{"id":1124,"date":"2008-01-08T10:12:04","date_gmt":"2008-01-08T15:12:04","guid":{"rendered":""},"modified":"2011-08-04T09:36:32","modified_gmt":"2011-08-04T13:36:32","slug":"madchester","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/madchester\/","title":{"rendered":"Madchester: Factory Made GarageBand"},"content":{"rendered":"<div class=\"image_block\" style=\"text-align: center;\"><img loading=\"lazy\" src=\"http:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/media\/users\/frankenslade\/hacienda1.jpg\" alt=\"\" title=\"\" width=\"375\" height=\"250\" \/><\/p>\n<div class=\"image_legend\">Everybody&#8217;s happy nowadays<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<p>Over the last couple of weeks I&#8217;ve finally gotten around to doing a couple of <strong>21st Century Things<\/strong>: I finally fiddled with the <strong>GarageBand<\/strong> program on the <strong>Mac Mini<\/strong> we bought about 8 months ago and I watched the movie <strong>24 Hour Party People<\/strong> and marveled at both the director&#8217;s self-referential <em>verit\u00e9<\/em> style and <strong>Steve Coogan<\/strong>&#8216;s glib narration. The fact that I never paid much attention to the Madchester scene and rave culture did not hinder my postmodern faculties.<\/p>\n<p>As the film moved from the early Factory bands, such as <strong>Joy Division<\/strong> and <strong>A Certain Ratio<\/strong> (ie, bands I owned albums by and liked) to the later bands I&#8217;d missed the boat on the first time around, such as <strong>Stone Roses<\/strong> and <strong>Happy Mondays<\/strong>, my interest in the film was challenged. The <strong>Tony Wilson<\/strong> character&#8217;s credibility was challenged too, and maybe it was no coincidence that he was being ravaged by Hacienda drug culture while extolling the virtues of the Happy Mondays frontman. But what do I know? That stuff was fantastically popular for a spell, especially in the UK, where the validity of popular musical tastes has been borne out by as many great and bad acts as our own nation&#8217;s hit parade.<\/p>\n<p>I was curious to hear these bands again. It had been years since I heard a Happy Mondays song and watched those videos of vaguely &#8217;60s-influenced guys in baggy, vaguely rap-inspired clothes dancing around like the &#8220;toaster&#8221; character in any ska band to some overly active snare and tambourine pattern. To my surprise, the first Happy Mondays video I checked out was fairly entertaining.<br \/><iframe class='youtube-player youtuber' type='text\/html' width='425' height='355' src='http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/0xKaq-SNeEc?rel=0&amp;fs=1&amp;ap=%252526fmt%253D18' webkitAllowFullScreen mozallowfullscreen allowFullScreen frameborder='0'><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>Then I checked out another video, one a bit darker but still fueled by a hyperactive, rest-free beat and repeating nuggets of rhythm guitar.<br \/>\n<!--more--><br \/><iframe class='youtube-player youtuber' type='text\/html' width='425' height='355' src='http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/6eRvviuKNh8?rel=0&amp;fs=1&amp;ap=%252526fmt%253D18' webkitAllowFullScreen mozallowfullscreen allowFullScreen frameborder='0'><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>Something about the music started to sound familiar, and I don&#8217;t just mean the fact that I was realizing I had heard these tunes in passing when they were popular. I was hearing the sound easily offered to Mac users through GarageBand. My point here is not to question the quality or validity of the Madchester bands but to show how the development of those songs and the charming, homemade quality of the artists&#8217; images were precurssors to what&#8217;s become an easily accessible path these days through GarageBand and YouTube-related video technology.<\/p>\n<p>Here&#8217;s Stone Roses, a band that still gets tremendous amounts of acclaim yet always sounded no better or worse than a decent track <strong>The Jam<\/strong> might have done on their running-on-fumes, <strong>Pigbag<\/strong>-inspired album, <em>The Gift<\/em>.<br \/><iframe class='youtube-player youtuber' type='text\/html' width='425' height='355' src='http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/k4bHMVAKDao?rel=0&amp;fs=1&amp;ap=%252526fmt%253D18' webkitAllowFullScreen mozallowfullscreen allowFullScreen frameborder='0'><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>OK, this is much more laid back than anything Paul Weller could have done &#8211; and the skipping drum beat and percussion track are free of the 4&#215;4 lodged up <strong>Rick Buckler&#8217;s ass<\/strong> &#8211; but you do get the connection, right? Weller got it. His first solo album is inspired by this scene. Even I know that, no?<\/p>\n<div class=\"image_block\" style=\"text-align: center;\"><img loading=\"lazy\" src=\"http:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/media\/users\/frankenslade\/hacienda_trainers2.jpg\" alt=\"\" title=\"\" width=\"445\" height=\"308\" \/><\/p>\n<div class=\"image_legend\">Running on the spot<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<p>Before playing around with the program, I had assumed that the Apple designers who developed GarageBand started with the musical concepts established by rap and hip-hop sampling. I guess that was part of what they had in mind, but even moreso I hear the components that made up all this Madchester\/rave stuff: <\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Bite-sized, 4-square, funky drum and guitar loops to make up groovy songs<\/li>\n<li>Hyperactive beats that encourage users to never let up for space or unexpected fills, thereby satiating the impulses generated by our cultural ADHD<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>I&#8217;ve long felt that the eighth-note, trebly bass parts of <strong>Peter Hook<\/strong> are among the most significant influences on the development of today&#8217;s indie rock, but now I see how the second generation of Manchester musicians have further influenced our musical landscape. GarageBand affords the individual the ability to make recordings as bite-sized, direct, and fun as &#8220;canned&#8221; studio recordings crafted for AM airplay in the &#8217;60s &#8211; bands like The Association, The Turtles, etc. There&#8217;s no need to pay a <strong>Hal Blaine<\/strong> or a <strong>Larry Knechtel<\/strong>. We owe a lot of the capabilities of Apple&#8217;s GarageBand technology to the Madchester scene.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Everybody&#8217;s happy nowadays Over the last couple of weeks I&#8217;ve finally gotten around to doing a couple of 21st Century Things: I finally fiddled with the GarageBand program on the Mac Mini we bought about 8 months ago and I watched the movie 24 Hour Party People and marveled at both the director&#8217;s self-referential verit\u00e9 <a href='https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/madchester\/' class='excerpt-more'>[&#8230;]<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[342],"tags":[164],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1124"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1124"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1124\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1124"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1124"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1124"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}