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CURRENT TEN
Camper Van Beethoven: "Take the Skinheads Bowling"
Lenny Dee: "Extreme Terror"
Lo Fidelity Allstars: "Feel What I Feel"
Meli'sa Morgan: "Do Me, Baby"
NOFX: "Radio"
P!nk: "Get the Party Started"
Joey Ramone: "What a Wonderful World"
Smokey Robinson: "Cruisin'"
The Stylistics: "People Make the World Go Round"
White Stripes: "Hotel Yorba"

Pump Up the Volume Number by Michaelangelo Matos

[this is the “director’s cut” version of a shorter piece that appeared in City Pages on 28 November, 2001]

various artists
Electric Ladyland: Clickhop Version 1.0
(Mille Plateaux)

various artists/mixed by Anabolic Frolic
Happy 2b Hardcore Chapter Six: The Final Chapter
(Moonshine)

various artists/mixed by Slipmatt
Speed Limit 140 BPM Plus: The New Era
(Moonshine)

As much as anything, from the lingering specter of “disco sucks” to rave culture’s cliquish insularity, post-house dance music’s greatest stumbling block is an entirely reasonable fear of sequelitis. It’s one thing to walk into a record store and confront dozens of titles that basically look (and within their categories, sound) the same. But low-budget cinema may be the only consumer product that flaunts its numbers as gaudily as do club compilations. To see the numerals following the titles of compilation CD series is to flash, if only subconsciously, on Friday the 13th Part 8 or Where the Boys Aren’t Vol. 43--at which point the notion of artistic worth generally goes out the window. Maybe that’s why three of the longest-running dance-music compilation series are wrapping things up and/or restarting the count before they reach double digits.

The difference between Electric Ladyland: Clickhop Version 1.0 and its seven preceding (unsubtitled) volumes is means of production. Where Ladyland mark one was devoted to breakbeat-driven genres (hip-hop, dub-hop, drum ’n’ bass), Clickhop replaces James Brown loops with the snap-crackle-popping digital detritus enshrined on the same label’s Clicks & Cuts comps. The new title, though, has many of the same glitches as its predecessors--not staticky aural accidents, but an aesthetic conservatism that seems fishy in such purportedly “experimental” music.

Most of Clickhop is pretty stodgy; even the novelty effects that permeate both of its discs--the pulsating video-game noises of Captain Comatose’s “Chin-Chin Stroker,” the squiggly sounds flipping away from the center of Deltidseskapism’s “Dax Att Sticka Ut”--have an air of misbegotten seriousness. A few things rise above: DSP’s echo-chamber ionosphere hip-hop, a Spectre track that sounds like an ambient remix of Petey Pablo’s crushing, Timbaland-produced “919,” and Akufen’s “Little Hop of Horror,” DJ-cutup-style megamix (or is that metamix?) that recalls sample-happy two-step garage producer Todd Edwards. But mostly we get tracks--like Frank Bretschneider’s “Halt,” Auch’s “All That Pretty Horses,” and Kerosene’s “Super-Mercado-Digits”--that differ from your average Kruder & Dorfmeister remix by having basically no low end. If that sounds unimaginative, what does it say about the album’s compilers that they programmed all three right near each other on the second disc?

Nor were any great leaps of imagination expended upon the new editions of L.A. indie label MoonshineSpeed Limit 140 BPM Plus or Happy 2b Hardcore. But that’s less of an issue, since neither title has ever been particularly high-minded. Speed Limit documented the transformation of UK breakbeat hardcore into jungle/drum & bass over eight mid-Nineties volumes; instead of following the genre’s evolution into the angry sputter of techstep, though, it veered into the far lighter sounds of happy hardcore. By 1997, Happy 2b Hardcore--each volume mixed by Toronto DJ Anabolic Frolic--had taken its place. Now, their fortunes are being reversed.

Good thing, too--the subtitle of Happy 2b Hardcore Chapter Six: The Final Chapter may be its least redundant feature. There may be no techno subgenre more deserving of the complaint that “it all sounds the same.” Even if it’s always been this way (and it pretty much always has), it didn’t have to be this bad. I’m still lamenting the hard right turn the genre took around ’96, when it mutated from drum & bass’s hyperactive little cousin (augmenting the junglistic breakbeat rhythms with a 4/4 kickdrum) to a frighteningly amped-up version of Eurovision, the cheeseball annual song contest that introduced Abba and Celine Dion to the world. Instead of melancholy-tinged euphoria, happycore bean evoking pod people dressed as Muppet Babies singing love themes from b-movies really, really fast.

Needless to say, this treacle gums up most of The Final Chapter: Kaos & Ethos’s “Drift on a Dream,” Scott Brown’s “Turn Up the Music,” Force & Styles’s “Look at Me Now,” ad nauseam. Occasionally, something pops out of the mix that recaptures some of the style’s early helium high--Breeze featuring MC Storm’s “Jump a Little Higher” and DJ UFO & Stu J’s “Flyin’ High” are to of the more literal examples. But if we’ve learned anything from Jason, the mad slasher of Friday the 13th, it’s that in a consumer society, nothing is ever really dead, no matter how much you say you’ve killed it. In other words, don’t count on The Final Chapter being the final chapter of anything.

In contrast, the hard-house tracks on Speed Limit 140 BPM Plus: The New Era bypass the heartstrings and aim straight for the adrenal gland, albeit in a pretty aggressively anonymous way. Not radically anonymous, the way early rave records like Forgemasters’ “Track with No Name” dealt a blow to the very idea of a pop establishment, but with a sense of routine: these artists accomplish their appointed tasks with lockstep inevitability. There’s a cold airiness to New Era productions by Billy Bunter, Vinylgroover and Slipmatt (who mixes the CD) that’s somewhat reminiscent of epic trance. The difference is that where Oakenfold, Sasha, Digweed, et. al., intend their sounds to fill “big rooms” (meaning arena-sized superclubs), these guys still have in their hearts the warehouses the early ’90s.

The New Era, then, is misleading: there’s more old-school rave fervor here as on Happy 2b Hardcore. But touches like the single-note factory-saw hook and sped up chant of “When I pump the bass/Rock this place,” from Dil ’n’ Doe’s “Da Bass,” or the bee-swarm synth-buzz of Malarky’s “Bust a New Jam” are subsumed in the tracks’ clinical rush rather than leading it. And when the Pranksters’ “Wassup Baby” repeats a someone muttering “underground,” you can bet the one they’re thinking of doesn’t have a “global” in front of it. I refer, of course, to the epic-trance DJ-mix series that’s just issued its 21st volume. Popcorn, anyone?