MERKER.TV – set jet
(CD – Konkord)
“set jet” was the last
record that dropped into Cracked HQ in 2008 and it warmed up the rooms quite
quickly. With better, tighter production and mastering by Patrick Pulsinger
– who even paved the way to the dancefloor for avant-noiserockers Bulbul – the
groove-factor has been pushed way higher than on their four song demo
from about a year and a half ago. The rehearsal room atmosphere has
vanished, the friends doing it for fun factor is lower, this CD is a premium
finished product! It is ten songs of grooving and hip-shaking funky
dance-music with wide variety and speckles of hip hop, techno and some irony
and in it. As they sing on the re-recorded opening track “supa”: “we
are superdeep, we are supertight, because we stay up all night.”
Dancefloor music and I have a
strange hate-hate-relationship. Usually I hate it and I also hate most of
what comes along with it. Every year or two there is a great song, artist or
album that for some reason, usually unknown to me, strikes something with
me. I already confessed to Justin Timberlake but also “Can’t get you out
of my head” was great. But most of it is just plainly shitty and stupid.
If it weren’t for the scantily clad girls in the videos I wouldn’t know
anything about dancemusic at all. (Okay, probably those dance scenes from
“Madagascar”…) But those videos sometimes keep me going when I am on
the running machine in the gym for another ten or fifteen minutes. Thank you
music television. Hey, sometimes it is all about the feeling of the moment,
about fun and enjoying life and nothing deeper. But if it gets too flat then
it starts to annoy me.
Some of that is true for some
of the songs on “set jet” as well. For instance, “St. Tropez” has
the same stupid beat and singing during the verses that Right Said Fred
(remember: “I’m too sexy for my shirt…” ad nauseatum) had. But the
lyrics are about the sexism, superficiality and stupidity of that kind of
fashion lifestyle that is pushed by glossy celebrity magazines and tv-shows
such as “XY’s next top model”. And the chorus is so cheesy I am
constantly reconciled with the song. Another instance is the track
“cortison”, where the singer first sings that he is not interested in
“sexy-shaped girls” because that “is not his destiny”. But then it
is all about “moovy-groovy” and what does “I loves my cortison”
mean? But that song has a cool funky drum roll rarely heard in such a
context.
By the way, who out there
thinks that Heidi Klum is really sexy? I mean in an interesting way? Yes,
any good looking girl in the right setting will look great, but how many
people are that – a million? And how many people are there who start
getting nauseous when the polished über-girl face of Heidi comes up on the
screen trying to sell cheap shower gel or hamburgers with her bright smile?
I could go on ranting about modern media forming the minds of ten year old
girls to believe that looking like Heidi Klum is sexy and that porno is a
positice adjective, but I’ll try for something more intelligent than that
instead.
There is a certain danger in
taking a superficial genre such as dancefloor music and playing an irony
game with it by overdoing and superinflating all its core ingredients.
Because the core fans and emulators of that lifestyle are unable to see the
irony. The bigger, the better, even if it gets completely stupid. And disco
has been the core genre of overdoing things. Do you remember the bikini
babes that Das Bo had in his “Bass” video? Sure you do. What a great
moment when he turned up on some charts show or else with two dancers in
bikinis who had about 170 kg each. That kind of irony turned itself out into
aggression and disgust with the mainstream crowd, but I cheered him on.
