Friday Cheese: I think we should see other people April 27, 2012
When I found techno, it was like a secret musical world. Hyper-fast trends and changes rippled through, mutating into little subgenres that shared characteristics, and would shoot little packets of loops and hooks back and forth at each other, mutating them slightly. And it was really cool to actually watch it happen in front of me - it's exactly that sort of buzz that makes people want to get in on the ground floor of something stylistic, because you get to be there as it continues to happen.
Of course for me, there was a fair bit of rose-colored-glasses-gazing. I read about the scene and happenings and all the breathless and self-reverential hype. I thought it was going to be the soundtrack to the brave new world that people like William Gibson were writing about - because hey, even if the arc of civilization as we saw it in the 90's continued into the inevitable atavistic filth-pile that seemed to be the logical end for all our communal desires and self-destructive aspects, at least we'd have sweet-sweet technology to escape into.
Eventually, I, along with a lot of other people realized that the way computers and computing worked would not lead us into glorious, glittering cyberspace full of hyper-idealized avatars. And raves and ravers...
Well, they were just the same hedonistic pleasure-seeking club-scenesters of yesteryear, except they could also double as traffic safety infrastructure in a pinch (not that there's anything wrong with that).
Still, it's hard when you have your first breakup with your first future-world crush. And even though I found my nerdy, shy ass being dragged to goth clubs at the time, and I started enjoying more and more industrial music (which has its own brand of hilarious cheese), I never let go of my love of anything that approximated cheesy techno. Of course, industrial music has plenty of cross-over acts at the time that lined up perfectly - I mean hey, Sheep On Drugs, amirite? And in that vein - Cubanate.
Even factoring in the natural hatred/distrust of anyone in the goth/industrial scene towards anything that might even smell slightly like techno/rave, I seemed to be the only person I knew that liked Cubanate. I mean, we're not talking deep artistic statements here, so I know it's empty-calorie industrial dance music, but c'mon - sometimes you want your music without caloric lyrical angst. It's empty fun, and plus, there's a blank space to project your own actual feelings and desires onto it when there are either no lyrics, or lyrics so devoid of meaning that they might as well be verbal plasticine. And empty it was... and delicious, too...
