My Complete Online Writing

Tuesday 25 May 2010

House and me

“House is a feeling…”

I don’t listen to oldskool very often –its too emotional. Nothing can quite make up for the fact that I was stuck in the West of Ireland in the mid 90s and not in Chicago (ok slightly unlikely at 15 years old) or Manchester (which would have at least been feasible at least) . Not only stuck in the Weset of Ireland but frequenting people who were into the Cure. The fucking CURE?!?

Ok I have gotten over it now, I mean it wasn’t their fault that no one I knew liked the same music as I did. Or that I had to spend hours listening to the British top 100 just to get a recording of the one or two hardcore tracks that made it to the charts – the only way to get at the stuff I really loved.

The mid 90s were our 60s and just as my mum’s generation in Ireland missed out on flower power, I missed that period and that brief feeling that cultural reinvention was possible. Sure there were flashes of it in Ireland during my uni years and later in the party scene of London in the new century. Even then I knew, they were merely the aftershocks of a powerful earthquake that had given people the power to shatter their lives, and to reinvent themselves and in doing so create their own idea of society and socialization. It wasn’t so much tune-in and drop-out so much as it was tune-in, jack-in, go down the rabbit hole, come out the other side and go do your job on a Monday. But all the while knowing you were part of something different, a counterculture within conformity. Like your own personal Fight Club but one where you gave everyone hugs instead of punches. A return to pure love…love for others, for strangers, for music…

If they ever build the time machine, that’s where I will go, to that time, to that place and to the feeling that was early House.

“The only way to make sense out of change is to plunge into it, move with it, and join the dance.”