international news_ Jonty Skrufff _ 22nd February 2005
Dance Is Dead Jaxx Backtrack
British pop duo Basement Jaxx won the Grammy's first ever Best Electronic Dance album award this week for Kish Kash and celebrated by immediately re-aligning themselves with house music.
"We're very pleased that they added the category and we won something," the Brixton duo told the BBC.
"It's nice to be recognised in America because dance music hasn't figured much in American consciousness for a long time."
The Jaxx's U-turn came just over a year after they emphatically distanced themselves from house music, complaining that their clubbing background prevented critics from taking them seriously.
"What's annoying is that we're always told we're an electronic dance band, that doesn't happen with Radiohead or Coldplay," Felix Buxton told NME. "They're artists and musicians, they don't have to explain."
Buxton also gleefully labelled dance music as dead in an interview with indie rock magazine Bang at the time (which ironically failed soon after).
"We used to be very conscious of our contemporaries- Daft Punk, The Chemical Brothers, Armand Van Helden," he said, "And while we were making this album (Kish Kash)we just started to feel like we're not part of anything any more. This whole world has just disappeared," he sneered.
In more Grammy news, Basement Jaxx also launched a Scissor Sisters style attack on mainstream America, complaining 'I think there's a bit of a homophobic/gay thing here with house music. Which is a shame, but for us in England, we're like 'Whatever, it's good music, so it's cool!'"
Super-talented fellow Brit dance producer Jacques Lu Cont (aka Stuart Price) also (quietly) picked up a Grammy for 'Best Remixed Recording, Non-Classical'.
(Jonty Skrufff / Skrufff.com)
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