I agree with this. I love house but I hate house historicism or at least house historicism and homage as it exists now, how it feels and how it’s sold
I agree with this. I love house but I hate house historicism or at least house historicism and homage as it exists now, how it feels and how it’s sold
Sannie Carlson (best known as Whigfield) is the name of a lady with Danish origins who decided to make a mark in the history of pop-dance music by selling millions worldwide.
In 1994 she gained a place in the Guinness Book of Records with the song "Saturday Night" as the first artist to go straight to number one in the UK singles chart with a debut single. Her discography is extremely impressive including numerous hit singles all over the world & four studio albums, a career spanning over a decade which for a pop-dance act is extremely unusual.
After many years on stage Sannie has decided to concentrate on the other side of the music industry, writing & composing for other artists in the business, both DJs & singers with names such as the Grammy winner Benny Benassi, Adam K, Ann Lee and In-Grid.
yeah definitelythat is always the danger with a return to house as 'house'
and not house as a post-disco continuum that is an adaptable template
yeah definitely
I happen to have been listening almost exclusively to ca. 77-86ish dance music lately in the course of preparing a post-disco top 100 and the more you listen to the more clear it becomes just how smooth and uninterrupted the transition from disco to house was, both in a "house is a feeling" and a more literal sense. which is I think is received wisdom at this point for anyone knows/cares about such things - that there was no house music year zero - but the seamlessness at a more granular level is still impressive. and it really is a continuum in the same sense as the nuum - producers, labels, DJs, etc all carry over as well as the records themselves.
and obv to dehistoricize "house" is to sever from its roots (i.e. queer communities of color) which I assume is at least part of what you're on about
not to pile on @craner
more of a Jam+Lewis etc type than me but he's always been a strong advocate of 80s black dance musics in general
the Italo thing is also pretty interesting in re the dialogue between the American and Euro-disco continuums
as you @thirdform surely know, the proto-house trackier end of Italo featured much more heavily in Chicago, specifically Hardy and the Hot Mix Five guys, than NY. Levan played some Italo records, but in a more general context of new wave, synth-pop, left-field, etc - which Hardy did too ofc, we're talking a matter of emphasis. you can really hear the difference in each city's respective transition to house and proto/early house records. NY is a straight transition from post-disco under the heavy personal influence of Levan (and his followers like Humphries etc); Exodus - Together Forever, Status IV - You Ain't Really Down, various Boyd Jarvis/Timmy Regisford things, etc. With the possible exception of Jarvis it's very songs > tracks. the earliest Chicago records like Knight Action, Jesse Saunders etc are very Italo. another way to put is things like this are a very literal blueprint for acid - this could be an early Phuture demo (and obv it's also not far off the slower end of EBM and all the other dark Northern European biz that lead into New Beat etc).
I find it interesting that the Italo revival generally, if not entirely, skewed toward the other end of Italo i.e. the cheesy bad English vocals, which as you say Italian heads at the time scoffed at. while the shit that mattered at the time was these crazy proto-house instrumentals.
I know exactly what you mean and it's true of D.A.F., as well, more or less, all post-Cowley Hi-NRG etcD.A.F is gay but not really queer, it's hard to explain
idk about "less", maybe more like a different emphasisAlso as a whole nyc house has less emphasis on the percussion
I know exactly what you mean and it's true of D.A.F., as well, more or less, all post-Cowley Hi-NRG etc
the high days of pre-AIDS explicit gay male sexuality
but speaking more broadly of disco as a whole I still think "queer" is better - there were always trans people around, and while there was/is absolutely an explicitly gay male element in disco there were also parts of disco that embraced gender and sexual ambiguity. early Prince comes out of that tradition, as well as obviously from (the very straight, albeit p-funk less than James Brown) funk. the symbolic unifying alliance is Cowley-Sylvester.
gotta pay the bills - including presumably medical bills - and his glory days were long gone by that point sadlywas Levan's last remix before his passing not of a really cheesy italo-house record?
gotta pay the bills - including presumably medical bills - and his glory days were long gone by that point sadly
not that he (or Hardy or Knuckles or anybody) were against "cheese", they played whatever they thought was good and worked