Tech-House Isn't Actually as Funny as You Think It Is – VICE

What connects the Polish social psychologist Henri Tajfel and Hot Creations mainstay Richy Ahmed? The answer’s an easy one: tech-house. As far as I know, Tajfel never got to share the decks with wAFF at a pool party in Miami, but his pioneering and far-reaching academic studies can tell us something about one of the strangest things about contemporary club culture. With a little help from the man himself, we’re going to look at how and why tech-house became the whipping boy of dance music.
But before we step into Tajfel’s study we need to briefly examine what we mean by whipping boy. Over the last few years, tech-house has gone from being a sturdily reliable form of club music that through its relatively uneventful rigidity gave DJs a means of filling a few hours of warm-up time to a punchline that’s been milked so often and so hard that the udder’s been reduced to nothing but shredded tissue and dried flecks of soured milk.
Tech-house has become a catch-all term that seems to suck in everything that the gatekeeper’s deem void of sufficient feeling. It is, it seems, house without the soul, techno without the mechanistic rigour. It is mongrel and in-between, an unfitting amalgamation of two sounds that were, if truth be told, never quite as disparate as the diehards would have you believe.
Sure, tech-house, like anything, has its faults, and no, it isn’t the most exciting music out there, and perhaps there is an argument to be made that making jokes at the expensive of really fucking boring producers and even more boring DJs will eventually do us all a massive favour as said DJs and producers confront the mediocrity of their life’s work and retreat into ether to take up crofting or retraining as a dental hygienist, but a cheap shot is a cheap shot and the body of tech-house is riddled with the gunshot wounds of a thousand pound shop pistols. Let us offer the shuddering, barely-breathing husk a lifeline. Let us offer this stumbling near-corpse a tourniquet and an olive branch.
Read more: Has anyone ever enjoyed a live techno set?
Developing in the mid nineties, by which time it’s generic siblings had formed their own identities, tech-house was a means of sonic exploration for DJs like Terry Francis and Mr C, who presumably wanted to free themselves of any supposed limitations. Subtlety—which has subsequently dissipated as the genre’s rolled itself into a churn of raw Beatport fodder—was key, and DJs and producers alike sought to incorporate the nuances with one sound with those of the other. It must have felt like a eureka moment for frustrated dancers worldwide. Finally, they must have said, jumping out of nightclubs like Archimedes from his hot tub, we can have house and techno together!
Sadly, music’s ceaselessly cyclical nature means that genres become passe nearly as soon as they become en vogue. Look at dubstep and electro, or moombahton and baile funk, kuduro or EBM; the cutting edge quickly becomes a dulled and blunted knife. Even a decade ago, a decade on from the sound’s initial inception, the world’s clubs moved to the sound of minimal, skeletal tech-house. The Innervisions crew were on the rise, and Kompakt were still clinging in there. Dancers lost themselves in this bone-dry and brittle music that seemed to have been made in a vacuum, arriving shrinkwrapped and airless. Fast forward to today, and tech-house occupies an altogether different place in the cultural landscape.
Thanks to globe-trotting parties like elrow, and the inexorable rise of festivals all of whom need six stages of DJs, tech-house is arguably more popular than it has ever been. It rumbles through both big fields and intimate warehouses, sparking up pristine European dancefloors and the trashed living rooms of house parties. Instagram is awash with blurry videos of rolled-fist drops and smoke machines. Brands align themselves to the tech-house stars du jour, painfully aware of a potential audience-engaging payday. John Galliano probably sends models down the runway to the sounds of Paul Kalkbrenner. The thing is, as we know all too well, popularity breeds contempt.
Every throwaway reference to “plodding tech-house” is both a potential valid criticism and a self-aware alert to those around you that you are above all that, that you are in the know, that you like dance music more than anyone at Tobacco Dock on a Saturday afternoon does. Next year you’ll be throwing another name into the joke-ring, always making sure that the whole world knows just how much you care about club culture, and just how little everyone else does.
Read more: We tried to work out why Scooter so popular
Back to the classroom and the reanimated remains of Henri Tajfel are prepared to give us the basics on intergroup relations and social identity theory. Not wanting to bore us, knowing full well that some of the group are planning a big one at Guy Gerber’s party later in the evening, he’s running through his understandings of a lifetime’s work spent researching just exactly how people interact with and without each other at breakneck speed. Essentially, he’s saying, all of us create imagined ingroups which allow us to align ourselves to often imagined and occasionally real factions as a means of creating a concrete selfhood that operates on the basis of rejection as much as it does inclusion.
To create an ingroup, he’s saying, watching the eyes of his new students lit by the hollow blue of a hundred phone screens, is to immediately create an outgroup, and to create an outgroup is to create a cocoon or a kind of social sleeping bag, protecting yourself from the elements you’ve decided to hold in disdain. Noting the palpable wooziness radiating from the hollow faces of the assembled few left in the lecture hall, he puts things very bluntly: making jokes about tech-house makes you feel like you know a lot about dance music, and that makes you feel good about yourself, and no, I don’t know why that would be. He shuffles his papers, marches out of the room, and slinks back into a mid-century armchair with a snifter of good, expensive brandy, and slaps on Strictly Tiefschwarz. A smile creeps over his face. He dies again, happy.
Step out of the academy and into the pub and think about the way you and your friends use language. Think about the amount of in-jokes and obscure references used to structure nearly everything you say to one another—a commonly shared linguistic pool is social architecture at its most bare and brutal. Without the allusions and nods and winks and endless circling back most of us would be left with a corrosive silence that’d suck the foam off every pint on the table. Making a joke about tech-house over an IPA or in a Facebook message is no more or less interesting than one about Mrs Braithwaite’s pronunciation of the word “glacier” in a year 8 geography lesson, or a bloke you once saw on Only Connect.
Actually, it is. It is far less interesting than that, because all it does is feed into the thing that’s gutting club culture—sneering, yellow-toothed elitism. Great jokes, though, lads. Very funny. Very, very funny.
Josh is on Twitter
By signing up, you agree to the Terms of Use and Privacy Policy & to receive electronic communications from Vice Media Group, which may include marketing promotions, advertisements and sponsored content.

source