In Defence of House Music

After a recent opinion piece declared house music to be ‘wank’, citing ‘monotonous beats’ and ‘the fear you may never hear lyrics again’ as a reason to declare an entire genre null and void, I would argue that not only is this a crass generalisation, but house music and the accompanying live scene in Liverpool represents one of the most important subcultures of our generation.

Firstly, and most obviously, taste in music is subjective. Objectively however house music’s focus on repetition is no bad thing. A loop or beat can form the backbone of a song, around which an artist has the room to experiment with subtlety and layering. This idea has been about for years, with the music of early electronic experimenters such as NEU and Silver Apples at the beginning of the 70s.

Just because house is repetitive, that doesn’t make it simplistic. In fact repetition used with skill results in music far more complex and engaging than the simple hooks and lyrical cliches of your standard chart-topper.

That’s not to say there isn’t shit house music, but for every Bob Dylan there’s a Cliff Richard, for every Arctic Monkeys there’s a Nickelback. The inconvenient truth is that 90% of all music is generally pretty terrible.

Another criticism was that ‘If you want to get into it, you have to go out of your way’. Regardless of genre, coming across that one obscure tune that can change your life, or simply get you dancing is one of the intrinsic joys of the music obsessive. How exactly is it a bad thing for a type of music to be enjoyed enough to encourage such depth of interest?

I admit, the stereotype of the house aficionado is a wasteman so incapacitated by years of drug abuse that the merest hint of a beat is enough to inspire a one-man rave. However electronic music doesn’t just require drugs to be enjoyed. For example the more mellow strain of house can make ideal music to revise to, or to nurse a post-carnage hangover (or post-Eat Your Greens comedown, depending on personal preferences of how best to get off your face).

Not everyone likes house music, that’s fair enough, but to dismiss it as ‘wank’ is to ignore a genre teeming with complexities and a following that is to 2013 what Madchester was to the Hacienda, and what Woodstock was to the summer of ’69.

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