Classic history tree of electronic music : http://music.ishkur.com/
E.g `Eurotrance`:
> "The rank repugnance of the self-fellating culture of DJ worship is at the forefront of this many-headed hydra of rapacious rot. Overbearing anthems, boring breakdowns, and tasteless DJ vanity have combined into one monstrous, obnoxious, pompous, unlistenable Babylonian nega-demon. Who is to blame for unleashing such a hideous beast of seething filth upon our ears?"
The site is basically one very elaborate opinion piece. Ishkur doesn't like Eurotrance. Deal with it.
Spain, 1999: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dH9W5LRcVzk
This was everywhere. Everywhere.
People did their own remixes with computers at home. Everyone and their cat tried to do their first techno/trance song in High School.
When "modern EDM" hit the US we have been listening to Techno/Trance since where, from 1992-1993? There were even official Techno/Trance remixes bought by everyone, too.
You seem to be basing your views on top 40 charts and what was protrayed in media. It's true, techno and electronica only rarely appeared there in the 90s. That's because electronica in the US was entirely centered around clubs and raves. Radio was controlled by a handful of big labels that all had a specific intent to shape the market towards specific genres. So techno in the US never became a "factory" product.
But that doesn't mean we weren't listening to it. I grew up in Kansas in a smaller city. In high school we were going to jungle or trance parties just as often as grunge. All the big box book and music stores had substantial electronica sections. We discovered music at parties, via word of mouth, and by the latter half of the 90s, via the internet.
People have been listening to techno in the US continuously since its inception in Detroit. But we've been listening to a whole lot of other electronica subgrenes as well.
The kind of music in your link has never been popular with electronica fans here. We find it manufactured banal empty trash to be blunt. The closest to that style that's been popular here would be Oakenfold and the like.
You also misunderstand hip hop in one of your comments. It is not just popular with black Americans. It's been popular with Americans of all sorts since its inception. In fact hip hop essentially subsumed pop in the late 90s.
There's been a lot of exchange between hip hop and electronica in the US too, particularly due to both using the 808 a lot. The latest electronica fad, the revival of phonk, is another example. It's a fusion of trap with breakbeat techno. And it's yet another example of how electronica is fundamentally international, as the revival has been driven by russian producers like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=smbiKaOAN3Q
I don't really know what you're trying to accomplish with your smugness, but to be blunt all it's doing is making you look both ignorant and prejudiced.
So was Spain. People shared music with each other. Radio? pop and rhythm & blues everywhere in top charts. While people IRL got into the clubs everywhere.
>The kind of music in your link has never been popular with electronica fans here. We find it manufactured banal empty trash to be blunt.
Here we had several substyles. As I stated, Andalusians were more fans of breakbeat, while the North liked progressive/proto-hardbass in 1999-2001 and the East with Valencia and its "route" among Barcelona was the Techno-Trance heaven. Ibiza longly was, was, it is, and it will be, THE "chill-out/house" genre place from Spain. For obvious reasons: partying tourism and a "hippie" vibe since the 60's.
Not to mention those things were a thing at the time of Lester Bangs or the NME, 50+ years ago (and even in reviewers of classical music) hardly a Pitchfork era phenomenon or invention....
Also to add to this the more I lean to the content creation side and work with artists, the more genres become blurry and irrelevant. Seeing critics and the creator of that history tree obsess over this and create micro genres to try to fit every music and their listener into this is just silly and far removed from how a good composer or producer with eclectic tastes works. Nowadays a mainstream song can be surprisingly creative, while the N-th production in a "good taste approved sub-sub-genre of techno" will have 0 artistic value.
This is just some guys opinions on music, let him talk about them, you don't have to agree.
I even wish the elitism still existed. I used to go to Pitchfork, Coke Machine Glow and sites of that type to read about music that wasn't getting covered elsewhere. Now it's basically Rolling Stone, but worse because it pretends to be counter culture while devoting endless posts to TSwift or Drake or any number of artists that can be heard on every major radio station.
That is to say -- I've found that while the sheer volume of mass-produced crap has gone up (including but not limited to music criticism), so too has the sheer volume of rare, underground jewels. I don't know if/maybe doubt discovery has been cracked yet.
There are never any cut-aways, or song clips, or on-screen graphics...anything to reduce the monotony. And yet he has a million subs and the comments section does include discussion of the record. It's not very deep, but it does exist.
For me though, it's too boring. I'd read the review if he wrote articles, but definitely would not watch.
This. As for discovery, it's never been easier to find things by oneself. Bandcamp (nice place to bootstrap rabbit holes), Spotify artists playlists, Youtube channels, Subreddits...
We love you too Ishkur! <3 from Holland
>It's important to first explain the horrible template that ruined Trance music. Somehow a musical artform that devoted itself to hypnotic rhythms and spacey soundscapes became, inside of a decade, a mass produced assembly line McProduct for middle class Europeans (pejoratively known as Trancecrackers because they're white. Terribly, tragically, sunblindingly, basic-bitch-ordering-a-pumpkin-spice-latte white) who should have not spent their young adulthood clubbing but rather dying horribly in another continent-engulfing conflict (I mean, come on: Europe is due).
You know, one could answer this with an equally salty comeback, like how ironic it is for an American to think he's in a position to lecture white Europeans in any way about electronic music culture or taste : we built, grew and lived this music revolution for 20 years, while white America was still all about stale rehashes of guitar-based genres*, and black America all about hip-hop. To some extent, they still are.
Then around 2009**, when we had matured this into something commercial enough to be sold to the US public, we exported the cheesiest, bro-ready fringe of it as "EDM" and sure enough, it caught on like wildfire. Frat boys & sorority girls had "never heard anything like this OMG!" :)
But with remarks like the one he makes about war, it's probably sufficient to say that this guy, knowledgeable as he is, sounds like a bit of a bigot and a right d*ck.
*This was the era when Eminem had lines like "nobody listens to techno" (and by "techno" he meant Moby, lol), while in Europe the Berlin Love Parade had a million people in the streets each summer. I was dumbfounded in the late 90s at how many different names the id3 tag format had for country music and Christian genres. It was a complete WTF from a European perspective ! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ID3#Genre_list_in_ID3v1[12]
** David Guetta-produced "I gotta feeling" for the Black Eyed Peas is widely credited to have launched EDM into the US mainstream. Soon after he & Tiesto had their Vegas residencies, EDC & UMF blew up and the rest is history.
Perhaps it will add a little context to note that Eminem, like Techno, is from Detroit.
Spain, 1999:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dH9W5LRcVzk
Meanwhile, the US got the shittiest EDM ever in 2010-2011 as something "revolutionary".
You kickstarted the acid house genre, but you let it rot in the dust in the 90's.
We Europeans had a huge underground fanbase since late 80's, and since mid-90's trance has been huge for example in Spain and Germany, up to the point to be broadcasted in the state-backed first TV channel in the mornings.
Europe had an _audience_ for techno, yes but also an audience for some of the cheesiest garbage dance music on the planet.
Don't lecture us -- Detroit and Chicago are the heart and soul of techno & house, even if the artists from there weren't always appreciated at home.
Europe has been exporting its garbage trance and progressive crap since the late 80s. Soul driven techno from African-American artists had a way of being exported over to Europe, absorbed by the locals, and shipped back as soulless amphetamine driven crap.
Electronic music in Europe has always been a huge industry, and some amazing music made... but as a % of product produced/consumed.. only a small amount of it was good (which amounted to a lot of excellent records in an absolute ocean of other junk.)
Back in the day there was an amazing amount of quality underground music coming out of Chicago, New York, Detroit / Windsor, and smaller centres in the midwest, too. Great stuff even from here in Toronto. The west coast was an entirely other story, mostly dominated by "funky breaks" and trance and stuff I didn't like.
Also I can't tell from your tone if the YouTube video you posted is made to be made fun of, or enjoyed? Because to me it's clearly the former. The kind of shit that teenage kids at raves back in the 90s would take meth to and grind their teeth and we'd just gag at.
Yes, we had all that crap here back in the mid-90s. Huge raves, mostly crap. EDM is just what the next generation called it, and I guess maybe it had a broader audience.
That's actually a sign that a genre has taken hold and reached maturity in a location, with subgenres catering for every layer of society.
As a genre ambassador, you know you've won when your sound (even a watered down version of it) has become the sound of pop music chart-toppers. That happened in Europe in the early 90s, in America in the early 2010s.
> Don't lecture us, Detroit and Chicago are the heart and soul of techno, even if the artists from there weren't always appreciated at home.
I don't know, that's a bit like saying that Helsinki is the heart and soul of Linux, and Uppsala that of MySQL, which is technically true but ... this isn't really where it came of age and blossomed.
> Europe has been exporting its garbage trance and progressive crap since the 90s. Soul driven techno from African-American artists had a way of being exported over to Europe, absorbed by the locals, and exported back as soulless amphetamine driven crap.
That's controversial. Techno is often described as the child of African-American soul music on one side, and white European experimental electronic music on the other.
It's trendy to stress the former and downplay the latter, and that's certainly fair enough for house music.
But when it comes to trance, eurodance, etc, I think that owes almost nothing to America or African-American music, and everything to Kraftwerk and Jean-Michel Jarre.
Not my recollection, though? "Electronica" was a mainstream record store category and a huge market in the late 90s and early 2000s in North America long before this "EDM" label was applied later.
I think, yes, that it fell out of fashion post 9-11 and so in the 10 year gap the EDM thing happened later. So we're really talking about a generational horizon thing here, where EDM was the re-emergence of the mainstream top-40 "rave" thing 10 years later for the next generation.
But I remember 3 waves of this stuff:
very early 90s, late 80s, crap like C&C music factory, etc. was the mainstreamization of house music. "pump up the volume" KLF "What Time is Love" etc. was chart topping mainstreamization of acid house, hell it got played all the time on the jukebox in my smalltown / rural Canadian high school. I worked an indoor mall amusement park and the early 90s equivalent of today's EDM was on constant rotation. Dance megamixes, etc.
mid-late 90s, "Electronica"; Chemical Brothers, Prodigy, Underworld, etc. were big. And then the tail end of that it just was everywhere.
And then later, this EDM thing.
So 10 year waves, and at no point has it really been foreign to North America. There were huge several thousand person raves all through the late 90s. It's just that in _context_ of hip-hop R&B dominance in North America and its exports, maybe it looks to Europeans as non-existent.
But take a look at the Wikipedia pages for the tracks and artists you mentioned, and see how high they went in the US vs European charts (to be fair, I was surprised that the Prodigy did so well in the US)
My claim is that the degree to which a genre becomes mainstream in a location is a good reflection of this place being "ground zero" for it.
The point is that mass consumption of dance music was a huge thing in North America.
I mean it's funny. In the early 90s I went to visit my extended family in Germany. At that point I was already a major techno fan, but the funny thing is that when I went to Europe all my cousins, the music they listened to was mostly American R&B and hip-hop. Watching overdubbed episodes of Family Matters. Huge consumers of a side of North American culture that I did not. So to me the demographic situation is more complicated.
I think many Europeans on this thread might have a biased perception of what music consumption in the 90s in North America looked like based more on North American exports than on what was actually happening here. That and most people here are quite young.
Kinda like the American perception on European's techno culture.
Hint: when the clubs released their yearly compilation based on 3 or 4 CD's, you had one disc per genre: Techno, trance, house and progressive/sung. So in the end we listened to all of the EDM offer inbetween depending on the mood.
Also, as I said, dance megamix CD's in Spain could be found as early as late 80's. Ok, more like vinyls, but the concept stays.
I don't have much to add to this apart from to say I think you're both right to varying degrees.
But more importantly I'm enjoying this passionate discourse on HN about a genre of music that I care deeply about.
I think it's fair to say that dance music today wouldn't exist without the breadth of innovation that happened on both sides of "the pond" in recent decades - and to not be too European/US centric - elsewhere around the world too.
That was a diss line about Moby, a "techno" artist who achieved mainstream US popularity around that time. Eminem wasn't trying to accurately depict the state of electronic music in the US, he was being salty.
By my own memory as a teenager growing up in the rave scene, electronic music was weird and unapproachable to pretty much everyone. Big Beat like The Crystal Method and Prodigy had made some waves, and of course there was Moby, but outside of my raver friends and a brief attempt to get eurodance (like Alice Deejay) on Top 40 radio by the local media conglomerates, "techno" was pretty niche.
I mean, in the early 2000s I saw Paul Oakenfold -- twice -- at small clubs, and it was easy to get into the front. I would write requests in big letters on my phone and see if I could get the DJ to play them. (Tiesto wasn't as approachable but that asshole would crank the speakers up well past their distortion point)
- 1994 Horses https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ice5Nw6ltfY
- 1995 Desperate https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pHdu9UwXqGc
- 1992 Drop a Beat https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WywzWjZATKA
- 1991 UHF3 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=21TjeBcA1cI
- 1991 Voodoo Child (Poor in New York Mix) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WywzWjZATKA
Electronic music is and has always been an international phenomenon. Innovations happen due to cross-pollination of styles, not because specifically white Europeans "mature" it.
The Techno that blew up in Europe was initially imported from African Americans. Jungle/DNB was born out of mixing UK Hardcore with Jamaican Reggae/Dancehall/Dub music.
Footwork, Club, Bounce, Industrial, House, Electro, to name a few, are all styles that were prevalent on dancefloors in the US during the time you characterize it as "all about stale rehashes of guitar-based genres". All of these styles are woven into the DNA of the new underground generation. Nobody "owns" electronic music, and the scene is so much better when people stop claiming that anyone does.
I suppose that's one way of saying you have a different perspective from mine.
>Electronic music is and has always been an international phenomenon. Innovations happen due to cross-pollination of styles, not because specifically white Europeans "mature" it. >The Techno that blew up in Europe was initially imported from African Americans. Jungle/DNB was born out of mixing UK Hardcore with Jamaican Reggae/Dancehall/Dub music.
I've addressed most of your points in another comment : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26981256
A lot of the genres that Ishkur despises are every bit as European homegrown as Motown is African-American to the bones.
> Nobody "owns" electronic music, and the scene is so much better when people stop claiming that anyone does.
Sure, but that's a bit like saying Silicon Valley doesn't own the Internet. It's technically true but SV is still (or was until very recently) a mecca, ground zero for all things Internet.
There is such a thing for music genres as well, and a good indicator of that is the extent to which that genre has bubbled up into mainstream pop music charts.
I took issue with your original comment because of the claim that electronic music is basically an ethnically white, European phenomenon. The SV->Europe comparison would be apt here if Europe were indeed _the_ mecca for all electronic music. This is obviously false unless you ignore huge swaths of the history or massively constrain your definition of what constitutes electronic music.
If you use the charts to measure what's happening at the underground/local level of any place, you're never going to get a good picture. Based on the charts (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_European_number-one_ai...) it would appear that Europeans seldom listened to music written by Europeans in the 90s!
Another favorite is Ishkur's "trancecracker" comic, which you can find here: https://modwiggler.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=245900
I was literally just making the argument with my friends who were going "oh, I wish Tiesto was still playing trance; he turned his back on the trance scene" to which I responded "Tiesto was never a trance DJ, he was a mainstage DJ. He's still a mainstage DJ, and you don't get on the mainstage playing trance anymore".
Also, any musician that wants to get big should know that the fastest way is to add words/lyrics.
Music is such a universal language that it needs to be annotated or something.
Ahem. I think you'll find it's a little bit more complicated than that
In the last 50 years, you can probably count the number of chart-toppers without lyrics on one hand. Animals, Axel F, Doop, Flat Beat, and Sandstorm (and I am not sure if these even topped charts everywhere).
Sure, if you are into the niche of EDM or techno club music, the situation is different, but none of those tunes sell millions of copies.
The point is you could spend hours actually developing subtleties in engineering, especially in timing and mixing, to produce something profound.
Or you could get a drum machine and a 303, and get someone sexy to sing/rap/speak over the top, make a video, and save a lot of time. A lot of pop music these days is quite simple, except for the singing, which I can admit is talented, but it's more about personality/fashion than music.
Trance ironically enough (including a lot of the stuff Tiesto worked on) is known for having very deep lyrics and that's a good chunk of what people are missing I think when they make the comments like above.
I'd check out Beautiful Things by Andain if you're curious. The lyrics are about a woman who believes she gave up her life and potential to be a traditional wife and is contemplating suicide to end her regret.
A lot of trance music never even had lyrics; listen to what came out before 2000. (Even Tiesto made a lot of music without lyrics before 2002 or so). If you want to find music that sounds like the early days of trance music then you'll more likely find it labeled as techno music today (which is not really all that surprising since trance music originated from techno music anyway).
Beautiful Things is arguably not trance music. Also, when you're studying or trying to concentrate, do you listen to music with lyrics?
Mainstage antics are part of performance. Check out every mainstream genre before EDM. Van Halen Jump is probably my fav example :)
There's plenty of even trance without mainstage antics.
I'm mainly being pithy more than anything else, lol.
The fact that it's originally a Jack Chick tract about how evil Muslims are makes it even better lol.
It is tough being a fan in the US when the kings of DnB all live in the UK. Can’t wait for Fabric to reopen - its time for a visit.