When witch house hit this year, it hit big. Or as big as a blog-derived genre can get, anyway. Suddenly everyone was gothing out and pretending they knew what purple drank was. Bigger dudes like Pitchfork, Drowned In Sound and even freakin’ Warren Ellis started being all, “Hey, guys: NEW THING” and that paved the way for more people to download Wavepad and copy/paste a symbol into their name. And that’s when it all started to go wrong.
It seems like every other day I see another band pop up with a long line of crosses and triangles and what’s basically a slowed-down Beyonce track. Guess what! For a music genre to be interesting, it has to be based on creating music. Balam Acab is a good band because he’s making achingly beautiful, dubstep-influenced beats that speak to the teenager inside us all. NIKE7Up is a good band because dude is like the Shadow Earth Girl Talk, warping pop music beyond simple screw edits into sinister-ass Top 40 hits that you can still jam out to. Groups like Butterclock and UNISON are good bands in an even more traditional sense; twisting cool, icy diva vocals around minimal synths. Pictureplane is a good band because his live shows kill, his music is transcendental mutant house, and he invented the damn name anyway. SALEM is a good band provided they’re cloaked in fog/darkness/vocal effects because even though they have epic studio output they’re still just three white people rapping. ┼┼E∆VY NI†E_†UR► and his slowed-down Soulja Boy track is not a good band or even a band at all, it’s a dude with ADD trying to ride the bandwagon.
I’m not saying slowed music is bad; groups like AIDS-3D and Mater Suspiria Vision do this to great effect because it works in tandem with the videos they create, i.e. it’s more an art project than anything else. And of course it all comes from DJ Screw originally. But to build a genre, something original has to come from it. And if it can’t, then witch house is better off dead. Wear your influences on your sleeve if you have to. Refuse to play unless you’re surrounded by fog machines. Hell, shove a million crosses into your band name until you’re nothing but crosses and everyone calls you The Cross, but MAKE YOUR OWN DAMN MUSIC.
At the very least, leave Beyonce alone. Her tracks are good enough at normal speed.
