Sons music- Scooter

When writing about the music of my life, I have always meant to make some mention of rave music, which was a part of my mid teens. First things first, I lived in a small town so it’s not like we had separate groups for metalheads and punks and goths and ravers and new wavers and what not- it was quite simply “outsiders” and we bonded together The next is that electronic music and especially rave doesn’t get a lot respect with music critics. It’s not that it doesn’t have fans or gets seriously studied; but at the same time- the stuff that I consider of that era can be broken down into Acid House, Breakbeat, Techno, and so on and it's generally a bit marginalized in music journalism This breaking of music down into boxes means that they sometimes get put in bigger unrelated boxes. I am probably even misusing terms in calling it "rave music" and not techno or EDM or another more appropriate musical term but I guess that is how I have it labeled in my head What I am trying to say is some of the biggest rave hits don’t get treated with the same respect as the wider alternative genre. Rave often had the same aspects as new wave synth pop and I will detail some of the post 90s breakdown a little bit later as well So Rave sat adjacent to those sounds, but I am no means an expert. My experience of the genre is the music of that day and I mostly experienced it from big budget compilation albums like SBK Record's Rave Til Dawn and others (the eternal way of defining music. They’re “playlists” now) and the songs I heard in those years as I occasionally ventured to the bigger city to go dancing at gay bars and dance clubs. I would also add that I made an acquaintance that was a hardcore raver who introduced me to stuff I would otherwise not would have been exposed to then. Maybe Rave to me was what didn’t get covered elsewhere. Rave sat apart from Madchester, the real rave music beginnings. Maybe it wasn’t that I was into rave but that it was slowly exposed to me. Again, don’t focus on the label, focus what I am trying to say was the music in my ears in those days. Nitzer Ebb both predated and defined that time for me. The Jesus and Mary Chain also somehow doesn’t fit my definition and was everything to me at that time. Similarly, KMFDM probably check more industrial boxes than techno, but was definitely a favorite of everyone I knew and was still in that element of breaking through from the Underground. (Maybe these are stories for another time). There are of course pop and industrial elements in the stuff I am talking about, even R&B, rap and hip hop elements. (Lest we forget The Movement's "Jump" perhaps the forgotten third of the 1992 trilogy- House of Pain "Jump Around" and Kriss Kross's "Jump") So maybe I should define this all as the larger category of EDM as some do. Since we are talking about what I was personally listening to- it seems appropriate. Also scholarly, that’s important- though again some of the most important music of that genre never made it to the radio or even those big aforementioned “various artists” compilations. Moby of course did go into the 90s and 00s a big Alt-rock (and even Top 40) star. Eyes backwards, we look at bands like The Prodigy, Lords of Acid and Messiah that could draw alt rock and even metal/hard rock fans I tie so many of these bands together to a certain time and yet - am I miscategorizing them or am I wrong to categorize them at all. Do the KLF, 2 Unlimited, and the Orb exist in that same space? What I do know is it felt like an explosion and that explosion had ripple effects. Some bands walked a tight wire of success and acclaim like the Chemical Brothers and Fatboy Slim. Some burned brightly as the next big thing and then either were or weren’t with various degrees of success- everyone from the Underworld to the Klaxons to Atari Teen Riot. I could go all day and I still haven’t touched on all the roads the genre of electronic music has traveled - ambient and trance and grime and whatnot. Anyway, this is a conversation that I always wanted to write up and strangely what got me here was wanting to talk about my #sonsmusic When I think of the bands I listened to in the early 90s and what came from them- I generally look at two paths One is the commercial path. The 90s radio was full with European dance music. Artists like Real McCoy, La Bouche, Culture Beat, Rozalla, Ace of Base, KWS, Cascada, Amber, Haddaway and Robyn (and many many others) dominated dance floors and charts into the early 00s. These for me are guilty pleasure pop songs. These bands provide a direct road to where artists like Lady Gaga and the Backstreet Boys would pop up and go on. I have to admit that I don’t love a lot of modern pop music but DJ culture is a dominant force in it (Tiesto, Major Lazer, Diplo, Afrojack, DJ Snake, Steve Aoki, David Guetta, Aviccii and many many more). But there’s also the side that blends in the goth, industrial and new wave influences that had a boom in the early 00s and given names like "darkwave" or "futurepop" and featured bands like VNV Nation, Apoptygma Berzerk and Assemblage 23.. And I am telling you all this to get to Scooter. Scooter is a popular German band that is what you get when you blend my paragraphs above into an industrial-strength mixer and then feed it steroids My sons grew to love Scooter from a local hockey game where the song plays when a goal is scored. They are, no doubt, the perfect soundtrack for adrenaline and excitement and I suppose, violence I am not sure Scooter is very popular in the US, though if you have heard them, it’s likely either the preposterous “How Much is the Fish?” or the energetic cover of Supertramp (what?)’s “Logical Song” (double what?) Scooter has unleashed a string of hit singles in their home country of Germany. But they definitely fall into that category with Aqua, Rednex and Vengaboys of being ridiculously over the top. Ask me if I love or hate them and I am not quite sure what I will answer.