Renegade Soundwave - Soundclash

What were we talking about before we rememberd the future and climbed a mountain? Oh yeah, the incoherent genre that is New Wave. We left off at Industrial influenced bands making dance music, so let's skip ahead to 1990 and see what happens when a dance club band dabbles in Industrial and Dub. 

Punk of the not-Ramones persuasion, if you'll remember, also involved the English revival/mash-up of Dub and Ska with quirky Rock & Roll. Renegade Soundwave said "you know what will really confound people? We'll take Dub (not Dubstep) and mix it with Hip Hop in an industrial fashion to present a definitive and questionably alternative view on typical societal subject matter. 

Works at confusing me right off the bat because the cover inexplicably makes me think i'm about to listen to the soundtrack of that terrible Who Framed Roger Rabbit? knock-off Cool World. Lot of good music wasted on that movie. I'm not a big Brad Pitt fan, sorry. Big fan of 90s Dark Dancetronica though, so it'd have to be some extremely terrible rapping to actually kill my vibe. 

Alright, well Blue Eyed Boy isn't Trip Hop, but it's really really close. Lucky Luke is terrible, like the worst possible Pet Shop Boys impression imaginable, but i'm not getting any sort of post-ironic so bad it's good kind of vibe, i feel more like this is supposed to be a joke. Some jokes don't land, sarcastic humor is fickle like that. Yeah, see, On TV lands a lot better, the mockery is much more readily apparent. Probably A Robbery, Space Gladiator, Pocket Porn, enough said. 

Yes, this is objectively terrible Hip Hop, but that's exactly like calling Frank Zappa "shitty Doowop." That is completely the point, and not in The Beatles Rubber Soul kind of way. Honestly, this has more in common with Zappa than say The KLF or EMF or anything like that; we're not suspending our disbelief, we're pantsing (which is to say depantsing) the subject, taking the piss, having a gaff, being humorous here. It's a sarcastic dig at mainstream culture, as opposed to Hip Hop's more shall we say sincere appreciation of pop-culture as shared experience. 

I think you could make a strong argument that Renegade Soundwave is quite a bit Dada, taking all the snippets of contemporaneously modern music and highlighting the nonsense experience it creates. That's an interesting analogy, 80s is to pre war decadence as 90s is to criticism of the war that decadence caused, Dada, like Industrial half a century later, emerging as direct criticism of the atrocities of Industrial Modernity. In a way, it's supposed to be disliked by mainstream society, anti-popular as opposed to ironically popular. 

Musically speaking Soundclash is a pretty on the nose title for this album, it sounds like Massive Attack and Pet Shop Boys got together and produced an album that nobody liked on purpose. I'm not sure if that was Flood's intention, but it kind of sounds like it was Renegade Soundwave's intention, so there you go. Plus, it's not at all unlike the mash-up of live action and animation of Cool World, and considering having mainstream audiences actually like his animated movies was never a concern for Ralph Bakshi that i'm aware of, it all sits quite happily in my brain. Your milage may of course vary, it seems quite easy to misunderstand the whole thing by dismissing it as mere cringe, and maybe at the end of the day that is in fact the actual point. To each their own, try learning how to not throw stones for a change, lest you have them thrown right back at you.