Dance Floor To ‘First Floor: Shawn Reynaldo Grapples With Electronic Musics Slippery Culture
Electronic dance music has been experiencing a constant nostalgia crisis since at least the 1990s. On the one hand, it's a simple matter of antiquity, the "old man shouting at the clouds" syndrome, where the landscape was always better, and today's children are not. I don't know real music, people become zombies on the dance floor, whatever. I refer to all those invoices, etc., etc., to some extent. On the other hand, on the more daring side, there are actual works that show how a predominantly black queer art form has been hijacked (and often almost destroyed) by white heterosexual entrepreneurs. We continue to uncover the stories of the women behind the rise of techno music, its queer roots, forgotten black innovators, and even how the musical experimentation that ignited the scene was ultimately defined by queer clashes.
Everything is over, but now ? No one documents what "the industry" is doing and what dance music looks like now than freelance journalist (and former San Francisco DJ and party promoter) Sean Rinaldo at the Ground Floor Info newsletter.
With missions like "Electronic music is getting old", "The decline of online DJ sets", "Tackling pop shame", "Turn off your music on Spotify" and "The album you're making could be a colossal waste of time". " and his beloved "Skrillex's Green Day and Dance Music's American Idiot Moment," Rinaldo takes an often tense and always compelling look at the current state of the globalized cultural dance floor. Research, statistics, and quotes from experts and greats. You'll find music news, news suggestions, your favorite you're basically on the ground floor as you enjoy the music and stage with songs and great interviews.
Now Rinaldo has expanded and collected some of his most provocative news articles into a beautiful book, First Floor: Reflections on Electronic Music Culture, Vol. 1 (Velocity Press) – Saturday the 30th from 3pm to 6pm at Public Affairs, SF appears to sign books and talk about her work with local techno hero Christina Chatfield. The event will be a great comeback. Reynaldo has been based in Barcelona for several years, and Public Works has been the scene of some of his most famous concerts, including an epic 28-hour farewell in 2015, making him one of the boldest achievements of the San Francisco scene.
Rinaldo is also an accomplished music journalist and editor. He knows what he's talking about in an article like The Collapsed Palaces of Electronic Music Media, who first hired me to write about the queer scene at XLR8R and who I later worked with at Red. Paul Academy of Music before his sad and sudden death. I spoke to him via email late at night about his project and its implications.
There are 48 hills flying here with one big hill . Why did you write a book? It's one of the more thoughtful and engaging newsletter groups out there, and very valuable to people who like to read books or hold things about music, but already have a "large audience". expresses itself through a newsletter, ordering the idea seems a little dated. At least in a nostalgic way. Did the "book platform" offer different possibilities or a form of legitimacy that still seems valuable in our online world?
Sean Rinaldo To be honest, writing a book wasn't my idea and it wasn't on my career list. My publisher, Velocity Press, first contacted me a few years ago saying they appreciated my writing and asking if I had any ideas for a book. .” "However, at the end of last year they contacted me again and asked what I thought about turning parts of my newsletter into a book. This piqued my interest, both because most of the content had already been written and because it looked great. A way to commemorate. 2019 all the work I've done with Ground Floor since the end. The last few years have been very turbulent in the electronic music industry, and not just because of the pandemic, so it was a decent attempt to describe this period more formally.
There was also a practical element. Anyone who already subscribes to the newsletter knows that I post a lot of words every week, and I was well aware that even the most loyal ground floor followers probably missed at least some of the articles I wrote. I also knew from day one that not everyone was on the same page, so putting everything in the book is a more holistic way for new mainstream readers than digging through online archives. On a narrative level, throughout the book I've brought together pieces that cover similar territory, even though they were published years apart, so I can weave a kind of narrative that allows readers to see how some of my ideas and observations hold up. up. extra time. (After all, nothing stays the same in electronic music for long.)
What's interesting about releasing the book is seeing how deep-rooted our collective sense of what I call "formal sentimentality" is, even among self-proclaimed avant-garde people. When we print the words and put them in a book, we can't seem to help ourselves; Work immediately seems more important. I suppose a similar thing happens with vinyl music releases; It doesn't matter if the vast majority of consumers listen via streaming; Hair looks more permanent and heavier when waxed. No matter how smart and attractive the physical body is, it allows for a connection that is difficult to achieve through online content alone.
48 HILLS I got to know you quickly, first as a DJ, then as a writer and editor (thanks for hiring me), but mainly as a DJ who brought a lot of new songs and artists to San Francisco through Icee Hot and Icee. Hot: Tormenta tropical festivals and more. (Since this is your "fun hometown," I should mention that your presence was so prominent that SF Weekly ran a story about you killing off your old DJ persona when you became an artist.) How do DJ skills and promoter experience help you get a lot of ground floor writing? Obviously, you know a good song when you hear one, and getting a behind-the-scenes look at the industry will help you learn how…
Sean Rinaldo One of the things that shapes my writing (and my general outlook when it comes to electronic music) is that I've been involved with the genre since I was a teenager and have been involved with it for over 20 years. Almost every aspect of society and industry is behind music.
While most people know me as a music journalist these days, I've been a DJ (club and radio), toured a bit, played parties, managed record labels, managed radio stations (I go to KALX in Berkeley), and because of that, I. .. What I get is a deep understanding of how things work. I've dealt with shady promoters, picked up artists from the airport, signed contracts with booking agents, organized press campaigns... I could go on forever, but the important thing is not to stay in this void. The road didn't tell me what I liked and what I didn't like. Forming and sharing ideas is certainly part of my job as a journalist, especially when it comes to album reviews and music recommendations, but when I write about systemic changes in culture and industry, it becomes a "specialty" and a lifelong passion. It's been long enough for me that several generations of club kids and club standards have come and gone.
48 Hills On this basis, I think one of the most refreshing things that Ground Floor brings to electronic music journalism is an openness perhaps not found in "old school" electronic music media. I've written honestly and deeply about topics like income inequality, oversaturation, exploitation, collection depletion, the precariousness of DJ jobs, and more. Which I don't think I would have read five or ten years ago. While I've detailed some of this for major industry media outlets, such as the terrible distribution of streaming fees for DJ Mag, it's clear to me, at least as someone who runs a similar independent media enterprise, that the newsletter format and readership I've been given that freedom to support.
As Ground Floor became more important to the scene and newsletters became more popular (and Substack showed its bad side), did you feel pressure around the content you produced in terms of continuing to monetize it? :? Do you avoid sponsors or companies trying to get you to write something? Is there a ground floor for journalistic posts?
Sean Rinaldo Fortunately, I think I've established myself as someone with an independent sound, so I don't often have labels, artists, labels or anyone come to me expecting me to say or do what I'm really going to do. I'm not 100% late.
However, I certainly still get all kinds of ideas and they only increase as the size of the first floor increases, but I don't have to say that more often. It's strange to think that the media landscape has reached such a point that someone with a big campaign for an album will release a special newsletter in advance of media coverage, but there simply aren't many publications left and those that are. They increasingly rely on factors such as brand partnerships, which seriously compromise the quality of their work and their integrity with readers. There's a feeling that everything covered in the press is bought and paid for, and while that may not be true, it's true enough to undermine the legitimacy of music journalism, and that's a shame.
Fortunately, they saved me on the first floor. No ads, no sponsors, and I think it's pretty obvious that I write about what I want, but at the same time, I'm afraid to put out newsletters as the savior of something. When I started the newsletter (even the name First Floor already existed as a radio show a few years ago), I was lucky enough to be a well-established journalist, so I wasn't starting from scratch. Even then, building a paid audience was very difficult and time-consuming. Unfortunately, we've reached a point where most people simply don't want to pay for media and will continue to consume free, low-quality content rather than pay for better work that they find more useful.
First Floor is one of the best music-focused newsletters on the entire Substack platform, but I'm still at a point where less than 10% of the total subscriber base opts for a paid subscription. Fortunately for me, I live a modest lifestyle, and being in Barcelona instead of an expensive hub like San Francisco certainly helps, but I wouldn't call what I do easy. It's a model that can be replicated for anyone, and certainly not one that can support the right media ecosystem at a macro level.
What I really like about 48 HILLS Ground Floor is that you appeal to your evolving tastes in a fast-changing and decidedly adaptable scene, which is very important as we and the music grow. (In fact, the book opens with a provocative essay chapter titled “Electronic Music Comes of Age.”) For example, your very honest struggle with the contemporary role of pop music in techno music and how it is relentlessly who you are; Pop made me stand up and applaud as one of a generation that believed selling out meant instant death, like the direct comparison between Skrillex and Green Day, your honest response to the music, and then your reevaluation of your performance brackets. What are you currently thinking about or have been thinking about a lot lately in terms of your attitude towards techno?
Techno , and dance music in general, has never been a static genre, especially given the continuing high standard of nightlife, and the pandemic has created a unique 'before and after' cultural dichotomy that is already shining brightly. Otherwise some radical changes will happen gradually. The past few years have seen a real generational shift, and the fact that COVID-19 has inadvertently forced many veteran clubbers into a kind of "early retirement" from nightlife has left a huge void that has thankfully been filled. Their own ideas: Our own ideas are complete. How should culture continue? Many of these ideas resonated with those who remember the "old" days, whether discussing Skrillex at Berghain or Britney Spears remixes and Vengaboys tracks being spun by Tastemaker-approved DJs.
Add to that the rise of social media and video streaming, and a culture that once functioned almost entirely offline can now sometimes be seen as an extension of the influence economy. Personally, I don't like these things, but at the same time, if I get angry and allow myself to constantly go into a flow of "these kids are annoying", I will stop making a meaningful contribution to the world's culture. So I've spent a lot of time over the last few years separating what I personally love about dance music from what I find creatively and culturally interesting. This means asking a lot of questions. Why do DJs play pop music montages and what does this say about the evolution of music consumption in the streaming era? Is there some kind of subversive commercial sound that "cool" people in hard "underground" spaces use to make fun of? How has the decline of music media and other "censorship" institutions affected this phenomenon? What's happening in dance music is driven by systemic changes in society, media, and technology, and even if the music itself sometimes eludes me, I'm really fascinated by the idea of connecting the dots and seeing how it all connects. To be angry
48 Hills discusses the dark origins of techno at various points throughout the book. As non-Black writers covering Black music forms, how do you think we should acknowledge our debt to Black artists (and writers) and pave the way for equality and compensation in the industry?
Sean Rinaldo: The most important thing journalists can do is repeat (and find new) stories about the black, brown, and queer origins of this music. I have to admit, there have been times in my career when I've seen the 1,000th article about the Belleville Trio and thought to myself, "Yeah! Absolutely." This rule may sound familiar to those who know it, but we are a minority, especially in countries like the United States, who have never recorded this music from our society.
It's crazy that dance music is still considered a European phenomenon to many Americans, but the idea has been around for decades; There was the "electronica" boom in the late 1990s and electronic dance music a decade later, and even today most of the world's top DJs and electronic music artists are still white Europeans. All you have to do is get the money you need (for example) furniture, furniture, furniture, furniture and tools and, as a result, get a mortgage, loan Hide:
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