Electroclash haters call it music-as-fashion or fashion-as-music, which is, like, so dumb, cuz it's better than music-as-academics (how the rockists get down) or music-as-testimonial (the one place where 50 Cent and Elliott Smith meet) or music-as-fill-in-the-blank. Maybe the charge gets levied because music is 'sposed to be a personal thing (auterism at its core) and fashion's 'sposed to be a masses thing (DKNYism at its core) so the intersection of the two sets off Adorno's oil-and-water high-low kulchur alarm bells and the rock fans go running for their Stones T-shirts (REAL music as fashion). In any event, music and fashion are each way more interesting communally — as in reactions of others and how those are responded to — than as Smithsonian pieces to be pondered and studied and zzzzzzzzzzzzz.
Anyway, I was shopping here in New York the other day, and in upscale-but-not-really clothing shop Club Monaco what should be playing but fucking Dynasty! No big deal, right, cuz clothing stores, car commercials and Europe are the last refuges for b-level house and electro music. (The house remix of Justin Timberlake's "Cry Me a River" that was dominating Gap playlists a few months back? Weak!) And yet people were DANCING IN THE STORE to the EP's leadoff cut, "Amy's Song," shimmying from one overpriced fall fashion to another as the staccato pulses relentlessly moved up the scale. (Why dance Muzak gets played in clothing stores — cuz beat-driven music's the last frontier of public self-gratification, which in the U.S. equals BUYBUYBUYBUYBUYBUY! Hire a hipster DJ for the Union Square Diesel store and — voila! — SALES ARE UPUPUP!) And so yeah, the Dynasty song just wasn't digging its background shopping-music role, thus the belching keyboards worked into legs, hips, necks, fingers, and the place — filled with clothes the three Dynasty gals wouldn't mow their yards in — was bumping!
Bumping like Dynasty's self-titled debut EP, which FischerSpoonfeeds electro tropes like monotone vox, simple looping basslines, hi-hat happy beats and linear melodies, but with an irresistibly snot slant. So when Dynasty feminizes Gang of Four's "I Love a Man in a Uniform" with "Uniform Lust" ("Fireman's vest/ Leave those on/ Take off the rest," they snarl with robotic desire) you curse your non-firefighting ways. And when singer Jibz Cameron says in "Wargasm" she wants to fuck the way your grandma might suggest playing Boggle, while a lead-hipped rhythm stumbles around her, it's still a coital anthem. Which equals personality-as-music or music-as-personality, and hurrah for that.
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