You'll remember us talking about the big flap over Disco at the end of the 1970s.
the disco sucks movement and the idea that so many rock and rollers just hated
disco for, we've, we've surveyed a number of reasons why they might have hated it.
I come down on the side of whatever some of
the other, whatever roles some of the other elements might've played.
I think that deep down most
rock and rollers knew that disco ultimately threatened a
lot of the aspects of the hippy aesthetic that
had, had, were so central to the rock music
that those rock bands, like they felt ]threatened by disco.
And actually they felt really threatened because radio
stations were changing format and that sort of thing.
Well, the 70s the 70s turn into the 80s.
As we go into the 80s, disco kind of falls, just the, the fad
for disco sort of falls away. It gets absorbed into all kinds of things.
We talk about Michael Jackson's music, and Madonna's music.
The video starts to become about watching other people
dance on these videos, and this kind of thing.
But disco music, that is the idea of dancing music in a club that is you know,
master minded or controlled by a dj who's, who's
controlling what music is played, that doesn't go away.
It goes off
the mainstream it's no longer, you know, a styles, so to speak, but it's
not, it, it, it continues to be a kind of a practice a musical practice.
And so uh,you can if you, if, and we will in just a minute sort of
look into how it is that disco continued, but continued as a kind of a club scene.
In other words disco and some ways kind of went back
underground after it emerged in the late 1970s and into the 1980s.
Anyways some of the important scenes that we can talk about there, lead
directly, to something that emerges in the 1990s called electronic dance music.
Some, some aspects have electronic dance music, or sometimes called techno.
And I could tell you back in the 90s, when I was teaching this course,
a lot of people were telling me you know, techno is the next big thing.
It's going to replace rock n' roll and rap.
And it is the music of the future.
This is the new rock n' roll. Didn't quite work out that way.
Although it, the music, the music was quite successful.
And the movement was quite successful.
So let's talk a little bit about how all that.
I'll play it out in a rather sort of a quick survey kind of way.
The important thing to think about when you
think about any kind of dance music is the
job of making the dance music thing happen has to do with the DJ and like a band
playing a live gig, playing a party or something, you've got one
job and that job is to keep people on the dance floor dancing.
While a band can reorganize the tune live and play different sections you
know however they want to do depending on how they've got it worked out.
A DJ is really a lot more restricted in a
lot of kinds of ways because they have to depend
on things that are already recorded or things they can
produce in addition to the recording to keep the music going.
So we've already talked about.
When we're talking about the roots of hip hop, how DJs would often times
take you know, a great sort of danceable part of a tune and have
it on two different turntables, and just kind of use the same record on two
turntables and just keep extending that by coming back and back and back to it.
And now we've got the possibility that in the 90s
people can do that digitally and so the possibilities are are
great and multiply.
But here, we've, we've gotta keep in mind that the DJ is the
person who really kind of, if, if a DJ is a creative person that
I believe they are, they're a person who takes this music and recombines
it in interesting kinds of ways to see if, to keep the party going.
You can be a bad DJ. That thing can fall apart.
It can be not much fun to dance in your club.
It takes some artistry to make it happen.
It isn't just sitting back there and pushing the button.
Anybody can do it.
People think that but there's a lot of artistry involved.
So let's take a look at some of the early
scenes that developed at, in disco and continued along afterwards.
Larry Levan in New York.
was a top disco DJ at the Paradise Garage club.
and the way that he put the music together is often
called Garage Style coming out of the 70s and into the 1980s.
If we go to Chicago, we get a guy by the name of Frankie Knuckles
who worked with Larry Levan but moved to Chicago, and
created a slightly different style, which he called House Style.
And sometimes what he would do is not only you know, resplice the records
together but he;d also get a drum machine and maybe a synth and add
extra beats and stuff so that he would be able to sort of create
ever fresh and ever new versions of tunes that had really already been recorded.
So he would bring a lot of different kinds of things together.
In other words, doing everything he could to take the best bits of the
record, and extend them so that he could keep people dancing on the floor.
In Detroit, a slightly different kind of approach developed,
by three guys that were often called the Belleville Three.
Belleville's actually a town in suburban Detroit area.
Juan Atkins, Derrick May and Kevin Saunderson, they
kind of blend together sort of p-funk kind of grooves with European
synthesizer music like Kraftwerk and things like this.
You get this, this kind of groovy sound but with all this
kind of you know, futuristic, synth kind of thing going on.
That's often thought of as the Detroit house style.
But some people think that's really the sort of beginning of techno because
of the emphasis on the sort of more atmospheric, synthesizer, kind of thing.
So what starts to happen,
in throughout the 1980s is these all night rave dance parties
begin to develop, heavily fueled by use of the drug, Ecstasy.
In fact in 1988 there is so much of this going on that is sometimes referred to by
historians as the "second summer of love," a summer of raves, of Ecstasy,
of dance music, and this whole scene throughout the 80s gets transplanted
to the UK.
Where UK DJs pick up on a lot of this kind of thing.
They see what's happening in the US, they bring
it back to their clubs, they create a scene there.
And so it's actually in the UK that the first, you
know, really important records start to emerge as as part of this.
It's not just a live thing, but they're actually recordings you can purchase.
the first U.K hit by groups like Orbital, Moby
and Prodigy and this happens in the early 1970s or
early 1990s I'm sorry what then happens is that the U.K.
scene as these records start to have
a little bit of commercial success over there.
Sort of makes its way back to this country again.
And we get this rave culture coming to the U.S.
in places like New York, San Francisco, and Los Angeles.
And we start to see by the end of the 90s hits in this country that
are more in the electronic, dance music, techno slash techno kind of style.
So we get for example in 1997 from The Chemical Brothers "We could Dig Your
Own Head", number 14 on the pop charts, of course number one in the U.K.
.
From Prodigy we get Fat of the Land, in
1997, number one on both sides of the Atlantic.
And Moby's album from 1993 called Play, number one in the UK,
number 38 in this country.
So we really see a resurgence of Dance music.
Dance but, but done in a way that's maybe a little less simplistic
or pop minded than say The Twist or Saturday Night Fever,
some of the other dance movements we've seen through the course of rock history.
Here, these artists that I'm talking
about, Chemical Brothers, Prodigy, Moby, they pride themselves on
being sophisticated, not in sort of using a mechanical
beat so that everybody can dance, but in creating
a kind of hipper, more sophisticated kind of music.
And so that's sort of the story, a very brief and, probably unfair
[LAUGH]
survey of electronic dance music.
But it gives you some idea of other things that were going on in the 90s.
Well, we come now to the, to the conclusion
of the course, and the conclusion of not only part
two but, for those of you who've been with
me, through part one, the conclusion of the whole thing.
And I want to leave you with a couple of parting thoughts.
The first thing too that I want to share with you is
the idea that, as time passes, our perception of the past changes.
As historians, we try to be as objective and tell, tell you how things
really were at the time, try not to be filtered by what we like now.
so in other words, just picking out the things in the past that we like.
we try not to be motivated by trying to change the history.
So it reflects values that we hold now, in other words don't
change the story because you want things in the present to change.
We try to be as objective as we can.
But even at that, histories change, and there are
things called, there's an area of academic, inquiry called,
reception, theory reception history which kind of tracks the way
things change as the values of different societies change.
So the story I'm telling you will probably change a bit as we move forward in time.
Sometimes what may seem important at the
time, that it's happening, for those of you who grew up in the 60s, 70s
or 80s turns out to be less important than we thought it was at the time.
And it can also turn out that things that didn't think were important at
the time, end up being more important than we thought they were going to be.
It takes times and historical distance for us to
be able to figure those kinds of things out.
History is, really does its best work when its able
to distance itself from the actual events, and look back
at them with with, kind of a disinterested objective kind of way.
You can't read history pulling for the home team, pulling for your favorite band.
You can't read history as a way of
justifying or validating your own personal taste in music.
You have to be objective about it.
And so, when we talk about the 1990s,
it's more difficult than any of the other lectures
that we've had up to this point because
the dust hasn't completely settled on the 1990s.
we don't, we're not really sure whether the things
we think are important now will end up sort of
shaking out once we have a little bit more
distance away from it as really being the important things.
I think most of what what I'm telling you in
these videos this week is probably going to remain pretty consistent.
I have to say, I've been saying this
for ten years, and it's easier now to talk about the 90s than it
was ten years ago, when we're only a few years out of the 1990s.
getting into the period after the year 2000.
that's really all still happening so that's not really history and
it's very difficult to tell how all that's going to shake out.
At any rate I want to thank you
for for sticking with me through the entire course.
If you're just if you just been here with me
through part two I thank you very much for your attention.
and for being a part of the course in part two.
If your somebody who started with me in part one and now your adding part
two, thanks for the thanks, thanks for sticking
with me with both parts of the course.
For those of you who haven't had part one yet, that course will be offered again
very shortly again on Coursera,
thank you very much.