AZ51LK said:
sydney: bars & lounges mainly play hip hop and r&b
hard to find a place that'll play house, d&b or trance that ISNT a house, d&b or trance club.
i love r&b and hip hop to death, but the type of crowds that the music attracts, well, is fcuked.
Couldn't help digging this thread up.
Agreed. Sydney has and will always have a very strong market for R&B/"hip-hop"/rap (and by that I actually mean top 40 stuff, not an interesting underground scene or anything). I would say at least half of all clubs/bars play this stuff, and they are always full. The music is boring and the crowds are amazingly bad, people there are either looking for a fight or looking for meat. Unfortunately, your friends who perhaps haven't really found the time to explore musical genres as much will insist on going to these places all the time, because they are the only places to go.
Not including the above, breaks used to be big, but these days it's all electro and electro-house. Which I don't mind usually, at least I don't mind old school electro and electro funk, but this stuff, while quite often pleasant to listen to, is getting tedious, and bang-gangers do my head in. I am hoping really hard that this love of electro will turn funky eventually and we will see a revival of Zapp and Roger style stuff. I suppose there is some Trance going round, nothing too impressive though, IM came to Home Nighclub not too long ago, but of course that is the new IM, which is really half electro-house anyway, don't tell any of the ravers at Home though. There are still some good doofs though, with generally good music and a good crowd, and as far as I can tell Psy is actually picking up, despite the music these days being a far cry from the music of 94-98. I think this has something to do with IM calling their music these days Psy.
As for Melbourne, I visited recently, and I'm not too sure of the scene there, but they seem to pay less attention to shitty music, this I think is in large part to Melbournites being a tad pretentious, but pretentious or not clubs there are much better, and the people there are much better. I went to Fractured down there and the fact that they managed to spin really acidic breaks with more than just the DJ hanging around amazed me. It was really kick-arse to be able to listen to something half decent. Even at Revolver, which as far as I can tell is really mainstream, the crowds were friendly and they played some nice funk tunes early on, and in the second room they had stuff which sounded really techy and dark, which pleased me greatly. All up, Melbourne is great for listening to interesting music that would never get a moment of time in Sydney. So you Melbournites shouldn't complain too much, at least it isn't a 50/50 split of Top-40 and Electro-House.
One of the highlights of recent Sydney clubbing experiences was having N'Fa at Funktrust, who is a Melbournite anyway. The irony.
