Marcel Dettmann and the Return of Maximal Techno

I was putting off writing an entry on Marcel Dettmann’s appearance at last Friday’s Bunker party at Brooklyn’s Public Assembly, figuring that a recording would soon become available as the next installment in the Bunker’s excellent podcast series. However, the recent appearance of what promises to be an epic five hour set from Jus-Ed makes it suddenly clear to me that these podcasts are delayed by about a month. I hate to add to the anticipation for those of you who have already been impatiently awaiting Dettmann’s set, but let me get this out of the way: you will not be disappointed. In the meantime, you might as well get your house on for a month with Jus-Ed--I sure will.

I’d never been to a Bunker party before, and I was shocked (in a good way, of course) to see such a draw for house and techno in Brooklyn--some regulars told me this was the biggest crowd they had seen yet. The pumping, high-energy vibe that opener Derek Plaslaiko had going in the back room got the night started out just fine, and the floor was already full, but my crew was more drawn to the subtle-but-freaky funk of Eric Cloutier’s set in the smaller front room. I mean, my man put on “Psychotic Photosynthesis” right when we walked in the door, and proceeded to fully live up to that promising start. No small feat. As those of you who have followed his recorded mixes know, this guy is someone to watch.

The fact is, however, that the size of the crowd and the general sense of excitement was due to the headliner--as far as I know (though I could be wrong), this was his first American appearance. I don’t really need to add to the hype surrounding not only Dettmann, but the whole OstGut/Berghain/Panorama axis of Berlin techno that has been taking dance music by storm in the past year or so. Chris Hobson’s review at Resident Advisor of Dettmann’s first commercially released mix typifies the eager praise the whole outfit has been getting:

Chances are we’ll look back at Berghain 02 as a defining movement when techno got out of that locked groove, and started moving forward again.

If I were Marcel Dettmann, this kind of talk would make me very nervous. But Dettmann showed no trace of nerves Friday night; he may not have executed flawless mixes all night (what great DJ does?) but he presented his set with complete conviction.

The reason this is worth caring about is because what he presents does indeed break away from the “locked groove” of today’s dance music. My use of the rather obvious term “maximal techno” is, of course, a simple inversion of “minimal techno,” but the difference between what Dettmann does and what minimal techno has been doing is complex.

In an interview, Dettmann describes the music he plays as “futuristic, anarchic, uncompromising,” with “character, soul and a kind of hypnotic, industrial feeling,” while maintaining “clarity, deepness, and simplicity.” These words could easily be empty platitudes, but in Dettmann’s case, this is pretty much exactly what he sounds like.

Let me put it another way. In conversation with the Berghain’s enigmatic owner, “Michael,” Philip Sherbune arrived at a compelling idea: the music associated with the OstGut label and the Bergain club is nearly a sonic equivalent of the Berghain’s space itself. As Sherburne writes,

Housed in a disused power plant, the Berghain complex is an intimidating, post-industrial behemoth boasting a cavernous main room; the more intimate Panoramabar upstairs; cement floors, ceiling, walls and staircases; and dark, meandering passageways and cubbyholes, which unlike their counterparts in the United States, offer zones of total autonomy.

If you’ve heard one of the several recorded sets by Dettmann, you’ll know what I’m getting at. In this musical world, BPMs are quick, but not overwhelmingly so, and beats are simultaneously unrelentingly hard and rhythmically fluid. Sounds are almost exclusively synth-based. You will probably never hear a vocal house track from Dettmann, but words are not limited to pseudo-mystical commandments issuing from the pitched-down voice of the God of Mnml; instead voices and instruments make allusive, arresting appearances. A breakdown is not a call for lighters-in-the-air swayage; it’s a moment of rupture, an explosive overflow of complexity and intensity.

Beyond stylistic descriptions, what’s especially critical in Dettmann’s conception is a careful interpretation of dance music’s history. In a great interview, on Beatportal of all places, he emphasizes this aspect of his approach:

For me it was the same--when I listened to pop music for the first time, I listened to Depeche Mode and I used to think, “what did they do before?” So I think it’s important to know what comes before, to understand it.

I listen to records that came out in the late ‘80s--Chicago stuff, Detroit stuff, so many fucking great records that I never listened to before--and when I find some artists that I’m really interested in, I want to hear all their stuff.

I think it’s really important to know where it comes from, the whole techno music stuff--is it Kraftwerk, is it funk, jazz stuff? I think it’s good to know.

Dettmann cites Robert Hood, Jeff Mills, and Joey Beltram as his “techno heroes.” It’s worth considering the relationship between the style(s) these figures represent and what is now called “minimal.” Philip Sherburne has suggested that there was some kind of bifurcation in dance music in the late nineties, with Detroit techno persistently “working within the margins of traditional song form,” while European producers began to make “an art out of producing microscopic variations on a single rhythmic theme.” He goes on to suggest that this new minimalism took two approaches: skeletalism, “the imperative to carve everything inessential from dance music’s pulse, leaving only enough embellishment (syncopation, tone color, effects) to merit the variation,” and massification, which “attempts to create extreme densities with a relative paucity of sonic elements.”

On the other hand, Robert Hood’s minimal blueprint on records like Minimal Nation (a favorite of Dettmann’s) isn’t “traditional song form,” but it doesn’t seem to me to fit this rubric either. His tracks, from earliest to latest, are far from the loop-obsession of post-Hawtin minimal, and they are more than just an unchanging framework for the superimposition of sound effects. Hood’s tracks are infused with a developmental flux within the groove itself, and often incorporate interruptions of voice or melody into an unpredictable structure.

In that same Beatportal interview, Dettmann connects the genealogy he traces directly to the music he plays and produces:

What I think is that this kind of techno music was always there for me. And for so many people, some young people, they aren’t growing up with this kind of music, so when they discovered this kind of classic flavored techno, the raw stuff, they don’t know it before. They only listened to some minimal stuff before, so they think “Oh, that’s new…”

That’s not new! It’s the classic way of techno for me. For me it exists the whole time, since I first listened to techno.

This isn’t just talk; Dettmann’s Berghain mix includes (somewhat controversially) Risqué Rhythum Team’s 1986 Chicago house record “The Jacking Zone” and Kevin Saunderson’s “Just Want Another Chance.” Last Friday he dropped Armando’s acid classic “Land of Confusion” near the end of his set, and yes, it brought the motherfucking house down.

It’s safe to say that the entire OstGut/Berghain/Panorama collective makes a similar effort to historicize their work; think of the wistful spoken interlude in Shed’s Shedding the Past on “the feeling of the intensity and purity of club and rave in the early days,” or hell, just listen to the Detroit-influenced harmonies of his productions (or check out this housey mix on mnml ssgs). The folks upstairs at Panorama, including Cassy and Steffi holding it down for the ladies, have consistently made room for old-schoolers Moodymann, Theo Parrish, Shake, Rick Wade, Daniel Bell, and so on (you've got to hear Steffi's live set here).

Remarkably, this “defining movement” in techno, this “move forward,” is really a throwback of sorts, a return to the origin points of house and techno. But this is only a regression in the sense that the songs of the Sex Pistols and the Ramones were retrograde imitations of Chuck Berry and the Ronettes. In reality, just as punk restructured rock music from the ground up, recalibrating its approaches and effects to maintain only its most salient features, the new maximal techno brings us back to zero.

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Musical Eugenics

Since the sixties, the Album-artwork-commodity (on LP, cassette, CD) has become something like Format as Big Other. You must not only listen to every song, in order, says the Media Father, you must like them all. Even “She’s Leaving Home.” Its primary injunction: NEVER SKIP.

That this plays into both high-modernist Art-capital-“A” ideology and the demands of the market should come as no surprise--can anyone really argue there’s a difference anymore? But what is equally important is its technological determination. This Idolator post laments the conflation of music criticism with reporting on technology, but is that really something new? When critics talk about an album’s cohesiveness it’s as much a discourse on the demands of a format as it is on “Art.” In the mp3 era, the Album’s hegemony begins to dissipate, leaving us in a single-based musical environment more like the years before the 12-inch record.

The question is, what replaces the Album, with radio all but outmoded and intangible media ubiquitous? Consumer challenges to the Album are not entirely new either. Consider the opening paragraphs of John Corbett’s brilliant book Extended Play:

At last, I have a CD machine with shuffle mode. It’s a miraculous button, “shuffle.” In an instant it does away with the logic behind decades of music industry packaging, the kind of logic that works with A-sides and B-sides (the soon-to-be-obscure domain of records and tapes), the same logic that sequences a release in a particular way so that cuts are preceded and followed by appropriate others. For instance, think about how many hit singles are positioned as the first cut on the second side of an album; that’s well known as the LP sweet-spot. In the place of this sequential logic, shuffle offers a random number generator, an exciting turn of events. Now a disc can renew itself virtually every time it’s played, putting together unforeseeable combinations, segues, connections, and leaps of faith.

As I see it, this is one of the great possibilities of musical postmodernity. In the process of shuffling, the activity of making connections and creating meaning is somehow thrust back into the lap of the listener. Naturally, shuffle mode doesn’t eradicate the old logic; more often than not, a listener will probably just press “play” and let the disc run its course. But that’s part and parcel of the postmodern: it makes a multitude of systems possible. At its worst, postmodernism manifests itself as an empty form of eclecticism in which, as Jean-Françcois Lyotard suggests, the bottom line is still the buck. At its best, the postmodern is about the opening up of options, the acceptance of incompatibility, the irreducibility of all forms of discourse to the logic of one.

Corbett’s (pre-Napster) enthusiasm for a function that I suspect is rarely used may seem quaint, but his insight into its potential, as some kind of digital-sonic Exquisite Corpse game, is prophetic. The very channels we necessarily use to access music today often don’t even allow us to experience the intended form of content at all (being able to download only half the tracks on a CD, or hear a couple on youtube, or catch some on television, through a blog, etc.). The resulting jumble forces us into being much more active consumers than a bunch of stoner rock fans in the mid-70’s sitting around listening to Pink Floyd’s entire oeuvre in chronological order.

A decidedly not random rejection of the Album’s sanctity is the homemade mix, a possibility that’s been around since the cassette tape, and has been made many times simpler with personal computers. Not to get all Nick Hornby here, but for many music people, making a mix CD/tape is a meticulous, deeply personal process, and receiving one is a profound pleasure. I can’t see any reason to be cynical about it.

On the other hand, the mix form has now evolved into an online application that’s like something out of The Matrix: Pandora Radio. According to their FAQ, Pandora is “a music discovery service designed to help you enjoy music you already know, and to help you discover new music you'll love.”

There’s a bit more to it than that. Apparently they use “vectors,” “complex mathematical algorithms,” and “distance functions” to recommend music to listeners based on a single artist or song selection, employing a system that Pandora founders Tim Westergren, Will Glaser, and John Kraft call the “Music Genome Project”: a list of “attributes” that attempt to quantify and categorize everything about all music. Westergren is quoted in this article in business journal Fast Company on the initial idea for his venture:

"I thought, if I could do a kind of Myers-Briggs [personality map] for music and tell people what songs they'd probably like based on musical similarities, the Internet could solve the problem of access," Westergren recalls. "It would be like what eBay did for pink flamingos."

Pandora’s self-described points of reference--genetics and psychology--make it difficult not to see its aim as manipulative in some grand conspiratorial way. Who knows why they thought it was a good idea to name their service after the mythical figure responsible for all the disease in the world, but as long as they were going for the whole revealingly disconcerting thing, “Panopticon” might have been more to the point.

An explanatory page sums up Pandora’s analytic method:

Together we set out to capture the essence of music at the most fundamental level. We ended up assembling literally hundreds of musical attributes or "genes" into a very large Music Genome. Taken together these genes capture the unique and magical musical identity of a song--everything from melody, harmony and rhythm, to instrumentation, orchestration, arrangement, lyrics, and of course the rich world of singing and vocal harmony. It's not about what a band looks like, or what genre they supposedly belong to, or about who buys their records--it's about what each individual song sounds like.

Never mind the reductive, self-righteous dismissal of affiliation, context, and reception; the danger runs deeper than that. Pandora can tell you that the Meat Puppets and Mötley Crüe both possess “Basic Rock Song Structure” and “Dirty Electric Guitar Riffs,” while completely missing the point, but it can’t tell you what Mobb Deep shares with Merle Haggard. You know the story about how Brian Wilson first heard “Be My Baby” while driving, and became so enraptured he had to swerve over to the side of the road, fearing he’d crash his car? It’s safe to say that this kind of experience is impossible on Pandora. These are not minor complaints.

In that same Fast Company article, we’re treated to a peek into Pandora’s “boiler room”:

There, five days a week, 32 music-addicted miners pick apart stack after stack of CDs, analyzing each track against a digitized checklist of characteristics. They are all professional musicians--most moonlight in Bay Area bands--and all have studied music theory and been put through an initial 40-hour genome training session (there are training updates as new genomes launch).

Wow, sounds kind of like that second Indiana Jones movie. You know, the one that sucked.

Pandora doesn’t just yank the still-beating heart out of the chest of the listening public, it also cages us in and lowers us down a fiery pit of consumer obligation. You may not be able to repeat a track, but you can definitely buy it instantly on Amazon or iTunes. In the end, we’re left with a dazzlingly naked instance of the most sinister machinations of the culture industry, tricking us into thinking it liberates us through choice when in reality it restricts us by choosing in advance. This is something a smart theorist called repressive desublimation, and a smarter theorist called placebo syndrome.

Technology is not just a part of culture, it is culture. That’s why something like Pandora isn’t just a benign diversion, and why media and format are worth as much critical interrogation as texts themselves.

In other words, when the syndrome is around, don’t let your guard down.

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A Resolution for Us

Hi, America. This year is supposed to be all about "change," right? Permit me one suggestion. Please change this:

There's a lot of encoded ideology in this goofy little TV spot. The point, obviously, is the binary opposition between masculine Middle American Greg and the flamboyantly effeminate European "techno twins." Ever hear the word "eurotrash," clearly the absent center of this ad's discursive world? An ugly term, as cruelly smug as the equivalent classist slurs that affluent liberal Americans use for their working-class countrymen, and as distasteful as the implicit cultural heterosexism that accompanies it here.

No one could blame Europeans if they accused us of being rather chauvinistic in our characterizations of European ravers. But I doubt they very often do, because they know that the joke is on us; indeed, the American role in the creation of dance music as a medium of cultural production, exchange, and reception is well known everywhere but America. I do not use the word "medium" rather than "genre" lightly; it's only by overlooking the DJ model of musical performance, absolutely crucial to dance music's development, that the majority of the credit for techno can be granted to Kraftwerk, for house to Italo-Disco. Besides, no disrespect to German and Italian techno ancestors, but for every Ralf and Florian there was a Larry and Fonce, for every Giorgio Moroder a George Clinton, and for all of them an Ikutaro Kakehashi--in other words, techno doesn't have a Mississippi Delta, as in a commonly drawn parallel. Its origin is international, fragmentary, and its subsequent proliferation equally so, but its historical nexus is the American midwest.

Today, it's strange that "techno" has become an umbrella term of some kind; the pummeling, invariant, obnoxiously "euphoric" sound that is too often associated with the word in the U.S.--refer to Exhibit A, above--is trance. The way most Americans use the word "techno" would be akin to calling Jack Johnson and Coldplay hardcore punk, or something. As Simon Reynolds has pointed out,

The urgent distinctions rock fans take for granted--that Pantera, Pearl Jam, and Pavment operate in separate aesthetic universes--make sense only if you're already a participant in the ongoing rock discourse. The same applies to dance music: step inside and the genre-itis begins to make sense.

What is it, exactly, about dance music that makes the majority of Americans so unwilling to step inside? Perhaps its aforementioned cosmopolitanism is irreconcilable with the widespread ideology of American exceptionalism? Perhaps its inauthentic, cyborgian subject positions are too antihumanist, too contrary to the whole "folksy" thing that the McCain/Palin campaign made scarily evident? Perhaps its anti-auratic network of exchange is too threatening to commodity reification and the spectacular model of monopoly capitalism? To be honest, none of these are entirely convincing, given American culture's complex historical engagement with all of these issues.

A frequent point of criticism of dance music by Americans--or rather, a frequent object of ridicule--is the beat that forms its foundation. The base to its superstructure, if you will (I would). By this I mean the BOOFTA or TAKA or OONCE or [INSERT ONOMATOPOEIC TRANSCRIPTION HERE] thump of the bass drum that is the rhythmic engine of house and techno. This beat is, of course, a legacy of disco, and is what has permitted the style of mixing that makes performance of this music so dynamic and exciting. What's critical about this subbeatomic division is the way it deconstructs the measure of western music, splitting it into discrete, equivalent bytes of rhythmic information. One is no longer of primary importance, nor are two and four subordinate. The new rhythm is not 4/4 but 1/1: a new musical language, with its elements running in code at a bitrate somewhere between 120 and 130. This is the sound of the information age.

So is there just something un-American about Roland, a Japanese immigrant?

Actually. Consider recently released year-end statistics on music consumption for the year. (Those of you delusional enough to think that chart music doesn't matter should report directly to David Ramsey's remarkable article on Lil' Wayne and schedule a follow-up appointment with jane dark.)

At the end of 2007, Rich Juzwiak noted the resurgence of house beats in pop and R&B, and regardless of contrarian interjections, the trend has persisted. On many key tracks of the past year, from the enjoyable (Rihanna's "Don't Stop The Music," aptly described by Juzwiak as "so housey, it might as well come with its own gay-pride float," Kanye West's magnificent "Paranoid," Ne-Yo's "Closer," even Taylor Swift's "You Belong With Me") to the ordinary (Rihanna's "Disturbia," Chris Brown's "Forever," Britney Spears's "Womanizer") to the repulsive (Katy Perry's "Hot N Cold," Coldplay's "Viva La Vida," Kevin Rudolf's "Let it Rock"), it's been time to jack. In fact, the whole of Kanye's fascinating 808's and Heartbreak--produced almost entirely with analog synths, that dystopian electro voice, and our favorite drum machine--evokes electronic music in a more reflective, domestic manner.

Let's hope these really are signs of change--something like what Nick Sylvester has speculated on in a post about Hercules and Love Affair, a potential progression in which

industry moves away from (for lack of better) rock-type commerce (event-as-spectacle, non-functional one-way products, more overhead and initial investment, fewer but bigger acts) to something like a dance-type commerce (non-spectacle events, functional decentralized and debureaucratized two-way musicmaking, less overhead and forcefed "artist development" more but smaller acts).

Author as producer, from work to text, as the O.G.'s would say.

This year, with Juan Atkin's seminal Classics compilation, his mind-blowing Deep Space album (both as Model 500), and Derrick May's potent Innovator compilation finally reissued on CD and mp3, with some of Carl Craig's greatest productions collected on his excellent Sessions mix, and with the increasing infiltration of techno sensibilities into contemporary music both "alternative" and "mainstream," there's no excuse for all the bullshit anymore.

So fuck you, Greg.

(Americans with catching up to do should check out French documentary Universal Techno [Parts 1, 2, 3, and 4], British documentary Pump Up the Volume [Parts 1, 2, and 3], and look back to this mix of American jams that deal with American themes.)

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Some Things You Can't Cover Up With Lipstick and Powder

1st Thing: This devastatingly incisive piece by Nick Sylvester and David Marx (which I came upon via Simon Reynolds), on critic's fave Greg Gillis a.k.a. GIRL TALK, the most prominent masher-upper of our time, and major list-topper of 2008. My only (slight) reservation is the concession to "Grand Wizzard Theodor" Adorno's "Grand Hotel Abyss" (to quote Georg Lukács's perceptive diss) at the concluscion; it's a brilliant incorporation of a theorist whose myopic pessimism often seems severely antiquated, but for that reason I think any references to Herr Professor Theo are worth interrogating a lot more. (Seriously though, why is it that those of us who love jazz and pop music reference Adorno more than anyone?)

Regardless, Sylvester and Marx have produced the definitive analysis of Gillis's success, and the "wildly insulting comment his Girl Talk project is making about pop music in the process."

2d Thing: One the essay's most important points, a point that is rarely noted, is that Gillis's work is pretty poorly executed. Sylvester and Marx contextualize this extensively in terms of sound art, but it's also worth contextualizing this "not-a-DJ" within the context of DJ culture, beyond where their essay stops. It brings to mind Jess Harvell's complaint, in his year-end entry on Optimo's sprawling post-punk mixes, about the reliance by dance DJ's on "the easy-to-mix 4/4 stomp of the latest identikit dance hit." Sure, dance music is as likely as any genre to sometimes seem stagnant, but Girl Talk puts things in perspective. Whereas a good dance DJ (JG Wilkes or JD Twitch of Optimo might be the most Pitchfork-friendly examples, but they're hardly the only ones with as broad a reach) carefully selects tracks and paces a set (other DJ's will know that's a hell of a lot harder than it looks in print, even when it hews closely to that so-called "identikit 4/4 stomp" that many of us love), Gillis pitch-shifts the shit out of many a sample, with the sole purpose of cramming it uncomfortably into the company of the other elements of that particular Girl Talk "song," and leans heavily on the rockist LP imperative. Presumably, the (often brilliant) mainstream pop hits sampled in Night Ripper and Feed the Animals aren't really worth taking seriously until they acquire the post-Sgt. Pepper neo-aura of the long-playing album, even if they now sound fucking stupid.

3d Thing: Saturday, July 5th, 2008: Theo Parrish at London's Plastic People, all night (which was something like six hours). When my cohorts and I arrived, Parrish was going through a typical range of disco, funk, and jazz tracks, all with seriously tricky rhythms, and all practically remixed through ceaseless EQ'ing. The set progressed into deeper and deeper terrority, at one point getting into a very percussive, acidic section much harder and techier than I had been expecting that night. It was well into the midst of this mindbending portion of the night that I suddenly heard an uncannily familiar, yet unrecognizable (at first) voice, cheerfully announcing:

Hi everybody! I'm Archie Bell of the Drells, from Houston, Texas. We don't only sing, but we dance just as good as we walk! In Houston we just started a new dance called the Tighten Up. This is the music we tighten up with.

Even though Mr. Bell (or at least his ghost) had himself informed me what track Parrish was mixing in, a track I had heard countless times on oldies radio, I was for a moment unable to place it; this time it sounded so modern, so futuristic. Later that night, we would hear Outkast's "SpottieOttieDopealicious," a Fela Kuti track, a bunch of dub reggae, and more of that obscure jazz fusion and disco that I had never heard before and may never hear again.

I wish I could share those moments with you, but the closest thing I can point to is this 1997 mix, in which Sheila E's "A Love Bizarre," one of Prince's great compositions, is heard almost entirely simultaneously with the tracks that precede and follow. The breadth of Theo Parrish's mixes goes further than that: check out this live set from 2007, which includes the B-52's, Cameo, and Yellow Magic Orchestra amidst jacking house and neo-soul. Of course, he's not the only DJ with open ears, and this approach isn't just limited to a history lesson. Dixon, Ellen Allien, and others can be heard spinning Thom Yorke tunes; this recent live set by Marcel Dettmann includes Radiohead, The Human League, Yellow Magic Orchestra again (I think), and even some jazz amidst house and techno both classic and current; Claude Vonstroke included John Coltrane's "Bahia," the a cappella of Khia's "My Neck," and the Pack's (awesome) "Vans" in his 2007 BBC Essential Mix; the sensibility of Baltimore Club and its subsequent appropriation by scenester DJ's like Diplo is entirely based on odd and abundant samples; DJ/rupture, whom Sylvester mentions in his post, incorporates not only American pop, but myriad global musics in his (seamless) mixes; hell, even post-disco DJ's Larry Levan and Ron Hardy were known to drop the Clash or Liquid Liquid or Frankie Goes to Hollywood or even Supertramp back in day.

All of these things seem something like mashups, but they're a different animal altogether. None of this is just a punch line about postmodern recontextualization, although it can certainly be called part of that too. It's about a track's material existence in the moment of its experience, the time and place it is played and heard. The repetition-compulsion Sylvester/Marx ascribe to Girl Talk's aesthetic doesn't apply; the DJ mix is about music as a phenomenological category. That's been the point of this mode of cultural production since the late seventies; though extended mashups of the Girl Talk variety are obviously something new, in some kind of way, they hardly seem necessary.

4th Thing: To conclude: a plea on behalf of a young DJ who works here in my small, pseudo-suburban college town. DJ Manic plays every weekend at the local top 40 hellhole, Indigo. For as long as I can remember, he has been pounding out the same thoroughly uninspiring hodge-podge of crunk hip-hop party jams, 70's AM-radio corporate rock anthems, vaguely alt-ish 90's nostalgia hits, and hipster electro snippets that makes up the majority of Girl Talk's albums and live shows (and yes, I have been to one). Sure, the (pretty smooth) transitions come after 30 seconds rather than 10, but it doesn't amount to anything all that different, and my (admittedly limited) experience of top 40 clubs makes clear that Manic is only one of the more talented of many DJ's with similar sensibilities. The difference? DJ Manic tops nobody's year round-up lists, and has never gotten an album out. Does this just boil down to the collective attitude of performer and audience, to whether there are smirks on their faces instead of grins? Is it fair that Girl Talk has ascended to this level of success, while DJ Manic is left playing a small club in a college town for a crowd of smug, white students who are probably only there in hopes of getting laid?

OK, never mind.

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