Electroclash: A Brief Cultural History

From roughly 1999 to the re-election of George W. Bush, the clubs in Brooklyn, Paris, and Berlin absolutely pulsed with a strange, twisted genre of electronic music, which gained the common name — Electroclash.

For five years, Electroclash was the thinking clubgoer’s music. While everyone else was jamming out to Daft Punk and the pop-trance of DJ Sammy, the hippest of the hip were Ian Curtis-dancing to the dark, burbling beats of Fischerspooner, Ladytron, Felix da Housecat, Peaches, and a host of others.

And then, in 2004 — the party was over. As soon as it arrived, Electroclash was gone.

But what was Electroclash, anyway? And how did it end up becoming so influential? What can we learn from a flash-in-the-pan club scene from fifteen years ago?

First, what made Electroclash so memorable was that it was one of the first genuinely queer music movements of the 21st Century, it was probably the first to capitalize on nostalgia and definitely the first to use 1980s aesthetics and sound. Both of these would kickstart a chain-reaction that leads inevitably to many of the staples in present pop culture, not just in music, but in television, and the willingness to keep looking backward.

It was too good to last.

The guy who coined the term Electroclash is Larry Tee, better known as the fellow who helped RuPaul become famous with “Supermodel” (rather than fading into obscurity as one of the background dancers in “Love Shack”) and perhaps even better known as turning Williamsburg, in New York City, into one of the hippest, most avantgarde places for music, fashion, and art.

The term is both a noun and an adjective, and describes in a single word the rough, harsh sounds of its synthesizers and its unwillingness to go into the mainstream.

We can nail down Electroclash as a sonic genre with a few commonalities between bands, albums, and songs: analog synthesizers, pounding rhythm, and a vaguely disturbed, spooky atmosphere which accommodates debauchery, boredom, violence, and deviant sexuality. The Los Angeles Times in 2002 called it “New Songs, Old Beats,” a phrase which summarizes the cores pretty well.

Indeed, Electroclash was marketed — for instance on the collection This Is Electroclash, and then again on the woefully misguided MetalliClash, which inexplicably had Electroclash remixes of Metallica songs—as being music that used as its vocabulary and style a conscious throwback to the 1980s. This was the easiest and most palatable way to sell it to non-clubgoers. The trouble was that where in the 1980s was never really specified, but the sounds were vaguely something from the early part of the decade and a little before, so something like 1979–1983.

That was the era fresh off of the Winter of Discontent, and the early 80s recession in the United States: a time of music that took cues from places like the dystopian sarcasm of J.G. Ballard, and the dark underbelly of the club scene at the time. But the latter half of the decade, with its bright colors and Reaganesque optimism — conspicuous consumption and the winding down of the Cold War — too often gets conflated with the first half, and so the whole decade is thought of as this rosy time of tinny synths and gawky outfits. This is how Soft Cell is remembered as the band that did “Tainted Love”…and not “Sex Dwarf.”

And conscious or not, Soft Cell’s masterpiece, Non-Stop Erotic Cabaret, from which “Sex Dwarf” derives (with a video so shockingly offensive and distasteful it has since passed into pop music legend), was one of the key records that influenced a great deal of Electroclash’s sound, as was Fad Gadget’s “Lady Shave,” which appeared on This Is Electroclash as an example of Electroclash’s roots. Now, Pet Shop Boys this ain’t—these tracks are music for being horny and nauseated at the same time, played in the kind of clubs where your feet stick to the floor in the bathrooms, with melodies straight out of DIY horror flicks. Yet even these nightmarescapes of clubland gone horribly wrong still had their tongues firmly planted in — well, cheek, but other places too. There was a playfulness, a sarcasm, and above all a subversive sexuality that would permeate Electroclash as well. Right from the beginning, then, was Electroclash pioneering itself as a truly queer genre.

The missing link between the super-monsters and scary creeps of the early 80s neo-invasion, and the decadent ultraviolence of Electroclash, was Divine, protégé and muse of John Waters, and godmother to American drag as we know it, up to and including RuPaul’s Drag Race.

The video for “Walk Like A Man” seems, in retrospect, like a blueprint for the Electroclash to come. There is Divine, peace be upon him, absolutely savaging masculine traits and desires for a Ronald Reagan audience. Listen to that intro, that synth melody which replaces the yodeling of the original — those are the spare notes of the infinite that was the American shopping mall, the boundless joy of 1980s glass and brass and capitalism. Now is that, you may ask, the Giorgio Moroder “engine beat” from “I Feel Love” ? Are the images a rather more queer assault against the tropes of the Old West than Devo attempted with “Whip It”? Both are yes. Yet imitation is the firmest form of flattery, and the crystallization of Electroclash as a sonic aesthetic — old beats, new songs, new beats, old songs — is right there in Divine’s ragged, growly delivery. Even in the obvious joy and fun that Divine is having, there is something perverse and gleeful, the knowing wink that became the one of the key ingredients to Electroclash as a visual aesthetic.

Along with everything we’ve already talked about, the dystopian futurism of Gary Numan and Kraftwerk, and others like them, was a major inspiration for Electroclash visuals, playing up an angle of intersexuality that overlapped with drag queens and other queer performers. There was a streak of hypercapitalism — or was it anti-capitalism? — as well, a flamboyance and glamor oozing straight into overindulgence, like American Psycho without the restraint or elegance of its original Wall Street setting.

But the biggest influence of all, by far, was the 1982 film Liquid Sky.

This film, an independent production that can’t really be summarized easily and has to be seen to be believed, has been mentioned several times as having an extraordinarily outsize influence on Electroclash, the genre, and Electroclash, the scene. For many, the two cannot be separated.

Liquid Sky is one of those video productions from the 80s that was light years ahead of its time — because of its rank awfulness. (“Possibly In Michigan,” to which it is sometimes compared, is another good example.) Everything about this film makes it scarcely watchable: the amateurish acting, the color-riot visuals, the half-assed soundtrack that can be generously described as the composer, Brenda Hutchinson smacking a Fairlight CMI Series I with her fist. The plot, such as it is, concerns aliens from outer space who have come to harvest endorphins that are generated in the brain when humans have orgasms. No, really.

These were the kinds of psychoses that throbbed in the big cities and underground clubs utterly free from the pop culture monoliths of Molly Ringwald or Marty McFly — these are what the scene seemed to be trying to resurrect, or at least live in.

So it should be as no surprise that in its pulsing heart of hearts, Electroclash was afflicted by sinister urges and morbid impulses. Every day was Hallowe’en. Right from the beginning we had Miss Kittin helplessly cracking up because Frank Sinatra’s dead — most of Ladytron’s 604 is about the typical travails of small towns and the quotidian frustrations of interpersonal relationships turned into scenes of deeply paranoid psychosis. Even artists in the scene whose music was more fun and comparatively upbeat had behind their infectious danceability tableaux of drug addiction that verged on self-parody (Femme Fatality) or vicious varieties of kinky sex (Dirty Sanchez — their name was actually less obvious than it seemed).

Does that necessarily mean Electroclash was bad or otherwise toxic? Not at all. If anything, Electroclash was a much-needed reaction to the late 90s neo-explosion of boy bands and girl groups which, buoyed by the optimism of the second Clinton term, were seemingly hatched every day like new pennies. Music at the time — even electronic music, like trance and house — were processed within inches of their lives, and authenticity was laughably absent, and indeed in the golden haze of the Dot Com Boom often proudly flouted. (One is inevitably reminded of the mantra that Macaulay Culkin, as Michael Alig, chants in Party Monster, to the effect that the “pursuit of all values other than money, success, fame, glamor,” were either “discredited or destroyed.”)

But more to the point, the put-upon inside joke of Electroclash was its performativity — it was all fake. It was a recursive, supercondensed, hypercontextualized take on the extremely obvious mainstream stereotypes of Los Angeles and Manhattan. But even then, the knowingness to it all recognized that fame is lonely, hollow, and sick — Britney Spears’ “Lucky” and whatever the Hell Lady Gaga was trying to do in her early days, but far sadder, fatalistic, and self-aware. Look no further than Felix da Housecat — usually a kind of chaotic fun, personified — and his astonishingly poignant “Madame Hollywood,” a wistful wish as much as it is a confession of faith. (Apropos of nothing, it stars Debbie Merrill, who you may remember from that one Tim & Eric sketch with Bob Odenkirk as a fat magician.)

The dissolution of Electroclash by 2004 was unfortunate: it could have flourished triumphantly in the second half of the 2000s, the Bush economy a hot moist host for its decadent moulds, but by 2009 it would have been killed dead by the shining lights of the Hipster — and with it, sincerity as a cultural fashion. The downfall of Lindsay Lohan and Amanda Bynes — l’age d’or of Paris Hilton, Nicole Richie, and their Hollywood set — in retrospect, now, plays out almost as a parodic art-imitates-life set-piece of Electroclash itself, but they have not aged well as heartless spectacle.

The simple fact was that people moved on…and that, again, it was too good to last.

Any club scene is itself an endurance competition, and the appeal of Electroclash was in many ways just as fake as the music that it was rebelling against: the aesthetic of hard drugs, debauched sex, and beautiful people — really rather more Scarface than Liquid Sky, although for some reason the comparison was never made — is a fun charade to put on, but very hard to keep up. At some point clubgoers just wanted to have fun again, and not have some dark sinister undertone to their extended plays; suddenly the same stuff they were playing at Abercrombie & Fitch — Mike Jeffries’ mad vision of immortal Adonises and voluptuous mahogany-and-teakwood roomsprays all around the world — was the same stuff, remixed, you’d hear at clubs. So while it may seem strange in retrospect, in many ways the insanely catchy clucks of Lucky Twice were the perfect anthems for the counter-reformation of preppy rich kids doubling down against Emo, and The Scene.

Electroclash died naturally — thankfully, there was no homophobic, transphobic spasm like that which killed disco, or some violent tragedy, like the demise of the Club Kids of the 1990s. So why did it?

Let’s take the Club Kids themselves as an example. Ultimately, even if Michael Alig (the real one) had not bashed that guy’s brains in, the Club Kid was altogether too wild to keep outdoing itself party after party. The Geraldo, Joan Rivers, and Donahue episodes which featured them were, in retrospect, uproariously ripe for parody the seconds they all aired, because the Club Kids took themselves so seriously and operated so publicly.

What does this have to do with Electroclash? Because there was no seriousness, nor hyper-publicity; unlike the Club Kids, it was itself, even at its most grave, its most sad, dancing with tears in its ears, still totally in on the joke. Of course, after awhile, jokes stop being funny.

We can see this now. The music and aesthetic movements of the late 00s that eventually exploded into Synthwave and New Retro Wave — Valérie, Futurecop!, FM Attack, Let Em Riot, and so forth —weren’t joking at all, because the 80s sound and substance was taken with categorical seriousness: the inherent cheesiness of John Hughes movies and Miami Vice were something to be celebrated, adopted, and imitated, rather than mocked or morphed. In this new cultural environment, such as it was, egged on by the defiant sincerity of Hispterism, the snark of Electroclash had no place. Even Vaporwave, which has been endlessly debated by music critics ever since its bizarre appearance, disappearance, and reappearance, was still more serious than this.

In 2006, Ladytron, the veritable founders of the Electroclash sound, such that their second album Light & Magic seemed to paradoxically influenced by the very movement they had started, had struck out on their own to rebrand themselves as a far more unique electronic band with Soft Power. By 2008 they had evolved further to something even more avantgarde; after the traumas of the Great Recession and the washing typhoon of the new ironic age, in 2013, Marnie, the face and voice of the band, would release a solo album that did what Ladytron itself seemingly refused to, and actually display fragile, vulnerable emotions.

The soundtrack to Drive, starring Ryan Gosling and the future Daisy Buchanan, Carey Mulligan, would also use 80s retro sounds, but with hearts exposed and emotions running high. There was no time for Electroclash’s bored anywhere-but-here apathy.

Electroclash’s last great gasp— concurrent to the emergence of Alan Braxe and Fred Falke as a dynamic remixing duo that turned punk and rock tracks into floorfillers — came at the hands of big-time producers with big-time names: Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera.

Both women had, in the intervening decade, seemed to struggle mightily against their own original late 90s image of being teen idols, with varying success — Aguilera had repulsed everyone with “Dirtty,” only to bounce back with her squeaky-clean and ultra-catchy “Candyman” in 2005. Spears, on the other hand, was on the upswing from her famous breakdown in 2007, the now-infamous headshaving incident mentioned earlier. And so, like many female artists, it was time for a reinvention.

The sound of Bionic, in particular, is owed to the involvement Daniel Hunt and Reuben Wu, which is to say the male half of Ladytron, of which Aguilera herself was a fan. The result was wildly out of place, even dated, for 2010, the same year as (to give some perspective) Ke$ha and Lady Gaga, who were both doing new things and inventing new sounds.

The same themes from Electroclash continue in Bionic: decadence, sex addiction, pornography, the romanticization of drugs (or at least druggedness)…the marriage of lust and technology in uneven and unnatural ways. But in a post-Great Recession world this was gauche and tacky, and both records failed for basically the same reason VH1’s CelebReality did: it’s not longer any fun when everybody’s broke (plus that famous quote by Alfred Hitchcock to the that effect that people enjoy a murder provided they aren’t the victim).

The tremendous incongruity of conjuring the imagery of J.G. Ballard (or John Brunner, or William Gibson — which science fiction author do you read?) amongst the newness of the first years of the Obama presidency was painfully obvious, and the evergreen allure of glistening analog synths and retro imagery were passed to the gentler, sweeter strains of Chillwave, and then to the many subgenres which now populate YouTube and Bandcamp. Perhaps nothing so crystallizes this new attitude, and new era, like the opening to Portlandia, which is itself now thought of as another relic of a bygone age:

Electroclash was a part of history, to be sure. In its reflection do we see a depressed, bored society at the turn of the Millennium trying to act out its darkest urges in an enclosed club setting — it was more than just chintzy synthesizers and genderqueer sensibilities.

More importantly, Electroclash — the scene, the music, and the look all three — showed what was possible. Queer artists could be queer and that, in and of itself would not define them. The 1980s could be mined endlessly for retro-fabulous music and style; it could be marketed and repackaged successfully and profitably. It could be argued that there is a line to be drawn from Electroclash to Stranger Things. And to that end, Electroclash stands godmother to virtually every 80s-influence music project today; without it, the viability of resurrecting the sounds and looks of the past as a serious venture probably wouldn’t exist.

Not bad for a five-year party scene.