Electroclash
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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Electroclash describes a style of fashion, music, and attitude that fuses New Wave, punk, & electronic dance music with somewhat campy and absurdist post-industrial detachment in addition to vampy and/or camp sexuality. The movement combines the 1980s electropop/new wave/Italo disco sound by means of synthesizers and drum machines. Visuals that are affiliated with electroclash often resemble or directly allude to post-1970s Westwood and Warhol fashion/art scenes, the mid-70s, Kraftwerk-ian German influences and early-80s New York Downtown dystopian avant-garde à la Liquid Sky.
Themes
A pellucid, bleakly ironic, but indulgently hyper-sexual post-feminist/post-9/11 stance is often evident in the themes of many Electroclash outfits. The genre is generally not a musical style as much as a kitsch-ily cold distanced stance - infected by exhibitionist sexuality and a winking fetish-isation of wealth, indulgence, consumption, and glamour culture - directly reflecting back to the trend's roots in club culture. Style is the victor over substance, as a point of pride.
But perhaps more exactly, "electroclash" is an aesthetic approach to a certain set of musical ideas and instruments, similar to "art rock" in that it's not so much a style as a way of doing things. This approach to electronic music--some distinguishing features being a proclivity towards aggressive, defiant lyrics (and performance persona) and deceptively simple, "retro" arrangements--is what denotes it as different from synthpop, IDM, or other branches of electronica.
Arguably, the movement has more in common with 'Paris Is Burning' style personal projection and dress-up than it has with any element of a musical genre. Essentially the trend of Electroclash, as fashion and pose, is its own driving force - the stylistic affectation is more important than anything going on in the actual music. The band Fischerspooner is an example of this philosophy in action - featuring indulgent, elaborately staged 1980s homage live shows with over-the-top backdrops, dramatic interludes, and costuming - rendering the music itself almost an afterthought to the production and image-making of the project.
