WMC 2008 Panels: Legends of House

WMC 2008 Panels: Legends of House

31 March, 2008 | 9.13AM

• Written by: Mr Tunes
• Filed under: Music News: frankie bones, junior sanchez, man parrish, shocklee, wmc 2008, wmc 2008 panels

Ok so the panel wasn’t actually called “Legends of House”, but that’s what I call it.

It was actually called “Electronic Music — History Made Fresh”.

First, let’s go over who was on the panel:

Brendan M. Gillen/Ectomorph (moderator)
Hank Shocklee
Frankie Bones
Carl Craig
Cornelius ‘Atlantis’ Harris
Man Parrish
Jesse Saunders
Junior Sanchez
Juan Atkins (absent)

This was, by far, the biggest highlight of the conference for me — all those hours spent inside while everyone was enjoying the pool and rooftop parties seems to have paid off.

The panel was focused on getting to the root of where house music is headed by discussing a bit of where it came from.

A great deal of time was spent reviewing the history with things like production techniques, the advent of the 12” single, and how remixing came about.

Hank Shocklee was awesome in how he was able to tell it like it is.

“Even Rodney Dangerfield was doing fucking disco”, speaking about how overdone the genre was and how house and new styles of dance music came into existence.

He mentioned how artists used to be on a per-single basis back then, and there were no guarantees of releasing a next record until your first one did well.

That brought up the point about how you had to work really hard to keep your career going, whereas today you have no limits.

Man Parrish spoke about how, back then, you could sell large numbers of records and it wouldn’t even be a big deal, whereas by today’s standards it’s hard to sell anything substantial.

Junior Sanchez made the good point that with the MP3 generation, no one is finding their own sound.

His point was that everyone’s sort of latching on to the latest big thing, and that brought it back to what the panel’s focus was on, which was how house music was a revolution from disco, and the next big thing is always going to take the shape of being a revolution from what is popular before it.

Again, Carl Craig was essentially silent like in the last panel, but eventually some of the members of the panel were able to coax a few words out of him.

After seeing Craig participate in panels twice this conference, my view is that he’s so quiet at these panels because he’s humble, and also because he’s a good listener; while other people fight for airtime he is always content with just being there.

When Frankie Bones spoke about how everyone is pushing their CDs so hard at the conference, Craig mentioned the fond memories of standing by the pool at WMC in around 1990 doing the same thing to the big DJs of the time there.

A good quote from the discussion came from Shocklee.

In response to someone who said they were frustrated with working in the industry, he said “dues are never paid, they’re like a light bill”, reminding everyone that you always have to work hard to get out there.

It was a great panel because it was fun to see the guys laugh and reminisce about their heydays in making music and DJing.

There was a real spirit in the room that reminded everyone where all this music has come from and it gave some insight into how to take it all to the next level.

Interestingly, this session was hosted in a tiny room, while at the same time, another panel on film licensing was going on in a large ballroom.

I couldn’t figure out why people would be more interested in the other session, but even more confusing was how the organizers of the conference were able to foresee this.

It’s sort of unfortunate that at a dance music conference people are more concerned with finding ways to cash in on the tracks, rather than listening to legends share their opinions on the business.

I guess those suckers missed out!

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