[peel] Dull-ish Festive Fifty - it's still a throwback!

[markbursa@...]

Christone's post raises several points.

Guitar music is dissed because its origins are rooted in the "bloody sixties" 
yet house is deemed acceptable because it dates from the 88. Er, the Bloody 
Eighties!

Even this is wrong. House was not "completely new" in 1988 as suggested. Its 
roots are in the work of electronic pioneers such as Kraftwerk, whose 
revolutionary music was conceived largely in... the Bloody Seventies. They themselves 
used electronic techniques developed by the likes of Stockhausen in... the 
Bloody Fifties.

Look around you and you'll see that electronic music has been around as long 
as guitar rock - if not longer. Instruments such as the Ondes Martenot as used 
by composers like Messaien in the early 20th Century pre-date Leo Fender and 
the solid bodied electric guitar by some decades. 

So drawing an arbitrary line in the sand in 1988 is dangerous and, in my 
opinion downright wrong. Same as drawing a line in 1977 would be. I'd go so far as 
to say that cutting edge musicians (Autechre, Four Tet etc) are not products 
of Acid House but of advances in production techniques, principally Pro Tools, 
Cubase etc and the ability to record directly on to a computer. Take a lok at 
what Wire are doing in the guitar idiom usiung these techniques for pointers 
to a more blurred, interesting future.

But of course Wire are "old" and probably not "going anywhere", like the 
Fall. To suggest the Fall "were going places....20 years ago" is to misunderstand 
the band and its relationship with its own - and Peel's - audience.

Finally ask youself why Peel's audience should overwhelmingly vote for dance 
music? Would Tim Westwood's audience vote for Belle & Sebastian? Peel's 
audience has broader tastes, but its core remains principally "indie". Like it or 
lump it.

Mark