DJ Sprinkles - Gayest Tits & Greyest Shits: 1998-2017 12-inches & One-offs Music Album Reviews

DJ Sprinkles - Gayest Tits & Greyest Shits: 1998-2017 12-inches & One-offs Music Album Reviews
A collection of Terre Thaemlitz’s gorgeous and thought-provoking deep-house 12"s turns a critical eye on history, identity, and club culture.

By 2008, when Terre Thaemlitz unveiled her deep-house masterpiece Midtown 120 Blues, he’d been hired and fired as a DJ in some of NYC’s most infamous and beloved trans bars; sold out venues around the world while first relocating to Oakland and then Japan; and released a string of experimental recordings on heady labels like Mille Plateaux. (Thaemlitz, who identifies as transgender and subscribes to a “non-essentialist” notion of gender identity, uses alternating pronouns.)

Midtown 120 Blues, released under Thaemlitz’s DJ Sprinkles alias, was a culmination of all that, a collection of 12"s and associated tracks all bursting with bright ideas. Some were textural: “House Music Is Controllable Desire You Can Own” burned off a murky, funky throb with breaks as rosy as the morning sun. Others were textual: “Midtown 120 Intro” displaced traditional house voices—those too-often uncredited, gospel-inspired Black women demanding attention, sweat, and emotions—for her own kind of diva vocals, a furious murmur illuminating his understanding of house as a “very specifically queer, transgendered, Latino and African-American phenomenon” fashioned in “hyper-specific” places: “East Jersey, Loisada, West Village, Brooklyn.” Midtown 120 Blues was a statement of purpose that expertly synced up form, function, and feeling. Its power came from Thaemlitz’s context—her history underscored his authority to, say, talk shit about Madonna—and came for the colonized oontz-oontz that Europe’s Nightlife Industrial Complex sold back to America and called house music when it was more like music for luxury hotels.

Midtown 120 Blues set up a soapbox under the strobe lights. Gayest Tits & Greyest Shits: 1998-2017 12-Inches and One-Offs, 19 languorous house tracks recorded around and after the major statement, looks underneath the dancefloor to the very foundations of society. The Balearic shuffle of “Useless Movement,” a collaboration with cyberfeminist Laurence Rassel, wonders whether the death of the author killed off women’s shot at recognition; it’s Lit Crit for the hips. “Admit It’s Killing You (And Leave) (Sprinkles’ Dead End)” remixes moments from Thaemlitz’s larger Deproduction project, which explores the destructive power of the nuclear family. The track puts comedian Paul F. Tompkins into a kind of Martha Wash drag, weaving a joke about right-wing discomfort with gay people’s existence in on itself until it becomes a call-and-response chorus that wrestles with the very notion of assimilation—all over crisp percussion. “Names Have Been Changed (Sprinkles’ House Arrest)” sets another Deproduction section, a long series of complex and excruciating depictions of incest, into an almost impossibly beautiful showcase for strings and lush hi-hats. A dub of this could be a heartbreak anthem; an a cappella might tear your soul into shreds. This does both at once. It’s some kind of terrible miracle.

The instrumental tracks on Gayest Tits & Greyest Shits reinforce the fact that Thaemlitz is among the finest producers of her generation. The nimble basslines of “Kissing Costs Extra” stay in the pocket like a pair of welcome fingers; the kicks are buoyant, even erotic in their bounce, if a bit too mid-tempo to achieve full sleaze. Almost 25 minutes spent in versions of “Sloppy 42nds” prove that the strike of a single piano key can hit harder than the most epic of EDM drops. One thing hard to remember about gay clubs, before we all had a phone in our hands for stimulation, was how boring they could be; you could stand somewhere forever, twiddling a swizzle stick to a mix not quite achieving liftoff—and then suddenly a look could catch a spark inside you, or a pattern of hi-hats could tickle your hips into motion. Thaemlitz works this boredom like Moodymann works anticipation, mining the mood for all it’s worth.

These recordings date back to 1998, the year Celeda and Danny Tenaglia began preaching a sacred text of house music: “Music is the answer/To your problems/Keep on movin’/Then you can solve them.” Compiled in 2021, when the clubs are closed and past-due reckonings of predatory DJs and entrenched industry racism and transphobia refuse to be ignored, this house music sounds more like a series of questions. What might it mean for a DJ to counter a crowd’s loved-up chants for “one more tune” with the shouts of “silence equals death” that form the climax of the astonishing “Hush Now (Broken Record Mix)”? After last summer’s BLM protests, how revolutionary, really, is dancing in the streets? Might “killing” the mood also have its uses?

House music, like collage, is a sample-based artform. But like techno, as artists like Speaker Music remind us, it’s built on Black labor. Sprinkles’ Bassline.89 EP, here in all its brutal glory, works over chunks of classic tracks by Black innovators like Farley “Jackmaster” Funk; elsewhere, the churning, humid storms of two long versions of “Masterjakor” suddenly clear into a third, quick flight into the blue skies of one of hip hop’s greatest one-hit wonders. And further complexities are mixed into these minimalist tracks. Thaemlitz insists his work be kept off all streaming sources, in part to “keep ‘queer’ audio and media functioning queerly, contextually, and with smallness.” This keeps Spotify from making money off her work, and fair enough. It also keeps YouTube’s bots from detecting the samples he uses—a practice that bothers her, he says, not for being found out but because YouTube then pulls down the tracks and blames her for their removal, angering fans. Both Spotify and YouTube are terrible, and artists deserve better. But in this smallness, there’s a tinge of gatekeeping. How do artists control who hears them and by what means? To be sure, these tracks will fill the dancefloor; but as with the productions of, like, every white DJ these days, they pay homage to Black musicians without paying them for their work. (The Sample Clearance Industrial Complex, meanwhile, is often little help.) And come to think of it, what did Midtown gain from its presentation as a white person playing the blues?

Gayest Tits & Greyest Shits is far more uncertain than Midtown; its power source is cohesion and nerve. Maybe, for Thaemlitz, music is neither the answer nor the question: It’s the problem itself.
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About Wanni Arachchige Udara Madusanka Perera

Hey, I'm Perera! I will try to give you technology reviews(mobile,gadgets,smart watch & other technology things), Automobiles, News and entertainment for built up your knowledge.
DJ Sprinkles - Gayest Tits & Greyest Shits: 1998-2017 12-inches & One-offs Music Album Reviews DJ Sprinkles - Gayest Tits & Greyest Shits: 1998-2017 12-inches & One-offs Music Album Reviews Reviewed by Wanni Arachchige Udara Madusanka Perera on May 21, 2021 Rating: 5

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