RIP Trilogy: An open love letter

Dear Trilogy,

It’s over.

I guess the lack of promotional texts, un-replied emails and the quietly announced press release told me as much, but it still took a while to realize that you and I (and about 2000 people every weekend, you whore) are over.

I’ve been through this clubbing heartache before with iBO and Alpha, so I know what to expect. You all gave us a weekly alternative, but you went one better as you were smack bang in the heart of Dubai’s commercial hub, Madinat Jumeirah. You gave us hope that big clubs with cool line ups could not only survive but grow, you gave us a reason to get excited on a Thursday night (thanks iLL Communications on the roof!) and every Friday when Deep were the biggest fish in the ocean.

You might have been relatively restrained compared to other Middle East clubs (no sparklers, no Superman music, just those rather garish cages above the floor), but you brought out DJs like Sven Vath, Todd Terje and Chase & Status, when no one else dared. You gave us names like Erick Morillo (back when he was good), Pete Tong and 2ManyDJs on a regular basis, forcing queues back out into the sweaty night, packing the club out week in, year out. You were all about the music, and for that I (we) salute you.

You gave local DJs a platform to shine, with warm ups and main slots across all 3 rooms. The hidden and hugely under-promoted 3^rd room became an exploration in sound, hosting some of the first dubstep nights in the city. Your DJ console in the main room was like commanding the Enterprise (although shorter DJs had to do so standing on a box), and your Funktion 1 monitors in the booth were the best party place in the club. And when you did do commercial, you did it as well as anyone as DJ Bliss and Shef Codes held it down on the rooftop.

You weren’t perfect. Why did you have a 20m high dome in the middle of the club, it certainly wasn’t for the sound it caused. And why, after you re-opened for the nth time, had no one done anything to the cigarette stained furniture? And sometimes, just sometimes, your programming was a little too ahead of the curve, meaning that your dancefloor would be more a morgue come 2am.

But over the years (how many years were we together now, 7, maybe more – time flies when you’re ordering Dhs50 shots), you’ve been there, our dependably forward-thinking bastion of music amongst the pop and (c)rap that dominates other clubs. I'm forever in debt to the recent manager (Buff) and resident (Ejaz) for making me a resident at the best club in town. And let's salute the hundreds of DJs who've played to thousands of clubbers, to those who worked the door, rung the tills, cleaned the toilets and escorted drunk clubbers out of your doors, you've all flown the electronic flag loud and proud. One last closing party would have been epic, but sometimes it's easier to slink off quietly into the night, so I understand.

I'll miss the long, lonely, post-clubbing nights punctuated by tinnitus, the snaking taxi queue at 3am and the hastily arranged after-parties with newly made friends. But you’ll be missed most for your music, for keeping your head (and musical morals) high and maintaining your love of back-to-basics clubbing when all around venues were succumbing to commercialitis. 

Thanks for the memories, Trilogy. 

Don't believe the hype

Hype ting 

When it's done right, hype is anticipation, it's excitement, it’s organic.

But if you think about it, hype has become advertising and publicity. Clever advertising and publicity, granted, but it’s become a man-made phenomenon, something thought up in board rooms and offices and not powered by the weight of public opinion (just look at the carefully orchestrated corporate 'Flash mobs' for evidence).

The film and music world have been subjected to over-inflated opinion forming, with a steady stream of teasers, trailers, innovative advertising and aggressive marketing causing consumers to binge on carefully provided information which is then eagerly dissected by on air, online and print media. And when the excitement levels have been built up to tantric levels and the album/film is released, you can almost guarantee box office receipts and top of the pops results. But – and this is the crucial point – consumers are nearly always left cold shouldered and disappointed, the hype almost never living up to the content.

We’re not short of big-budget examples: Prometheus and Man of Steel from the film world, and Daft Punk’s recent Random Access Memories have all promised brave new worlds and failed to deliver.

In Daft Punk’s case, the Parisian robots come with a natural weight of expectation – their first two albums helped shape the current dance music climate, ushering in a new wave of bands and DJs, while the 8 year gap between their 3^rd and 4^th album only heightened the sense of occasion.

Sony cleverly tapped into that natural hype and created a precise military-style campaign that started with targeted 15 second TV trailers (just 8 seconds of which consisted of music, and even then it was just one chord progression), and ended with blanket advertising across virtually every medium on earth (no, really). 

Then came a series of in-depth Contributor interviews, where Nile Rodgers, Pharrell and the rest all gave fawning interviews in which they added further fuel to the fire, proclaiming the new Daft Punk album to be the second coming (and we all know how that turned out, Stone Roses fans). This was swiftly followed by a longer, 2 minute clip of ‘Get Lucky’ debuted on huge screens at Coachella which promptly went viral quicker than puppy in a onesie, and drew bigger cheers than festival headliners Blur.

This supremely limited content was enough for Soundcloud warriors, however, who quickly drowned the internet in bad re-edits, extended remixes and mashups, gaining millions of downloads and hits within hours.

Next came the predictable interviews where the ‘Da Funk’ duo proclaimed that the current state of dance music was in dire straits (the insinuation being that their absence had caused it), and that their album would be the antidote to the current rash of EDM sweeping the world. By looking back to the classic disco sound of the 70s, they’d bring the funk and soul back into dance music, giving us more than processed beats and wasp-in-a-bottle basslines.

Finally, it was time for the journalists to stoke the flames as part of their carefully guarded album play back sessions. With a huge stereo primed with their fourth album, Daft Punk allowed some of the world’s media into their world to listen to the album just once. NME, no stranger to hype themselves, called it ‘the best party of the decade’, said that the album left ‘the tatters of 21st century dance music strewn around their robot feet, vanquished,’ while also commenting that it sounds like the ‘theme tune to a 70s US sitcom.’

And therein lies the hype. Because nothing should ever sound like a 70s US sitcom and receive praise, and especially not when it’s been created by Daft Punk.

Yes, Sony’s marketing team have pulled off an astonishing feat, propelling Daft Punk to countless records (their first ever No.1 single, the most requested track on Pandora, the No.1 album in over 28 countries) and have made the Guy-Man and Thomas Bangalter millions, and the record company gazillions.

But in doing so, they’ve pulled the wool over everyone’s eyes – the music fans bought the hype, pushing it through carefully orchestrated social media outlets via the Daft Punk homepage. The journalists bought the hype and gave it more column inches than any album or event in living memory. And ultimately, the fans bought the hype, desperately wanting this carefully woven story to be true. Taken alone, Daft Punk’s album would probably have been seen as an ambitious failure, on a par with Human After All.

But under the mountain of hype and unsustainable pressure heaped on by layer and layer of expectation, it’s one of the most disappointing albums in recent time. As Public Enemy wisely said, don’t (always) believe the hype :: 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LK8sxngSWaU