Where's the party at?

Electro-punk hits the dance floor.

By Amanda Nowinski

IT'S ABOUT 10 :30 on a Monday night, and the Trouble party at the Great American Music Hall vibrates beneath my feet. Techno-IDM producer Uprock perches behind his laptop, unleashing spasmodic waves of crunchy, processed funk that collide with a steady computer beat so crisp and mean my inner dancing queen begins to stir. I close my eyes and imagine myself late at night in a disco where perspiration collects on the ceiling and warm bodies swirl beneath a dusty, barely bleeding red light.

I open my eyes. Of the 100 or so bodies filling the dance floor, there's hardly a head nodding or a foot tapping. But what's even more bizarre is that about 50 kids are sitting on the floor. That's right, grandma and grandpa clubber, I said sitting on the floor. And I don't mean sitting at tables, observing the mayhem (or lack thereof) from afar. These kids – almost entirely early twentyish, white, and decked out in dark, somber art-school clothes – are crouched on the ground, attentively facing the tiny laptop on the stage. The no-parking-on-the-dance-floor law has been repealed.

"Don't be so cynical," a friend warns as I grumble about the sober squatters. "These are indie kids rebelling against mainstream club culture." Indeed, resting inert on the floor is the antithesis of the bump-your-fuckin'-ass dance club experience, and although I can imagine a few more pressing issues to stage sit-ins over today – tanks rolling into Bethlehem, innocent people barely living on death row – I feel where they're coming from. I recall the recent cover of Remix, where trance DJ D:Fuse wore a cowboy hat with an American flag taped to the front – irony not included. And same goes for Ikea party names like Square, White, and Pink; tweekers chewing their mouths in VIP rooms; pill mongers "fighting" for party-people rights; the corny, "tasteful" sides of trance and house.

I sympathize with a mobilized action against the Cheese. But the last time I saw kids sitting on the floor listening to badass techno was at a rave 10 years back, where piles of dumb fucks on E (myself included) sat smooching and grasping for one another's clammy hands. No, we're not in goofy raveland anymore, and thank god for that – all messy eras must come to an end.

But hey, where's the party at?

New kids

The party's on – but it's got a crowd full of new faces. The IDM appeal to the indie rock crowd is nothing new, but it has certainly gained momentum locally with the rise of experimental Bay Area producers like Kid 606, Kit Clayton, and Blectum from Blechdom, who in turn have helped introduce the post-rave generation to dance floor techno, even if they're not all exactly in it for the dance – yet.

But while the IDM and new-techno sector remains fairly timid when it comes to booty operations, a new wave of indie kids have also set their eyes (and their butts, for that matter) on the latest flash in the pan: electro-punk, or as others call it, electro-clash. This '80s-imbued music, club, and fashion scene has lured curious rockers following bands like Peaches, Fischerspooner, and Chicks on Speed, whose rude, bitchy, horny lyrics set the tone for a bouncy good time (even if the music isn't all up to snuff). Electro-punks are not going to stick safety pins through their noses or land in jail for acting up onstage – Sid Vicious is still MIA. This is a much tamer, sensible crowd that likes its haircuts asymmetrical and prefers the kind of Reagan-era freak styles that back in the actual day warranted a hallway beating at most urban public schools.

Older electro purists may not love this latest incarnation of electro, which shares little aesthetically with Afrika Bambaataa and Soulsonic Force's 1982 "Planet Rock" and Cybotron's "Clear." Cowbells and vocoders – trademarks of the original style – are not much there; it's really just the firm, spacious pulse of the Roland 808 drum machine that connects the genres. The music that falls into the electro-punk category is also quite unlike the dance-focused acts that have crossover appeal, like Adult. and Japanese Telecom, who are more techno-oriented and program tighter beats.

Given the escalating hype behind the electro-punk scene, which is centered in New York, one can only assume the trend will pass quickly – as soon as Miss Kittin poses in a Gap ad or Chicks on Speed perform the national anthem at a baseball game. (Chanel frontman Karl Lagerfeld just shot the cover of the Chicks' upcoming release. Teenage indie hard-liners will fume – first the White Stripes! Now this!) But flash in the pan or not, electro-punk marks a significant convergence of two scenes that until now have been regarded as natural enemies – rock is about watching bands; dance music is about ignoring the DJ. Not since the early rave-influenced Manchester bands, like the Charlatans, the Happy Mondays, and the Stone Roses, have indie and dance kids licked each other's taste buds with such enthusiasm.

"Electro-clash is primarily an indie rock crossover crowd," says Larry Tee, a New York promoter and ex-über club kid-dance producer who runs three new electro nights in New York and who also gave the scene its name. "The tempo speaks to the ravers – they get that part. But the cool thing is that it does speak to two different crowds. So finally the indie and the dance community have come together in support of a sound."

If people with funny haircuts and weird pants can get along, you'd think world leaders would be able to follow suit.

Nihilism rules

It's 1 a.m. at Fake – a Friday-night weekly that mixes new electro with old new wave, rock, hip-hop, and punk – and I'm transported back to 7 p.m. at a Lowell High School dance in the '80s. Except that here, while androgynous girls and boys in heavy black eyeliner do the praise-the-goth-gods boogie, I manage to feel incredibly out of place and warmly at ease at the same time. Smiles abound, asses shake, there's no attitude at the door or on the floor. DJ Jenny, who promotes the night along with Omar, drops the Smiths' "How Soon Is Now?" The crowd goes mad. A seasoned Robert Smith look-alike in a white blouse and a skinny black tie squeals with delight, and a girl who was probably born soon after the song was recorded fiddles with her pointy black boots and glides beneath the dim purple lights. Jenny plays Miss Kittin and the Hacker's "Frank Sinatra," a wonderfully harsh techno-electro track over which the Kittin purrs, "Lick my ass ... suck my dick." Her cruel giggle sends shivers up my spine – a perfect moment for the sentiment of these uneasy 2002 times.

San Francisco has long been a house music town, but the anesthetized, commercialized – and might I add, wholly incorrect – version of that culture does not hold up today. There's more reason than ever to be angry, and it's not enough to lose yourself for an entire weekend, to swallow a handful of pills and remain impervious to the outside world. The new electro grounds listeners in the present, offering a confrontational take on a bleak world. Peaches tries fucking the pain away, while Miss Kittin sneers like a jaded club ho about the absurdity of celebrity worship. There's a delicious black humor in the new electro that has been missing from the dance music scene. Peaches speaks more to today's youth than Blue Six's "Music and Wine" and "Very Good Friends," song titles that evoke the shallowest moments of the mid-'90s boom times.

"People are really fucking bored with house," says Chris Orr, a local DJ and journalist who began playing house in the mid '80s. "I'm a house fanatic. It informed my late teens and early adulthood. But everywhere I go, I hear the same records. House has been cheesily commodified – it used to be a nasty warehouse music with a nasty edge."

Futurists like Juan Atkins in Detroit and Larry Heard in Chicago brought technology to the people by moving bodies on socially diverse dance floors, and as corny as it sounds, they helped a post-disco and -new-wave generation to see brighter days, to feel alive and connected to strangers during the 12-year Republican reign. But as Europe and the United States commercialized the music and culture in the '90s, the surface of dance devolved into a shiny, money crowd product the original converts hardly recognized. "The music became less important when the drugs came in," says Bruce Gauld, a veteran DJ of San Francisco's early house scene. "The mythology of house was that you had to take ecstasy. And I thought, 'Wow, this is about music, it's not a package deal.' Plus, the house mythology came from England, and I was hating that. Acid house started in Chicago, but English people caught onto it and made another kind of connection with house and acid and drugs. So it came back with floppy hats and Day-Glo and smiley faces."

Coincidentally, a member of one of the edgiest acts to emerge in the New York electro-punk scene was once a key player in the evolution of S.F. house: Thomas of Wicked. Discouraged by mid-'90s house culture, he skipped town for Manhattan, where he cofounded ARE Weapons. "I love house music and disco," he told me two years ago. "But I hate the scene in America, which is all I really know. It seems to be a passive experience. Some areas are really punky, but the experience that most people have is passive. It's a background thing, and that's not what it's meant to be."

"We all grew up on punk rock," he said of Wicked. "When I came across house in '88, it was the most punk feeling I'd ever had. There is a side to house music that is as pure as the finest punk rock – to me they're one and the same."

While there's a rawness to the early house (particularly acid house) and techno records that might compare to punk, the house scene's social stance was not overtly rebellious – yet it felt completely antiauthoritarian. "House wasn't 'rebellious' per se," local house producer Tyler Stone says. "It was more against society at the time. It was about being inclusive, which, at the time, seemed radical. It was about finding your own identity among people who were different."

This notion of radical inclusiveness might seem hippie-dippie and absurd to the new generations, who, understandably, have rolled their eyes at the largely insipid veneer of dance culture. But truly, for those who came up through Reaganism and Thatcherism, the house scene provided a release from the homophobic, racist lies that fueled the status quo. From Inner City's "Good Life" to Ten City's "My Piece of Heaven," the music lifted and provided the intangible thing that house has always aimed to bring: transcendence.

While electro-punk says fuck off to the apathy of the smug cocktail sippers, it can't provide the spiritual food the very best house and techno bring. Truly, we need both medicines right now.

Selling power

Whether or not dance music or electro fans agree that the quality of the music is up to par, it's possible that it will burst into the U.S. mainstream. "I'm cool with it because it brings finances and attention to more experienced people who deserve it," says Bre-ad of Exact Science, a local label that has long promoted the bridge between dance music, b-boy culture, and new electro.

Not only do many of the new electro bands have that most powerful selling force, sexually charged women, they've also got the performer-as-spectacle thing going on. The electro-punk sound is not necessarily easier to access than more-traditional forms of dance music – plenty of house tracks could have done well on commercial radio in the States had they been given the chance. What appeals to the MTV population is that there's a band onstage.

"The fact that electro-clash has personalities that you can relate to, or people you want to fuck, gives it the energy it needs to go big," New York promoter Tee says. "Who wants to see two square-headed balding British DJs twiddling knobs anymore?" He mentions that WIT, a girl group he helped launch six months ago, just received a six-figure offer from an undisclosed record label. "We tend to use another girl for dancing, to plump up the female voluptuousness. This is true pop art like in the Andy Warhol tradition – they don't want to let integrity get in the middle of their careers."

And neither does the rather limp-sounding Fischerspooner, who recently inked a multimillion-dollar record deal with Ministry of Sound, a British club-culture corporation that supports some of the most mainstream trance and progressive house acts around. I ask cofounder Casey Spooner to describe the politics of their work. "It seems that what we're doing has some political implication, but I can't figure it out," he tells me over the phone from New York. "It has something to do with corporate culture. But as you know, we are sleeping with the enemy now. But it's under control. I'm not getting fucked – I'm fucking them."

Gotcha.

Comparatively speaking

A few New Yorkers I contacted for this piece insist that the electro scene is racially mixed – well, sort of, anyway. But in San Francisco that claim is difficult to make. Aside from Off the Hook and Exact Science events, parties that dig deep into original electro, most of the electro-punk parties I've attended have been almost entirely white, which underscores the notion that electro-punk is truly an extension of the rock scene. Unsurprisingly, not everyone's buying the electro-punk trend.

"It's a safe way for a predominantly white audience to experience hip-hop," says Chris Kahuna of weekly hip-hop party True Skool. "They won't go to a hip-hop club, although the style has a lot in common with hip-hop. But I guess they need it – it introduces them to something in a safe environment to something that we already love. Basically, they're taking black music, watering it down, and repackaging it to a white audience."

Tee feels that his crowds are slightly mixed, and he's unapologetic about who's benefiting most – a stance few white Californians are prepared to take. "There hasn't been much of a voice for white music in the recent past," he says. "Emo isn't going to cover the whole spectrum, and there's a lot of funky influence at play. Whites have been very underrepresented in pop. There's been so much R&B and rap, but there hasn't been a voice of disaffected white youth since grunge." Does this make Spooner the new Kurt Cobain? I have a feeling Cobain would be puking in his grave.

Other DJs feel that the kitschy aspect of electro-punk undermines the quality of the music. Jeffrodesiac, a local DJ and member of the Robotronik act, emerged from the indie and punk scenes, but he prefers the older tunes and regards the electro-punk hype with a large helping of distrust. "When you're involving irony, there's going to be a mediocre level to what you're doing," he says. "And that's why I like the older shit. You're not thinking how 'ironic' it is. It just sounds good."

Girl power

Still, the electro scene has more to offer dance music than a punky kick in the ass: a strong hit of feminism is one of its finest attributes. Women's relative invisibility in dance music production is shameful and will surely be a mark on its legacy in the years to come. The dance industry has failed to generate substantial amounts of female role models – female singers are simply not enough, particularly when they rarely get credit for their contributions. It's still just Kings of Tomorrow; it's still just Masters at Work. Surely women play records, promote events, and run P.R. companies, and although these contributions keep the infrastructure moving, a record with your name on it is what goes down in history.

Women have a high profile in the new electro movement from a production and singing standpoint. In fact, one might argue that with acts like Adult. (featuring Nicola Kuperus), Miss Kittin, Peaches, Chicks on Speed, and Ladytron, women are taking the lead. Not only are these females holding down the fort, they're also cheeky enough to rebuke the pop image of the perky, perfect girl.

"I was really happy to see that Miss Kittin wasn't a size three," says Phoenix Perry, who, along with Brian Jackson, plays in synth pop band Memory Systems and promotes Synth, an event that highlights local and out-of-town electro, techno, and experimental acts. "She's at least a size eight; she's a normal woman. That there are women like Peaches, who doesn't shave her underarms, is pretty inspiring. Social awareness had vanished. It had become chic not to care. And electro is really in-your-face."

"It's been really nice, as a girl DJ or promoter, and not having had respect for a long time," Fake promoter Jenny says. "People are starting to realize that if a girl is involved, she's not just the door girl or the helper. There are a lot of strong, vocal women that are very feminist-based. They have issues they're putting out there."

Enjoyment 101

Even though many indie kids don't seem to be feeling the dance, there's a sense that in time, the indie and dance scenes will more comfortably coalesce – and why the fuck not? "This is a fresh incarnation of the music," DJ-journalist Orr says. "To go to a party and stand with the hip-hop kids, indie kids, and dance kids, that's what I'd like to see happening. This is a new fusion that throws a gauntlet down to say that we should all work together and create a dialogue not just between continents but between people who live in the same fucking town."

You don't have to be a genius to see that the dance scene is suffering from a bad case of boredom. Parties are dropping off by the week, and the exclusive, underground folks seem exhausted by seeing one another at the same events, where they're not generating any new sense of excitement. And while they may complain that the electro-punk kids don't know their history – something I heard constantly while researching this piece – the older dance folks seem to have forgotten that historical knowledge plays no role when you're falling in love for the very first time. Perhaps those who really care should go ahead and start up a tired-raver Ph.D. program at Stanford. Music generates its own truth at the moment it's played; education comes later on down the road. Maybe the electro-punk kids are just chasing a trend, but no one can tell me that the joy on their faces at Fake or Off the Hook is contrived.