re. Autumn Miller, “Cinema” (dubstep), youtu.be/wBTr_Yfo1bI
[size=125]The machine is breaking down? Broken robots – The tight and unified coreography of the Rockettes girls chorus-line folded… exploded… and atomized. Replaced by a free-style solo dancer… Animated by a reanimated Pomo scrap heap of digital sounds… She mimes the irregular movement of short-circuiting droids going toward disassembly. Like the huge machines of the Soviet and American industrial periods, there is high high energy, and big amounts of power – a high energy particle spins off – now reified into something compact and thin like the new iPod – The latest, newest… she is only ten years old. This is not chaos… it’s just a pattern you are never going to see again. Replay –[/size]
“The Frankfurt School began to analyze mass culture, the state, reactionary sexual mores, and even philosophy with regard to their effects on consciousness. Highlighting how everyday artifacts illuminate the character of society and the cultural trends of an epoch quickly proved of particular interest for its members and associates. Critical theory sought to make good on the injunction of the young Marx and engage in a “ruthless critique of everything existing.” Its leading representatives insisted that the whole could be seen in the particular and the particular reflected the whole. “The Mass Ornament” (1927) by Siegfried Kracauer, for example, noted how the geometric patterns and highly orchestrated movements of a dance troupe known as the Tiller Girls (anticipating the Rockettes of Radio City Music Hall) reflected the regulation of audiences and the loss of individuality in mass society.”
[size=75]Critical Theory - A Very Short Introduction, Stephen Eric Bronner[/size]
“Dubstep is a genre of electronic dance music that originated in South London, England. It’s overall sound is “tightly coiled productions with overwhelming bass lines and reverberant drum patterns, clipped samples, and occasional vocals”. The earliest dubstep releases date back to 1998 and were darker, more experimental … Towards the end of the decade the genre started to become more commercially successful in the UK. Producers also began to fuse elements of the original dubstep sound with other influences, creating fusion genres including the slower and more experimental post-dubstep, and the harsher, electro house and heavy metal influenced brostep, the latter of which greatly contributed to dubstep’s rising mainstream popularity in the United States.”
[size=75]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dubstep[/size]
“Skrillex, who seemingly appeared overnight, is so huge YouTube will probably make you sit through a Procter & Gamble ad for VapoRub or a digital pregnancy test before you can watch his excellent video. … Skrillex is a pop star that’s never had his music played on commercial radio or television. Purists of the dubstep genre, of course, hate him. They say he looks like a jackass and his music lacks subtlety; that it’s too in your face. His sound has petulantly been labeled Brostep — the connotation being that only jockish idiots and frat boys listen to it.”
[size=75]http://www.whatsupmann.com/2011/12/skrillex-dubstep-brostep/[/size]
"The Soviet’s national dance, the “Machine,” which is held perfectly to express the gospel discovered by Karl Marx and expounded by Lenisn, is expected to become popular here. … Now the philosophy of Bolshevism has given England something which will go beyond even the black bottom and the multitudinous jazz incarnadine. … Moscow, to keep pace witht he present mechanical age produced the “Machine”. According to information supplied by local dancing-masters, the “Machine” is a creation in which the arms, legs and body copy as nearly as possible the graeful movements of a piston while the feet stamp out the rhythmic beats of a hammer. … A piston has it’s uses but it lacks the joie de vivre. “That the Bolshevik directorate should want the human race to be as like machines as possible is required of them by their theories. But it is not a temptation to which the natural man will succumb. Other writers have declared that the dance will be a noteworthy improvment on the ugliness of the black bottom and the Charleston.”
[size=75]The Miami News - May 15, 1927, Soviet Russian Machine Dance Proves Popular[/size]
“Nikolai Foregger, an avant-garde Soviet choreographer of the 1920’s. … Foregger’s name crops up occasionally with the mention of the ‘‘machine dances’’ that spread throughout the dance world by the 1930’s. Most of his experiments, however, are virtually unknown outside the Soviet Union… Foregger went one step further. His choreography included acrobatics and physical culture - the marks of the healthy new Soviet man - but they also identified the human body with the machine. It was the machine as liberator, not as enslaver. The technology of the future, with its urban rhythms, symbolized the human future. … Foregger did it first. His ‘‘Machine Dance No. 76A’’ of 1923 to the Mossolov score was a five-minute reconstruction…”
[size=75]The NewYork Times, January 18, 1985, THE STAGE: RUSSIAN-INSPIRED CABARET, Anna Kisselgoff[/size]