Originally published at: http://boingboing.net/2017/06/26/pop-music-genres-illustrated-w.html
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I’m most impressed that the keyboard never slides off his knees.
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Change the beat on the “techno” one and it could be mid 90’s happy gabber.
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Nice Leonard from FMJ cosplay.
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Cool Stormtrooper artwork!
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I’d personally prefer the pre-gabber shift in such music, and stick in some pre-jungle breakbeats and make it happy hardcore. 
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This is awesome and I will think about it all day. I definitely have a soft spot for Africa by Toto.
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I’m looking forward to using some of these as status updates. “Congress slices Medicare! Genre: SAD”
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That would be bouncy techno rather than happy hardcore, which was influenced by early gabber and house music. Happy gabber started when English happy hardcore was still breakbeat, then the happy hardcore DJ’s started playing it as well as bouncy techno, and lost the breakbeats.
I preferred English happy hardcore when it was breakbeat. I’ve still got some early tapes where the DJ’s were playing jungle and happy hardcore, and no-one cared.
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That green screen is going to waste here.
Also: thanks for the biggest ear-worm ever. This annoying piece of crap will be in my head all day.
“hurry boy she’s waiting there for youuuuuu!”
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Steelpans come from Trinidad, not Jamaica. But perhaps the mistake is deliberate…
Maybe the vernacular is different in the locations we’re from, but in the US we called the genre that came out of darker hardcore (you know, hardcore – with breakbeats!) but was fun, happy hardcore, breakbeats intact. Some stuff that was really bouncy gabber and faster bouncy techno also tended to be called happy hardcore in the US, despite having lost the hardcore breaks. But as far as I’m concerned, whether you’re from the U.K. or the States, “proper” happy hardcore has breakbeats inherently, and sounds a lot more like hardcore or early dark side jungle, than gabber or techno. Was it Knight Force records? That’s the happy hardcore I’m talking about. 
What’s all that stuff on the table?
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The precious things.
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It’s a case of parallel evolution. The southern half of the UK was where the breakbeat hardcore scene was (and it was very English dominated), but Scotland and the north of England was more influenced by the Dutch hardcore scene. I don’t know for certain where the tipping point from one to the other was, but I do know that Stoke-on-Trent was home to both the breakbeat leaning Club Kinetic and North Radical Technology, which was mostly gabber and speedcore with hard trance and acid techno in the back room.
Breakbeat happy hardcore started losing its breakbeats around 1995-96 as there was more and more crossover between the two scenes, but happy gabber slightly predated that as the Dutch were being influenced by the likes of Scott Brown, Ultra-Sonic and Ultimate Buzz. Happy gabber may have even been the reason why breakbeat happy hardcore ended, I remember stuff Paul Elstak, Bass D & King Matthew and Charly Lownoise & Mental Theo being included more and more throughout 1995. I lost interest in English breakbeat happy hardcore when it finally stopped being breakbeat and focused more on the Dutch side of things who were moving on from their happy phase.
I don’t think there’s much point in arguing which was the real hardcore, they both were and their descendants still are.
Kniteforce. They were the one of the hold outs (and then not really, they just had a seperate label for the non-breakbeat hardcore). When the label went bankrupt* that was it for the breakbeat side of things. I have a load of old Knite-force and Remix Records stuff that I want to rip to FLAC, but I haven’t had a chance to do it in the last 15 years and now I’m a bit scared to look at it in case it is all unplayable now.
Hopefully I’m not going too off topic here.
* Knite-force founder Chris Howell made a lot of money from Sesame’s Treet getting to No.2 in the UK charts and invested it all into starting Knite-force. For some reason no-one told him that he would have to pay income tax on it, and when the Inland Revenue caught up with him he had to sell all his labels and their back catalogues to pay them.
The moral of that story is “don’t be a one hit wonder and always pay your taxes”. Chris finally managed to get his original label back about 10 years later.
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Awesome info, sounds like you were producing and/or DJing in the UK at the time?
Edit: And yes, I think “parallel evolution” of happy hardcore/happy gabber/bouncy techno sounds about right to me, because yes, much of it was concurrent. In the USA, almost nobody DJ’d actual breakbeaty happy hardcore – I did for a small period, and a handful of folks I knew of. But the gabber parties and “hardcore” (US use of the word, hardcore techno) would often have DJs/producers playing happy gabber and stuff along those lines (but again, I can’t think of too many folks in that world who would have put on a breakbeaty happy hardcore record).
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Dogs = Art Of Noise version.
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Thanks. You beat me to it.
Most people think that anything from the English-speaking Caribbean is always from Jamaica.
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