Something New: An Oral History of House Music

Well, as I looked up the definition of an "oral history recording" I found a lot of answers defining it as an imprecise, general term ("oral history," not "oral history recording"), that can be someone who has rehearsed and is formally speaking about history, and has credibility to do so, all the way to people talking about "the good ol' days." In the same light that our professor has his own special interests when it comes to researching and discovering answers about his own interests (as does any historian), I wanted to learn and comment on a topic of my interest - as opposed to defining history tonight, as something that happened at least 100 years ago. (I hope that's alright, after all, history is being created every second, and just because it happened a little over a few decades ago, doesn't make it less legitimate right?) Tonight I learned more about history of music, in the 1980's. I found several oral history recordings of famous Djs and Producers as well as a documentary that discuss the history of house music; both in the United States and Europe.

The oral recordings I mainly focused on for tonight's blog post, were from the legendary DJs Richard Sen, P-MAC, Lesley Lawrence and Colin Faver, all interviewed in one video, constructed by StrutRecords and uploaded onto youtube.com (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qAFQFKqA3oo) The other film I watched, (documentary in this case), was also, luckily uploaded onto youtube.com: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qcpWFiriv3w) [Very quickly, I guess a question I have is: is it completely fair to say that documentaries can be comprised with multiple oral history recordings?]

These DJs had so much new information to share for my ears. Being quite the house music fan, of course I know a good amount of history, but to hear history coming from the mouths of the European DJs was exciting. This mini collection of oral history videos revolved around how European musicians received the first sounds of house music (from the wareHOUSES, and underground dance/club scene of Chicago), and then what they decided to do with it. Making the point that they didn't linger on trying to all establish their own unique copies of "original sounding, chicago based housed music," but instead revisiting memories of what came out of hearing house music for the first time. Things like IDM (Intelligent Dance Music, raving, Madchester music scene, influencing hip hop with house and so much more. Europe not only didn't just imitate house music, they stylized it and created new sub-genres. Up until about 5 years ago, house music was widely (and ignorantly) known as a "European" dance music genre. The popularity for House music in Europe has remained so large, while it has only really just returned (in massive numbers) to the States in the last decade. These DJs make the point that Europe not only adapted to House music in the 80's, they also distorted the genre, helped make it more globally recognized, and have recently brought it back to popularity for both the underground scene and now the mainstream. They also point out that house music has influenced pop music and disco all along but remained so underground that they never were globally recognized as origins for very popular genres.