No House Please, We're American

Electronic music has been a staple of the charts since 1988. In the UK, that is. A dance song will hit the number one spot at least once a month, and often stay there for several weeks. Great Britain holds house music in such esteem that it's even made stars out of the often reticent DJs behind a lot of dance music--Norman Cook, aka Fatboy Slim, is a staple of the English gossip columns, and Moby, an American, was recognized in Britain five years before he broke the Stateside charts.

America, on the other hand, is just getting into electronica. Last year, Fatboy Slim's Rockefeller Skank was a huge success, as was the Sneaker Pimps' "Six Underground" the year before that. The question is, however, whether devotees of house music would even recognize these two songs as part of the genre at all. Aren't they too poppy? Too conventionally-structured? Are they electronica perhaps only because they happen to employ the odd sequencer and a loop here and there?

Therein lies the key, in my mind, to why America hasn't yet warmed to house music. To the unschooled ear, (or at least the ear which hasn't spent the past ten years being bombarded by it) it doesn't quite sound like *music*. There's no familiar verse-chorus-verse structure to it. Often, the song will use no familiar musical instruments--or if it does, they will be lifted from an older song with which the listener may not be acquainted. Sometimes there will be no lyrics, sometimes no beats, sometimes nothing at all but a few bleeps, for minutes at a time. House is truly a new genre of music, and for the newcomer, it can be confusing.

And herein lies the success of Fatboy Slim in America. He employs rock conventions in dance music, thus creating a very traditional-sounding, and therefore accessible, house record. Take "Rockefeller Skank," his hit single. It's got a hook, as anyone not living in a cave during the summer of 99 can attest to. While we're being exhorted to "check it out now, the funk soul brother," we also can hear the typical 1-2, 1-2-3-4 breakdown of a rock song in the background, despite the fact that it's a looped piano instead of a guitar that's making the noise. The intensity of the backing music ebbs and flows, letting you know when it's chorus time because everything comes in at once. It's electronic rock'n'roll. Being a Fatboy Slim fan lets you say you're a fan of dance music without your having to go through the struggle of trying to interpret a ten-minute ambient track composed mainly of beeps and squelches.

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