The 80's have come and everyone's getting a bit bored of disco. "Disco Sucks" campaigns are everywhere, popular rock artists are being called sellouts for incorporating disco synths into their music, and hipsters don't like how mainstream it is. Theres only two ways for it to go really; Either it crashes and burns along with the bell bottom trousers, platform shoes and white man afros. Or it throws all that synthetic polyester out of the window and uses it's core sound to evolve into something different.
1984(ish):
In a way both of these happened, but once it was out of the limelight of mainstream popular music, it was kept breathing in the underground gay, black club scene around Chicago. But it had taken on a new sound, and was something that could only be heard at a select few clubs, played by a select few Dj's. This new form of the genre was called "House".
Dj's playing this music were not only pioneering a new sound, but a new way of playing it. They were playing two beat-matched records simultaneously, switching between them frequently. Once the tune was coming to an end, there was already another one cued waiting to kick in just as the clubbers thought it was all over. Today, mixing isn't really seen as something special, seeing as it can be done with just a few clicks of a mouse. Although real DJ's are still out there who use Vinyl and CDJ's without a screen and an auto-synch button. In those days it was a seriously hard skill to learn and took a LOT of practice. They would still play a lot of the old disco tunes, as well as this new wide spectrum of a genre called house, which could have anything from an ecstatic up-lifting sound with high female vocals which still sounded a lot like Disco, to a deep, dark and gritty minimal sound which was primarily focused around the bass. Either way the off-beat high-hat symbols were a recurring trend in them.
1985
This new House sound started branching out across different cities and into different sub-genres. Acid house, Techno and Deep House and Garage all came from this place. It had reached as far as crossing the Atlantic into the UK with it being played in underground clubs around London and Manchester. Even Paris! Later on in the UK this music scene evolved into the "Rave" scene,which was characterised by bright neon colours, yellow smiley faces, whistles and ecstasy. It started around 1988, and grew into sub-genres like Jungle, Drum & Bass and Garage in the 90's.
The link between electronic music and video games is a pretty obvious one, if it weren't for those simple monophonic and polyphonic synths that play such an important part in early electronic music, there would be no famously cheesy but catchy tunes like the classic Tetris and pac-man theme tunes. Or my favourite childhood one, the "Streets of Rage 2" soundtrack which brings back seemingly endless memories of after-school gaming with mates, and wishing my parents would buy me a "Sega Megadrive". They are ridiculously catchy but I have my suspicions they are designed to cause migraines as if the massive bright flashy pixels weren't already giving you borderline Epilepsia .
