It Took Seconds

Four minutes and four seconds: As I said in the Candy Flip entry, the early 90s were a moment in music where categories like ‘novelty’, ‘pop’, etc. started to pretty much dissolve, largely because the primary use-case for a lot of singles was in a context where ideas like that made no sense: E’d off your tits in a warehouse somewhere. The structure of the music business - Top Of The Pops, “The Charts”, the radio as was - simply weren’t set up to accomodate or process this stuff. So we had at least two years through which Radio 1 DJs, TV presenters, et al - the people whose jobs in the culture were to mediate pop - were basically wandering through a fug of bafflement.

One of the things that happened to pop during this odd time was “Toytown Techno”. The idea was that not only could anyone make a hardcore techno track in their bedrooms but that anything could become one - any bit of half-recalled pop-cultural flotsam could be turned into a record. Kids’ TV programmes, mostly: this was just before the Internet came along and made sitting around trying to remember shit you saw on TV age 8 even more pointless.

In the old system of pop toytown techno tracks were novelty records, simple as that: but there were so many of them, and they did so well. There was a very good reason of course - an unexpected, once-familiar sound could trip dancers’ surprise switches and set off a chemical domino topple in the brain.

Anyhow, “Pacman” by Power Pill is absolutely typical of the format except that the person doing it is a very famous electronic producer rather than a vanishing bedroom no-hoper. (He wasn’t the only one who slummed it.)

What would your 4’04” track be?