So what is “New Rave”? Can we say for sure what it means? It’s such an ugly term and it makes no sense. New Rave. Say it out loud. It must have something to do with New Wave, right? Or it’s a progression of underground club culture? Oh, wait, it’s another genre invented by the British music press for the sole purpose of hyping up a style of music that doesn’t exist; and who are the perpetrators this time? That’s right, it’s everyone’s favorite bastions of pointless print journalism, The NME.

New Rave is a genre devoid of all meaning. It’s a construct of The NME that in no way represents any of the bands that have been tarnished with its brush. That is not to say that the bands don’t make good music – they are some of the most creative acts around – but really what do they benefit from being thrown haphazardly into this genre that represents the needs of the media more than the music scene?

At the start of the new millennium we had Electroclash; this in turn became Electro-rock; and now Electro-rock is not cool, so it has received this new, less-than-cutting edge moniker to re-brand it. The music hasn’t changed, and the bands who were making Electro-rock have carried on as if nothing happened, but The NME has a new term to splash all over its pages and convince malleable minds that terminology is more important than music.

It’s all “HYPE! HYPE! HYPE!”, as if we need yet more dreary bands thrust in our faces and proclaimed as “the next big thing”. No doubt this year there will be another term thrown into the mix and The NME’s front page will inform us “New Rave is Dead! Long Live Rave-Rock!”

New Rave, Neu Rave, Electroclash, Electro-rock, Disco-punk, Dance-punk, Indie-rave: They’re all the same. None of the bands making the music have gone anywhere, yet the media plays on fickle readers’ minds by repackaging the same thing, year after year, under a different guise; and consumers lap it up!

You may have caught a Youtube video of a Klaxons’ gig with hordes of teens brandishing glowsticks. Some media circles have cited this as meaning that the original Rave era that began in 1988 has come full-circle and begun again in a post-modern format. The difference now is that there is nothing revolutionary about New Rave, but that hasn’t stopped the media insisting that this is a rave-revival. Is there really anything “Rave” about “New Rave” music? Rave was never supposed to be trendy.

Bands typically associated with New Rave include Datarock, recent Bangkok-visitors Shitdisco, and, primarily, Klaxons. The latter, however, has publicly denounced New Rave as nothing more than a joke that got out of hand.

"As far as I'm concerned, it's an in-joke between me and my friends," said Klaxons’ front-man Jamie Reynolds. "Just the fact that it's become a sort of international media phenomenon I find really strange.”

What’s frustrating for music-lovers is that the hype generated by this new genre almost overshadows the great songs of bands like Klaxons. The NME does a wonderful job of over-hyping new bands while simultaneously forgetting about the bands it was hyping a month earlier. This makes if difficult for new music to grow, because it is replaced by something almost identical within a matter of weeks. Furthermore, consumers are being told that they should adopt a new identity to fit in with the music they are listening to. Whatever happened to the music itself?! Consumers seem to have become increasingly lazy, relying on the media as a whole, not just The NME, to tell them what to listen to.

So what have we learnt from New Rave? Well, we can be sure that electronic music has met rock, but we already knew that. Ultimately we don’t gain anything from the propulsion of New Rave as a marketable form of music. However, if it helps new bands achieve success then some good does come of it, particularly if, as Klaxons have done, the bands speak out against the label they find themselves under.

Techno' tags: New Rave, The NME, Klaxons, Electro-rock

I’m beginning to feel like it’s time to move on. I’ve been in Thailand for 19 months and I am unsettled by the same thoughts that were crossing my mind when I decided to leave the UK in 2004. Everything seems to be winding down now and the only thing that is really keeping me here is work. I enjoy my job, but money has been playing on my mind a lot recently. I don’t want to go back home; not to live anyway. I don’t think I ever will.

At the moment, I would like to go and visit friends and family in the UK, fly to Japan or China on my own to spend a few weeks seeing things I’ve never seen, and then end up in Australia to try and face something vaguely resembling real life; I think I’m ready for that now. I have enough money to get myself set up, although I do worry that I may spend all my money getting myself set up without actually finding a job. If that happened then I’d be in an awkward place.

I’m going to take a nap and see if I can’t wake up feeling slightly more positive. Girls, work, money, life: Four things that have been playing on my mind a lot recently.

I swallowed a piece of gum a couple of weeks ago while drinking a shooter of tequila at Jazzit. My initial reaction was panic, but I soon realized that I was neither choking nor in any great discomfort. I recalled the great story I was told growing up that if you swallow a piece of gum it stays in your body for seven years. I’d never swallowed an actual piece of chewing gum before so I decided to do some investigating (which consisted of one Google search).

I got this from Ask Yahoo:

…a newsletter focusing on health myths addressed the topic of swallowing chewing gum. In their opinion, it's not the healthiest thing you can do, but if you do swallow your gum, it will simply pass through your system undigested into your stool (much like fiber).

Turns out I’m safe, but this made me wonder how many other times I was lied to by adults as a child. If you drop a penny from the top of the Eiffel Tower, it could kill someone, right? Wrong! I found this:

…every country in possession of a tall building has a corresponding legend about murdering people by dropping change from it. It's difficult to choose which aspect of the legend says more about human nature — our ignorance of the laws of physics or our insatiable bloodlust — but in either case, it's one more reason not to visit France.

Let's assume the good folks at the Empire State Building are lying, and pennies rain down from the roof of the place daily in a veritable hail of copper. The Empire State is 1,250 feet tall, so a cent dropped from the top would hit the ground at around 280 feet per second. Factor in a penny's light weight and flat, non-bullet shape, and the odds are the tumbling coin would barely break the skin. This is why, for instance, large hailstones sting but do not, say, pierce a skull and shoot downwards into a human torso, like a hot knife through a bag of exploding red butter.

I can’t believe this. I don’t know what to think any more. My life has fallen apart today.

Techno' tags: Urban myths, Swallowing chewing gum

So here we are, back to where we started after the Bangkok bombings of New Year’s Eve. No arrests, no evidence, no charges. So what have we got? Well, there’s the coup that didn’t exactly go as smoothly as everyone thought; there’s the escalating problems in the south, where this morning two couples were gunned down in Songkhla as they rode to work on motorcycles; there’s the airport from hell; there’s the galavanting former-PM and his censored propaganda; and now, after all the fuss that was made last week, the 19 people who were taken in for questioning over the New Year’s Eve bombings have all been released.

From the International Herald Tribune yesterday:

"All of them have been released because we don't have evidence they were involved in the bombs," Lieutenant General Prayudh Janocha, commander of the army's central region, said Saturday.

So why were they taken in at all then? And I was sure that Assistant National Police Chief Pol Lt-Gen Jongrak Chuthanont had gone on record as saying he knew who had blown up Bangkok, although in the same statement he did say it was hard to find evidence to convict criminals, so maybe we should give him a break, poor guy.

Those 19 people must have been arrested for some reason. Now we have come full circle and we still know absolutely nothing. Jemaah Islamiah has already denied any involvement, so the door is wide open to all theories.

As if the fallout from the mysterious bombs was not enough, today the transport ministry decided to reopen Don Muang Airport. Lucky for Thaksin he is not in power so that he has to deal with the shambles he created in making Thailand a travel hub for Southeast Asia. Domestic flights are due to resume soon in order to take some of the burden off the almost 4-billion baht Suvarnabhumi Airport. We were promised Rolex, we got a Casio calculator watch, and now it’s broken.

On a positive (?) note though, it was very, very cold today; so much so that I woke up shivering. The weather has gone completely barmy and it’s forcing me to consider buying a water heater.

Techno' tags: Terrorism in Thailand, Bangkok bombings, Suvarnabhumi Airport

Someone just left me this comment:

you have the writing ability of a fingerless and retarded pre-pubescent mongoloid. please as im sure YOU would write find yourself some NEW cliches.

That's fantastic. Someone actually took the time to write that. This guy must be a genius because he has written his comment as if he was actually a… well, I'll stop there. I feel he let himself down with a second sentence that doesn't make any coherent sense. This man is obviously very angry. I, on the other hand, am laughing at him.