Daniel Wang

DANIEL WANG – Redbull Interview

What exactly are we talking about when we refer to a 4/4 beat? Disco? House? Techno? Blues? Rock? Excuse me?! Shut off your mobiles and computers and start to concentrate! One of dance music’s finest, Mr.Danny Wang, will teach you a lesson that is deeper than the Mariana Trench. In explaining why dance music goes back at least a hundred years he touches topics from the beginning of mechanical music to contemporary house. Throw in a nightingale, an East German transsexual and her collection of ‘Spieluhren’ and a crash course in vogueing and you’re all set. Once upon a time…

RBMA: »How many people here are actually familiar with Mr. Danny Wang?«

Danny Wang: »Thank you, but I don’t expect everyone to know me. I’m not a superstar like that.«

RBMA: »If you have the slightest interest in disco music you might have come across his label Balihu Records. Which means what? Balihu?«

Danny Wang: »It was actually a nonsense word. A ballyhoo in English means a big commotion, like a big noise, aaarghh. But it’s actually a nonsense word. Because when I made the label everybody was saying “spiritual grooves, deep house” and I just wanted to avoid attaching that kind of meaning to it. It should be kind of nonsense, it should just be anything you want it to be.

You know, ever since the wordd was invented, how many words do we have now for what we call dance music? Trip hop, blablabla, 2-step, drum ‘n’ bass, the point of all this is the possibilities of music over a four/four beat. And it’s been that way for about a hundred years, actually. Blues was music over a four-four beat, rock is, bossa nova is. So I wanted to not attach, say: “This is house,” or you know? I just used the word disco a lot because since the ’70s when this was all invented, about 1973 officially, this is the proper birth date of disco, that’s Love Is The Message, that’s the whole Philly sound, Gamble & Huff, if you’re familiar with it.

You know, we’re playing with the same idea since that time for the past 33 years or so. And it’s been called disco since that time, and it was a so much more open word back then. It’s kind of like a tower of babel where everything split apart and into different genres, but it’s obviously like a big tree they go back to the same root. We’re going to have lots of very corny metaphors here today, I apologize, but I didn’t say disco.«

RBMA: »But didn’t you start Balihu back then initially to get DJ gigs?«

Danny Wang: »Well, yeah, because I realized the only way in 1993 anybody would get a gig, I mean this is 1993, Danny Tenaglia and Junior Vasquez.«

RBMA: »We’re talking about New York, right?«

Danny Wang: »We’re talking about New York, and still I feel this way. Nobody needs an openly homosexual Chinese/American DJ pop star. I still don’t think it’s ever going to happen and that’s OK. I’m happy to do my own thing. But I realized the only way to get any attention and to say: “OK, here is someone who obviously knows something about disco and house music,” is: make a record.

So I just took all this records, I took 17 samples, because everybody was sampling at that time, and just strung them together and made a sort of parody record. OK, here is my idea if you want to sample all the old disco records. But of course the joke was that you couldn’t recognize a single one. Or you could recognize about three out of 17. And there was this sort of joke on it, like if anybody recognizes all these records, I’ll give you a trip to Paris or something. Eventually one person named a few samples.« 
RBMA: »But not all?« 
Danny Wang: »Not all, no.«

RBMA: »But maybe we should show them what you did as you started out.«

Danny Wang: »So, this is how Gerd and I got to know each other, and you know what? Let’s do an overview, because I don’t want to give you the impression that I’m going to sit here and talk for three hours about what I do. In fact this whole talk, I hope, will be about ten minutes now, five minutes about myself and the rest is about… (asks participants to open their handouts) Can we open the thing, please? Let’s take an overview.

Alright, if you go to the second page, some things to think about. First things that came to mind – it’s personal opinion again – it’s perfectly alright to be asocial and it’s OK not to like or buy stuff, because we’re all here and we want to be polite, we want to be nice to each other, and lots of people here, I think almost everybody here is talented and has something to say. If I were running this camp, I’d almost want to say turn off the computer, turn off the mobile, and turn off the email. Myspace especially.

People who really concentrate on music, does anyone know Eric Satie? We all know Eric Satie, right? Yes, famous theme. Does anyone know how he died? He’d lived alone in a room for 15 years, and when he died he was covered with old newspapers and umbrellas, because he was so afraid that every time he went out he was afraid of rain or something like that. He collected old umbrellas. And you know how he actually made music, right? Why he started making ambient music? Because there was too much loud accordeon music in the cafés, and I was thinking this yesterday when the radio show was blasting out over the speakers during dinner.

He simply wanted quieter music so he could digest his food. There actually have been studies by the American military in the ’50s and ’60s that say loud music with rhythm actually disturbes digestion and it’s not good for your health. I really wanted to put on some Satie during dinner yesterday. Number two, why we’re here. What we’re going to explain in a minute. Just as a painter you can not only use one color and straight lines to paint, it’s really about expanding our minds, our understanding of chords, and melodies, and harmonies, and also tone palettes, which we will get into in a little bit.

Let’s see, I’m going to jump down a bit here, and I think maybe what always scared me most of all about modern music is the amount of force that entails. I mean, you’re talking about 120 db’s of sound coming at you. We kind of live in a ‘might makes right’ world right now with George Bush running things and everything. Whoever has the biggest bomb wins, but I don’t think that should be the case, and you probably don’t either. Might should not make right, especially as music, but like it or not, even though so many DJs talk about peace and love and whatever, I think they follow the exactly same principle.

Whatever is loudest, and thickest and fattest is what cuts through, and the rest doesn’t really matter. Frankly, it’s a great way to destroy everything that’s great around you. And probably the thing that bothers me most of all is things like MTV, because as we all know music has been going downhill probably since about the early ’80s. It’s exactly when MTV came in. This is when the picture and propaganda replaced music. More often than not, almost always, music is basically marketed towards a social group.

It’s saying: “You’re gay, you’re listening to this music. You’re black, listen to this music. You’re white, listen to this music.” And MTV has enforced that, and no matter what, we can’t avoid it, even in what we do, thinking this is right. But looking at music as a pure, I don’t want to say pure mathematic or scientific phenomenon, but in the root, of course, in the ’60s and ’70s there were no such distinctions. I mean, everybody was into disco, it all came together: Latin music, salsa percussion, rock, blues, classical.

It was all there and there was really no distinction. The idea that there should be any distinction is purely a marketing ploy designed to separate people. This might be totally obvious, but we have to start with this premise, beginning. At any point of the lecture somebody says: “Oh, that’s not black music, that’s not real,” or: “Oh, that’s not a proper classical transition, Bach would never have played that.” I think we have to throw that out. So, thinking this, I started making records and this is how Gerd and I met. And what are we supposed to hear now? Should we hear something that…? This is not necessarily something I’m proud of, this is maybe something I produced that you like.«

RBMA: »Yeah, that I like and you did at a very early stage, and I think you’re pretty dissatisfied these days with what you did back in the days.«

Danny Wang: »Erm, I should say the first records I really just sampled a lot of stuff, I just took things that I liked. I didn’t know what I was doing. I’ve done a theory course in college, primarily learn to apply it, and I think people say often that there is a ten year rule: you start out doing something and then ten years later you’ll come to the revelation of how all the knowledge you’ve acquired actually applies to what you do. It takes a while, actually.«

RBMA: »Do you get a lot of flack for your opinion?«

Danny Wang: »Actually less and less. I can’t even believe I’m here, and people are giving me a chance to speak to so many people.«

RBMA: »Because your views are pretty… how do you say?«

Danny Wang: »You bring the slogan. Let’s do a quick overview, OK? In this package you will find, what do we find? Overview: Personal journey, we’re talking about how I got into this whole thing, that’s, I hope, the only personal part. Page one, and then: Finding records. I started seeing this list. Now we’re on to page one and two. See these lists here? So I was living in San Francisco, this is about 1991, and my friend said: “You’ve got to see this magazine. There are these two gay black guys from Chicago who put out a big list of all the records that were house records for them up and until about 1987.” Which was already amazing, this is 1991, you know?

There were some Strictly Rhythm records, that was it. No one talked about house music the way they do now. People didn’t really even talk about Techno that much either. Like Derrick May was saying yesterday, only in a few warehouse parties. And here was this list of a hundred records that I’ve never heard of, and furthermore you go out to the record shop and they would be everywhere for two or three dollars.

And you’ll recognize some of these. Should we go down the list a bit? Does everyone know what Love Is The Message is?« 
»Most? Kind of. Erm, Love Is The Message is the number one house, the first [record], 1973, what I was talking about. The invention of house music. And then we go down the list. I think Trussel, the thing that was just sampled, was number 60, I Love It by Trussel. We just went and found this record for like three dollars, and it was just amazing.

So I decided I would go, and you would get these things on bootlegs, I went to every record shop, and I wouldn’t stop until I found every record on this list, and found out why they were good. A lot of times I would buy them and think, ‘This is total crap, why would anybody play this?’ Because I was getting into Strictly Rhythm and all this stuff at the time. And the bass drum sometimes was really tiny, sometimes it was really corny and kitschy.

Like Clark Sisters – You Brought The Sunshine is actually kind of a swingbeat. It’s like a ‘bam ba ba dah…’ (sings) That kind of beat. It’s not at all disco. And this is for your reference by the way, too (shows the list), because maybe you go and check out some of these records.«

Love Is The Message is also called the Brooklyn National Anthem. Has anybody seen the movie Paris Is Burning? You know this movie? It’s the gay, black drag queen movie about ‘Vogueing’, about the whole… Should we do this?«
(gets up to demonstrate vogueing) 
»Alright, you can do the bus stop to this song, pretty much. Everything’s on the four/four. One, two, three, four, one, two, three, four, one, two, three, four, right? It’s also going … ‘bam, bam, bam, bam…’

And I would go out to clubs and just see kids, mostly gay black or Latino kids, or two or three Korean kids who would spend all night just ‘bam, bam, bam, bam’, everything on the beat. All the time. This became an obsession, for hours. And it came from this song, and also there even old school rap stars like Doug E. Fresh rapping over this record.«

RBMA: »I know EPMD sampled this for It’s Time To Party.«

Danny Wang: »And again, going back to this theme of not making any difference between black music, white music, gay music, whatever. It was all one thing back in 1973. Nobody cared. There was no gangster rap, there was none of that. Actually there were a lot of hip hop stars that who really are gay and they won’t admit it.

Thank you Love Is The Message. Alright, let’s move on a little bit. Alright, from this record actually I started thinking, ‘How can we possibly get back to the stage where we start these kind of sounds again?’ It’s also a crucial record, because if you listen to the bassline…«

»At about age 17 or 18, well, 14 or 15 you start discovering sexuality. And there is one thing this thing certainly doesn’t talk about. What role sexuality plays in music.«

RBMA: »What role did it play?«

Danny Wang: »For you or me?«

RBMA: »In regards to music.«

Danny Wang: »I can’t, you know, that’s a good question. Well, when I discovered I was gay I was going out to gay clubs and listening to house music. And it wasn’t just that, because most of the time they weren’t so much gay clubs, they were actually always more black people than gay people in general. But the really strong intention, the people who really danced were the gay people, obviously. The gay black people…«

You know, doing all this. Or to say it simply: They tell me to be free. They tell me to just throw all your cares away and don’t be embarrassed, don’t be ashamed. That’s what the whole vogueing and breakdancing… you know, you look ridiculous. You do look ridiculous spinning on your head on the floor. But if you do well enough and your soul is in it, or whatever, it doesn’t matter. And that’s probably the biggest lesson that soul music and black music taught the entire rest of the world for the past hundred years.

That is: ‘Be free, let it out, put your body’ – like Stephanie Mills sings: “Put your body into the music,” and don’t let it only be in your head. That’s one of the most important things. Like people said of Chaka Khan, you know: “I’m every woman.” (sings Chaka Khan – I’m Every Woman) She’s one of the greatest singers, because she sings with her whole body. And if you look at it, actually all the great soul singers are that way.

They sing with their whole body. It’s also very interesting because obviously microphone recording made a lot of things possible. Like in the ’50s, ever since the time of Chet Baker. People say Chet Baker and Ella Fitzgerald wouldn’t even be possible without the microphone, because these people were not ‘AAAHHHH’ singing – that actually kind of comes back in the ’60s and ’70s with the divas – they would be whispering into the microphone sometimes, and without a microphone it wouldn’t be possible. I mean, why do you have opera and this ‘OOOHHHH’… (imitates opera singing) …this kind of singing in the 18th century? There’s no other way to amplify the sound in a big concert hall.«