Just before the end of the year, Pitchfork retweeted an old column of mine from 2015 about Italo with the subhed of most “uncool” genre ever. Nevermind that the word “uncool” doesn’t appear in my love letter to Italo, it stirred up all these memes from wankers people trying to ratio the tweet who had clearly never read the piece nor heard Italo until two years ago but couldn’t help publicly posting their ignorance. (And cheers to a former employer for the clickbait-y engagement.) I lament the loss of reading comprehension, but I also hate the loss of nuance that accompanies such knee-jerk responses that defines our online engagement.
So before every other creative endeavor turns into Pitchfork regurgitated clickbait and gets erased from history, thought I should put up links to my old dance music column, Electric Fling (fun trivia, the original column name was Machine Vibes, but there was another column there with “machine” in the title, so I named it after –yes– an old Italo track by Stefano Breda). Without further ado:
Mister Sunday’s Neverending Dance Party
Ambient Music’s Alternate Realities
Electronic Warfare: The Political Legacy of Detroit Techno
Let Me Be Your Radio: The Bizarro Universe of Italo
Western Dance Music’s Ongoing Dialogue with Africa
Constant Vacation: Inside Amsterdam’s Dance Scene
The Next Revolución: Adventures in Modern Mexican Dance Music
andy beta 