What Is Music Genre

This already poses a problem because a musical genre does not have a single definition at all. Generally it can be used to indicate either a certain type of sound, or a certain type of musical writing, or a precise and well-defined set of consolidated forms and methods for making music, or it can simply indicate the instrumentation or the rhetorical-prosaic content of the music; however it may also indicate sets of various kinds born of combinations of the possibilities listed above.

1. There is however a point in common to all these things; they are all musical categories, which in turn can be subdivided into three large, all-encompassing macro-areas. There could be no acid house without Chicago house.

Created in impoverished areas of Chicago by music lovers who bought up cheap but effective gear like the TR-808 drum machine and various turntables, Chicago house was an entirely new kind of dance music. Harder edged than the funk and disco that came before it, but perhaps even more suited to the dancefloor, house music was pioneered by such DJ greats as Frankie Knuckles, Marshall Jefferson, Steve ‘Silk’ Hurley, and of course the entire Trax Records roster, headed up by Screamin’ Rachael.

The acid house was the biggest youth revolution to hit Britain after the 1960s and left a profoundly changed cultural landscape to posterity. A quarter of a century after its birth, the impact it had on fashion, cinema and design seems very strong. He changed a lot, from the perception that one had of the phrase ‘guys, tonight you go out’ to the laws in force.

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Calling the protagonists of this golden age, many remember how quickly the acid house has taken hold, but also how quickly such a disruptive phenomenon began to be commercially exploited. In 1987, by mistake ,Marshall Jefferson teamed up with DJ Pierre and the late Spanky to produce a record called ‘Acid Tracks’. Written by Pierre and Spanky, produced by Jefferson and released on Trax Records, ‘Acid Tracks’ is the release after which the entire genre was named. The track makes extensive use of Roland’s recently released TB-303 bass synthesiser, programmed to play a short sequence with a slowly varying EQ cutoff filter. The roots of this revolution already lie in the fertile soil of the early eighties, but when it really began to shift, at the end of 1987, it took little more than six months to pass from a handful of few followers to a nationwide spread. The ‘warehouse parties’ came to count twenty thousand raver by the summer of 1988. 2. It’s hard to remember how desperate the clubs were at the time.

With a few exceptions, they were places to get drunk, in the evenings ,music was a less than secondary aspect. But the devastating acid house-ecstasy combo returned to the scene, bringing the dance floors to fire. Ecstasy changed people’s appearance, initially the acid house was the result of the perfect combination of a new drug, a new sound and new technology. The collision of these three elements created a scene much more egalitarian than any other. Hooligans and doctors ,blacks and whites, straight and gay, students and street people. the background doesn’t matter, everyone was part of a family under this new banner. Once the term acid house became more widely used, participants at acid house-themed events in the UK and Ibiza made the psychedelic drug connotations a reality by using club drugs such as ecstasy and LSD. The association of acid house, MDMA, and smiley faces was observed in New York City by late 1988.

This coincided with an increasing level of scrutiny and sensationalism in the mainstream. In London, DJ pioneers like Maurice and Noel Watson at Delirium, Colin Faver and Eddie Evil Richards at Camden Palace, Jay Strongman and Mark Moore at Heaven and Dave Dorrell at RAW, were the first to play house music, but it was only with the arrival of ecstasy between 87 and 88 that things began to get serious. A new generation of clubs such as Danny Rampling’s Shoom, Nicky Holloway’s The Trip and Paul Oakenfold’s Spectrum formed the hard core of the capital scene, alongside the Manchester Hacienda and Sheffield’s Jive Turkey, but for now it still seemed like a well-kept secret. It was so new and different from everything you’ve ever tried,’ explains K-Klass’s Paul Roberts, ‘that you had to say it to a couple of friends, to bring them into the den of the white rabbit, but no more … it was beautiful and you wanted it to remain secret and special. ‘

In hindsight, most of these early devotees admitted how naive and idealistic their presumption of being able to contain what was going to happen was naive. In May 1988, both i-D and The Face wrote articles about the emerging scene and with the arrival of summer newspapers and tabloids followed suit. ‘We are talking about a phenomenon that in the space of 12-16 weeks has gone from being known by four cats to the headlines of the Sun,’ says Cymon Eckel of Boys Own. ‘I think we understood that the honeymoon was ending, we were not really trying to protect the principles of acid house, but the incredible parties for equally incredible people.

The speed with which the acid house exploded in the summer of ’88 surprised everyone. Initially it was thanks to word of mouth: those who experienced these parties in London, Manchester and Sheffield came out changed and felt a desperate need to evangelize its enlightening experience, doing so levitate the numbers from week to week. The devotees were now recognizable outside the clubs, on the buses and in the streets, clearly betrayed by their way of dressing, wearing their hair and, above all, the spark in their eyes. The groups of friends were now divided into those who had already had their miserable vision those who had not yet converted, but the number of the first quickly began to exceed that of the second.