The Joycore Supremacy

No-one can be told what joycore is. They have to be shown it.

With that in mind, please go and watch the video for ‘Odyle’ by Heloise and the Savoir Faire Dancers over at Heloise’s website. While you’re at it, you can watch the one for ‘Members Only’ too, if you like. But we will mostly concern ourselves with ‘Odyle’ for the purposes of this guest appearance. (It’s not the first time the song has featured on Fluxblog, but bear with me.)

I can’t remember exactly when Flux started using the term ‘joycore’, but it caught on pretty fast with a cabal of weird geeks dedicated to neologism and new religions, who promptly started propogating the idea in small but hostile circles. The hostility stemmed from the prevalence of borecore in the world, a most pernicious syndrome. Borecore is anti-fun, anti-sex (unless it’s Pitchfork-endorsed sex, the kind that “climaxes in rage, regret and release”), and most importantly anti-pop. The war between the two ways of thinking is ceaseless and intense.

(Incidentally: this is, to my mind, a preferable duality to ‘rockism’ and ‘popism’, whilst suggesting many of the same conflicts. I know many rock fans who are deeply offended by the suggestion that something about their taste in music makes them humourless plodding bores, and rightly so: School Of Rock is a deeply joycore film, ‘I Believe In A Thing Called Love’ a joycore song. Equally pop can be borecore: Westlife are the proof.)

Two popular misconceptions exist regarding joycore. The first is that it is primarily provocative, intended mainly to annoy. It’s true that like any list that splits the world into binary categories (‘You’re Gonna Wake Up One Morning And Know What Side Of The Bed You’ve Been Lying On’), joycore and borecore were always going to generate controversy. The fact is, it’s very, very easy (and fun!) to annoy Mars Volta fans, regardless of whether you’re doing it on purpose or not – but this is a joycore bonus, not a raison d’etre.

The second misconception is that joycore involves a relentlessly upbeat façade of cheer and smiles that refuses to recognize the nasty things in life and thus quickly becomes wearing (this misconception also crops up in discussions of the related ideology ‘poptimism’). We can illustrate the fallacy of this by paying close attention to ‘Odyle’. The lyrics are full of signs of the apocalypse: the sky is falling, and a psychic has foretold Heloise’s impending death. But this world can’t end without a new one beginning, and so the dancing goes on. There’s anger there too, in the defiant shouty-shouty bit of the chorus, like a great lost Le Tigre song. ‘Odyle’ has room for all of this, as well as for big ideas. But it’s still unmistakably pop in the simplest, most fun sense – just listen to the way that beat pulsates and builds like ‘Can’t Get You Out Of My Head’, or the hint of Blondie melody in the way Heloise sings the title.

And then there’s the dancing. One of the crucial fundamentals of borecore is that borecore does not dance, and it most certainly does not do the kind of dancing engaged in by the Savoir Faire dancers. Borecore’s puritanical attitude says that anything ever done by Britney Spears etc is forever tainted – out goes the baby with the bathwater. Joycore knows that choreography is not in itself a bad thing. The hegemonies that often go with it in pop’s less fine hours (being thin, being bland) can be dispensed with without throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Those moves can be for everybody.

Reclaim the dance.

(This post sponsored by The New Hip Hop, Political Correctness Trend.)