Tuesday, October 6, 2009

Techno Continues to Evolve

For the past ten years or so, Hip Hop music has surpassed Techno as the music of choice for most of the masses in the United States. Where massive clubs playing House and Trance once ruled the nights, such is no longer the case. Where most American cities had a radio station or two playing techno, these are extremely difficult to find nowadays. But I believe the tide has turned a bit. Many people have grown weary of hip hop since a lot of the music sounds exactly the same from song to song. Rap lyrics which are often a part of the hip hop scene have consistently relied on violent messages and that's gotten really old.

I bring this up because besides this being a slow news week in the PI world, there was a recent Blog Comments discussion about House music evolving into Dance music and how Dance often has included remixes of Hip Hop. That remains true. Hip Hop is often remixed to a faster beat for Dance Club play. But we're also seeing more and more Techno artists create from inception Dance music that incorporates Hip Hop and Rap. This is an interesting development that shows that music is constantly evolving and often borrowing from other genres.
This is the kind of thing that is helping bring back Techno music! Update: By coincidence, the Orlando Sentinel ran an article on Sunday (appeared in other Chicago Tribune papers too) about how the current Top 40 hasn't been this diverse since the 70's. It mentioned that Black Eyed Peas were finally dethroned off the #1 slot, a position they held for a new record of 26 weeks with their I Got Feeling and Boom Boom Pow songs. "Boom Boom Pow" represents what's happening in terms of dance music, R&B and pop converging, according to a music expert from Edison Research.

In the first video below we see Eurodance artist Natalie Horler of Cascada (Germany) incorporate Rap into EVACUATE THE DANCE FLOOR while in the second video we see House DJ David Guetta (France) incorporate Hip Hop singer Akon directly into SEXY BITCH.




1 comment:

Anonymous said...

interesting article. I would love to follow you on twitter.