To EDM, or not to DANCE, that is the question
We can’t speak for everyone, everywhere, but if you are from Europe, or at least Britain (where we are based), you might have grown up during a period in time (let’s say the 90s and beyond, though you may be older still - no problem) when we became used to the ever-evolving and fast-fracturing of musical styles, and particularly the names attributed to them.
What in the latter 80s was loosely referred to as Club Music, or Dance Music, consisted of little more than Disco, House and Techno. But post-Acieeed, this quickly strayed into more descriptive subdivisions, primarily Detroit Techno, Chicago / Deep / Garage and of course Acid House. Others briefly rose and fell, like New Beat and Balearic Beats, pointing to a near-future between then and the early 90s as these initial core reference points began to frantically splinter into further sub-divisions such as Italo and Hip House, Trance, Baggy and another dominant umbrella term known as Rave… By the mid 90s riotous new sound tributaries abounded by the month, with fresh genres being ‘discovered’ as the then-limited dance music media (effectively three or four magazines) sought to identify the latest variation on the theme of rhythm, and become first to hype it into the musical ‘movement’ stratosphere.
Think back on some of the numerous 90s terms that appeared to mutate and spread like some mysterious killer-sound-flu… Breakbeat, Jungle, Drum N Bass, Hardcore, Happy Hardcore, Handbag House, Prog House, Ambient House, Trip Hop, Goa Trance, Psychedelic Trance, Epic House, Chill, Bleep… They go on and on and on.
Better still click on the ClubMixed.com link to the ‘CLUB CLASSICS: UNIVERSAL STORIES OF DANCE’ MIKE COSFORD MIX – A music and visuals DVD created by D-Rom in 2001. It contains a subtitled year-by-year history of the club scene, detailing the terms, tracks, clubs, genres, DJs and influential club events that took place through the 80s and 90s. It’s a mightily accurate retelling, I must say (particularly since I compiled and wrote it, ahem!).
The subtitles are in English, Espanol, Deutsche and Francais, whilst the music is, of course, universal.
Throughout the 90s, in the UK at least, it would evolve like this… A fresh musical sub-division would tend to emerge initially as the epitome of cool. This would last for a few months, 12’s / Maxi’s would begin to fly out of nowhere, as the genre quickly mushroomed at some crazy rate of interest, until, compilation albums started to appear on the major labels, with TV adverts, and the whole thing become overwhelmed by an unholy collision of the fascinated, the influenced, but ultimately and most damningly by the commercial bandwagon jumpers. At this point the whole genre would capsize and sink, in terms of credibility… Within a year of emerging, the original terminology used to identify the style would become a dirty word.
Naturally, the genuine aficionado’s of said sound-style would tend to stick with it, resentfully recede back into the margins of the production underground, continue to develop their skills, until, probably two years later, re-emerging, utilising a refreshed term for something slightly varied, yet strikingly similar.
An example might be the continual reinvention of Jungle / Drum N Bass, which over a twenty year period continues to mutate around the some central core, essentially doing much as before, in equally exciting ways - It’s always been about effective packaging… and then the repackaging!
There are countless examples of perfectly good music’s that are bid a less-than-fond farewell, only to resume sometime later as the new height-of-happening. The Emperor’s New Dance (or E.N.D.) anyone?
Why all this? Well, I’m just musing, perhaps feeling overly nostalgic and reflective in response to the increasingly dominant and overbearingly corporate use of the term E.D.M., or Electronic Dance Music. Let’s face it, EDM sounds far too much like a handy moniker that some repressive government arm might one day use to serve the scene with a catch-all banning order (OK, OK, it was ‘Repetitive Beats’ and it was a UK Conservative Government of the Rave era that tried to ban playing such sounds, at parties, under the notorious ‘Criminal Justice Act’, attempting to persecute people for playing music that some others happened to not enjoy so much, to more than 5 people at a time). That said, with ‘Corporate’ involved it won’t be in any danger of being banned of course, though it might be in danger of becoming bland.
The influence of the United States of America looms ever-larger on the EDM / Club Scene, with such stock market funded interests (by law driven by ‘profit first, service irrelevant’ control rules) being best-served by something that comes in slick packaging, primed to be pumped out to a vast worldwide market, one that it increasingly controls.
Fear not though, because, whilst the terminology used is something that a Corporate certainly CAN influence, what CAN’T be fully controlled is the music itself, and the fresh and hungry young producers of the sounds… The independent-minded will – as ever – seek new ways to deliver their freely expressed new ideas to the wider marketplace.
And with outlets like www.ClubMixed.com, that will, thankfully, always be the case.
