As my first foray into the underground, house music molded my present-day tastes as much as any genre. It also helped shape much of the electronic-tinged sounds that pervade popular music today. While the late ’90s and early 2000s dance music scene gifted us with arena-ready jock jams like “Sandstorm” and “Zombie Nation,” house music’s ascension proved just as vital, if not more so, as anything to emerge from the trance, techno, or drum & bass sectors of the broader dance spectrum. Chromatics, Todd Terje, Hercules and Love Affair, even modern incarnations of Britney Spears and Rihanna — none of which would exist, or at least sound the way they do, if not for the steady, bass-heavy house grooves that dominated club and rave culture around the turn of the century.
Due in large part to trailblazers such as Daft Punk and Basement Jaxx, the broad divide between pop and underground dance music that previously existed was assuaged. Yet, despite their apparent resistance toward one another, there was always common ground between the two. Hell, house itself emerged from disco’s ashes in the early ’80s Chicago warehouse scene, as pioneers like Jesse Saunders and the late Frankie Knuckles basically just played disco records with a 4/4 bass kick behind them. Before that, there was Donna Summer and Larry Levan. It’s all cyclical.
After more than a decade spent toiling away beneath the popular ecosystem, pop and electronica are more intertwined than ever, and with the endless sea of music available on the internet, it’s debatable whether an “underground” even exists today. But these nine songs were, for me at least, some of the most notable tracks from what could be considered that movement’s pivotal era.
