Have you ever thought about what your music says about you? What’s the over-arching vibe of each genre you choose? How does music transcend language?

Some evolutionists think that our capacity to sing and make music came before we humans learned to talk. It makes sense when you think about nature and how everything in the natural world has a rhythm or a cycle to it.

Music can be a private and intensely personal thing, or it can be a first impression that we offer to the world. Everyone has a different level of affinity for it, some folks (like me) practically need it to live and breathe, while others hardly give it a second thought.

Genres wax and wane in popularity like changes in the weather. Some become permanent fixtures in the cultural landscape while others disappear as quickly as a thin layer of fog.

Some types of music are easy to understand on the surface. Rock ‘n’ roll and rebellion. Classical and cultural refinement. Disco and decadence.

But others are more chimerical. What outsiders perceive on the surface is nothing like what seasoned aficionados experience on the inside. Jazz, for instance, is frequently misunderstood.

But when it comes to perplexing perceptions, it’s hard to top a certain style of dance music that evolved at the hands of DJs during the decline of disco. Many people never get past the label.

Just what the heck is “House Music” supposed to mean anyway? Well, if you plug that moniker into your digital music robot of choice, you’ll be presented with a 4/4 rhythm somewhere in the neighborhood of 120 beats per minute. It loosely fits between EDM and Techno in today’s jargon.

If you were to hear it for the first time here in the 2020s, you might think it a sort of ordinary, albeit monotonous, dance music, the occasional wailing diva aside. But that would be taking it totally out of context and neglecting its history. House works best when you get inside it.

House Music is where every other flavor of electronic dance music began. It’s the original. It was born in the same moment as the drum machine and the direct drive turntable. It shares its DNA with Hip-Hop. These two twin genres form the foundation of DJ culture.

As often happens when something entirely new arrives on the scene, an ethos arrives with it. Remember, by the late 1980s the hippie era was most definitely over, and AIDS was decimating the gay population.

Somehow, House Music managed to rise up in the midst of all that grief and loudly proclaim that everyone has the right to love any way they want; that every color, background, or belief is equal; and unity for the common good is the path to peace. High ideals, amirite? Well, quietly, and under the radar, House Music producers have kept on making records and the genre lives on.

PLUR was the code. The acronym stands for Peace, Love, Unity, Respect. Stuff we could use more of nowadays. Insiders of that era, especially in the urban centers of the world, experienced probably the most diverse and welcoming community ever seen in Western culture. Positivity is the spirit of House.

The flipside of the House equation is the DJs experience. When you are mixing House records you get to be the ghost in the machine. Beat matching vinyl records is a post-modern moving-meditation unlike anything else, (emphasis here on ‘records’, your brain doesn’t respond the same way to digital files).

Last but not least is endorphins. Those juicy brain chemicals that make your whole nervous system light up and help you feel more alive. Losing your body to the House beat, (or its close cousins Breakbeat and Techno) for an hour or three is a sure-fire way to release the tension and let the neurotransmitters flow.

It may just be one of many dozens of musical flavors you can stream from your tap, but the history, ethos, and sheer fun of mixing it keeps it alive in my house.

Like you, I am looking forward to the days of a big sound system and a crowd of people. Till then, I’m happy spinning for a party of one —  U Isabelle! — and streaming my beats out to handful of friends every Saturday night. Check my Patreon page for details on a new Wednesday morning 2-hour high-energy House set starting this week at 11am Pacific. We’d love for you to join us!

Much love! Keep it moving till next week!

M+

Mark Metz
Director of the Dance First Association
Publisher of Conscious Dancer Magazine