In My House There Is *Only* House Music

I have often had people refer to me as a “purist” when it comes to music. It’s funny, I guess in a way that is exactly true, but in most ways it is exactly not true. In Aidan’s post about house music, he referred to some artists that I consider to be at the forefront of house: Shake, Theo Parrish, Recloose, Maurice Fulton, and Herbert. To that list, I will also add Omar-S, Reggie Dokes, Morgan Geist/Darshan Jesrani/Metro Area, and Soundhack. As evidenced by some of the comments on our interview with Omar-S, plenty of actual house purists don’t even consider many of these artists to be “house” at all. They get tossed into various other genres: “techno”, “nu-disco”, etc. But all of these artists have that one thing which I do feel strongly about being pure: the feeling.

House music didn’t begin with 100 deejays all playing the same pseudo-r&b records mixed in safely with the tried and true classics. It began with people expressing themselves through a variety of music, none of which was actually “house” as we know it because it simply didn’t exist yet! Ron Hardy didn’t go to the record store and buy every new release out of the bins labeled “House”, nor did Larry Levan or Frankie Knuckles or any of the other essential deejays who created this shit. Instead they connected records based on a feeling, that funkiness, “soul” as many call it. Even the most abstract electronic rhythm track that was played had that going for it! Those abstractions were used to increase the energy that was being generated by other soul, disco, electro, and hiphop records.

What’s funny about the artists I mentioned above is that they all play wildly diverse deejay sets of tracks coving the last 40+ years of dance music, and their productions are widely varied and most times much more experimental than safe. This is why I take offense when people in the dance music press say things like “It seems the American sound hasn’t changed a great deal.” or “But I guess I’m enjoying so many of these records that it’s easier to relinquish the idea that innovation is the be all and end all in dance music. I mean, this is house we’re talking about afterall.” as Ronan Fitzgerald has been going on about. He holds up the modern “minimal techno” scene as the standard of innovation, which is laughable at best. That sound is the definition of a homogeneous dance music sub-genre that continually feeds off of itself. This should be obvious by the fact that playing “house” records is an event worth noting!

So yeah, maybe I *am* a purist. I’m a purist for those ideas that made house music interesting in the first place: diversity, soul, and experimentation. Those qualities can not be found anywhere else like they can in these artists mentioned, and many others as well, most of whom are from the United States. However many actual house music purists there are in cities like Chicago and New York who only tolerate very limited playlists, they do not speak for the entire country nor the entire culture of house music. There is a thriving scene of people who are interested in that feeling that only house can deliver, and you can see it in the record stores as well, as long as you’re willing to look beyond whatever safe predictable genre the dance press is pushing this week.