Hit the Road, Jaxx

Basement Jaxx: Felix Buxton (left) and Simon Ratcliffe. Photo by Gemma Booth. Courtesy Beggars Banquet.

Most of the time, I’m willing to accept the vagaries of the music industry, why artist A realizes massive success while the obviously more talented artist B languishes in a sort of purgatory. Generally, the logic is obvious: something in artist B’s makeup — be it their songs, their image, their language — is at cross-purposes with the record-buying public. Once the offending factor is pointed out to me, I accept it and move on, chastened but ultimately in agreement.

But not when it comes to Basement Jaxx.

Filled with rapturous vocals, stardust synth melodies and propulsive beats, every Basement Jaxx song is a burnished dance-floor anthem. South Londoners Felix Buxton and Simon Ratcliffe seem to have conceived the band with the utmost gratification in mind; like early Prince, the Jaxx are pleasure personified. More impressive still, Buxton and Ratcliffe satisfy our visceral urges while winning over snooty music critics, who slaver over their stylistic derring-do.

Based on these criteria, Basement Jaxx should be at least as big as American acts like Usher, Destiny's Child or Jennifer Lopez — maybe even bigger, given how so many U.S. artists seem more beholden to cross-promotion than songcraft. Indeed in Britain, Basement Jaxx is a formidable pop force, a mainstay of the Top 40. And yet the Beggars Group, Basement Jaxx's North American representation, has only modest sales expectations for their forthcoming greatest-hits compilation. Out next week, The Singles culls 13 of their most seismic club cuts and two spanking new songs, including the sly ’80s flirtation Oh My Gosh. Music critics will sing a chorus of praise, but then critics reside in an echo chamber, where praise becomes amplified without sounding out to the wider music-buying public — who will likely pass over The Singles for Jennifer Lopez’s latest howler.

Basement Jaxx's last studio album, Kish Kash, sold approximately 500,000 copies internationally; only 75,000 units, a mere 15 per cent, were sold in the U.S. At first blush, that percentage might seem quite reasonable, but not when you consider that the U.S. typically accounts for 35 per cent of worldwide music sales.

The truth is, North America's desultory attitude to Basement Jaxx has less to do with the band than the fact that dance music doesn’t sell in North America. While music consumers in the U.K. seem to embrace diversity, in North America, tastes have become increasingly homogeneous.

“In North America, the mainstream is stacked against anything outside of hip hop and pop,” says David Freeman, a rep for Beggars Group Canada. The charts bear him out. Like Coke and Levi's, American hip hop dominates most everywhere, but looking at the Top 40 UK singles chart for March 6, we also see club cuts from Fatboy Slim, Chemical Brothers, Cabin Crew and New York's LCD Soundsystem. On the American Billboard chart for the same period: hip hop (50 Cent, Snoop Dogg), pop (Green Day, the Killers), and not a trace of dance music.

The last time dance music pricked mainstream consciousness in North America was during the early ’90s, when a fleeting fascination with “Euro” made fleeting stars of Denmark’s Aqua (Barbie Girl), Germany's Snap! (Rhythm is a Dancer), Italy’s Black Box (Strike it Up) and Belgium’s Technotronic (Pump Up the Jam). By the mid ’90s, however, grunge was the nation’s fixation.

While America accounts for 35 per cent of worldwide music consumption, of that number, more than 85 per cent are American artists. Kevin Unger, a club columnist for Canadian Music Network, an industry trade publication, says America “often turns a really blind eye to international acts, and I think that’s an ego thing more than anything else.”

The merging of hip hop and R&B under the “urban” rubric had a lot to do with dance music’s vanishing from commercial radio, but Unger insists dance is responsible for its own downfall. He points to two millennial developments: the apotheosis of the DJ and the proliferation of the remix. Despite all the magazine features proclaiming DJs as the future of music, mainstream consumers never really bought these self-satisfied, largely nameless headphone-junkies as viable “personalities,” much less musicians. Remixing, meanwhile, was a club practice that turned recognizable songs into vaporous abstractions. Many people decided that dance music had becoming a little too abstruse.

“I think the public needed something they could sink their teeth into, and so they turned to urban, because it’s still got a beat that you can dance to,” says Unger. “Here, they had an artist they could brand, they had a face they could put to the music, and they abandoned dance music.”

Towards the late ’90s, music marketers minted the phrase “electronica” in order to brand a new wave of percussive music emanating from Britain and France. One of the defining compilations was Wipeout XL, a 1997 video-game soundtrack comprising, among others, the Prodigy, Leftfield, Daft Punk and the Future Sound of London. As with most arbitrary descriptors, “electronica” soon became a catch-all for everything from big beat (Fatboy Slim) to techno (Underworld) to drum ’n’ bass (Roni Size) to more outré beat manipulations (Aphex Twin). By embracing everything, electronica ceased to mean anything.

“It ultimately became a bad marketing term by major labels who were trying to figure out, 'How the f--- can we break the Chemical Brothers?’” says Freeman.

For proof of America's dismissive attitude to dance music, you needed only watch this year's Grammy Awards. Many observers saw the introduction of a new category, “Best Electronic/Dance Album,” as a sign of legitimacy, but it's telling that the nominating committee could only come up with one American act, the Crystal Method. The other four nominees? British (including Basement Jaxx) or German. Furthermore, one inclusion (Creamfields, the latest snoozer from DJ Paul Oakenfold) wasn't even an original album, but a mix CD.

Basement Jaxx. Photo by Jamie Beedon. Courtesy Beggars Banquet

Dance music is a way to throw off the manacles of thought and reason and surrender to the power of percussion; it rarely has an agenda beyond physical abandon. “Political” dance music is oxymoronic, for the simple reason that partiers don't want polemics messing up their vibe.

And yet, dance music has a history of inspiring panic. Back when rock ’n’ roll was the de facto dance music, people were so scandalized by Elvis’s pelvis that in an early appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show, he was only shot from the waist up. In the early ’90s, public hysteria about the effects of the drug Ecstasy prompted the British government to stanch the growing rave scene by outlawing dance parties in some areas of the country.

The so-called Disco Era is now just a gauzy memory, but few can forget its fiery end — in America, at least — when an angry mob stoked by radio deejay Steve Dahl convened at Chicago's Comiskey Park in the summer of 1979 to light disco records in a massive funeral pyre. It was only the climax of the persecution of disco, which many right-wing politicians saw as an epidemic of mindless hedonism perpetuated by blacks and gays.

That was more than a quarter-century ago, but many contend that the same attitudes are still at play. Witness Basement Jaxx’s Grammy acceptance speech in February. “It’s nice to be recognized in America,” Ratcliffe told the crowd, “because dance music hasn't figured much in American consciousness for a long time.” Wary of appearing spiteful or unappreciative, he ruminated on the reasons for the band’s low stateside approval. "I think there's a bit of a homophobic/gay thing here with house music, which is a shame." His elocution may have been clumsy, but the sentiment was quite clear.

“With house music, its roots are gay, black, Puerto Rican and so on, and while those communities are still making that music, it’s gone way further," says Toronto DJ Denise Benson. "But I do agree that that stigma exists.”

Adds Benson, “The other thing about Basement Jaxx is that they've never been afraid to be sexy. Some of their stuff is really blatantly sexy and you could totally assume it's queer, even though they're both straight guys.”

Having given us Christina Aguilera and Lindsay Lohan, America can lay claim to the lion’s share of sleazy pop. Yet it demonstrates a weird prudishness when it comes to dance music.

No band embodies the Atlantic divide in dance music better than New York’s campy disco revivalists, Scissor Sisters. With 1.6 million sold, their eponymous debut album was the best-selling album in the U.K. in 2004. In the U.S., it moved a paltry 150,000 copies. Lead singer Jake Shears credits the disproportion to the band’s playfully homosexual image. “People in the U.K., more so than in the United States, realize that music transcends sexuality," Shears told one interviewer.

Sexual proclivities aside, Unger contends that if dance music is ever to regain Top-40 prominence, it must rub out the associations of DJ culture and reinvest in melody — the more recognizable, the better. Efforts are already underway: Britain’s Cabin Crew is getting major UK chart action with Star to Fall, a springy variant of Waiting for a Star to Fall, a 1988 hit for Seattle's Boy Meets Girl.

“I think it's a brilliant way to go,” says Unger, “and I think it's a way of bringing the element of song back into dance music.” That may be, but it doesn’t address America’s abject refusal to dance to anything but its own drum machine.

Andre Mayer writes about the arts for CBC.ca.

Letters:

Interesting take on Basement Jaxx. Their music is quite interesting. However, where I part ways with you is in your rather blanket comment, "While music consumers in the U.K. seem to embrace diversity, in North America, tastes have become increasingly homogeneous." Basement Jaxx personifies two important near equal halves of the UK music industry, POP and Dance. As a North American living in the UK I find their music far more homogenous. Actually it is so much so that I have been desperate for some other types of music. What you would classify as homogenuity in the North American market, I would classify as a broader pallet, which rightly or wrongly, is not wholly fixated with dance or pop.

Pierre T.
Ontario

Great article. Dance music, however, has its roots in the club, not on the radio. When going to the club, as Pete Tong puts it, people are there only to have a great time. When good djs play or tour, there is a far different atmosphere created then when the top 40 is being played, which is the usual scene. The club turns from "I am a thug because I listen to 50 cent and don't dance" to "I don't care who is here, I am going to dance, partner or not." Thus the origins of dance music, which goes way back are about fun, not about relating to the artist. Thank you for your time, and again great article.

Nathan Deisman
Edmonton, Alberta

I think I have an idea as to why dance music hasn't caught on here in North America. It's the same reason why I just don't like dance music. It has no character.

The lyrics don't tell a story. The melody (if it exists at all) is generally completely made up of computer sounds. I like music that is, call me silly, music. You know the kind of music that's actually made with instruments like guitars, pianos, horns, even a ukelele. It's not music if all you have to do is press a button on your desk-top. Even less if all you're doing is replaying somebody else's computer generated sounds in bits and pieces and remixes.

How can anybody compare a DJ, who does nothing more than play music that is already created, to an artist who writes the melody and the lyrics, and to whom the craft is meaningful?

The tone of the commentary is such that the reader is lead to believe that dance music has a rightful place in music as a whole, and has a legitimate place at the Grammys (and other music award presentations). I believe that nothing can be further from the truth. Dance music is a total cop-out.

I fear that the days of meaningful music are numbered. As the real songwriters get older, there are fewer and fewer to replace them. Who will tell the stories in song when Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell, and Bruce Springsteen are gone? I doubt that P. Diddy and company will have the same staying power.

Some may say that "urban" music does this storytelling now. While that may be true to a degree, urban music is almost always angry. Never sympathetic, rarely reflective, and from what I've heard, it hardly ever tells a story. It seems to only capture the angst of the underprivileged. It doesn't speak to or about the average youth with an average life and average problems.

Just a few thoughts from a 40-year-old who was club-hopping during the hey-days of disco. I hated it then, and I'm afraid, now that I've developed a taste for music of (almost) all genres, I find it even more distasteful, self-gratifying and empty than ever.

Debbie Burton
Mt. Pearl, Newfoundland

The article "Hit the Road Jaxx" is based upon the very naive premise that sales and popularity of music in the United States is based entirely upon audience preference. Larger sales shifts can be attributed to consumer predilection, but foreign and dance acts don't succeed in the U.S. because they're not marketed as well as domestic acts. The money isn't there in the first place, which in turn affects sales, which further affects the marketing budget. It's not nationalism, it's business practice.

Name: Vanessa Koepke
Toronto, Ontario

I have to say I agree immensely with this article. However, I think a lot of the cause of the United States' unenthusiasm for other genres of music besides pop or hip hop stems from a lack of diverse music playing radio stations. This is an issue which really irks me. How can many Americans discover new sounds if all they can listen to are the same dorky songs played over and over? I would practically kill for a radio station that played Kelly Clarkson or Usher less then 100 times per day. I don't understand why we must be fed the same shash hour after hour, day after day. Are we Americans that moronic or closed minded that we will only listen to a few songs from a select group of moderately talented songsters? I don't think we are, at least I hope not. I like to think the problem lies more in the unopen arms (and ears) of the radio station giants, like Clear Channel and other similar companies. Industry-dominating companies like these make sure we Americans get an earful of the bands and singers that keep their pockets full. It's really a sad cycle. I long for the day when I turn on the radio and my ears are filled with something other than the same overplayed anthems. Sadly this day just seems to be getting further and further away.

Rheanna
San Antonio, Texas

I found this article of particular interest. As a fan of Basement Jaxx and other electronic dance artists, I can never find anything by them on this side of the pond.

I think the reason that this music doesn't sell is the lack of exposure on music channels and radio stations. This music is showcased regularly on BBC Radio 1. Canadian and US stations are too heavily formatted with classic rock reruns and top 40 teeny bopper stuff to play this music.

If there were more mainstream exposure of this music, then it would take off here in Canada. It's a shame really.

Greg Merritt
Fredericton, New Brunswick

In response to Debbie Burton's comments: I respect one person's opinion on the state of dance music, but I don't think she "gets it." I find her comments rather uninformed. There is a staggering amount of astounding underground dance music out there being created and played that would floor you in its originality and variety. As was mentioned, two perceptions of dance music hold true: 1. It was never intended for radio (exception being Internet radio which is a boost to the genre and frankly is the only media broadcasting left not controlled by the soulless mega-corporations); and 2. It was never intended to contain challenging lyrics — that was never what dance music was about. Therefore, it really doesn't work well into the music companies formulas for widespread marketing, distribution and profit. Dance music continues to be best disseminated the way it always has — by small genre-specific labels and DJs that have an penchant for new sounds and trends and can skillfully spin vinyl in the clubs that can move a roomful of partiers to an emotional response. Just because you don't get it (I suspect your only exposure to dance music in the past ten years has been the tripe you've heard on Top 40 radio or in a Top 40 club), that doesn't mean that artists like the Chemical Brothers, Basement Jaxx, Deep Dish, Underworld and the Prodigy and DJs like Tiesto, Roger Sanchez, Sasha and John Digweed aren't worthy of the accolades they receive. It takes a special ear and talent to create impressive dance music, just like any other style, or to whip 2,000 revelers in a superclub into a ecstatic frenzy. Just because you don't hear it on the radio ten times a day doesn't mean that it isn't any good! Go out to a underground club some night — you might be pleasantly surprised.

Reid Dalgleish
Calgary, Alberta

This is a great article! I am a fan of Basement Jaxx as well as other dance music artists, and I can't understand why it hasn't caught on with more of my peers. It is great party music, perfect to dance the night away. Though I also enjoy what another reader has deemed "real music" with guitars, drums, bass and other traditional instruments, one must expand their horizons. I encourage others to try different music for different occasions, and Basement Jaxx, like so much dance music, is perfect to "just give'r" and let yourself go.

I was also quite pleased to hear about Basement Jaxx's Grammy award. Maybe this is a sign that the Grammy's can redeem themselves and try to tune in with some other genres besides "overplayed pop." Who knows, if they keep up like this, maybe they can beat out Desperate Housewives in their ratings next year.

Thanks again for a great piece!

Whitney
Halifax, Nova Scotia