music. I believe that if you put your ego in front of the music, and place it in front of the speaker, then the people trying to listen to the music can't hear your music, they just listen to your ego."

And that is the best way to sum up UR, the ego was left at the door, whilst europe began to embrace the cult of the superstar DJ none of the Underground Resistance ever did take up that summer residency in Ibiza, DJ at the opening of the Olympics, or have a track appear on the Matrix soundtrack. It's not the sort of thing they would directly badmouth about, they're not the kind of people to do so, but they are proof that UR are in it for the right reasons, and that is the very reason why more people need to explore their catalogue, because there is a lot of quality in there,

Here are my top 5 in no particular order.












For my part, the attraction to UR is the fact that they are doing it for love; as hard as the music can get Banks is obviously a caring guy, who is really involved in the local community through youth projects as well as with the Resistance. I discovered them through Jeff Mills who has always been the celebrity face of UR, It was before the internet made it this easy to share music so I had to get the tracks the hard way, resulting in a few hundred spent and a few boxes of records that I don't really have the space for, would I change a thing? Nope, my life is enriched knowing these tracks.

Complete interview with Mike Banks from Wired Magazine here

Underground Resistance complete discography here

Thanks to Ewan Pearson, Tom Middleton and Christian Smith.

Belgian New Beat.

Belgian New Beat is not the sort of thing I would spend hundreds of pound on, however, it fascinates me, it was a fledgling moment between 1988 and 89 where kids were looking to Chicago, Detroit and the UK and seeing Techno and House explode on popular culture, a decade later the UK charts were absolutely choc full of Belgian artists releasing europap like Whigfield's 'saturday night' and Snap's '(I got tha) Power', but at its inception New Beat was something new and something that belonged to the kids of Belgium... and lets face it, what is Belgium known for apart from being next to Holland, and being invaded by the Germans, and Beer, and chocolate, and child sex rings? They deserved to have their own thing to be dancing to at the weekends... the Dutch were dancing to Acid Techno and the UK were blissing out to Acid House. "Legend has it that the Belgian New Beat genre was invented in the nightclub Boccaccio in Destelbergen near Ghent when DJ Marc Grouls played a 45rpm EBM record at 33rpm, with the pitch control set to +8. The track in question was Flesh by A Split-Second." (wiki: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Beat )



Original.




The same track at 33rpm

There is a history of DJ's playing music at wrong speeds to create new genres, Jungle was apparently the result of DJ's speeding up breakbeat records and Happy Hardcore *shudder* was similarly created as a result of pitching up acid techno records, but it is always good to know that the RPM switch on a vinyl deck can create a scene and give young groups of bored people something they feel they can belong to. And that track probably does sound a little better at the slower pace.




Groul's (right) inadequecy with the equipment he used led to Belgian domination of Europe for over a decade.
There is an argument that the amount of music on the internet has cheapened the listening experience, that people don't appreciate it anymore because they dont have to pay for it. I don't really subscribe to that view. I used to spend an awful lot of time listening to music on the pods in record shops, and I was always subject to the taste of the buyers in that record shop... now I have total freedom to explore, getting inside tracks and following trails to find out where they came from, the quality is not really as good but then again, you can buy a 5th generation pressing of a track on ZYX records on vinyl and the net result is the same, unwanted popping and hissing. Another advantaged is that you get to see the odd video, which is very much the thing that gives Belgian New Beat its charm. We will examine the New Beat video phenomenon later, but first we will have a look at some of the more famous tracks of the sub genre.



Don't know too much about this group but the track was released in 1989 and has been subject to a single repress in 1992, which means it will probably be difficult to get on vinyl seeing as it never had distribution outside Belgium. Its producer Patrick De Meyer, would go on to take New Beat to the masses as producer of Technotronic and 2Unlimited, acts that it might be argued, killed the genre entirely. This, track veers just about on the right side of what might get played in a club today, with a bit of editing. This is a good track to gage a new beat record, spoken vocals in German or French, roughly 110bpm and much moodier sounding than the luv'd up sound of Italo-Disco, the noise coming from closer to the mediteranian roughly at the same time. The Belgians didn't get as much sunshine as Italy, which is probably a good gage of wht the Flemmish are into moodier sinister sounding tracks.




The video to this one is simply hideous, it reinforces every stereotype that prejudiced people have about European dance music... mullets, leather jackets, headbands, shitty dance routines...just click on it fully if you want to see it. What is really noticable about this track is the similarity the main synthline shares with 'what Time is Love?' by KLF. Who stole from who?  Everyone was stealing from each other, S-express and M*A*R*S* famously scored number one hits with 'the theme from S'Express' and 'Pump Up the Volume' respectively, selling millions, but having to give all their royalties to the people they sampled without permission, something that the likes of Grand Master Flash and Afrika Bambaataa had to deal with some 5 years earlier, when they sampled the krautrock folk. But sample stealing is another subject for another time. Onto the next track.





This is exactly the kind of track that was being pitched up to plus 8 in holland, with the roland 909 synth stabs, the deliberately pitched down vocals would sound normal at 45rpm, there was a kind of symbiosis between the dutch techno movement and the belgian new Beat shizzle, and they were driving distance from each other so there was no reason why the club kids of Holland and Belgium in the late 80s couldn't enjoy both.





This one has a bit more of a breaky feel whilst still keeping to the same speed, it retains the moody feel, and after 4 tracks you are probably starting to get a feel of what New Beat actually is...



This one is the track probably best known from the new beat spectrum, one that tends to pop up on the ministry of sound type 'old skool' albums, it is much faster than the 110bpm tracks, It is heavy as fuck and probably the one that I like least out of all of the examples I've given, however, there is a DJ Hell remix that has blown up several of my speakers.






A band that certainly took New Beat as an inspiration are Belgiums own Soulwax, although it is difficult to tell whether they are being ironic or not. This one appeared on their Radio Soulwax part 2 album, remixed and cut to shreds, but it shows that there is life beyond Anita and Ray, for New Beat, it was the European equivalent of the British Acid House explosion of 88 and 89, but unlike Acid House, which eventually moved on to the rave scene, jungle scene, happy hardcore scene, trip hop, etc et al which all sprouted from Acid culture, it appears that new Beat producers would eventually end up pumping our charts full of fodder.



This is sadly the legacy of New Beat, the stuff that the producers will be most remembered for.

For a pretty convincing top 50 of New Beat tracks click here

If you fancy getting a few online mixes down your ears, have a click on this with a much less detached and more fond take on the sub genre.

Grauzone.

I've been out of action on the music blog for such a long time because I simply didn't know where to go with it, but now I know... I will take the obscurest bands I can find from Belgium, Italy or in this case, Switzerland and paste the wiki entry for these bands...


At the end of 1979 Marco Repetto (drums) and GT (bass) left the punk band Glueams, to form together with Martin Eicher (guitar, vocals, synthesizer) a new band called Grauzone. Martin had already supported Glueams on their single mental.





They gave their first concert in March 1980 at the club Spex in Berne. Martin's brother Stephan Eicher (guitar, synthesizer) and Claudine Chirac (saxophone) supplemented the group temporarily in live appearances and recordings. After ten concerts, four singles and an album the group split up at the end of 1982.

GT and Marco Repetto formed together with the former Glueams guitarist Martin Pavlinec and the drummer Dominique Uldry, the band "Missing Link", later "Eigernordwand". GT supplemented the futurism oriented performance group "Red Catholic Orthodox Jewish Chorus" around performance artist Edy Marconi, in which occasionally Marco Repetto also played. Later the group changed their name to "I Suonatori". Stephan Eicher started a successful solo career. 1988 published Martin Eicher his solo-EP "Spellbound Lovers". Marco Repetto started in 1989 a new career as Techno and Ambient DJ, musician and producer (a.o. mittageisen v2).



The band is most famous for their 1981 hit "Eisbär" ("Polar Bear"), which was later covered by the French band Nouvelle Vague. The single went to #12 in Germany and #6 in Austria. Another track that was played a lot in dance clubs in the eighties was the instrumental Film 2.



That is the extent of my knowledge about this band... I first heard them when they popped up on Hot Chip's DJ kicks compilation a few years ago, since then I have heard Ivan Smagghe airing them and  Andrew Weatherall played them at a night I went to far too long ago, I have since discovered that they are a pretty awesome post punk 80s band but because they never really got out of Switzerland I never got to listen to them until the internet had well and truly happened. but it kicks shit out of Kajagoogoo or Flock of Seagulls. In certain places they sound lots like Public Image ltd, Gang of Four, and you might even expect that Kele from Bloc Party may have a record or two by them. In other places they sound like the goth techno you would expect to hear at the Panoramabar in Berlin or London's Fabric. It is also uncanny how much they sound like Joy Division.














Part of the magic of exploring a band like this is that they were people who lived directly in the embers of the second world war. These were guys born into the threat of nuclear war, they didn't have the same experiences of the 80s that Britain did and as a result the music sounds different not only in terms of the language barrier, but the production values, emphasis on rhythmn and song structure is vastly different to Duran Duran and Bananarama. Soft Cell and the early Human League material is the only tangible connection to the British music that was happening at the time, but more at the forefront were Wham and Culture Club, the latters wading in on politics was 'War is stupid, People are stupid'... Thanks for that Mr George, now I think you'd better be off because there's a rentboy chained to your radiator.