i suppose what i'd say is:

* it's okay to say that you and your generation don't care about the question of futurism/innovation

* and it's okay also to say that it's not a particularly relevant consideration within electronic dance music today. and it's even okay to argue that fixating on that might blind one to other virtues the music has

BUT

* don't then retroactively try to make out it was never that crucial, downplay its role in the past. cos man, i was there, i read all those dance mags, interviewed loads of musicians, and the rhetoric was all "we are the future", "this is future music", "living for the future" etc. To a comic and shlocky degree at times. It was the central plank of the manifesto! i mean, cmon, the whole thing kicks off with "Acid Tracks" by a group called Phuture. And then all the Detroit guys, they were all mad fiends for Alvin Toffler of Future Shock and 'techno rebels' fame. And all the science fiction, outer space imagery...

it's true Philip Sherburne's piece isn't that gloomy but i thought it was interesting that he has the straight-up declaration that "the futurist impulse has gone, totally stalled", because it's all very well for me, as a fairly remote onlooker, saying such things based on the handful of things i hear. but when Phil the fiend, who's totally immersed in the music and deejays it on a weekly basis, when he concludes that, then, it's definitive, surely?

But yeah, you're right, that's my role you see: the Ghost of Future(ism) Passed. This baleful specter who won't shut up!

Actually it doesn't cause me anguish particularly anymore, at least compared with five years ago. I don't think dance music should be given more stick about its non-moving-forwardness than anything else. Whereas i did used to think it deserved to be chastised for it precisely BECAUSE of how it used to go on and on and on about about Da Phuture and make these massive claims for its own innovativeness.