lost in the schaffel

 

Minimal house was in such a rut by the early 2000s they tried to juice it up with some glammish boogie swing in the form of the "schaffel" fad  pushed by Kompakt.  

Born of Wolfgang Voigt's formative adoration of Marc Bolan - as evidenced much earlier in the 1996 Love Inc. track "Life's A Gas" (which samples you-guessed-it). 

Schaffel - a moment so minor that I clean forgot to mention it in this 2011 archaeology of the term and the rhythm-feel known as boogie  via a Soul Jazz compilation of Southern Rock titled Delta Swamp Rock

As it seems to languish behind a registrants-only wall at the Graun, here is the relevant portion of the piece:

... Southern Rock overlaps with that broad strip of Seventies blues-tinged rock called boogie, which ranges from ZZ Top to Brit combos such as Humble Pie who toiled on the US arena circuit and became vastly more popular in America than in their homeland. Boogie has a technical definition: a musician friend explains that it has to do with 4/4 being subdivided by 12 rather than 16 notes, with syncopations on the third subdivision of each beat. 

But the best way of conveying it is to just point at examples: "Get It On" by T.Rex (Bolan's 1972 T.Rextasy-exploitation flick was titled  Born To Boogie), "Slow Ride" by Foghat, "Whatever You Want" by those dependable boys in blue denim Status Quo (who then got parodied by Alberto Y Lost Trios Paranoias on "Heads Down No Nonsense Mindless Boogie").

"Boogie" originally comes from "boogie-woogie", a piano-oriented style of blues designed for dancing, which emerged in the 1930s and filtered into numerous corners of American popular and roots music.  As adopted in rock, it signifies a black-and-bluesy swing, a funky shuffle feel.  What's odd is that boogie today has a third, completely different meaning: it is used by DJs and collectors to refer to an early Eighties postdisco style whose slick, synthetic funk couldn't be further from the low-down earthiness of Southern rock.

The origins of this other boogie go back to the late Seventies when the word started cropping up in the titles of disco-funk tunes like Taste of Honey's "Boogie Oogie Oogie", Earth Wind and Fire's "Boogie Wonderland", The Jacksons's "Blame It On the Boogie" and Heatwave's "Boogie Nights". The week before Delta Swamp Rock arrived in the mail, I received a boogie CD-mix from a deejay friend, Paul Kennedy, which he'd titled Juicy Nights and crammed with postdisco gems by outfits like Change and BB & Q Band.  A few of the names were familiar to me from the Eighties, when another deejay pal of mine used to buy U.S import 12 inches, an outlandish concept to someone on a student grant.

What defines this  boogie is that it's disco but slower and funkier: 110 to 116 beats-per-minute is the prime range, says Paul, with a strong accent on the second and fourth beats rather than disco's straight stomping four-to-the-floor. It's mostly played by bands, as opposed to being the creation of a producer, but synth-bass, electronic keyboards and drum machines get more prominent the deeper you get into the Eighties. Some of the most famous examples of the style are hits like D-Train's "You're the One For Me", Peech Boys "Don’t Make Me Wait", and Yarborough & People's "Don’t Stop the Music", while pioneers and exemplars include Kleer and Leroy Burgess  (of Black Ivory and Aleem).

Thing is, I don't recall anybody calling this stuff "boogie" back then; they'd just have talked about "club tracks" or  "discofunk".  In deejay Greg Wilson's exhaustive etymological history of the genre,  the word "boogie" crops up as  a vague reference in the occasional club flyer or record shop section, or as a verb equivalent to "get on down" . But boogie only really becomes a genre tag retrospectively, to describe a kind of music no longer made, and even then only by a small number of London-based soul cognoscenti.  It's really only in the last decade that the term has achieved serious currency as a record dealer and collector buzz-word.

Boogie is a prime example of the creative remapping of the musical past that is rife today, with DJs and compilers retroactively inventing genres that had only the most tenuous existence in their original heyday (see "acid folk, "junkshop glam", etc)....

"dance music is not showbiz"

A bit from an interview with a Uruguay magazine about Energy Flash coming out in a Spanish translation and at the end was I asked about my work-in-progress Shock and Awe:  

Is there any link between glam rock and electronic music?

 Not really, although the great German techno producer Wolfgang Voigt is a huge fan of T. Rex. And there was a fad in electronic dance music the mid-2000s for schaffel, which is a rhythm that is related to the boogie feel of T. Rex and things like “Spirit in the Sky” by Norman Greenbaum. That sort of shuffling, bluesy groove. A lot of mostly German producers were putting out tracks with that feel.

I think the connection between glam and rave is simply this idea of kids going crazy and dancing. A lot of glam was all about rhythm – the desire for a stomping beat after a period in which rock had got very laidback and album-oriented and pensive.  The kids want to boogie. Slade, talking about their rise to popularity, say that everyone was bored with album-rock that you had to sit around listening to.  They say, “the kids just want to rave’ – i.e. have a band like Slade that was high-energy stomping music.

So as much as it was about costumes and make-up and camp, there was also a primal aspect to glam that harked back to rock’n’roll but also looked forward to  rave. It’s a continuum of music to go crazy to.

The DJ is a god?

 Not for me, strangely. I never got into the veneration of deejays. Some of the best deejays I’ve danced to are relatively unknown.  When I think of the best, most incredible dance nights I’ve had, often I don’t remember, or never knew, who the DJ was. It was the resident DJ at some club.

I have seen some amazingly skilled DJs who really add something through their techniques, but generally speaking, deejaying is  about playing good records in a sequence that works, that has highs and lows.  And at the end of the day, the DJ would be nothing without the producers of the music. Who sometimes are DJs, but not always. So if anything, I would say the producer is the god. 

But more than that, the crowd is the star.  I don’t like the thing of everyone dancing but staring in one direction at the stage. I prefer clubs where the DJ is to one side, tucked out of sight, in a little booth. There’s nothing to look at with DJs. It is much better to look at the other dancers, make eye  contact with strangers, or look at the gang of friends you came with. Or just close your eyes and get lost in music. Dance music is not showbiz.

[of course what I am forgetting here, historically, is disco, where there very much is an overlap between glam and dance music, at least in terms of fabulousness and dressing up. Also an overlap between showbiz / show tunes and disco.  Also EDM at that very moment was becoming all about spectacle and hi-tech display, even costumes with Deadmaus etc. Still in terms of my preferences it's a valid statement]