happy happy ('ardkore) joy joy

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possibly THEE most universally reviled musical genre of the 90s, disdained by dour junglists, house aesthetes, detroti purists, steadfast rockers, and mo wax losers alike. happy hardcore. (as a seperate, differentiated genre from gabba.) personally i luuuuurve it. (in small doses. every now and again. it's relentless up uP UP UP!-ness can be...overwhelming. especially when not stimulated.) anyone else (aside from ned, and possibly tom) wanna come to its defense? c or d? s and d?

― jess, Monday, 8 October 2001 00:00 (twenty-three years ago)

am i right in thinking this could be the type of music pinefox would loathe most? NEW!

― jess, Monday, 8 October 2001 00:00 (twenty-three years ago)

gah! and someone wanna delete the dupe?

― jess, Monday, 8 October 2001 00:00 (twenty-three years ago)

I own Happy 2B Hardcore Volumes 1, 2, 4, and 5. They're all great, especially the "Time After Time" remix on Volume 2. Someday I will listen to all of them back-to-back.

I don't think the genre is nearly as universally reviled as adult contemporary though.

― Ian, Monday, 8 October 2001 00:00 (twenty-three years ago)

hmmmm. perhaps that should be "universally reviled by 'discriminating' hipsters", i.e. the people who post to ilm ;)

― jess, Monday, 8 October 2001 00:00 (twenty-three years ago)

another side of it is that i know this stuff ONLY through compilations like h2bh. where do you buy the 12"s? where are clubs (in america) that play it? is it a big scene, even around the world? are their magazines devoted to it? i just realized that it may be the one genre i enjoy which i know next to NOTHING about...

― jess, Monday, 8 October 2001 00:00 (twenty-three years ago)

i would also like to apologize for the gross grammatical fug-ups in that post. yeesh.

― jess, Monday, 8 October 2001 00:00 (twenty-three years ago)

fugs up are all good.

I always thought Happy hardcore was all about pot which meant that fugs up is good ro at the least accepted.

― Mr Noodles, Tuesday, 9 October 2001 00:00 (twenty-three years ago)

Have heard there's a big scene in Toronto, believe that's where Anabolic Frolic of H2BH fame resides. British friends have told me there are a decent number of smaller clubs that play the stuff over there, but perhaps UK posters could better address that question.

Don't know of any that would play such crass music near where I am, although a British freshman who lives near me claimed that a hired DJ recently spun happy hardcore at a frat party here (!!)

Magazines? Buying 12" singles? You got me, it's all a gigantic mystery.

― Ian, Tuesday, 9 October 2001 00:00 (twenty-three years ago)

'Intellectually'/aesthetically I should like happy hardcore - as a corrective to the silly snobby idea of 'intelligent dance music', and as a direct descendent of the great helium-voiced era of UK 'ardkore - but most of the records are horrible and drive me nuts. Of all the 'good times' dance music, it seems to me to lack that hint of dark urban angst etc. that always underwrites the best hedonistic pop (eg Chic) - ie its too bloody happy/pleased w/ itself!

― Andrew L, Tuesday, 9 October 2001 00:00 (twenty-three years ago)

I love it - though I've not kept up with it at all. I listened to it loads in around '97 and tried to find out about it. It was making a break for respectability around then (calling itself "fourbeat"!) and all the mailing lists were full of people saying oh it's not as good now as 2-3 years ago, which is true of all dance genres all the time of course.

It is incredibly difficult to find the 12"s - the Record And Tape exchange's dance dept. frowned on it and so happy hardcore stuff that was brought in wouldn't get market rates (even by R&TE's tenuous definition of same) and then was just thrown into their vast ocean of 50p 12"s, with very few exceptions. So the only 12s I ever ended up with were cover versions in a happy style. This is my favourite 'genre' of happy anyway - familiar songs put through a kind of Perpetual Euphoria Machine - so I was fairly happy with it.

Packaging is a big part of the game in music for me, though, and it's hard to think of a music less attractively packaged than the "Bonkers!" series of mix CDs by Hixxy and Sharkey, which grew to grimly dominate the UK hardcore scene, or at least that bit of it you could find in HMV. Their wacky grinning faces were part of why I lost interest. Other potential reasons: i. I wasn't taking drugs. ii. You don't actually need that many happy hardcore records in your life.

You're right about the hipsters. I worked a few times in the record shops in the Record & Tape chain and on one occasion played a happy hardcore CD, with results similar to the "You fuck one sheep..." joke - every single happy compilation they got in after that was dutifully shoved behind the counter in case I wanted it, so astonished were they that anyone could actually listen to this stuff.

― Tom, Tuesday, 9 October 2001 00:00 (twenty-three years ago)

My two favourite hardcore tracks ever:

"Like A Dream" by somebody I can never remember - more breakbeat than fourbeat but it breaks down into the most glorious helium loop of the intro to "Like A Prayer". V v v v druggy (I say from near-zero experience).

"Don't You Want Me" by Eruption - not a cover version but their own song. Very simple but something about the flatness of the girl singing's voice makes it poignant - and if you aurally squint you can even make out a hint of darkness, or certainly at least loss, in the singing too. I am kicking myself forever for not buying a 12" of this when I actually saw it once for a fiver.

― Tom, Tuesday, 9 October 2001 00:00 (twenty-three years ago)

my mate will loves this. i suspect if you can buy the 12's anywhere, then it'll be scotland where it is still the dominant yoof thing, more specifically glasgow. wont forget visiting a friend in inverness, hanging out at his mates - kids on farms in the middle of nowhere watching billy connolly and listening to 'get tae fok' on fuckoffandfuckingdie records or something.

so go to glasgae

i will get him to suggest some stuff but hes not in on the new stuff. he only has stuff from 1995/6 i think, when he was into it.

russian happy hardcore: even worse than everyone elses : check this http://hardcore.maker.ru/music.shtml the secondlink for each track is the one you want ("proclushat")

― ambrose, Tuesday, 9 October 2001 00:00 (twenty-three years ago)

The one thing that tends to irritate me about four-to-the-floor happy hardcore and prevents me from liking it more than I otherwise would is the boing-ing sound of the beats. It works a charm in gabba but it just sounds badly recorded with happy hardcore, detracting from the cool melodies'n'riffs'n'vocals. The breakbeat stuff doesn't have this problem, but then in my head that will always be merely a subsidiary to the original hardcore, a lot of which was very happy indeed.

― Tim, Tuesday, 9 October 2001 00:00 (twenty-three years ago)

i posed the question becuz i am currently in the process of making a couple mixes of "classic" hardcore/proto-jungle for olympia girl (since she was roughly 10-12 during the early 90s), and was surprised to hear her say a few weeks back that the only thing to do that night (when she was still in oklahoma, mind) was to go to a happy hardcore party (! was i at the mere "people aside from me even listen to the shit" factor of it all.) the new american yoof movement?

― jess, Tuesday, 9 October 2001 00:00 (twenty-three years ago)

Certainly hh has one vital realization -- that 80s melodies and synths were great, and even better faster. Outside of as a break from a varied set, replete with thrill of recognition and silly grins, it gets old fast. Also, exceedingly hard to dance to in any decent fashion.

― Sterling Clover, Tuesday, 9 October 2001 00:00 (twenty-three years ago)

dont really like it very much. theres 2 good tracks though. DJ Force & Evolution's 'Lost It' from circa 94, which samples the children from Lost Boys 'thou shall not fall', this is still breakbeat focused, but is far too late to be considered just 'hardcore' (plus doesn't share the same stylism).

and DJ Kaos 'Hold Me Now' circa 97, samples Chicago i think. is just very silly. but good.

― gareth, Tuesday, 9 October 2001 00:00 (twenty-three years ago)

Thee only thing better than happy hardcore is cheeze-euro-trance. I want to hear covers ov Kansas' "Carry on Wayward Son" and Foreigner's "More than a Feeling" done in thee cheezy-euro-trance style. I can just hear thee diva vocal rising thru thee reverb. It would be FANTASTIC.

I hate funky-house-disco-sample-loop more than any other musick ever.

xoxo

― Norman Phay, Tuesday, 9 October 2001 00:00 (twenty-three years ago)

One of the dumbest things I did last year was to burn off my fave cuts from Happy Hardcore (Jumpin and Pumpin) and Happy Anthems 2-4 (Rumour), because if I still had the full packages I bet I could make someone here drool with jealousy. As is, I did burn the best cuts from them, and I did keep Happy Hardcore 2. Obviously, I love the stuff, a lot, esp. its early breakbeat-driven, junglist origins. DJ Seduction especially.

― M. Matos, Tuesday, 9 October 2001 00:00 (twenty-three years ago)

four years pass...

There is no finer music to accompany a ride on the Waltzers!

― Mestema (davidcorp), Friday, 2 December 2005 14:44 (nineteen years ago)

Haha: I want to hear covers ov Kansas' "Carry on Wayward Son" and Foreigner's "More than a Feeling" done in thee cheezy-euro-trance style -- October 8th, 2001! Did Pash appreciate very nearly getting his wish during the 80s soft-rock/power-ballad trance-mix boom of 2002/03/whenever that was?

― nabisco (nabisco), Friday, 2 December 2005 18:23 (nineteen years ago)

There was that happy hardcore cover of that one Chicago song, innit?

― Carl Handwriting (dog latin), Friday, 2 December 2005 18:24 (nineteen years ago)

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