nuum wars
Simon "Energy Flash" Reynolds, K-Punk and friends have been having an interesting (and intriguingly nerdish) discussion on 'nuum', or the 'hardore continuum', the family of British music descending from rave and hardcore, and covering the range of jungle, garage, grime, and a thousand subgenre cousins. A blogger-heavy conference at the University of East London has given them license to go into depth. Simon's posts (1 2 3 4) are unashamedly, delightfully, high-falutin':
You could see rave as a whole, and the nuum in particular, as modernism's last stand, or unexpected comeback, long after the ideals of modernism had been abandoned, eroded, questioned, everywhere else....Miraculously holding pomo at bay, the nuum preserved within itself, within its own partially cordoned off space, the heightened temporality of peak-era modernism: a sensation of hurtling into the future.
K-Punk, incidentally, has a nice little defense of criticism.