The government-enforced isolation of Native Americans in the United States has fostered cultural independence, in contrast to the marked musical acculturation between the Hispanic-speaking and Amerindian societies in South America. But in modern times, North American groups have tended to set aside tribal differences and seek a pan-tribal cultural unity. The ‘Ghost Dance’, a religious cult led by Jack ...
Dancing is as old as time, and its one constant is music that you can do it to. And while not all music is designed for dancing, some revolutionary dance music has been produced since records began. Some of it is intentionally disposable, but it is surprising just how much of the dance music made in the last ...
The Afro wig. The mirror ball. Platform heels. A pair of lurid flares. The enduring iconography of the mass-market disco era might seem laughable now, but to reduce such a revolutionary social force, and creative musical explosion to a few items of fashion tat would be very short-sighted indeed. As has happened with many other musical forms, the ...
Disco had successfully been portrayed in the backlash as un-American, of questionable sexuality, lacking the substance and resonance of rock. In underground clubs, however, house music constituted a mutation of the sound, concentrating its energies on the synthetic noises and elements of repetition that were common in many disco cuts. House music derived its name from ...
In the mid-1980s, the Chicago DJ Pierre was fiddling around with a new piece of technology, the Roland TB 303 machine. Tampering with its bass sound produced all sorts of squiggly, complex patterns. Pierre and the DJ/producer Marshall Jefferson gave a 12-minute tape of these doodlings to a local DJ, Ron Hardy, who played it at ...
Drums are the basis of tribal house. While the percussion may be simple and repetitive, its appeal lies in a certain primal, driving energy, stemming from the rhythmical drumming antics of tribespeople in pre-industrialized societies. From Middle Eastern prayer call to Brazilian batucada rhythms, many musical styles are culture-specific. However, the West often lumps together this ...
As the 1990s began, dance music was really only subdivided into house or techno. However, another genre was forming alongside the explosion of big outdoor raves – hardcore, where extreme hedonism met a kind of underclass desperation. Hardcore has meant different things at different times. In the early 1990s, different parts of Europe had different words for ...
In the UK, hardcore split into two camps in the early 1990s. One half would lead to jungle, but within breakbeat hardcore, a faction of DJs and ravers felt that the music was getting too gloomy. Producers and DJs such as Slipmatt, Seduction, Vibes, Brisk and Dougal effectively led an exodus of white ravers away ...
Effectively a hybrid of Tangerine Dream-style cosmic synth-rock and Giorgio Moroder Euro-disco, trance began to crystallize out of turn-of-the-decade trippy techno at the end of the 1980s (although disco records such as Grace’s ‘Not Over Yet’ or Donna Summer’s ‘I Feel Love’, produced by Moroder and Pete Bellotte, could lay claim to being earlier trance cuts). It was Hardfloor’s ...
Jungle was a reaction against happy rave’s crossover commercialism. The music did not so much die as go back underground, becoming darker and more sinister in order to reflect the prevailing, early 1990s mood. By this time in dance music, there had been plenty of media scare stories about ecstasy fatalities. As drug use spiralled for some clubbers ...
In the early 1980s, Derrick May was one of a triumvirate of techno pioneers in Detroit who began providing a soundtrack for the future. May was friends with Kevin Saunderson and Juan Atkins at junior high school in Belleville. Atkins turned them on to music by the likes of Giorgio Moroder, Kraftwerk and the sprawling Clinton/Parliament/Funkadelic funk beast. The ...
Growing out of Belgian ‘Hoover’ tracks (seemingly featuring the sounds of insanely trumpeting harmonic vacuum cleaners) by the likes of T99, and old hardcore tunes such as Beltram’s ‘Energy Flash’, a Dutch strain of rave added an absurdly fast Roland 909 drum machine to the music. This shuddering, rapid kick-drum sound took off in Rotterdam, which was attempting ...
The breakbeat is, literally, the percussion-only segment of a funk or disco track, where the dancers would cut loose. Finding that this was often the segment they most wanted to play, disco DJs would cut between two copies of the same record to create a funky drummer mélange. In the mid-1970s, too, Kool Herc invented ...
The UK garage scene began in London in the 1990s when enterprising DJ’s such as Norris ‘Da Bass’ Windross and Karl ‘Tuff Enuff’ Brown set up after-hours parties in the capital’s pubs for clubbers reluctant to end the revelry after spending the evening at one of London’s new superclubs, such as The Ministry Of Sound. ‘We used to pitch it ...
Disco may have died after it went overground in the late 1970s, but one New York DJ continued spinning his favourite tunes at the same club from 1977 to 1987 – Larry Levan. Though Levan’s DJing style was wildly eclectic, the smooth, soulful flavours he favoured would become known as ‘garage’ – named after the club Levan ruled ...
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David Bowie
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