Tannen 'Blackout' = Eric Prydz rip-off?

If you've been listening to Nick Warren's latest, you may have noticed a striking similarity between Tannen's "Blackout" and Eric Prydz's remix of "A Bit Patchy." The inspiration is obvious, but I'm reluctant to call "Blackout" a blatant rip-off. The idea of Tannen (Stel and Phatjack), A) creating a track that by sheer coincidence sounds like one the biggest tracks of last year , or B), thinking that they could get away with releasing an obvious copy of one of last year's biggest hits hardly seems plausible to me. The track is obviously a tongue-in-cheek tribute. If it was actually a genuine rip-off, do you really think Nick Warren would have included it on Paris, moreover, signed it to Hope?

Dave Seaman: "One man's trance is another man's techno ..."

Dave Seaman calls out industry press for its "obsession with labeling, pigeonholing and the general sub dividing of dance music..." Seaman points out that "the lines between [genres] has become so blurred that they don't actually mean anything anymore," and that "it's all electronic house music at the end of the day and the minute you try to break it down and intellectualize it is the second you strip away its soul and spirit."

Let me play devil's advocate here. True, genre-labeling and the like can be pretty annoying, but it's a necessary evil. After all, in order to talk about and adequately describe this music that we all love, some degree of classification and discrimination is required. To the extent that we're all human and speaking in a language limited in its means to convey the infinite complexities of life, less-than adequate labels are going to have to suffice. So while I agree that in general, labeling is lame and will never do descriptive justice to that which it labels, it's inevitable, and complaining about it accomplishes nothing.

Dave also wrote about his annoyance at the term 'progressive house' "being used as a dumping ground for any old lifeless, generic rubbish that comes along." Dave wrote that he had "always thought progressive to be more of a spirit than a genre." I agree, but again, I see no point in getting worked up over what people are calling things.

Progressive, by Definition, Cannot Die

The definition of progressive (source: dictionary.com):

pro·gres·sive /prəˈgrɛsɪv/ Pronunciation Key - Show Spelled Pronunciation[pruh-gres-iv]
- adjective
1. favoring or advocating progress, change, improvement, or reform, as opposed to wishing to maintain things as they are ...

When people suggest that prog is dead, they're missing the point: progressive, by the above definition, cannot die, unless it ceases to change. The fact that music doesn't sound like it did 10 years ago, 5 years ago, or even 1 year ago, is evidence that progressive music continues to exist.