Electronic Music, Part 1: Introduction and House Music

I think we are going to have to split this article, but we'll see how wordy the piece gets before I'm done. For starters, and this has happened in metal as well, what people have done when trying to explain the wide variety of electronic music is to split electronic into so many genres that some of the genres only have one group or one track in the genre. To use a metal example, most people call Fear Factory, "tribal tech-metal." Well - okay - but if this is a genre, who else might we name? Fear Factory is pretty good by the way. They are a kind of glam-based form of metal and they make some interesting use of electronic programming.

So we're going to do our first breakdown, and what we're going to do is two and only two categories in our initial breakdown. The first we'll call - for the sake of clarity - "electronic dance music," which I will probably call EDM from here on out. The second we'll call, "electronic listening music," which I'll probably refer to as ELM from here on out.

Most of the time people would call "ELM," Intelligent Dance Music, or IDM. First, you can't dance to any IDM I've ever heard, and the "intelligent," only fits because the pieces are generally incredibly conceptual or mathematical in nature. Therefore, we're calling it ELM here, and not IDM. Period. Have a nice day, if you're capable of having one.

EDM: We Like to Dance, But That Ain't All of It

Now, we are still going to have too many genres, but there is only one more basic breakdown for EDM, and that is according to the drumbeat used in the dance music. The first type would be House, the second Trance, and the third, Breakbeat. I name House first because it is probably the oldest from of EDM, and so let's hit the history of House and I'll list a few tracks you might try to grab off of Gnutella. We'll work it over a little, but House isn't incredibly complex really.

Our problem is going to be when we get to breakbeat, because there are so many different forms of breakbeat, from most of the pop music on the radio today, to all kinds of esoteric weirdness. Plus, breakbeat is also going to overlap with ELM on some level. So let's hit House, which by the way is amazing stuff, and then we'll move along to some of our problem children.

House Music: We Mix "In House"

House starts in Detroit. You've got these two men of African descent from a horrible area of Detroit. Detroit is probably the worst city on the planet today, and back then it was pretty much the same. They'll have to send the Reserves in to get the place back in order. Each one of these men has one edition of the best Technics turntables ever made, even better than the best digital Technics turntables made today, and each one has a massive collection of the old, smooth R&B style records, like Motown 45's or the Thunderbirds.

The guys take these two turntables, and and an analog mixer, and they do some shows at the dance clubs to make a little extra money, mixing everything live to keep the music interesting. The music was different every night, and it was mixed, "in House." The club would pipe a disco-track in over the speakers, and then the men would mix in the R&B groove and play around a little with the sounds using the mixer. This was probably about 1977 or 1978.

One thing I have to hit here is that no DJ has worked straight from the tables without some kind of kit. What these two men were doing in 1977 or 1978 was not very sophisticated really, and they were running straight from these turntables and what is called a "pipeline," which is not a show I would want to try to pull off. So remember, yeah, you can kill some stuff with turntables - you can - but everyone has a kitbag as well as the tables, no matter how well the tables are burnin'.

The next development with House really comes with the "phat 808." The 808 was a Roland drum machine, and it was pretty cheap for as amazing as it was. The module ran around 2000 dollars in the early to mid-80's, and was one of the first drum machines produced that actually worked. The module could do some things that the state-of-the-art machines today can't do, and further, a lot of people run their current machines off of sample packages of 808 sounds. It was just a classic piece of work, and unfortunately, even solid-state burns out someday, and I have heard of no-one that has a working module today.

There were other versions of House, like "House bands," where there would be a live-type group with some kind of kit behind them. Also, once the "808 dropped," House started moving away from the smooth groove of R&B to a more funk-style rhythm with a heavy "kick," in the beat. There is a very slim boundary-line between late-House music, which was sort of hanging around into the early 90's, and true breakbeat, which appeared at probably nearly the same time in the early 90's where House was still hanging around.

Another event was that Europe picked up on House music. Most people associate "House music," with the very "gay," and sort of "New Age," form of Euro House called "Queen House," which was connected with transvestite shows. In some cases, a DJ who knows their stuff will remix the old "Queen House," at those types of shows. However, even Euro House wasn't confined to that type of music.

Alright, so let's make a sort of list. I know House real, real well, but we'll hit some of the better points. One of my favorite versions of House is Puerto Rican House music. I went to Middle School in an area where there were a lot of Puerto Rican immigrants, and Puerto Rican House was all over the place. The other thing about Puerto Rican House is that all of the stuff that I know of is a form of House called, "Booty House," and the stuff is so, so - incredibly filthy.

However, part of the fun back then was that even if it wouldn't air on the radio, no one made any direct references to anything, and instead used all kinds of funny lingo to refer to this incredibly filthy stuff. It was hilarious, because sometimes at my Middle School dances they'd be running Booty House and no-one but the students had any idea what any of the words meant. Further, if you were in the know, you probably had an inside-line with the Puerto Ricans, and yours-Aryan-truly did, which was a big-time compliment.

So the list:

1. Technotronic: "Pump Up the Jam," which was really just a "wallflower call," was their hit, but "Get Up," which is pretty filthy, was by far their best track. The problem is that Gnutella doesn't have the best mix of the track up, so you might want to stick with "Pump Up the Jam," for the time being.
2. B-52's: "Love Shack," is a classic, and they have a better one, but I haven't even turned up the name of that one yet. This deserves a story. The B-52's got started in Athens, Georgia, just hanging around Georgia State University at the same time as the original R.E.M., and they were a Southern gay-house band. They could play, and they were funny, and so dirty that you'll have to hear the track to understand. Their MC was this older Jewish gay who was so "absolutely fabulous," that the BBC show needs to be canned for plaigiarism. Then they had "B-52," herself, a no-talent who could do mod-dancing and would dress 50's mod and shake her cantaloupes at their shows. SO FUNNY! Oh man.
3. Dee-Lite: "Groove Is In the Heart." Slide-whistles, filthy lyrics, Puerto Ricans, and a short rap feature by Q-Tip from a Tribe Called Quest. Get it now! DO IT!
4. Snap: "I've Got the Power." This is a rebellion piece, which was a rarity in House, and features KRS-One. The radio-edit is on Gnutella, but the longer version, almost a full 9 minutes, which is a live-board is way better, and if you knacker with Gnutella bit you can find it. This is great stuff. Also, if you know rap, KRS-One did have a square sound, even for the time, but the flow on this track is very deceptively simple. Kind of a proto-hip-hop piece.
5. "What is Love." If you remember the old SNL skits making fun of poor-phisher-men, then you may remember this track. On Gnutella they have the mix of this piece of Queen House mixed at the "Night at the Roxie," by DJ Antoine (An - twon) as I recall, which is the best version ever done, and a real treat, whether you queen or not. This is the archetypal Queen House track, and the Night at the Roxie remains the most notorious "queen-show," ever pulled off. The Night at the Roxie would have been too gay for me, but it does sound like it was one heck of a good time.
6. KLF: The two classics are "3 am Eternal," and "Last Train to Trancentral." KLF was a UK group, and they were also just this side of hip-hop. KLF stood for "Killer Life Form," and they were a good-sized performance-group with both UK honkies and UK Afrikans in the group, which is unusual no matter how you slice the pie. They have an ELM piece that is incredible that I'll talk about later. Get the KLF!
7. The Bangles: "Walk Like an Egyptian." I'm pretty sure that this was a Puerto Rican performance group. The track isn't a slam on people of African descent. I am good with the lingo, and I get most of the piece, which is kind of a joke on NYC-stereotypes, but I have not gotten the reference of the title and the chorus yet. It is a funny one though. I'll tell you, going to Stetson Middle School and hanging with the Puerto Ricans did help me get the skinny on life a bit earlier than most people.
8. Falco: "Amadeus." This was an Austrian House group, and a definite "gay-core," type of thing. In other words, it's "gay," but it is not easy on the mind when you're high. It's hard for me nearly ten-years stone-cold-sober. Very hardcore. A little fragment of the piece appeared in the "Amadeus," fictional biography movie of Mozart.
9. Suzanne Vega, remixed by DNA: "Tom's Diner." Suzanne Vega, who was a very-talented underground singer-songwriter, wrote "Tom's Diner," to satirize people who write garbage poetry about drinking their morning coffee. Not exactly an exciting read, or at least I've yet to see a successful version of that one. I've tried to write about 30 versions of that one my self! There was this House Dance collective called DNA that remixed the track "House style," and it was so popular in the Dance Clubs that it wound up hitting MTV. Get it off Gnutella and send it to your art-school girlfriend if she's not packing a piece. LOL!

So we'll cut this article here and move on to Trance. Frankly, I know next to nothing about trance except some very basic things, so we'll just have to let someone else educate you better on that one. Still, I can make a beginning at it. We'll do that and then we'll HIT THE BREAKS!