A NAUGHTY BIT OF CRAP

“We’re all dilletantes now.” – Tom Ewing, ‘Download This’.

"She's like [xXx] but without all the bad qualities." - Indie fan, about dilletante xXx.

I think what I like about garage is its refusal to let me not be a dilettante. I’ve been extremely wary to the point of inaction about even starting listening to garage because there is so much of it and I don’t have any idea of where to enter and I’d have no chance of catching up, keeping up. Then I realised that this was me approaching it from a rock mindset (I hesitate to use the word “rockist” because I see it increasingly used and I’m not exactly sure what it means; some form of conservatism, completism, and centralism, I think) which means that I approached it wanting my appreciation of and collection of to be complete, my appreciation of and collection of to have a center to revolve around (a canon?) and a comprehensiveness that I don’t associate with garage 'thinking'.

I suppose such a shift in mindsets was occasioned by the emergence of dance (note: a genre of dance is Album Dance) but that has completely passed me by as of yet. Coming from indie leanings one of the main values it covets is integrity: integrity of soul / spirit / attitude, integrity of your worldview and integrity of your collection (to mean purity and comprehensivity). So what’s so enthralling about garage is that it forces me to be a dilettante: it is built into the very music. The way it is distributed, the white-label culture, its London-centricity, the keeping up with ‘the pirates’, everything, means that ‘integrity’ collapses as a tenable value. And it’s exciting.

(Side note: you might ask why hasn’t pop-centrism forced such a shift to dilettantism. Well in a way it has in that it’s meant I have dabbled a lot more but there is no necessity [physical or otherwise] built in.)