Apocalypse... no? + Introducing Classified
The lockdown is lifting in Switzerland, so what does that mean for these apocalyptic recipes?
It’s June 1st, and the lockdown is, well, kind of over in Switzerland - at least for the time being. This weekend we were able to go to Interlaken for a little vacation, next weekend ski lifts and other things will open, and in general things will be normal (except for large festivals, so there will be no Celine Dion spectacle at Paléo this year, and no Montreux Jazz Festival, amongst other things).
This also means that the conditions that led to this blog have changed. I am no longer constrained by one grocery shop every two weeks, nor am I constrained by the need for canned goods over fresh goods. Now it seems that I can just cook a bit more normally - I can go to the store if I’m out of tomatoes (though I still try to limit my shops to once a week or so). In a way this is wonderful, but it also means that I don’t have to push myself to work with what’s in the cupboard, or challenge myself to make something interesting out of only a can of corn. There’s a loss that comes with all this freedom as well.
In other words, it seems like this project has found a natural end. Perhaps we will find ourselves in lockdown again, and it will rev up a second time, but for now it feels silly to cook with frozen peas when I can get them fresh from a farm. For now, I feel great that I have put up 30+ delicious lockdown friendly recipes, that I have helped friends, family members, and strangers to try new dishes and experiment with their food during a weird time, and that I have had a great excuse to write things regularly.
So here’s what’s happening now:
I will not be posting any new recipes that are lockdown themed, and I will not be posting recipes regularly or on any kind of schedule.
I will still post recipes here occasionally, as I really enjoy doing it, and I really like having all my favourite recipes in one place. But these recipes may be more complicated, and may not include a single dried or canned ingredient.
Most exciting (at least for me) is that I will be devoting my writing efforts to a new project with a few friends. If you’ve enjoyed this blog at all, I’d be grateful if you check out (and share!) our new project: classified. It is an excuse for us to dig into how and why we classify things, what makes something one thing and not another thing, and if and why that matters. We will try not to make it all about musical genres, as we have ambitions to explore other things, like food, alcohol, film, art, and architecture. You can read more about the objectives of the project here.
Our first post is below. If you find it interesting, I’d love if you signed up at the classified website, and I would be super stoked if you shared with your friends (or enemies). Hope you enjoy!
Electroclash: Overview
At the intersection of house, pop, synthpop, DIY, and a Brett Easton Ellis novel, for our first post, we should have started with an easier genre to define
Peaches performed in Toronto at a small venue in 2001 or 2002. It was raw, visceral, energetic, and just plain fucking fun. There was a moment when she spat fake blood and half chewed Timbits over the crowd. It was fantastic. From the look of the crowd, not many people knew what was going on, and not many knew what to call what she was doing, or how to process it - it was something familiar yet new: a blend of synth sounds, the irreverence of pop music, the recognizable kick of the drum machine, and the disillusionment of the bling of mainstream pop culture.
Peaches straddles the line between what became known as Electroclash, and what would become Electropop (more familiar acts like Robyn, and Ke$ha, pop music infused with synths and more of a house backbeat). But where Electropop has a mainstream appeal, and a certain radio-friendliness to it, Electroclash was - well, trashy. I don’t know if this helps, but Electroclash is to Electropop as the Sex Pistols are to Blink 182.
There aren’t a lot of Electroclash acts to point to; rather, a handful of songs that really capture what is going on. But here’s what they have in common, and what sets them apart from other genres.
Electroclash took the Paris Hilton lifestyle, the plasticity of new Hollywood, the glitz and vapidity of new money and fame for fame’s sake, and essentially pantsed it. Steeped in skepticism and cynicism, and heavily laced with some combination of disdain, detachment or irony, it’s not always clear whether the artists wanted to be in the world they despised, despise the world they were in, or were just throwing a tantrum and tearing apart a world to which they could never belong. Or maybe it was all of the above. It’s hard to take the genre seriously, but it’s just as hard to look away.
Vocals in Electroclash tend to be far away, bored, dark. The entire genre is a queering of mainstream pop music and pop infatuations, and so it is no wonder that many of the acts associated with the sound were queer artists: Peaches, Tiga, Chicks on Speed, Fischerspooner. (Is it any wonder these artists could so easily call out the ridiculous camera-ready candy faux queerness of the likes of Paris and Nicole?) While it wasn’t evident in 2001, the ripples of Electroclash can be felt across genres today. It definitely created a lot of space for queer artists to just fuck around; it also renewed artists’ licenses to unmask faux class through a lens of vulgarity. This music wasn’t taking anything too seriously, it had a punk and DIY sensibility but with 808s instead of electric guitars, and while it wasn’t always punk in its sound—though it had its moments—it was disaffected, a counter-culture moment in its own right, but more easily and quickly swallowed up by mainstream culture than punk was.
In the end, though, it is perhaps Electroclash’s direct response to the cultural call of the times that makes it somewhat difficult (if not impossible) to remove the function of “time” from the equation that defines what the genre is (or isn’t). And why we struggle to be convinced whether there is, or can be, a rebirth of the genre; and whether that trashy, polluted river can ever be stepped in twice.
(All songs below are snippets. Full tracks can be listened to in Spotify.)
Key Album: First Album by Miss Kittin & The Hacker
The seminal album (and one of the most enduring figures of the sound) was probably Miss Kittin & the Hacker’s “First Album”.
Key song from the album: Frank Sinatra
Three Key Songs
Tasting Notes
Synth-based, 808s and 909s as drum machines
Often a dystopian reflection of celebrity / popular culture
Often trashy, in a deliberate way - punk aesthetic without the punk sound
For the rest of the week, we will suggest a few more key artists and albums, and round off the week with an Electroclash playlist to get your weekend started.
Notes
This is our first post, so it is worth mentioning our credentials, or lack thereof. We are not specialists in anything we will be writing about. Ultimately, we are enthusiastically curious and attentive consumers of stuff, looking for an excuse to dig deeper into it all, and excited to share what we find with others. We’ll get (lots of) things wrong, and we welcome constructive discussions on why Le Tigre should be considered Electroclash (we don’t think they should be) or why Peaches should not have made the list (she definitely should have, and we are unanimous in this).
So please, add comments, song suggestions for our playlists, general suggestions for the newsletter. Email us with requests of things to cover and we will do our best. Or worst. Either way.