(Potential) Apocalypse: The 90s, House, and You

by Alex Swanson

I didn’t really get into house music until this past summer, when I finally got in touch with groovier, funkier vibes. I think they were latent in me all along, what with ABBA: GOLD being quite literally the album of my youth and the Bee Gees, Diana Ross, and Donna Summer forming the real backbone of family time in the living room—my real kinfolk. Of course, that’s all disco—but they’re all part of the same lineage.

My favorite at the moment is neo-90s garage. The name sounds more esoteric than the music, which grabs onto a very primal urge to bop. A lot of what’s going on in neo-genre today plays off ‘90s club culture, particularly raves (hence the word garage, implying both home-grown production and the setting for parties). More on that later. For now, think deep kick drum/high hat beats in a regular 4/4 time signature overlaid with consistent synth. It’s repetitive, but it doesn’t have the hard edge of contemporary techno. It’s all about celebrating the collected dancing crowd, androgyny, certain substances, and the spirit of the underground.

Today, women serve the neo-up. Example #1: Shanti Celeste. Originally from Chile and now the current queen of the Bristol house scene (Who knew? Apparently the seaside town of Bristol on the southern English coast is one of the destinations for house and electronic), Celeste gives us contemporary cleanliness while remaining true to her ‘90s roots. While she stays cool n smooth behind the turntable, her black bun bobs up and down to rich beats pumping “Nu4him,” my favorite single from her latest, Alma. Her sets, on the other hand, are known to last well over four hours, maintaining a semi-vintage flow throughout. Samples and original beats interlace with bangers like “Felix” from 2015’s Universal Glow, which puts you in a trance where all you know is the base, the synth, and the sweat.

Next up we have Azealia Banks. In today’s cult of the author, it’s difficult to separate the artist from their work, especially when the artist is a problematic-as-hell homophobe second to only one other in her talent of being baited by a tweet. But as truly terrible as she is on social media, Banks’s newest genre-bending mixtape Slay-Z serves us something special. Its first single “The Big Big Beat” opens with a heavy bass/synth riff that immediately has us grooving. With the introduction of a solid high hat and drag ball announcer vamp, Banks slips into her slick rhymes. It’s all about self-love disguised as vanity—“Look at this wrist, look at these colorful chips / Look at these tiddies, double D's, it's the double-dutch,” she goads us on. Between raps she goes for a sung chorus that is, of course, a total ‘90s pastiche.

And that’s what these women are going for on the grander scale, right? Pastiche: that term signifying the liminal space between homage and parody: aware of itself enough to have a name. I think it’s fantastic. Neo-90s garage (and in Banks’ case, its many contemporary variations) tells us that certain cultural forms we created in previous decades were strong enough to last and re-emerge as modern genres. While house music is basically artificial—the artist’s hand here only goes as far as the button or keyboard—Celeste and Banks show that it has an integrity that can keep us dancing.

So what about the spirit that the original ‘90s garage rebirthed? This is where ABBA and the Bee Gees come into play—that lineage I mentioned earlier. While their original beats may be slower, the same temptation to dance as one among many remains. A combination of jadedness towards stagnant contemporary pop culture and nostalgia for better times when the party drugs weren’t so strong make for an artistic déjà vu, with certain motifs returning again and again.

On one level, this repetition as beautiful as the music is. Pop culture as we know it is interconnected inside a decades-long spiral, turning and oscillating to churn out forms at once new and old. “The ______s are back” is an all-too familiar refrain that takes this idea to corners of fashion, media, even art.

But that’s where I get scared. We can mask this oscillation as pastiche, when in reality more often than not it implies laziness—not totally on the artist’s part, but on the viewer’s (or listener’s, or wearer’s). To place something in a timeline of set cultural norms—to effectively canonize it, or at least see it in clear relation to a canon—satisfies a primordial urge to categorize and make sense of the fundamentally organic enterprise of artistic creation. And while it is indeed gratifying (trust me, I’m an art history major), it’s not necessarily correct, especially if we define good culture as new. Really new—as in never been done. In formal terms this would be quite avant-garde, and completely outside this system of appropriation and production. To be lazy, then, is not only to accept pastiche but also to mask it as completely original and new work.

So the question is: is everything I love and hold dear just kitsch in the end? Well, yes; that is, if we define kitsch as pastiche, which I wouldn’t necessarily do. For all their similarities to and influences from the ‘90s, Shanti Celeste and Azealia Banks create relatively new work, if not from a production standpoint then definitely from the cultural “moment” in which they release it. Pop culture today is framed in a very different world stage than it was in the ‘90s, and while the forms it takes may be locked in a spiral of kitsch, its reception is not. From the intangible emotions house music engenders in our hearts and grooving feet to the new sound systems it bangs through, everything around neo-90s garage culture is different, progressing in a more linear way than the music itself.

A house song or set is incomplete until it is presented, hopefully with as much hype as it deserves, to a crowd of willing dancers. This isn’t high art standing on its own with no care for who encounters it; pop culture is commodity, activated only through consumption, at least in a capitalist sense. Let’s face it, the music industry is not the most Marxist place. The act of listening and reacting is a fundamental part of a piece’s place in pop culture, second only to the sound of the song itself. It’s up to us, then, as contemporary listeners (experiencers, if you like) to create new contexts to play music that exists in a different framework, which, if ignored, could implode on itself in a bonfire of kitsch.

So maybe “Stayin’ Alive” was a warning after all.