Minimal house was in such a rut by the early 2000s they tried to juice it up with some glammish boogie swing in the form of the "schaffel" fad pushed by Kompakt.
Born of Wolfgang Voigt's formative adoration of Marc Bolan - as evidenced much earlier in the 1996 Love Inc. track "Life's A Gas" (which samples you-guessed-it).
"Boogie" originally comes from "boogie-woogie", a piano-oriented style of blues designed for dancing, which emerged in the 1930s and filtered into numerous corners of American popular and roots music. As adopted in rock, it signifies a black-and-bluesy swing, a funky shuffle feel. What's odd is that boogie today has a third, completely different meaning: it is used by DJs and collectors to refer to an early Eighties postdisco style whose slick, synthetic funk couldn't be further from the low-down earthiness of Southern rock.
The origins of this other boogie go
back to the late Seventies when the word started cropping up in the titles of
disco-funk tunes like Taste of Honey's "Boogie Oogie Oogie", Earth
Wind and Fire's "Boogie Wonderland", The Jacksons's "Blame It On
the Boogie" and Heatwave's "Boogie Nights". The week before Delta
Swamp Rock arrived in the mail, I received a boogie CD-mix from a deejay friend,
Paul Kennedy, which he'd titled Juicy Nights and crammed with postdisco gems by
outfits like Change and BB & Q Band. A few of the names were familiar to me from
the Eighties, when another deejay pal of mine used to buy U.S import 12 inches,
an outlandish concept to someone on a student grant.
What defines this boogie is that it's disco but slower and funkier: 110 to 116 beats-per-minute is the prime range, says Paul, with a strong accent on the second and fourth beats rather than disco's straight stomping four-to-the-floor. It's mostly played by bands, as opposed to being the creation of a producer, but synth-bass, electronic keyboards and drum machines get more prominent the deeper you get into the Eighties. Some of the most famous examples of the style are hits like D-Train's "You're the One For Me", Peech Boys "Don’t Make Me Wait", and Yarborough & People's "Don’t Stop the Music", while pioneers and exemplars include Kleer and Leroy Burgess (of Black Ivory and Aleem).
Thing is, I don't recall anybody calling this stuff "boogie" back then; they'd just have talked about "club tracks" or "discofunk". In deejay Greg Wilson's exhaustive etymological history of the genre, the word "boogie" crops up as a vague reference in the occasional club flyer or record shop section, or as a verb equivalent to "get on down" . But boogie only really becomes a genre tag retrospectively, to describe a kind of music no longer made, and even then only by a small number of London-based soul cognoscenti. It's really only in the last decade that the term has achieved serious currency as a record dealer and collector buzz-word.
Boogie is a prime example of the creative remapping of the musical past that is rife today, with DJs and compilers retroactively inventing genres that had only the most tenuous existence in their original heyday (see "acid folk, "junkshop glam", etc)....
I don't know anything about minimal house but I always felt that this Porter Ricks tune from '97 had a boogie-like swing to it:
ReplyDeletehttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V8lmanXLZSs&list=PLJfo04_AmCPpM0bXusgK0adfMNGElXU3-&index=4
In London, boogie as a genre tag certainly had currency by around 1987. I used to hear it mentioned on pirate radio. Two semi-legal comps were issued by Kiss FM around this time: Boogies Tunes 1 and 2. This 1983 tune by Derrick, which is on one of them, was I know key to the construction of the genre:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fvrcNVKOOG8
So, I don't necessarily agree with you that there's been a post hoc creative remapping. Rather, boogie has just steadily gained broader visibility over the decades, growing out of what was essentially a Black corollary of rare groove.
As you say, Leroy Burgess was definitely the top man for this sort of stuff.
NB I was also hearing the term drum and bass around this time, to signify groove-heavy tracks such as Dexter Wansel's Life on Mars.
Drum and bass is a term you get in reggae from the late 70s, I feel like I was listening to something only the other week where the phrase "strictly drum and bass come and wind up your waist" suddenly popped out. Or maybe it was an 80s dancehall tune.
DeleteA lot of genre terms have this sort of ancestral half-life - the opposite of the normal idea of a half-live as what comes afterwards. Perhaps embryonic or zygotic is the better way of putting it - a buzzphrase, a vibe or flava description, floating around, and then it gets codified, and there's a category in a record store, a club night dedicated to it, maybe even a book.
The term reverse-fades into existence. Like reverse-reverb.
Post-rock is a classic example. The phrase had existed for decades, since the late '60s, was used in all kinds of different ways over the years, but only sporadically. I first started using it as an adjective and then in about a year's time, it became a noun. And ultimately became the noun for a kind of music I didn't really recognise or enjoy.
The downtempo bedfellow of boogie in the UK in the mid/late 80s was 2-step soul, seen as having particular appeal to erstwhile reggae aficionados, e.g:
Deletehttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zMyHr-a_bMs
That's a good thought re. Porter Ricks, although to me it actually sounds more like a Bo Diddley groove - the way the riff slashes across the 4/4 thump.
ReplyDeleteBeen ages since I listened to Porter Ricks. I saw them live once and it was great, I think they used guitar distortion pedals as part of their sound. The gig was in a hollowed set of space in the foundations of the Brooklyn Bridge - the ideal location for their vibe.
Must have been pre-9/11. I think that space was called Anchorage. I saw Pole there, also a pretty apt venue for their thing.
ReplyDelete