Electronic dance music's recent youthquake has brought forth not only a lot of new production talent, but also a healthy number with distinctive styles. That's certainly the case with the 22-year-old Montreal producer who goes under the moniker Jacques Greene—a normal-enough-sounding name, particularly given his hometown, but one that didn't take long to become a name to watch.

Greene has released a handful of 12-inches since 2010. They largely refine a similar palette—skipping house rhythms and bass patterns that owe the post-dubstep diaspora, marked by long-furling neon-synth chords and soulful vocal snippets each sent through curling, patiently winding low-pass filters. Filters can be shamelessly hokey, as anyone whose ears have suffered through a night of bottle service is aware, but Greene uses them so subtly it becomes intrinsic to the fabric of his tracks as the shiny keyboards. "Another Girl," released in January 2011, remains the shimmering peak of this style.

Greene's music since then has found even more wrinkles. Most recent is the Concealer EP, released this past January. Its highlights are "Flatline," featuring vocalist Ango, a more or less straight R&B tune that maintains Greene's trademark sound, and "These Days," which refines the formula of "Another Girl" to a giddy point. SOTC spoke with Greene over the phone from his Montreal apartment a few days before his appearance at Mister Saturday Night.

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Dick Clark was cool—as in unflappable, not hip. That was key in an American 1950s where, for much of the nation, the latter condition was basically synonymous with "longhaired Commie fag degenerate." But Dick Clark—that nice boy? No way was he any of those things, not in 1950s America, not for six decades as a TV presence as fixed and permanent as late-night infomericals, still to this day, thanks to GSN.

Clark's a game-show titan second only to Merv Griffin, but that's TV. Clark's role in musical history is both more and less ambiguous. Make no mistake—American Bandstand, which Clark hosted from 1956 to 1989, did as much to legitimize rock & roll for Ma & Pa America as anybody before the arrival of the Beatles' "Aeolian cadences." Though the show existed for four years on local TV in Philadelphia before Clark became host, it was under him that it went into national syndication, and under him that it became one of the most copied programming formats ever devised—the direct model for everything from local record hops real (e.g. this Idaho TV show, Seventeen, featuring a line dance to the Diamonds' "The Stroll") and imagined (The Corny Collins Show, from John Waters' classic 1988 film Hairspray). And, of course, it was the basis of Don Cornelius's Soul Train, which promptly began beating Bandstand's ratings in major cities around the U.S.

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See more photos from Kraftwerk's weekend sets.
Kraftwerk
Museum of Modern Art
Saturday, April 14

Better than: The ShowClix waiting room.

There was a roar that went up during the full stops between songs early in Kraftwerk's Saturday-night MoMA set, the fifth of eight total (the seventh begins tonight). It started like applause but kept rising, thickening—there was no mistaking it. It wasn't simple relief that we finally got into the damn building after the concert series' well-publicized online ticket-sales flubs, or that (I hope) we didn't have to pay $45,000 for one. It was more like gratitude, as if we were getting to shake hands with Thomas Edison: Thank you for inventing everything. OK, maybe not "everything," but like James Brown or the Beatles or Bob Dylan, Kraftwerk's impact is simply too big to measure.

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If you think the opinions of critics and passionate fans of rock and rap and pop and country mean nothing to the Grammy Awards, being a dance-music fan widens the gap that much more. Essentially, if you're allergic to bottle service and/or newbs with glow sticks, you're better off crying into your pitch-shifter. The bulk of this year's Best Dance Recording roster is out to party like it's 1999—specifically, that year's Ministry of Sound compilations, only dumbed further down. Yet that's notable in itself—part of a shift exemplified last December, when I this Top 40 back-announcement: "I heard that overseas three years ago. That's how far ahead of the curve Europe is when it comes to dance music." That pronouncement is this category—which has six nominees instead of five—in a nutshell.

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A good while back, I was envisioning a Grammy-night dogfight between what, at that point, were my two favorite albums of 2011: Lady Gaga's Born This Way and Paul Simon's So Beautiful or So What. (Both ended up on my Pazz & Jop ballot.)I mentioned this to Maura and she said, "No. Adele." Up went my vision in smoke. Still, I figured the Englishwoman would at least be looking back in passing at the Egg Lady and Mr. Grammy together. Of course they'd both be nominated, I figured. Gaga is Gaga, and Simon's album wasn't simply his strongest work since Graceland—after many, many plays (none for work, incidentally—I didn't write about it), I think So Beautiful might be his best album, period.

Obviously, my predictions didn't mean anything. Gaga has nothing to worry about, but not only wasn't Simon nominated for Album of the Year, he wasn't nominated for anything at all. This for a guy who managed a 2001 Album nod for the outright dud You're the One—never mind that he's one of only three people to win three times for AOTY: in 1971 for Simon & Garfunkel's Bridge Over Troubled Water, in 1976 for Still Crazy After All These Years, and in 1987 for Graceland. Simon may stew over "coming in second" to Bob Dylan all these years, but this year was his chance to at least try to pull ahead of fellow three-Album winners Frank Sinatra and Stevie Wonder (whom Simon thanked in 1976 for not "mak[ing] an album this year") in the Grammy sweeps.

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The Grammys have a determinedly behind-the-times history, and Song of the Year is one of the ceremony's most reliably old-fashioned categories. It's given to the songwriter—even though what constitutes a "song" today is a lot different than when the Grammys began in 1959, back when sheet music was still a major music-biz income source. Usually the nominations overlap heavily with Record of the Year (which is given to artist and producer), with a couple of differences, sometimes confusing ones. (Take 2010—since when was Beyoncé's "Halo" more of a "record" and "Single Ladies" more of a "song"?) This year, the category seems like as much of a straight shot as the other Big 3 (Album and Record). But as with everything the Grammys do, from picking the nominees to putting on a show, there's always the possibility of surprise—last year looked like it belonged to Eminem, and he got shut out. It's highly doubtful that'll happen to Adele, whose "Rolling In The Deep" is nominated here, but with Grammy, you truly never know.

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53. Phil Collins, "Another Day in Paradise" [1991]

52. The 5th Dimension, "Up, Up and Away" [1968]

51. Olivia Newton-John, "I Honestly Love You" [1975]

50. Celine Dion, "My Heart Will Go On" [1999]

49. Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass, "A Taste of Honey" [1966]

48. Bobby McFerrin, "Don't Worry, Be Happy" [1989]

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via SoulTrain.com

What must it have been like to be under the sway of Don Cornelius back when he was a salesman? Damn hard to resist, most likely. Cornelius was a salesman before he was a DJ, a DJ before he was a TV host, a TV host before he was a mogul—a series of roles that require incredible patience and a knack for holding your cards close. Cornelius, with his miles-deep megawatt voice, wild sartorial tastes, and definitively unhurried manner, could have been a card sharp in a different era. Instead, he became the greatest Saturday-morning television host in American history and one of black music's ambassadors to the world.

Cornelius, who was found this morning dead of an apparent suicide at age 75, was the creator, producer, and star of Soul Train, though he'd likely have disavowed the last honor—the show's stars were the kids who danced every week. But his presence lent the show a weight unlike that of any other show of its kind. On American Bandstand, the model of the teen-dance show, Dick Clark played the eternal teenager, a slightly older ideal of a cool Philadelphia 16-year-old with some moves. First in Chicago, then L.A. once things got rolling for real, Cornelius was maybe Zeus's idea of a teenager, but nobody else's. He never raised his voice, you knew, because he never had to. Yet that gravitas worked in Soul Train's favor: This stuff was OK for your kids to like because a Very Responsible Adult was overseeing things—a super-fly bedrock for a troubled time.

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Avicii
Lavo
Saturday, January 21

Better than: Sensory deprivation.

Anthropologically it was worth it; logistically a lot less so. Arriving to Lavo, on East 58th Street, at 11:45 on Saturday night is risky enough—it's a high-end bottle-service superclub, the kind dance snobs tend to avoid on principle. This past Saturday the mob was especially dense for the set by the young Swede super-house sensation Avicii, who's touring behind the laudable "House for Hunger" campaign; his management hosted a dinner beforehand across the street at Tao, which shares ownership with Lavo. His ties with David Guetta (whose last album Avicii appeared on) and the general excitement over dance music hitting the mainstream give him a lot of momentum.

Avicii's also got hits, and sometimes they're pretty good. The best is one he played on Saturday—something I'd been hearing around forever, always kind of liking, but never following up on—"My Feelings For You," a collaboration with Sebastien Drums. I remedied that lapse in knowledge during his set with my phone. It was one of the few times during the night when my fascination with what I was watching was matched by the music being played.

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Seze Devres / www.sdphotography.net

Bryan Kasenic (left); cake.

This week, the Voice profiled Bryan Kasenic, who throws the monthly Bunker party—the city's premiere techno event—which celebrates its ninth year tonight at Public Assembly with a bash featuring Chicago house legend Derrick Carter and Dutch techno great Legowelt. Below are some outtakes from our interview, in which Kasenic discusses his entrée to New York, the records that made him a techno fan, avoiding "amateur night," and not being the background to someone else's K-hole.

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