The Blindboy Podcast - Steeplechasers Sepia

Episode Date: June 13, 2018

The History of Disco Part 2. House Music/Techno Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Praise be to Alan, you furry cousins. What's the crack? Welcome to week number 35 of the Blind Boy podcast. Oh, isn't it marvellous? Isn't it marvellous to be in the middle of summer? the response to last week's podcast was so positive that this week's podcast is going to be a part two to last week's podcast last week's podcast was about the history of disco music it was a hot take it was about i argued as to why disco music is the real punk rock by contextualizing the history of disco music in 1969 with the stonewall rebellion and the resistance and civil rights movement for lgbt people and that's what last podcast last week's podcast was about. And ye fucking loved it. Ye really, judging by the response I got on Twitter, ye really enjoyed last week's podcast. So I left ye off at the very, at the end of disco, 1979.

Moving into the post-disco era of the 1980s. So I want to pick it up from 1980 this week and continue on with the incredibly interesting history and evolution of disco music and how that as well intersects with the history of gay civil rights and gay culture because it is pride month and why not if you didn't hear last week's podcast which was called devito's teapot um in order to fully enjoy this week's podcast i do suggest go back and listen to last week's one first you absolute cunt so i suppose before i go on i want to explain kind of why i'm so passionate and just ridiculously interested in in music and and specifically how genres of music develop i fucking love that i love just listening to tunes and hearing the history of other music in in music do you get what i'm saying being able to

hourly trace different genres within music and seeing how that evolution happens and what also fascinates me is like, there's a field called memetics, alright? And memetics would have been championed by Richard Dawkins. Now Richard Dawkins, we now know him as a rather rude, grumpy old atheist. But before he was a grumpy old atheist, Richard Dawkins was an evolutionary biologist. And one of his greatest theories was the theory of memes. Now when I say memes, I don't necessarily mean what we have as a meme.

A meme today is an internet meme. That's quite different to Dawkins's meme Dawkins's concept of what a meme is is he took Darwin's theory of evolution which is the survival of the fittest and said this does not just apply to biology and genes it also applies to ideas and culture and i like to take that theory and apply it to music because it's very very evident you know um music and musical styles and musical genres they tend to develop organically as a response to the culture of whoever is listening you know they kind of organically develop along and the fittest survive you know the the best songs and the best tracks are the ones that survive and go on to spread their influence to songs that come

out of that just like genes do in an evolutionary gene pool but also within genetic evolution there's mutations are very important you know now mutations are freak accidents of genetics that happen every so often and 99.9 percent of the time a mutation is a bad thing but every so often a freak mutation will happen and that turns out to be beneficial and it changes the course of evolution the same thing happens with music music plods along survival of the fittest and then every so often something mad happens either some mad visionary releases a piece of music that's very divisive and different but goes on to influence many people. Or they make a mistake and this mistake changes the course of music.

And how disco evolves from disco to post disco and later into what I'll be talking about today which is house and techno. That happens as a result of these memetic mutations, we'll call them. And one of the biggest memetic mutations of the disco era, and I spoke about it last week and I actually got something wrong about it, was the accidental creation of the 12 inch vinyl single now last week I said that DJs the 12 inch vinyl was invented

so that DJs could take a fag break a DJ would be playing a tune in a disco and he'd be like fuck I'd love to go for a fag

but I can't leave the desk because the song will be over in a minute and I need to put a new one on it wasn't the need of a fag that prompted the change it was the need of a piss I got that wrong last week so a DJ was like I need to take a slash so he went to someone who presses records and says can you make the album long enough that i can go for a slash mid song and he said grand yeah we'll get what's normally a seven inch small single fuck that we'll put one song on

a 12 inch make it longer that was an accident born out of necessity that was a mimetic mutation right there and the happy accident that resulted is that number one you had a longer track that necessitated a different type of mix and number two you had larger grooves in the record which gave much greater fidelity and a louder sound which accommodated the massive sound systems of the disco so that right there is a memetic mutation in the genetics of disco that's really shifted where it was heading do you get me so last week we explored the parallel timelines of the gay rights movement and disco music and the liberation of gay people in 1969 in the stonewall rebellion how you know being gay stopped being illegal and it stopped being considered a mental illness and gay people

felt more free not completely free but more free to be themselves to have a group identity to frequent common places and to develop a culture and a huge part of this culture was disco culture going to a disco dancing all night with someone of the same sex and having your own thing your your own identity. And praising the DJ. And disco ended in 79. As I said, after it became incredibly mainstream. But also with a hugely homophobic backlash. Not only homophobic but racist.

Because disco at its heart is black gay people latino gay people who are at the heart of the movement and transvestites and transsexuals and all of that one unfortunately something else Something else which progressed disco on further in the 1980s was the outbreak of HIV. The initial disco community of the 70s, it's estimated by the mid-80s, up to 50% of them had died of AIDS. mainly as a result of the what was known as the bathhouse scene in cities like new york that alongside the discos you also had these bathhouses which were also had djs and had music but it was like a sauna and it was where gay men would have orgies. And it's very unfortunate in culture that in the early 80s this disease started to emerge which appeared to exclusively affect gay men. You know, it happened at the same time as well with the rise of Ronald Reagan and theagan and the christian christian conservative right who were demonizing gay people there was a moment in time in the early 80s where the christian right felt like they had their proof from god that aids was a punishment in the early days of hiv and aids

it came out of fucking nowhere right right? Upon the gay community. People didn't know what it was. It was referred to as gay cancer. It was just this horrendous disease that was killing gay men. Like I said, 50% of that original disco community died in a short space of time. And no one knew what it was the bathhouse scene completely disappeared and it is the onset of aids and hiv completely changed uh gay and queer culture in cities like new york and san francisco where the disco music was also happening so this is the early 80s post disco era where it had gone back underground

it was no longer mainstream the music was more electronic as i explained last week but you have this huge new problem of aids now it's weird for us in 2018 to really understand the scope of how frightening AIDS was back then in the early 80s because obviously it's still a problem now but thankfully today it's a much more manageable disease we know a lot more about it we understand safe sex but they didn't know what it was. And a few factors kind of put gay men at the highest risk, mainly, alright, obviously high promiscuity in the bathhouse scene. Also, anal sex is one of the riskiest practices, unprotected anal sex is one of the riskiest practices

for transmitting aids to another person but they didn't really know why it was happening aids first the first recorded kind of cases of aids or hiv it would have been in the 1920s in a place called Leopoldville in the Congo. The Belgian controlled Congo at the time in Africa. Ironically, Leopoldville. Leopoldville was weird. There was a time when it wasn't technically a country. It was owned by King Leopold of Belgium.

It was owned by King Leopold of Belgium. And as an aside, an ironic aside, Roger Casement, a gay man who is one of the leaders of the 1916 Rising, Roger Casement is considered the father of modern human rights because Casement was the one who exposed massive human rights abuses in the Congo in 1914, 1915, at the hands of Belgium's King Leopold who had run this kind of private enclave called Leopoldville that was producing rubber and the human rights abuses he was committing were astounding and Roger Casement is the person who exposed that but sadly Casement was written out of history for being gay and not remembered

in ireland as the legend and hero that he truly is but anyway this hiv started to emerge in in the congo era around leopoldville 1920 in humans and again it's probably as a result of it's that genetic mutation that i was talking about a while ago there was a disease called siv which is simian immunovirus it affected only chimpanzees from the congo but then around the 1920s it started to present itself as HIV, human immunovirus in human beings. And they're not sure why that happened. The most likely theory is that a genetic mutation occurred because of bushmeat. Bushmeat is when you would eat like a monkey or non-traditional meat. So the tribes in the Congo at the time were hunting chimpanzees. And while they were hunting them for food, they might get bitten by a chimpanzee or whatever.

And this SIV would infect humans. And it shouldn't technically have crossed the cross to humans and been impactful on a human being because it was simian immunovirus and not human. But some person got bitten or whatever and a genetic mutation happened where SIV turned into HIV and that's where they think AIDS started. And it developed around the Congo silently for years and years until it made its way to the United States in the 1980s.

Now another theory about AIDS, which is conspiracy theory. And I'm going to say it just because it's interesting, not because it's true, because it's an unproven conspiracy theory. Because it's an unproven conspiracy theory. But. Some say that in the. I think it was the 1960s or 70s. A pharmaceutical company or whatever. I think from Switzerland.

They went to the Congo. In the 60s or 70s. To. Immunize people. Living in the Congo. Against polio. And what they did. To the this vaccine is they took cells from chimpanzees and some claim that AIDS was accidentally created by human beings given polio

vaccines to the Congo but that is a hot take conspiracy theory I wouldn't go believe in it we do know that HIV came across from SIV then a very unfortunate man called Gaetan Dugas who up until 2006 he was called patient zero for the he had been in the congo he was a gay flight attendant he'd been in the congo and then he would travel to cities all over the u.s and they traced wherever this lad had been and whenever he had visited a gay bathhouse that's where the cases of hiv were coming from so this man gay tanan Dugas was considered the person who caused and spread AIDS in the United States in the late 70s and the deaths started to present themselves in the early 80s it was only till 2006 with some research did they find out that

there was multiple cases it wasn't just because of this one man who spread the virus so this huge aids crisis and hiv crisis in the early 80s in the lgbt queer community massively affects how gay people can socialize now the 70s had been the disco and bathhouse era where you know discos were full of open sex like more so the bathhouses but people were fucking each other in discos um now they were scared to they were scared to be as promiscuous as they would have been 10 years ago and what i think happened as a result of that is sex stopped becoming the vice in the disco community in the early 80s because of aids and what became the new vice was drugs the early 80s so i heightened amount of drug use in the disco community mainly

speed and a drug called mda which is an mdma precursor now like young gay men they still wanted to go out have a have a bit of crack have some community have a bit of crack, have some community, have a sense of identity and enjoy themselves but in this kind of atmosphere of terror of what if I get AIDS so this is what I think and

it's kind of my own theory speed and ecstasy okay if you start doing speed, if you do a line of speed the last thing you want to do is have sex you get speed mickey you can't even get an erection okay same thing with yorks like mda mdma it makes people want to enjoy themselves and be part of a community and empathy and love and makes them want to dance all night and stay up but ecstasy doesn't generally doesn't make people want to have sex with each other so drug culture became almost like um a replacement vice for sex within

that 1980s early gay community so now that you have an entire audience dancing out of it on speed and MDMA naturally the intensity of the music must respond to that and that's precisely what happened and we can trace this to a legendary DJ gay African-American DJ by the name of Larry Levan, who founded the Paradise Garage. And I spoke briefly about Larry last week. He created the Paradise Garage based on David Mancuso's loft. But Larry Levan is the first. He himself is a genetic mutation. He changed the game.

And he's who I'm going to speak about first. But before I get into Larry, what I might do is just give you an example of musically where disco was, or post-disco we'll call it, was in 1981, 1982. In kind of the peak Larry Levan era. I'd mentioned the importance of 12-inch records okay and the 12-inch is an extended version of a song that's maybe between 8 minutes and 12 minutes long and the production of it is different it's it's produced not for the radio but produced for the dance floor so the bass guitar is louder the bass drum is louder the vocals are pulled back a bit but one crucial thing with the 12-inch mix is what you have is iss, right, a breakdown in the song. How do I explain a breakdown?

Traditional song, radio song, we'll say late 70s, verse, chorus, middle 8, double chorus, whatever. A breakdown is an extended, maybe 16 to 32 bars, where the entire beat goes back to something very minimal. Now all that was, was the production engineer who had to create this 12 inch mix was basically left with all the individual tracks of the song and had to figure out how the fuck am I going to make this eight minutes long. So what they'd do is they'd'd just go I'm just going to play the drums now and maybe I'll just play the bass and they'd break it down for a segment this again was a happy accident but what DJs such as Larry Levan found is when they would play the 12 inch mix of a song

to a crowd that are out of it on speed and out of it on MDMA. The breakdown was by far the most important and most celebrated piece. This was what the audience responded to most violently because they're out of their minds, they just want to dance and the song steps away from melody and goes straight to just the groove the most danceable piece of the whole song so djs like larry levine found well i'm gonna start just extending the breakdown more and more and more because this is what these drugged out lunatics want to hear so what i play you now is an audio example of a song from 1976 by the rolling stones now i mentioned by the late 70s disco had become incredibly mainstream and every artist was jumping on the disco bandwagon because it was a novelty

if if you had a disco record you had a guaranteed hit that's how popular it was in the late 70s so the rolling stones obviously the record company said it to him it's a prime example of the stones being you know a rhythm and blues band just going fuck that we release a disco record make a lot of money even though you know they didn't contribute to the culture of disco they've got no evidence of them being a part of it in any way they just came across and said let's do a disco song and have a number one and they did and the song is called missing you it's a fucking class song i'm not shitting on the song it's amazing it's one of my favorite rolling stone songs and in fairness to them they did bring uh something unique to the disco sound but it's a blatant cash-in record so what i've managed to

find on youtube is the actual 12 inch disco mix of Missing You. And what I want to play is just the breakdown of the song. And this will let you see what an actual breakdown is. Where the song strips down to its constituent most basic parts for 16 bars. so I've been walking Central Park Singing after dark You would think I'm So that there is Your breakdown And

That mightn't sound Too impressive To us in 2018 But trust me In fucking 1981 82 when that was being played That's pretty fucking strange and revolutionary because what that is there is that's an exact hybrid moment when Larry Levan was DJing in a club

and he would play that segment of a 12-inch record now it's not just like that particular Rolling Stones song I just chose that because it's not just like that particular roland stone song i just chose that because it's an excellent example but the vast majority of 12-inch singles had that little 16 or 32 bit breakdown where it just strips back to a bass drum or a bass or a keyboard where it's very minimal larry levand might have two copies of the same record and he would extend that bit just that bit for maybe five minutes and what you have there is music where it's no longer about the melody there's no one singing over it it's just a very hard repetitive single beat which it can only only people who are off their tits on speed or ecstasy are going to respond to that because it stops being melodic and it becomes more tribal it becomes a

physical experience to that that takes control of a drugged up person's body and they go into that trance that rave trance that they're looking for that's when they peak and larry levine would have been playing that all night so if you kind of walked past one of his sets at certain times you wouldn't even recognize it as music and what makes it so kind of bizarre is that that's a very novel new thing but at the same time it isn't it's the most basic simplest music just a drum beat and maybe one other element and that's a hybrid moment that culture dj culture of repetitively looping the breakdown in a 12-inch record is when it stops

being disco music and it stops being post-disco music if it was a post-disco record and it becomes something new that moment would would be what people would call proto house music it's when the genre leaves disco to sow the seeds for something new and that's that's your mimetic mutation there that's your happy accident that might have worked and might not have worked but it did work and it was so strange and revolutionary it really kind of changed the game that practice of playing more and more breakdowns in larry levand's paradise garage and the other thing that makes Larry Levan so revolutionary is you now had a situation where people were going to to see the DJ you know you weren't going there

to listen to Diana Ross or the Rolling Stones you were going there to hear what curated playlist had was Larry Levan gonna do and what shit larry gonna do with the records that you simply could not do at home or here anywhere else and that's what he was doing on top of that larry levine was massively influenced by jamaican dub music which placed massive emphasis on sound systems so larry levine had a cracking huge kind of a sound system that you'd expect a live band to have this massive pumping fucking stereo on top of that lights larry levine at his dj desk had control of the lights so he would create a light show that would go alongside with the music that he was playing to create this truly new thing that was unlike

anything that had been seen before you know to to really put the dj at the forefront of the night and those simple things is what made larry levand like a legend you know he's started He really set the tone for what the modern DJ is, even more so than David Mancuso. He sadly, Levan died of AIDS, unfortunately. So who kind of took the helm from Larry Levan then is a lad called Frankie Knuckles and Frankie Knuckles was another young gay black DJ who had learned his trade from training underneath Larry Levan but Frankie Knuckles didn't make a name for himself in New York in the Paradise Garage Frankie Knuckles took the New York skills and he brought them to Chicago and Frankie Knuckles had a gaff called the warehouse which was literally a fucking warehouse with a sound system in it um which is that's where stuff starts getting really interesting because Frankie Knuckles was playing the same kind of tracks and 12-inch mixes as Larry Levan was.

But Frankie Knuckles had a particular interest in what was known as Italo Disco or high-energy disco. And this is where a European influence starts to come in to disco music. Disco had gone massive, right? Now, there's no internet. This is the late 70s, early 80s. So nobody kind of told Europe that disco was cancelled in 79. So countries like Italy and Germany

started to produce their own disco music and it would have been cringy as fuck at the time it was the height of novelty music you know abba kind of came out of that scene the disco musicians were white they were shit at singing they wore ridiculous costumes i mean you had groups like ganymede from austria who used to dress up as aliens and spacemen and this music was utterly laughed at and seen as trash throwaway novelty music by seriously uncool Europeans who were behind the times because you don't get people behind the times anymore because of the internet culture is kind of homogenized but in 1976 what they were doing in Italy could genuinely have

been seven years behind what was happening in New York because that's the way it was you know so musically what was really separating Italo disco Italian disco and Austrian disco and German disco from the American disco that had come a few years before it is that because of european artists like giorgio marauder and craftwork who were messing around with synthesizers the disco music from europe was very much electronic it wasn't using drum kits it was using drum machines and it was using synthesizers to create this new electronic sound it was also a hell of a lot faster so this is the stuff that Frankie Knuckles was playing I'll play a little example now of a song by Ganymede called

It Takes Me Higher to give you an example of what i'm talking about so that now is clearly that's sonically very different you know when you contrast that to what larry levine was playing that's it's way harder it's faster it's more electronic you know and that's ganymed they're technically not a tallow disco but technically space disco which was a strange european novelty genre of disco music where the themes of the music were about space and the artists would dress up as spacemen or aliens and you see it today at daft punk you know daft punk dressing up as robots that's not original uh thomas bangletar in daft punk his father was a space disco producer he used to make space disco records so daft punk are really an homage to that genre from the late 70s. But that's what Frankie Knuckles was playing.

And it's very different. And because the music was getting that hard and that fast and that electronic in the warehouse in Chicago, you know, people started to dress differently. Like the disco roots were completely disappearing. This was not disco anymore. People weren't wearing flares. They weren't shuffling to dance. They were turning up in track suits and baggy pants and tank tops.

To reflect the dark, sweaty, fast, drugged up environment of the warehouse club. Because of this people stopped calling it a disco and what happens is near the warehouse a record shop opens up and the lad who was who owned this record shop noticed that at about eight o'clock in the morning because the disc or this disco warehouse would go on all night at about eight o'clock in the morning he'd get a load of young people into the shop into his record shop going fucking frankie knuckles was playing some shit last night i don't know what it was i need to hear it because frankie's playing these fucking you know mad italian songs you're not going to be able to buy them and the guy who owned the record shop was going what do you mean like what what

type of music was it and the customers were saying he was playing it in the record shop was going, what do you mean? Like, what type of music was it? And the customers were saying, he was playing it in the warehouse. He was playing it in the house. It was just, it's house music. Do you have any house music? And that's when, for the first time ever in Chicago, about 1981, 1982, that it starts being referred to as house music. It's not disco. It's completely removed from disco. music it's not disco it's completely removed from disco they're disco records technically and they're 12-inch mixes but the way that frankie knuckles is playing them either speeding them up or looping them it's something different now it's very electronic and the patrons are starting to look for i want house music records i want the records they're playing in the house, in the warehouse. And it's interesting that this happens in Chicago, you know. In the podcast that I did about Northern Soul, I mentioned, you know, the roots of Moatown. Now, I'm very interested in how music reflects the culture and the environment that it comes out of, okay? Motown music, we'll say Diana Ross and the Supremes from the 1960s, that came out of Detroit, Motor City.

Motown music has a metallic clank to it. It's got tambourines. It's got a very strong metallic beat. And they say that this is because of the people who were making Motown music were working in fucking car factories all day and their their the rhythm of their job was the clanking of machines in a factory and similarly with Chicago another hugely industrial city far more industrial than new york you have young black working class patrons going to the warehouse and being completely comfortable with this very fast-paced

mechanical music which is starting to be called house music you know and i find that interesting i wonder had frankie knuckles chanced his arm playing very fast electronic italian disco in new york would he have gotten away with it because with new york it was a bit more melodic they were still dancing they still wanted a bit of repetition but it wasn't as hardcore as what frank Knuckles was doing in 82, 83 in the warehouse. So Frankie wasn't just playing Italo disco you know he was also playing American post disco music which I mentioned last week is one of my favorite genres of music and post disco is underground stripped down disco music that started about 1979 1980 by underground artists who were primarily using electronic instruments synthesizers and drum machines because they didn't have the budget for

big band disco music so what emerged was post disco music and post disco if you want to hear examples of it go to spotify rubber bandits and listen to my post-disco Roots of House Music playlist on Spotify but post-disco it had greater complexity to traditional disco. Traditional disco was a little bit samey but with post-disco it took a lot more influences from jazz, it had more complex chord progressions and nearly every song was new because they were experimenting with synthesizers so from the culture of the DIY culture of post disco what started to happen in the warehouse um with Frankie Knuckles because you know he was a creative DJ and he would have been mixing tracks back and forth and really bringing his own thing to it but

the warehouse was too revolutionary and too cool for it to stay a secret in the black gay community of Chicago and it didn't last long so by late 1982 straight people started showing up tourists started showing up people who weren't about the culture who kind of diluted it down and made it the anti-crack so Frankie Knuckles fucked off and opened his own gaff called the Power Station and the warehouse

kind of fell to shit but in another gaff in Chicago by the name of the music box a lad by the name of Ron Hardy shows up now Frankie Knuckles you know he was responsible

for the term house music he was an undisputed legend but in hindsight he was still a bit traditional he was playing records he was fucking around with mixing whatever but he was just a bit traditional. He was playing records. He was fucking around with mixing, whatever, but he was just still playing records. Ron Hardy was... He was off his tits on drugs all the time, from what reports say.

But what Ron Hardy was doing was a lot more creative. He was becoming... bordering on a musician himself, the way he was playing the tunes. He was fucking around with eq using the eq and the filters like they themselves were musical instruments you know modern dj techniques and speaking earlier about mimetic mutations that happen in music happy accidents that have massive impactful effects on the future of the music

and the future of house music. Ron Hardy came across a record, right? And this record was, it was a Dutch record that was made just for DJs. It wasn't even intended to be played for the pleasure of your ears. It called mix your own stars right and all this record was was a drum beat just one drum beat and the intention of how this record was supposed to be used is that you would play this one drum beat on one turntable and then you could mix another track into it if the two tracks didn't mix you'd pay this drum beat in between but it was just a record with a drum beat so one day or one night at the music box club Ron Hardy threw on this drum beat record to mix between tracks but he was off his fucking tits

half the time and was liable to just leave the DJ box for no reason, so he left this record on, for the full 10 minutes, the track was called 119 BPM, and it was just a drum beat, Ron Hardy left it on, big big mistake, and fucked off to the jacks or whatever,

technically it should have been chaos but that's not what happened so here's a little sample of this functional track that wasn't even intended to be listened to aesthetically from some dutch label so fucking Ron Hardy comes back to the DJ box right out of his mind and goes oh shit I just let that on for 10 minutes and notices the audience not only didn't give a fuck they loved it they stayed dancing like lunatics for 10 minutes solid to no music nothing other than just a drum beat okay and that was revolutionary at the same time it wasn't because dancing to just a drum beat is the most human thing possible that's the first ever music was probably someone just banging a drum or banging a stone or something but this was a wake-up call

for ron and hardy going fuck me there doesn't need to be melody there doesn't even need to be a bass line just one drum will do it if these people are on enough drugs so then he starts you know synthesizers and drum machines were quite cheap circa 1984 he brings with him to the club a piece of equipment called a roland 808 drum machine and starts playing his own repetitive boom boom boom 808 drum beats along with whatever tracks he was playing and that's where you first start to hear what we consider modern house music modern dance music electronic beats being made by the dj this new sound and that's what Ron Hardy brought to the table if you just listen to this this is an 808, a Roland 808 drum

doing a house beat now we have something that sounds like modern house music it's not disco anymore it's something completely new it's a new genre of music so when Ron Hardy started doing this the people in the audience were like he's making music up there now I can do that so you started

to get all these people in their bedrooms who were going to Hardy's show going I can do that at home making their own kind of house tracks bringing him them to Ron Hardley. He was playing them at shows and a new genre of music was born, house music, which then developed, went over to Detroit. In Detroit, they started techno music and that's the start of it all.

About 1985, modern electronic dance music, house, techno, fucking trance, still exists today, has its roots in that, it has its roots in 1969 disco, going from disco, going back underground, then the fucking aids crisis causing this massive upsurge in ecstasy and speed use until eventually you're left with hard electronic fucking beats now of course it's mainstream again you know it's very far removed from its roots in gay culture but you know when i was growing up in limerick house techno rave these were incredibly masculine macho music for you know hard bastards listen to this stuff and next time you're in a club

and you see all you know a lot of lads fist pumping to fucking avicii or whatever remind yourself this is this is music rooted 100 in the struggle for gay rights gay culture this is the gayest music available to humankind it's music made by gays for gays that has been co-opted and appropriated by mainstream straight culture

and it's just worth thinking about something worth appreciating the next time you hear EDM is it's just worth thinking about something worth worth appreciating the next time you hear edm is it's called today you know but isn't that an interesting interesting progression how all that came about you know and that's what excites me i love that um i grew up in a house where i would have been i know older brothers who were listening to bowie and dylan and stuff like that but when i got to about 11 years of age i started listening to the prodigy because that's what my friends were listening to and the prodigy is very hardcore rave music which has its roots in that 1980s house and I remember hearing the prodigy

which was chaotic electronic noise listening to that but then also listening to the records that my brothers were listening to traditional rock and wondering at a very young age how the fuck did music get to what the prodigy is this brash electronic sped up heavy pumping noise and that's what kind of bred in me this obsession of getting music and picking it apart and taking it back in time and reverse engineering it to find out exactly how certain sounds emerge and the truth is it happens gradually as a response to culture but every so often

there's very important memetic mutations a genetic accident that happens that changes everything and twists the course of where that music should go you know what I mean I hope you enjoyed that you pricks changes everything, and twists the course, of where that music should go, you know what I mean,

I hope you enjoyed that, you pricks, so I think, well we're coming up now, nearly 50 minutes in, we're coming up to the, Ocarina Pause, which is a weekly fixture,

in this podcast, where the app, Acast, needs to insert, a digital advert, so what I do, do is I play a Spanish clay whistle called an ocarina and we have a little pause for the ocarina and you may hear the ocarina or you may hear an advert depending on your geographical location I think for this week I'm going to do a house music inspired ocarina pause. So we'll see how this works out.

You're invited to an immersive listening party led by Rishi Keshe Herway, the visionary behind the groundbreaking Song Exploder podcast and Netflix series. The visionary behind the groundbreaking Song Exploder podcast and Netflix series. This unmissable evening features Herway and Toronto Symphony Orchestra music director Gustavo Jimeno in conversation. Together, they dissect the mesmerizing layers of Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring, followed by a complete soul-stirring rendition of the famously unnerving piece, Symphony Exploder. April 5th at Roy Thompson Hall. For tickets, visit TSO.ca.

On April 5th, you must be very careful, Margaret. It's a girl. Witness the birth. Bad things will start to happen. Evil things of evil. It's all for you. No, no, don't. The first omen. I believe the girl is to be the mother.

Mother of what? Is the most terrifying. Six, six, six. It's the mark of the devil. Hey! to be the mother. Mother of what? Is the most terrifying. 666 is the mark of the devil. Hey! Movie of the year. It's not real. It's not real. It's not real.

Who said that? The First Omen. Only in theaters April 5th. Oh yeah. So you might have noticed this week, I've got a slight set of the sniffles on me. I'm a little bit sniffity. I have not been doing lines of speed in honour of the Paradise Garage. No, I've got a bit of cunty hay fever, you know.

But, yeah, fuck it, that's what I like about the podcast. You know, if this was on RTE like all right number one RTE are not going to let me do 48 minutes on the history of fucking house music number two they're certainly not letting me do it with sniffles but this is my podcast and that's what I want to do I want to do a history of the history history of house music and techno, with the fucking sniffles. Which takes me to, the patronage of this podcast. This podcast is supported by,

you the listener, and very occasionally, the odd bit of sponsorship. Whatever sponsor is comfortable with me, talking about the IRA, basically. But, the, this, yeah, it it's it's supported by you

you know I'm not this podcast isn't funded by fucking RT or BBC or TV3 or anyone it's it's made in my little studio in Limerick and put out by me and it's completely 100% independent production which is what I like because I have full creative control and I love doing it and I'm just so happy I'm just like I loved being able to chat about something I'm very passionate about there with no producer fucking you know rubbing me on the shoulder saying you've gone too deep gone too deep into the history of house there bring it back bring it back make it more mainstream can you write bruno mars into the history of house music please no i can't

um so if you would like to support this podcast financially, what we have is a little system based on kindness. There's a Patreon account for this podcast. Patreon.com forward slash The Blind Boy Podcast. And what I ask you to do every week is, if you like this podcast and you like the five hours of free content that you get every month, give me the price of a pint or the price of a cup of coffee if you want to contribute to this.

And if you want to continue listening for free, you don't have to give me the price of a pint or the price of a cup of coffee. Only if you want to. It is a model based on kindness and soundness. So that one's up to you. If you liked it, consider it. Thank you. You marvellous bastards.

Okay, let's take some delicious questions. Stephen asks, Blind boy, what is the crack with Tommy Robinson? I personally believe he is a ghoul. But you can't deny the crowds he's got out he's not unlawfully in prison he's not been unfairly treated how in the name of Jesus does he have such a following they even had a march for him in Belfast that's too close to home um I mean look Tommy Robinson is he's an archetype do you know he

I mean regarding his popularity we've seen that a lot before he's like Britain's fucked at the moment you know Britain's in a very bad place economically it's not great the levels of poverty in Britain are disgraceful, there's inequality

there's lack of employment and Tommy Robinson is appealing massively to the uninformed white working class communities because he offers a very simple angry narrative. These people are very rightfully angry because they don't have opportunities, their communities are neglected and they don't see a future and oftentimes the easiest thing to do with that anger is to direct it at a simple problem and if that simple problem is a person who lives down the road who looks different to you then that's what happens that's what humans

do we've seen that a lot and Tommy is just a new archetype that fits that role i mean oswald mosley was doing it a lot i think oswald mosley was a bit posher with tommy robinson he is a man of the people but that's not his real name his name is stephen yaxley lennon he's shamefully the fucking you know know, descended from Irish immigrants. His fucking parents or grandparents or whatever received the same horrendous treatment that refugees are receiving now, you know. Irish people were at the end of that anger in the 70s and 60s in Britain. Regarding fucking Tommy Robinson being sent to jail there recently it's absurd he first off he there was a trial there's a there's a trial on in britain and this trial is a child sexual abuse trial um i believe now i don't i don't have confirmation but the I believe that the men accused of sexual abuse are Muslims

Tommy Robinson is pushing a narrative of Muslim rape gangs and he was convicted of contempt of court for recording a Facebook video outside either this trial or another one and was given a suspended sentence so when you go to court and a judge gives you a suspended sentence it's basically I'm letting you off the hook but if you fuck up jail immediately so Tommy Robinson ignored this and then went outside the court and recorded another Facebook video clearly violating the terms of his suspended

sentence knowing well he was going straight to jail with no trial because the trial had already taken place but what pisses me off most about tommy robinson's actions in that case is that this is a child sexual abuse trial they're trying to bring potential abusers to justice so that there's no more victims you know and by him acting in contempt of court he genuinely jeopardizes that trial he could have the accused men could have walked free because of Tommy Robinson's actions that's why contempt of court is an important thing that you don't do but yet he did it anyway for whatever reason I don't know and he did it knowing he would also go to jail so I can't understand that I don't know what the crack is there and the followers who are angry

over that despite very clear evidence in their face of this is what happens that's the power of emotion over rational logic that's what that is you know they were rioting that's when emotion takes over logic and the powers that be in england are going to have to fucking sort out their inequality it's that simple these tommy robinson supporters they have a right to be fucking furiously angry. They have a right to be upset. They're just directing that anger at the wrong source. Do you know? And it's an age-old problem.

It's just repeating itself. And this is what happens when you deny information and education and resources to certain communities. It's fucking shame and as irish people we just gotta fucking keep an eye on that shit in ireland you know don't let that happen here and people say oh no no we've got such a strong we'll say republican history and you know solidarity with certain communities oppressed communities that that could never happen here yes it could happen here it will happen here do you know solidarity with. Certain communities. Oppressed communities. That that could never happen here. Yes it could happen here. It will happen here.

Do you know what I mean. Marcus asks. Any advice on procrastination. I'm a serious cunt for it. I have tunes to learn. For a very important gig. In a fortnight. But I avoid learning them at all costs.

This is an ongoing problem. Well Marcus. What I would. What I would suggest there is. avoid learning them at all costs this is an ongoing problem well marcus what i would what i would suggest there is first off if if when we procrastinate heavily okay and not only number one we're procrastinating something that we like doing i'm assuming if you're in a bloody band you like being a musician number, we're procrastinating something that's, you know, it's a good thing, it is a good thing if you do a good job at this gig, I assume, it would be a bad thing if you fuck it up and don't practice, so to me, on a psychological level, that would suggest that you are allowing an aspect of your behavior right probably you know being a good

musician you're allowing the part of yourself that is a musician to define your value as a human being okay your marcus the musician is tied up with marcus the human being and if you probe within yourself i would i would wager that you possibly believe that your value as a human being depends upon how good you are as a musician your identity as a musician and your identity as a person are tied up you need to separate those two things marcus first of all um an aspect of your behavior cannot define your value as a human being that's not possible a good way around that is to think of some other thing you do that you don't give a shit about for me it's cooking I enjoy cooking but if I make a bollocks of a dinner I don't really care I'm just a bit disappointed but I certainly wouldn't procrastinate cooking or I wouldn't beat myself

up or feel bad or feel like I have less worth if I fuck my cooking up ask yourself if you you know make a bollocks of a gig or if you're not as good as you think you should be as a musician does this hurt you does this reduce your self-esteem and if so just take a look at that no aspect of your behavior can define your value as a human being okay that's a given there's you you you posted this you said there's two weeks and you posted this six days ago so you gotta get that shit done i suffer from procrastination the odd time but I have I keep an eye on it because

if I procrastinate I can't do my job the hardest part about anything is putting your arse in the seat Marcus you actually have to just that really difficult thing of sitting down with the tunes and doing it.

And you have to actually do that. And after 10 or 15 minutes, it'll be easy and you'll enjoy it again. The hard part is not practicing. It's dragging your arse to the seat to actually do it. That's the hard part. And whatever your procrastination style is, eradicate that. If it means, you know, as soon as you sit down to record you clean your room well fuck that don't clean the room or if it means going on instagram then

put your phone in a different room but the most hardcore way to deal with procrastination is to simply do it to straight up no i am doing this now and the more you do that the less of a problem the procrastination becomes but the root issue i would imagine is you are defining your value as a human being by your talent and ability as a musician okay and that's common as fuck we all do that whatever the fuck we're procrastinating you know if the thing we're procrastinating isn't genuinely boring do you know it's okay sometimes maybe to procrastinate you're cleaning your room because that's not enjoyable or it's okay to procrastinate not doing fucking taxes or washing the paint in the fucking wall outside the house that stuff isn't enjoyable so it's okay

to procrastinate that but it's when it's something you actually enjoy that's your livelihood and that's not good that's a a deeper psychological issue that has to do with self-esteem essentially but it's normal as well it's part of the beautiful tapestry of being a human being as well it's part of the beautiful tapestry of being a human being lads i'm seriously making shit of your podcast hug this week um number one the nature of the podcast i played a lot of tunes okay number two because of my sniffly nose i am reluctant to take pauses because it is in those pauses that I get mucosal so I'm trying to speak quickly and keep my pharynx and larynx in a

continual state of movement I don't know why the fuck you want to be listening to me with this shit but it's one hour now that was the podcast I'll leave you be. I enjoyed that lovely two-part history

spanning, you know, fucking three decades and not only telling the story of a music genre but the kind of, the important culture behind it and learning shit like that for me learning about you know house music and disco and how it intersects with lgbt culture those are the things that reduce my homophobia we say like i'm not that homophobic but like i grew up in a homophobic culture do you know what i mean i would have grown up um using the word gay to mean bad i'm not i don't actively have an issue with gay people but i did grow up in a culture as a straight person that does have issues with gay people so

i have a lot of that baggage and learning about stuff like that learning about why gay pride is important why it's a genuine a movement why it's important for gay people to have an identity in a community and to learn a true music that helps me to be a little bit more aware of my privileges as a straight person and to have more respect for queer people, queer culture and their spaces you know and I hope that

did it for ye possibly so fuck off go in peace you beautiful beautiful people and enjoy yourself and have a lovely week and have some compassion for yourself and some compassion for your neighbors and don't be too hard on yourself or anyone else because you're sound Thank you. Thank you. You're invited to an immersive listening party led by Rishikesh Herway, the visionary behind the groundbreaking Song Exploder podcast and Netflix series.

This unmissable evening features Herway and Toronto Symphony Orchestra music director Gustavo Jimeno in conversation. Together, they dissect the mesmerizing layers of Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring, followed by a complete soul-stirring rendition of the famously unnerving piece, Symphony Exploder, April 5th at Roy Thompson Hall. For tickets, visit tso.ca.