tremble clef

Wednesday, February 15, 2006

Moby, "Dream About Me (Booka Shade Remix)" (2005)

"Electro-house bobbins": what a great label. If I made music I would adopt the moniker of DJ Christopher Bobbins, and create a monster anthem filled with people grunting "Eeyore! Eeyore! Eeyore!" But I digress.

ILM would probably like to say that it invented a lot of things, but the coining of this phrase would be a more genuine claim than others. Of course, this is not to say that the message board offers any definition of the term. Just as well: it leaves us free to invent some. In common English parlance, "bobbins" does suggest rubbishness -- as in, "this is bobbins," or, my personal favorite, "you have such a bobbins face" -- but none of that negativity adheres when the word is applied to the genre of house. To me, it's most descriptive of the kind of dancing the genre induces: a kind of bouncing and gentle bobbing that can be done without your arms ever crossing the Homosexual Line.* Because of that, I think of electro-house bobbins as removed from, or even opposed to gay diva house music. Funnily for dance music, it's quite reserved and sexless in some ways.

Which is not to say it can't be good. At the very least it improves Moby. This Booka Shade remix of the latter's "Dream About Me" is less startling than their reworking of Tahiti 80's "Big Day," which was filled with squelchy effects, some great strings, and a dirty vibe that was particularly evident in the breakdown. The remix of "Dream About Me" is more unabashedly bouncy and round-sounding, in an effort, perhaps, to stay true to Moby's new-agey persona. Moby's voice gets a bit of distortion near the beginning, and there are some fedback guitar sounds, but for the most part the song is more finger-snapping than groin-thrusting. But I for one am okay with Moby getting a remix in a sexless genre; he should be bouncing around in a room filled with, um, big balls, not subjected (and subjecting us) to a dirty vibe.

*Quentin Tarantino, in an interview with Playboy magazine: "Can I tell you another definitely nonguy thing? When you're dancing and you put your hands way above your head -- that's very nonguy. There's a kind of homosexual line that exists right above your shoulders. You can dance like this (waves his fists at rib-cage level) all day, but the minute you start going like this (waves his hands above his head), that's very nonguy."

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