Domingo 24 Jun 2007, 14h:09

SCOOTER – THE GREAT Q&A

It would be so clichéd of me to start this entry by saying how Scooter divide opinion more than any other act in electronic music, but I will end up doing it anyway. They do divide opinion and do so on almost every music related issue. Scooter’s music, their rollercoaster careers, the band member changes, their marketing and their general decision making can all be interpreted in so many different ways. Being an act that has survived in name since 1993, you could debate about Scooter until you are blue in the face. And being as opinions and interpretations are so divided, so polarised, it is indeed easy to argue about them until you are blue in the face. Discussions about Scooter bring up so many interesting and important issues that are relevant to absolutely any band, whatever genre they are from. Marketing, fanaticism, emotional connection, creativity, originality, cashing in, selling out, following trends, talent, covering, sampling … and the list goes on (if you’ll pardon the Scooter pun). Any issue of musical “ethics”, so to speak, Scooter illuminate it; they pose the question. For example, is it really acceptable for any act to only spend 6-8 months writing an album? Is it really acceptable for any act to take someone else’s melody and change a few notes to avoid legal problems? How original does any act have to be to avoid becoming rip off merchants? What should be the most important thing to an artist, being creative, being famous, being popular or earning a living? Can the quality of music produced ever make up for the "bad musical ethics" of a given artist? I think it’s about time someone got to grips with these questions by imposing a bit of reality and context on the musical world of Scooter.

There is of course another issue of people making judgements about Scooter without really having any idea of what they are talking about. Lots of people have an idea in their head of what Scooter are meant to be, of what they are meant to sound like. In many cases these ideas are so far removed from reality that any coherent, accurate debate becomes impossible. I personally think it’s time to put an end to these misconceptions, whether they be understandable ones or wild and grossly narrow ones.

I thought the best way to do this was as a Q&A, clearing up those misconceptions, imposing a bit reality and once and for all putting down all my opinions on this massive EDM institution in one place.

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Q: So who is this Scooter then? Isn’t he some guy called Dave from Sheffield in the UK?

This is something people unfamiliar with Scooter get wrong often. But these are mistakes almost every novice Scooter fan seems to make. First and foremost, Scooter has always been 3 people. Their blonde frontman, H.P., does get a lot of the limelight, but Scooter have always been a three man group. Originally they were H.P., Rick and Ferris but Ferris left in 1998 to pursue a solo career. Ferris was replaced by Axel Coon until he also left in 2001, after the release of RAMP! (The Logical Song). By this point replacing the third member was becoming a bit of a tradition, and being a band slightly obsessed by habit and tradition, they allowed Axel’s replacement, Jay Frog, to be replaced himself by Michael Simon in 2006. The band was actually original formed as a remix project called The Loop!. But when they decided to release a track of their own, Vallée des Larmes in 1993, they renamed themselves Scooter. The band themselves felt that the sound of Vallée des Larmes resembled fairground music and that “Scooter”, being German for the bumper cars at fairgrounds, would be a good name. Whether it is a good name is debatable. Although, it’s certainly a name that will not be forgotten in the music industry. All members of the band, old and current, are German, including their manager Jens Thele and the band are based in Hamburg. Dave from Sheffield is one of frontman H.P.’s many nicknames, of which the only explanation I can give is that he likes all things British, presumably British names and cities as well as sports cars.

Q: So they’ve been around since 1993 then?

Yep, indeed they have. The band’s second single Hyper Hyper which came out in 1994 was pretty successful and really cemented them as a full-time project. The first album ...And The Beat Goes On was released in 1995 and since then there have been 11 other albums and over 30 single releases. These guys have been around for a long time; too long some might say. So contrary to popular misconception, held by many in the UK at least, Scooter did not form in 2001 and release The Logical Song, nor did they disband after Maria (I Like It Loud) in 2003. The UK commercial dance scene (as did I) got all excited over them when The Logical Song was released but, with the decline of dance music in the mainstream, the UK scene generally lost interest in them, despite Scooter’s more recent attempts to sneak back in by tapping into newer, emerging dance trends. But people in the UK have almost universally turned their backs on the mainstream, so Scooter will have to stop messing around the chart trends and get a little more serious and creative.

Q: Scooter are so cheesey though? Those chipmunk vocals are the epitome of cheese!

Well, there are a few things I can say in response to that. Firstly, I think some people do have an over-the-top obsession with cheese. Largely, I think it’s an image issue. I genuinely prefer non-cheesey music most of the time but sometimes it’s just nice to have something a little less serious, something more tongue-in-cheek and more “happy”. In the end, it’s down to taste and people have a different tolerance and reception to cheese. Some people love it; some run a mile from it. Some, like myself, like it in very careful moderation. But the key issue with regards Scooter is that, just as cheese is distinctly relative and there are degrees of it within genres and between them, there are degrees of cheese within Scooter’s music also. Some of it is very cheesey, some of it is a bit cheesey, some of their material is as serious and/or sombre as music comes. It’s the more intelligent side of Scooter that largely goes unnoticed and is totally ignored by many of the critics. Every album has its share of genuinely intelligent sounding, non-cheesey music yet people still often solely associate Scooter with cheese.

The instant association people make between Scooter and so-called “chipmunk vocals”, or high pitched voices, is also puzzling. High pitched vocals appear in a measly percentage of Scooter’s tracks overall and are in only 9 out of their 36 single releases. From a UK perceptive, Scooter have only themselves to blame for the misguided perceptions that people seem to have of them. Having had success in the UK with The Logical Song they preceded to release another 4 HPV singles back-to-back including a re-release of Posse (I Need You On The Floor). So you could forgive some people who are less familiar with all their work for being suckered into thinking that every Scooter track sounds like The Logical Song. This is certainly not the case. Rather, on the contrary, the diversity of styles and sounds in Scooter’s music is vast, almost to the point where it is too vast. So you can’t really label Scooter cheesey. Not strictly. Coldwater Canyon, Rhapsody In E, Sputnik, Firth Of Forth, Waiting For Spring, Mesmerized, Watch Out, Main Floor, to name but 8 of their tracks off the top of my head, are nothing like what most people would identify as cheese.

Q: What about that blonde idiot talking shit all over the tracks?

This is very much like the cheese issue in many ways. Firstly, I would instantly concede that, just like cheesey music isn’t everyone’s cup of tea, H.P.’s vocals are going to sound odd, even annoying, to some. What the people who dislike the vocals have to realise is that it’s not what H.P. says that people like, it’s the sound and tone of the lyrics that give many of the songs that extra lift. Admittedly, some of the things H.P. comes out with are questionable in terms of sense but at no point are the lyrics meant to make sense. I think the lyrics in Posse (I Need You On The Floor) are the perfect example of how lyrics that mean very little, that have very little representative content, that are generic and clichéd in many ways, can actually improve a track because of the extra tone of aggression that they give the track. In a twisted sort of way, I view the lyrics in many of the tracks, although a lot less so with their newer material, as being a parody of MCing, with tongue placed firmly in cheek. While I would agree that lines like “It’s not a bird, it’s not a plane, it must be Dave who’s on the train” are complete ridiculous and should have rightly been axed instantly, others like “Rockin the business, so come on and check this, get up tonight, we’re gonna make it right”, from the track Call Me Manana in this case, are as inoffensive as they are clichéd and meaningless and serve only to ride the rhythm of the track or enhance the track’s mood through the tone in which the lyrics are presented. But having said that, I think some people are just incapable of just having a bit of a sense of humour. As I’ve said, a lot of the lyrics are very tongue-in-cheek. I think some people take their music far too seriously. Why do lyrics have to make sense? Why do they have to say something profound? Why can’t the lyrics be a bit odd? H.P.’s just giving the music an extra dimension; he’s not writing a lyrical thesis on the state of the human condition. In Weekend! he may arrogantly claim that he is a “preacher”, but if you think you have something to learn from H.P. you are grossly missing the point of his lyrics.

Although, having said that, one thing has started to bug me about H.P’s lyrics, more specifically H.P.’s lyrics in their more recent material. The band in the earlier years were all about having fun - craziness, having a laugh. They didn't take themselves so seriously. Furthermore, it was about “us” - "ravers unite" etc. The “union” of the band and the fans. That union, that sense of belonging to something, was responsible for luring in many of their fan base. Now, slowly but surely (something that we saw as early as Faster Harder Scooter in 1999 - but even Faster Harder Scooter had more references to the fans and the union between fans and band in the lyrics) things have got so serious musically. There's this arrogance - this hyper-coolness that worked at first but is now just backfiring. The lyrics on their 2005 album Who’s Got The Last Laugh Now? were just too much for me. H.P. needs to stop being this gangster rapper and start being the fun-loving, fan-loving MC he once was. Lines like “leave you there with stitches, jacking to the pictures of your sister, 'til your hands got blisters” are just plain ridiculous really, when you consider who and what Scooter are musically. H.P. is white, German and involved in producing mostly commercialised electronic dance music. He’s not 50 Cent. Lyrically, H.P. has got to the point where it’s as if he wants what he says to mean something which in my eyes is blowing up in his face. Scooter are a band that have a lot of other problems creatively at the moment, as I’ll go on to talk about, but writing arrogant lyrics like “you're on the run you faggot lost your flavour like an old piece of gum” is going to make people think you’re a bunch of tossers. They need to end that now.

Although, my main response to this question would in fact be exactly the same as my response to the issue of cheese. Simple put, not every Scooter track has H.P. in it. On their first album, ...And The Beat Goes On, H.P.’s voice was used very sparingly and on every single Scooter album there are a number of instrumental tracks. So you can easily enjoy Scooter but still avoid H.P. Just listen to the instrumentals. You can’t really dismiss Scooter on the basis that H.P.’s vocals drag their music through the mud.

Q. What about the ripping off though? Surely, they cannot be considered anything like a good band considering how much they rip people off, right?

This issue is the one that most polarises opinion, I think. People either accept that “everyone borrows things from other artists” and end up condoning Scooter raping and pillaging everything they can get their hands on. Or people reject “ripping off” as being complete and indisputable evidence of a band’s utter lack of talent. What we need here is a little bit of even-handedness.

Firstly, I think it has to be said that the age old “it’s acceptable because loads of people do it” argument is just not going to hold water. Two wrongs don’t make a right as they say… neither does 100 wrongs for that matter. I think you definitely have to take each act’s covering and sampling on its own merits: the extent of their covering, how tastefully the use of another artist’s work is, whether the full permission of the original artists is granted etc. And I think there is a line of acceptability that shouldn’t be crossed if an act wants to be taken seriously musically. I really don’t see any problem with an artist saying to themselves every now and then, “that little melody from artist X would fit nicely into our new track, works really nicely – let’s see if they’ll let us use it”, or saying “I love track X by artist Y – i think we could put a really fresh spin on that.” Often covers do produce really interesting and worthwhile results, especially when producers of electronic music reinvent a tune from outside electronic music. In Scooter’s case there have been many occasions where Scooter have taken a melody from another artist but, by combining it with their own original parts, created a wholly new sounding track. The Logical Song is a great example of this, a track that is barely comparable to the original Supertramp track.

Scooter have always made covers and sampled from other artists (from the very start), and that is absolutely fine to an extent. No sensible Scooter fan would deny that. As long as permission is sought and granted by the original artists. But I do think Scooter have started to cross the line of acceptability, mainly because the covering and sampling has got to the point where it has put notions of creativity and originality firmly on the back burner. The number of covers and samples on the last 4 albums, for me, is excessive, far too excessive. If you compare the level of original material on ...And The Beat Goes On to Mind The Gap or compare the covers on Wicked to The Stadium Techno Experience you can see the difference. The Stadium Techno Experience and Mind The Gap are decent albums but, for me, they are "lazy" albums compared with previous ones. Even albums like We Bring The Noise! and Back To The Heavyweight Jam are more "pure" than the albums from the last few years. 5 or 6 years ago a Scooter might have had 5, maybe 6 ripped melodies. Mind The Gap sampled melodies from Eddie Floyd, Sheryl Crow, Elvis Crespo, Depeche Mode, Bay City Rockers, KC & The Sunshine Band, DJ Sandy Vs. Housetrap, Bodylotion (a.k.a. Neophyte), Tuxedomoon, Enya as well as classic trance melodies in the form of Solar Stone - Solarcoaster, Alex M.O.R.P.H. - Creatures and Fictivision vs. C-Quence – Symbols. You could even include vocal samples from the soundtrack to the film The Fifth Element which formed the basis of my favourite track from the album, The Chaser, if you think that counts. If you do, that’s no fewer than 15 parts taken from other artists. For the single release of One (Always Hardcore) the Scooter boys added to covering Bodylotion’s Always Hardcore by shoving in Cappella’s classic melody from Move On Baby. I’m sorry, but that line has been well and truly crossed! The 2 albums that have followed are in a similar vain too, Robert Knight, The Shadows, Gary Glitter, Jimi Tenor, John Foxx, The Police, The KLF, Blue Oyster Cult, The Prodigy (yes, they shamefully copied the breaks in Smack My Bitch Up for the musical car crash that was Does The Fish Have Chips?), Jordan & Baker and Aphrodite's Child have all received the Scooter treatment.

But it’s not just the amount of sampling that bothers me. In many cases, the way it’s done is so tasteless. Behind The Cow was the ultimate example for me. Two melodies were ripped off for its production, yet these 2 melodies didn’t even fit together in the same song. Then just to top it off, they shoved in a Fatman Scoop hip-hop interlude towards the end of the track, which just sounded completely ridiculous. And it’s this “copy and paste” style of music production that I’ve come to hate. It’s lazy and often it sounds completely shit. Behind The Cow sounds like 3 completely different tracks stapled together and has no holistic quality to it whatsoever. Jigga Jigga! is an example of where this “copy and paste” style was executed more effectively, yet this cannot make up for the fact that it’s 3 melodies taken from other artists (Alex M.O.R.P.H., Fictivision vs. C-Quence and Ron van den Beuken) glued together to form a new trance track… as well as vocals taken from Enya’s Exile…. (or at the very least very heavily influenced by). To me, this isn’t making music – its musical engineering. And it’s not the best way to create truly great music.

Now look at an album like Wicked. How many covers are there on that? How many samples were taken from elsewhere. Well, Marc Cohen’s Walking In Memphis and the traditional Scottish highland riff of Scotland The Brave formed the basis of I’m Raving and Break It Up was written for them by someone else. As far as I know of, the rest of the album is Scooter’s own work. And there’s the conundrum. It’s not as if they can’t make their own original music. It’s just easier to rip people off. Making albums with 9, 10 or more ripped melodies or ideas just means they can knock out that yearly album in double quick time. Sad, but true, I think. Wicked remains my favourite Scooter album. It’s as original a record as Scooter have ever produced and just sounds awesome. It oozes talent. The same cannot be said for Mind The Gap or Who’s Got The Laugh Now?, I’m afraid.

But does the covering stop them being a good band? Well, I think when it gets to the point where only 1 or 2 tracks on your album are wholly original then you start asking serious questions. Many would claim that good bands just make good music, regardless of where it comes from, regardless of how it is made. I would disagree. Music can be good regardless of its origins and the context surrounding it. But you have to take into account these things when judging the band as a whole. Scooter have made some great music in their time – that doesn’t make them a good band now. They were creative pioneers back in the mid nineties. Now, they are a band of massive “hits and misses” who seem more concerned with making a quick buck than leaving any kind of sustainable and commendable musical legacy.

Q: Scooter produce an album every year?! Are Scooter just trying to print money or something?

This is actually a major gripe I have with Scooter these days. Quantity over quality, constant flow of music over serious commitment to the music produced. The worrying thing is that, by the sounds of it, Scooter actually spend a lot less time producing tracks these days that you might readily assume. To me, 6-8 months is just not enough time to make a complete and developed record. A year isn’t enough really. Ideally, you’re looking at 18 months to 2 years. But in an interview to mark the release of their most recent album, The Ultimate Aural Orgasm, the band admit that they only spent 3 months working on actual tracks for the album. To me, this is scandalous. They even admit they are lazy and spend 2 weeks messing around and dossing. And when asked, when do you know when the album is finished?… their response? The product manager tells us to finish!! So initially they'll spend about 4 hours a day on the album and then when the "finishing date" comes closer they'll start spending 16 odd hours a day trying desperately to get it finished. How is that a good, relaxed, creative process? It's not! They say the pressure of needing to finish helps them. How does it help? It may help them to finish quickly - it doesn't help them to make good music. The setting of strict deadlines, being ordered about by a "product manager" (how business-like does that sound?), only allocating 3 months to serious production, cramming most of the production into the final 3 or 4 weeks to meet the deadlines, the lead member of the band watching videos of classic cars on his computer for 2 weeks at the start of production… it's just a shambles.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KJRo_n4NhYw
Check the evidence: See the 4.06 mark to hear the band's response to the question "How do you know when the album is finished?" (Unfortuntely this video is no longer available on youtube - you'll have to take my word for it.)

Scooter have had an album every year. By no means are they all mind-blowingly amazing. The way I look at it is, Scooter could have produced 6 absolutely classic albums. Instead, they’ve produced 12 albums that range from awesome to totally incomplete, the latter being more common than the former, I’m afraid. One can only imagine how different things could be for Scooter had they just taken their time a little bit more. Who knows, if Scooter had spent 2 years making Mind The Gap, Panties Wanted, a diabolically identical cover of the Bay City Rockers track, might not have even made it onto the final record as they could have had several other tracks that worked far better to replace it with. To use a metaphor - I like junk food. It tastes nice. But it's processed quickly and doesn't taste as nice as freshly prepared food. Because it's not of as high quality you get hungry more quickly, thus needing more food more quickly. Thus you need more junk food to satisfy yourself. Because you eat so often you get bored of eating. Eating is no longer a pleasure and you are locked in the habit of quick fix hunger remedies. But if food is freshly prepared it takes a lot longer to prepare. More thought goes into it - consideration as to the amount and nature of ingredients. You have more scope for choice as to what you include and what you don't. You might even change your mind about a certain ingredient. The variety of meals you can cook from day to day is greater. The final product is far superior to your Big Mac or Whopper - it tastes nicer and is better for you. Because it's such high quality it satisfies your hunger for longer, you go longer without eating but when you do eat you enjoy eating. It becomes a pleasure you look forward to more. The same goes for the production and release of music. The difference between spending 2 years producing an album and spending less than 1 is like the difference between going to MacDonald’s for your dinner and going to a high class gourmet restaurant.

Scooter fans generally are just too impatient and want more and more as fast as possible. I myself would rather wait and hear something really special. Not to mention the fact that some of the fans, especially the fans discovering Scooter after 2001, will buy absolutely anything with Scooter's name on it. I personally have definitely grown out of this "it's amazing because it's Scooter" mentality and I certainly won't buy any old shit. Many of the fans are very emotionally involved in Scooter and in a way that is strangely separate from the actual music. I know because I've experienced exactly the same habitual connection myself in the past. It's hard to describe, but it's almost as if your perception of the music is tainted and distorted by what the band or group represent in your head, by associated images and emotions, by the band's demeanor and philosophy, by the sense of belonging to the group's "extended family" - the whole package. And while you are under the influence of all these factors, you remain convinced that Scooter really are the most amazing band in the world. The emotions you experience when listening don't come 100% from the music itself; rather, a significant degree of these emotions come from perceptions and associations that are stored in the subconscious. This forming of emotional connections independently of the actual music is by no means exclusive to Scooter, but it's something Scooter, either deliberately or by accident, have mastered to perfection. But I'm adamant that it's not healthy, either for a fan or for the band in question. For the most emotionally involved fans it stops them from being able to look beyond that particular band, to the point where they become, to coin a phrase, "musically reclusive". I think it's important not to generalise too much, of course - not all Scooter fans are mindless zombies. The Scooter "machine" influences people to differing degrees. But I still believe that a significant number of Scooter fans have an absurdly "Scooter-centric" view of music. For Scooter this is dangerous because it means that they always know, if only subconsciously, that no matter what they produce, excitement and critical acclaim from the fans is more or less guaranteed. There's no pressure to produce something special, only to produce something "new" and as quickly as possible.

And that’s the main problem with Scooter’s most recent albums. Nothing about them is special. If you’ve heard one, you’ve heard them all. Bland, generic, incomplete, mixed up… and not even original. The problem, in my opinion, isn't individual tracks on the albums necessarily. Mind The Gap has some cracking songs on it. Who’s Got The Last Laugh Now? has some good ones as well. The problem is the overall sound. I think you have to step back and look at the whole. Looking at the last 3 albums holistically, where is Scooter's material really going? What direction are they going in?

You look at an album like Wicked. It had a definite theme. The album was ambient, the basslines were softer and the use of pianos connected a lot of the tracks together in an obvious way. It contained none of this self-praising bullshit. The same goes for that minimalist, 'techy' sound on Back To The Heavyweight Jam. The album had a theme. The albums now though, really are a random assortment of styles, including the same generic trance and typically structured single material.

Let me put it this way. You could jumble up the tracklists of The Stadium Techno Experience, Mind The Gap and Who’s Got The Last Laugh Now? and the albums themselves would look and sound pretty much the same. You could swap One (Always Hardcore) for Hello (Good To Be Back). Privileged To Witness, Like Hypa Said and The Chaser could be swapped. You could swap Trance-Atlantic for Mezmerized. Suavemente for A Little Bit Too Fast or Apache. Pulstar wouldn't sound out of place on Who’s Got The Last Laugh Now?. Yet you take Scooter Del Mar or Zebras Crossing The Street and put them on Age Of Love or Our Happy Hardcore suddenly they sound out of place. The tracks on Wicked are clearly meant to be on the same album. This is the problem for me. The albums as a collection of individual tracks don't really work. As a statement of the band's current moods, expressions, influences and overall sound the albums tell us nothing.

What was so great about the 'old Scooter' was that it changed constantly between each album. You could trace Scooter's development as a band - they started out with an old skool, "ravey" style mixed with melodic trance elements - this moved onto Wicked with a softer, more ambient sound along with the pianos. From this we had Age Of Love which moved in almost a synth popish direction with tracks like She Said and Hit The Drum. With No Time To Chill and Back To The Heavyweight Jam we had a toughening up of this sound, which by Back To The Heavyweight Jam had become quite gritty, techy, "industrialised" and minimalist. Always progressing.

It would be nice, before the release of a Scooter album, for me to be able to say to myself, "I wonder what sound Scooter are going to go for?" or "I wonder what the musical theme to this album will be?" But going off the other albums I know it's just going be some predictable Hello/One/Weekend type stuff with some stolen “eurodance” melodies or high pitched choruses, some generic trance and some rather odd experiments that are generally a bit hit and miss. Scooter are always coming up with "new ideas", experiments like Suavemente or Shake That or The Leading Horse. But whatever you think of these experiments as songs, you can't really argue that these songs represent a new direction which Scooter are taking themselves musically. As ideas, they are one offs which leads to this mix and match style of albums. Albums where happy hardcore tracks with high pitched vocals like All I Wanna Do are lumped on the same album as disco-house tracks like Shake That!. Or where generic trance tracks like Mesmerized are lumped together with odd hip-hop experiments like The Leading Horse. It's all so random. Ironically, Scooter are on a Trip To Nowhere.

And finally, having heard how little time it took them to produce, look at The Ultimate Aural Orgasm! The tracks that have potential are either old ideas done not as well as before (e.g. Love Is An Ocean) or are rushed tracks where the best parts aren't utilised properly (e.g. Scarborough Affair). And the bad tracks are so bad that they are embarrassing (e.g. Does The Fish Have Chips). Even my favourite track from the album Ratty's Revenge has a painfully bland main riff that could be a lot lot better. To use a golfing metaphor, Scooter's handicap is way too high and they are currently shooting the course way above par.

Q: So what do Scooter need to do to sort themselves out then?

1. Scooter have always covered and sampled - but this sampling has gotten out of control. The band needs to try and be original as it possibly can mainly for the integrity of the band itself.

2. Scooter generally make decent albums - but they produce them far too quickly. Scooter need to stop churning out albums for the sake of it and concern themselves more with quality over quantity. The band would be respected by the industry and fans a lot more if they were seen to be making music for the love of making it rather than be seen to be on a "musical gravy train", printing the dollars quicker than they can spend them. Simply, their albums would be a lot better if they spent a lot longer making them.

3. Scooter have always been a commercialised band - but, following on from the last point, the group need to stop trying to be a commercial, chart band and be more true to themselves as producers. If the commercial scene likes a Scooter production and latches onto it, thus making the guys a lot of money, then fair enough - but the No.1 objective should be making music that is 100% sincere to the moods, feelings, talents and expressions of the artists concerned - music for the love music. It's not about chart positions and platinum awards, and top of the pops, TV performances or radio airplay. They see themselves far too much as celebrities these days. What they need to realise is that electronic music doesn’t want or need celebrities. It needs and wants good producers and DJs.

4. Scooter's music up until 2002 was a progression - an evolution. Listen to Hyper Hyper and then listen to Ramp (The Logical Song) you can hear the difference. Listen to everything in between you can see how they've gone from one sound to the next. Each albums has its own sound. But sadly the band hasn’t evolved its sound since Nessaja. Each single follows the same old forumla, each album follows the same formula - sadly even the instrumentals (as awesome as they are) are starting to sound the same. e.g. Coldwater Canyon is quite different to Rhapsody In E yet Trance-Atlantic and Mesmerized are so so similar. The word is predictable. Yeah, Suavemente and Shake That were stylistic experiments yet they still had the same structure as all the modern singles, which quite frankly is boring and stinks of commercialism. Scooter need to change their sound and need to make future albums represent a holistic sound that hasn't been tried previously.

5. And finally, H.P. needs to put a stop to these overly arrogant, MC battle style lyrics. It’s just over-the-top and doesn’t suit Scooter’s image.

Put simply, Scooter need to cut the bullshit, lock themselves in a studio and not come out until they've made an album worthy of their name, representative of their stature, until they've produced a holistic, original and interesting record; not just 3 months worth of any old shite cobbled together from the scrapyard of other people's ideas.

But having heard their latest effort, The Question Is What Is The Question, which is due for release in August of this year, I think there's probably more chance of Osama Bin Laden attending George Bush's funeral than Scooter changing their ways. Having only just jumped on the electro-house bandwagon with the single Lass Uns Tanzen, a track I actually liked - one of their best for a while, they've leapfrog onto another bandwagon. Will the next album be jumpstyle influenced? Is this finally a new direction for Scooter? Of course, it isn't. Just like the dire Fatman Scoop rap interlude in Behind The Cow, like the 50 Cent-like tones of The Leading Horse and like the funky cheesiness of Shake That!, this is Scooter trying their hand at anything and everything in an attempt to be popular. They're more concerned with the trends going on in music around them than actually thinking for themselves. I know in my "Music According To Me" journal entry I admitted that you can't escape society but Scooter it seems are consumed by it. The notion of being creative in your own right, or of being a pioneer, has totally left them.

Q: There’s a lot of criticism in this journal entry. So why are Scooter so high in your last.fm charts?

Well, the sheer volume of tracks produced by Scooter means that they are a lot more likely to pop up in a shuffling iTunes library than anyone else. And the simple fact that Scooter do almost no collaborations with other artists (collaborations being very common within electronic music and something that can can seriously effect how often an artist is scrobbled) is just one other reason why Scooter scrobbling can top up fast. Also putting my chillout tracks on shuffle, which I do fairly regularly, inevitably throws up Scooter tracks like Sputnik, Firth Of Forth and Monolake. I think a lot of people will readily concede that there is something slightly deceptive about last.fm charts. Although, having said that, despite my misgivings about the current Scooter, I will carry on listening to their older stuff, especially albums like Wicked. They have produced some brilliant stuff after all, both cheesey and serious. It’s just slightly submerged in a vast sea of listenable, average, mediocre, dodgey or marginally embarrassing tunes amassed through years and years of rushing through albums.

So, in my eyes, it's all been downhill since Wicked, which is along time ago now I know. That's not to say there weren't good albums and tracks after that, but not even a quality album like We Bring The Noise could recreate the originality and completeness of Wicked. But Scooter's real fall came after The Stadium Techno Experience in 2003, the band hitting their most spectacular low in 2006 with the tracks Behind The Cow and Does The Fish Have Chips? It's along way back from there, believe me.

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A "Brief" Clarification
(Added 11/08/07 and updated 17/08/07)

Having read over the comments for this journal and re-read my own responses I'm a little wary that I may have confused my own position slightly. If I'm going to write a huge article like this in the first place I think it's important my opinions are ultimately clear.

When responding to 24carat I come across as someone who has just rejected the newer Scooter, having accepted that they have transformed from being a good commercial band into a tragic commercial monster. While on the other hand my second response to Ian_B_MTL makes it seem as though I have just grown out of Scooter, coming to a "realisation" that they always were a band of very limited worth to electronic music. These two positions just don't sit that comfortably together. Two points need to be made.

Firstly, what I think has to be stressed is that there is a difference between enjoyment of music and appreciation of the depth of feeling, effort and craft that goes into music. The two are linked in many ways, but not inseparable, in my opinion. As I have grown up I have become far more appreciative of this craft and feeling in music generally.

What Scooter's more commercial material had is a "vivacious character" and a vibe of carefree happiness and/or brash confidence, often combined with a rawness and power, which to me, still makes it quite enjoyable. But what makes me appreciate their music less now than I used to is that so much of their music does lack that depth of feeling and craft that gives the artists I listen to more regularly these days so much more credibility.

In other words, what much of Scooter's music lacked in depth, craft and "intelligence" it partly made up for it in character and a unique sense of indifference to the "image" bullshit that follows music around like a bad smell. It was uncompromising, in your face and full of party spirit. Being older and of more sophisticated taste, music that lacks depth and craft appeals to me less these days. To cut things short, it is possible to enjoy music that is what you might describe as "empty headed" on the grounds that it is … well, fun.

Although, there might be a tendency amongst many to only see "intelligent" or "carefully crafted" music or music with "depth" as really only including subtle ambient music or music with intricate beat patterns such as drum & bass or breaks. I don't see it that way. And equally, when I say "intelligent", I don't just mean, in some pretentious way, that a certain track is intelligent when it produces more adult, mature or less base emotions in someone. Again, it isn't as simple as that. To me, trance can be very intelligent and can have tremendous depth and, while most hard house, hardcore and electro-house hardly "warm the soul", so to speak, the best stuff from these genres is usually still laboured over and crafted very carefully to produce the optimum emotional effects. In other words, it is possible to have a track that is creatively intelligent or well crafted and still have oodles of party spirit and be fun. What I'm saying is that Scooter's material either had the former of those 3 or had the latter and not normally all 3 at the same time.
(Although, at this point I would agree there is probably a slight problem with semantics here - It's a difficult point to express accurately, I think. So many of these words cross over into slightly different territory.)

And here's the second point. Scooter have, as I bang on about throughout this article, changed. And not for the better. The Scooter of today produce far fewer tracks that have depth and intelligence, and because of time constraints, tracks are "crafted" and laboured over even less than before. While at the same time, the "empty headed" or "fun" side of Scooter has lost all character and is a crusty caricature of its former self. And these two problems have, in a way, met each other in the middle, causing a general thinning down of Scooter's music, causing a blandness. The magical trio of "fun", "character" and "power" have seeped out of Scooter and not been replaced by anything like enough depth, craft, intelligence or innovation to make them as credible or as enjoyable as they were.

When, according to my analysis, what Scooter needed all along to make them a truly great musical project was to combine that magical trio with greater levels of "craft" and "intelligence" to make it more than just fun music. And dare I say it, it is usually the more commercial acts which lack the elements of "intelligence" I'm doing my best to express and, while commercial music in EDM terms is normally more fun and … well, cheesey, the inevitable association between cheeseiness (or being carefree) and lack of intelligence is firmly established. Sometimes these acts only have themselves to blame for the way people look down on them and their fans.

To me, Cascada is a good example of this in recent commercial EDM. Fun it may be but well crafted or "intelligent" it certainly is not. I do appreciate fun music; I listen to electro-house and freeform after all. But no longer do I particularly appreciate music that is just fun and nothing more… that is slapped together in a couple of hours by someone who really couldn't give a shit about what they're making. That's the difference.

But what ultimately has to be recognised by the most vociferous critics, whether they think the above arguments hold water or not, whether they have time for "empty headed" music or not, is that Scooter are still a complex musical phenomenon. They aren't an open and shut case, which incidentally, makes them difficult to generalise about. For every so-called "pile of commercial crap" attached to Scooter there's a shining jewel of musical genius. But what the Scooter fanatics have to accept is that much of what they listen to from Scooter does indeed lack depth, craft, intelligence and creativity (even more so now) and that Scooter had the potential to be of much greater worth to the progression of electronic music. But, I still defend any Scooter fan's right to enjoy Scooter's cheesier, commercial material for what it is… simple, carefree music.

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Well, there you have it! My final word on Scooter. There’s nothing more to say…Fuck off!