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Electronic music re-emerges into the mainstream
by Matt Keppel
The average human heartbeat is around 120 beats per minute (bpm). The average dance records bpm is about the same. Coincidence? Of course not. Modern electronic dance music is designed to complement your body's natural metronome. What better bodily timekeeper than the heart to keep up with the booming, synchronized repetition of a drum machine? When you're out at a dance club, stuck against the six-foot tall stacks of industrial-strength speakers, you're probably already one of those initiated.
Club music: techno, house, drum-'n'-bass. They're all part of the genres, subgenres, and intricacies of what was once a sliver of the music market and is now, if we're to believe all of the glowing words in the music and entertainment press recently, a major arm of recently recorded music.
U2, David Bowie, even Eric Clapton (believe it or not) are discovering 'electronica,' the new genre of rock music that has been around for years, hiding in underground circles and waiting for the right time to strike open and flood the mainstream. It's about time, too. The last massive surge in the pop music stakes was the grunge explosion nearly six years ago. Now that the heavyweights of the Seattle scene have become the new exponents of 'classic rock,' the excitement and fervor have crossed over from guitar-based angst anthems to disco-oriented creations by techno-savvy bedroom musicians. The price of purchasing synthesizers, samplers, and drum machines has dropped in the past decade, making do-it-yourself composing and recording easier and more appealing. So, if homemade electronic pop is being touted as the 'newest' form of 21st century music, where is its past?
Brief history lesson: Modern electronic dance music was more or less created during the mid-'70s heyday of the disco era. While the R & B and soul edge of disco records gave dance music its pop song structure and inherent warmth, the pioneering synthesizing groups of the time (like Germany's Kraftwerk) married that groove with the streamlined, uniform perfection of machine-made rhythm tracks. So by disco's end, at the dawn of the '80s, electropop had surfaced and hit the pop charts, taking over disco's reign. Concurrently, electrofunk (a more R & B-based sound than the Euro-based electropop) had emerged and provided listeners rap music's introduction into mainstream rock vocabulary. By the mid-'80s, house music, a heavier, more electronic form of disco, was being presented in the inner city clubs of Chicago and Detroit. Exported to Europe (like disco before it), house music took on an even edgier sound before it was sent back to America a few years later as the subgenre 'acid house' and broader-labeled 'techno.' Enter into the '90s as techno further sub-divides into 'drum-'n'-bass' and 'trip-hop.' Now, welcome to the future.
Here are some of the '90s subgenres of electronica:
Techno is the broadest term used to label most relentless, pulsating dance songs that feature the most basic electronic rhythm tracks. As is usual with dance music trends, most of these creative, challenging, and successful bands (or technicians, rather) come from England. Almost all of the artists mentioned below do.
Press stars The Prodigy, a techno band formed six years ago, have been signed, after an intense bidding war, to Madonna's Maverick Records. They're currently riding their No.1 British hit "Firestarter" to American success as well. A new full-length album will be out this summer.
Another highly touted team, The Chemical Brothers, recently collaborated with Noel Gallagher, the lead songwriter of Oasis (England's biggest pop export in years), on the single "Setting Sun," included on their new full-length Dig Your Own Hole.
A massive single, "Born Slippy" by Underworld, featured on the popular soundtrack of Trainspotting, is also included on their sometimes abrasive album Second Toughest in the Infants. It's just another example of how soundtracks are becoming the hotbed for the debut of new electronica music. Recent soundtracks, the aforementioned Trainspotting, Lost Highway, and The Saint, feature dozens of techno tracks by artists as obscure as Bedrock and Dreadzone and as popular as Nine Inch Nails and Smashing Pumpkins.
Since techno's explosion in the early '90s, the only subgenre that has earned moderate press attention has been drum-'n'-bass. A form of techno, but with radically shuffling, non-repetitive drum programming and a bassline debt to reggae, drum-'n'-bass found its first personality in Goldie, a synthesizer technician and graffiti artist. Drum-'n'-bass has been adopted by mid-size artists such as Everything but the Girl (for a twist on their jazz-styled sound) and been given the grandiose overblown rock turn by such icons as David Bowie and U2 on their respective current releases Earthling and Pop.
Techno pushed itself (and its listeners and dancers) to the limit with the 140-160 bpm that some of the more hardcore artists were using in the early '90s. By the middle years of this decade, some emerging artists had slowed down the beats of electronica to the speed of rap music (but without that genre's humor and bravado).
Trip-hop (its name a play on words for rap's alter ego, hip-hop) is a moody, dark, and slinky sound that keeps techno's fascination with machine control under a more human rein. Check out Massive Attack's Protection for a series of vocalists' take on trip-hop. Portishead's Dummy features the restrained cool of vocalist Beth Gibbons over a spare soundscape. Former Massive Attack member Tricky released one of the darker techno-related works of the decade, his multi-layered, paranoid classic Maxinquaye.
As one of the most quickly evolving veins of contemporary rock music, electronica's boundaries and subgenres will surely have changed and expanded by the century's end. Some of the bands mentioned will have grown into multiplatinum stars with increasing back catalogs of records, and others will have disintegrated like the guitar rock-based, one-hit wonders of the grunge phenomenon. With music tastes being as fickle as they are, is it safe for the average teenager to slap down several hundred bucks for a synthesizer instead of a guitar? Many of these teens may do just that.
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