Dot Dunger

February 22, 2014

The man of steel (Gary Steel, that is) has been thinking about that Dotcom chap, and specifically, his album.

Kim-DotcomTHEREโ€™S A NOBLE tradition amongst serious exponents of electronic music craft thatโ€™s particularly common amongst techno and house producers. These are dance music genres in which authentic craftspeople admire anonymity. They know that at its best, dance music is a level playing field: the dance floor is a place for people to shake their asses without having to worship the Godlike edifice of rock star-like celebrity. But of course, the more popular they get, the harder it is to shed a skin, and to simply be the sum total of the sounds on a disc. Some producers change their monikers with abandon, so it becomes a full-time job for fans to keep up, and exposes those fans as hopeless nerds. After all, they should really be chasing great sounds, not a brand. Other artist/DJs release 12-inch singles in limited white label editions with no name at all or, as in the case of the critically acclaimed dubstep producer Burial, keep their identity hidden. [Well, he managed that for seven years, but has recently blown his cover.]
Good_Times_Kim_DotcomOn the other hand, thereโ€™s no credibility in a dance music artist who exploits his music as part of a brand-building exercise, and thatโ€™s my first big issue with that big man, Kim Dotcom, and his Good Times album.
For any New Zealander or resident who has kept up with news stories in the past couple of years, Kim Dotcomโ€™s presence on the local scene, for better or worse, is huge. [Excuse the pun]. Had the FBI-engineered raid on his mansion never happened, itโ€™s my guess that Dotcom would still have become a larger-than-life figure [excuse me again] on our tiny stage. Letโ€™s not retread old details, but clearly, the controversy over the raid and the subsequent shutdown of Dotcomโ€™s file-sharing business, the legal complexities, the business with our prime minister and John Banks and on and on, have all kept the Dotcom name in headlines.
And thatโ€™s the problem in attempting to assess Dotcomโ€™s album, which he has apparently pieced together in fits and starts during the troubles of the past couple of years.
kim-dotcom-620_2118143bI contemplated the possibility of hypnotism so my head would be devoid of any memory of Dotcom, and I could assess Good Times with none of the obvious baggage. But that would be a lot of trouble all in aid of what really is a lousy record.
In truth, I donโ€™t know what I think of Dotcom and his various pursuits. On the one hand, it seems to me that his file-sharing site was only doing what many other file-sharing sites do, acting as conduits between sender and recipient in much the same way as snail mail or email. It seems to me that seemingly above-board websites like YouTube are brazenly above the law by allowing anyone to put anything online for anyone to watch or listen to, and only pulling it down when a copy-write owner complains. Compared to that, any supposed indiscretions of Dotcomโ€™s Megaupload site, now closed, seem trifling. And it feels to me like the old guard in Hollywood have chosen a soft target to test their legal weaponry on, in the hope that he will be an example that scares off others, or perhaps sets a precedent, resulting in file-sharing sites dropping like a house of cards.
On the other hand, Dotcomโ€™s tendency to throw money around in a fashion well documented through the 20th century by various nouveau riche comes across as garish and more than a little bit dull. Itโ€™s that mindless hedonism thatโ€™s about as subtle as a flying mallet and slimes its way through Good Times, one of the most excruciating albums to have troubled my CD player, and already a candidate for Worst NZ Album By A Rich Bastard In 2014, aka, an album that tastes like fart de foie gras.
Okay, let me be fair: there are a couple of good things about Good Times. One is the sound quality, which is decent. A lot of contemporary dance pop is compressed to buggery, but this isnโ€™t. Thereโ€™s a good amount of tightly controlled bass weight and the synth sounds, which dominate the mix, are nicely insectoid as they buzz from speaker to speaker.
art-KimDotCom-620x349Another good thing are the guests: people like Laughton Kora and Tiki Taane and Printz Board (Black Eyed Peas) who manage to ever so slightly elevate this sorry endeavour with whatever musical personality they possess. I said slightly.
And itโ€™s not enough. Good Times is an aesthetic travesty, and at times itโ€™s so bad that it made me shudder with a kind of cultural cringe reserved only for portly German narcissists who have the audacity to think that their business savvy extends to musical talent. Which brings me to this: just exactly what does Dotcom do on Good Times, anyway? Theoretically, he produced the album, at Neil Finnโ€™s Roundhead studios, but did he play any hand in making the sounds found on the record itself? We may never know, or care to know. Certainly, itโ€™s stacked with collaborators, and the only identifiable Dotcom moments are those excruciating Teutonic-tinged raps, genius lines like โ€œSleep all day/Party all night/Have what you want/Whenever you likeโ€ (โ€˜Good Lifeโ€™). Shades of the Roastbusters?
While that song clearly maps out Dotcomโ€™s superficial worldview, and the whole endeavour just goes to reinforce the manโ€™s inflated [ha!] sense of self, itโ€™s inevitably the horrible Euro-house flavours that kill the project stone cold dead. As early as the second song, the title track, the rhythm gets stuck in a kind of goosestep thatโ€™s anathema to a country versed in the blissed out rhythms of Bob Marley and the dub skank of Fat Freddyโ€™s Drop.
At times, itโ€™s hard to imagine that Dotcom comes from a country famed for the pioneering work of electronic legends, Kraftwerk, whose ironic, darkly humorous and carefully layered work has endured, and influenced generations of the better techno heads. For a few euphoric seconds, the song โ€˜Good Timesโ€™ even sounded a bit Kraftwerkian, but soon I was laughing at him, not with him, as he intoned: โ€œHands in the air/Hands everywhere!โ€ in a leering rap that conjured up the ghost of none other than that entertainingly gauche Wellington electronic band, The Body Electric (remember โ€˜Pulsingโ€™?) He does it again on โ€˜Party Electricityโ€™: โ€œYou and me/We are wild/We are freeโ€, and then: โ€œWild, free, and sexy!โ€ You can almost hear him sweat. And then on โ€˜Wunderbarโ€™, the killer line is, you guessed it: โ€œOoh-la-la/You and me are/Wunderbar.โ€
Then thereโ€™s โ€˜Keeps Getting Betterโ€™ (I only wish it would), on which vocalist Ilati comes on like a naughty teen wishing she was really Miley Cyrus, not propping up some rich blokeโ€™s vanity project; and โ€˜Take Me Awayโ€™, possibly a true sentiment sung by Dotcomโ€™s wife Mona.
Sadly, the project does guests like Kora and Taane no favours, either. โ€˜Change Your Lifeโ€™ has the former trying his soul emoting to clichรฉd jackhammer beats and house clichรฉs, while on โ€˜Little Bit Of Meโ€™, the latter allows his own brand to be submerged in a long drop reserved for arenas full of dumb shits waving their stumpy hands in the air.
Itโ€™s possible that some of the above lyrics are sung with tongue in cheek. After all, Kim Dotcom has shown himself in interviews to be an articulate, and one suspects, thoughtful bloke. But none of that really matters, because in its totality, Good Times is such an affront to good taste that it should probably be extradited and classified and buried in the FBI files, even if the man himself is allowed to stay in NZ.
kim-dot-com-topThe reason Good Times pisses me off isnโ€™t that I have any kind of beef with Dotcom. Itโ€™s simply because itโ€™s a waste of space in a crowded market, a rich manโ€™s vanity project that proves nothing, is nothing except some noise to fill the terrifying void.
The real shame about Kim Dotcomโ€™s album is that he could have invested the money it cost in the work of a genuine artist. But philanthropy doesnโ€™t seem to be part of Dotcomโ€™s mindset, just the pursuit of hedonistic pleasure. Pleasure without consequences. At the very least thatโ€™s a shame; at the worst, something to be concerned about. GARY STEEL

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Steel has been penning his pungent prose for 40 years for publications too numerous to mention, most of them consigned to the annals of history. He is Witchdoctor's Editor-In-Chief/Music and Film Editor. He has strong opinions and remains unrepentant. Steel's full bio can be found here

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