House finds a new home: South Africa, a hotbed of contemporary musical innovation
By Simon Hampson(2010)
From its beginnings, house music has eluded definition, refusing to be categorised as a single sound. Yet, almost intuitively, you know it when you hear it. Indeed, one of the genre's's earliest tracks, Can You Feel It? by Chicago's Fingers Inc, famously concluded that "House is a feeling", while LFO's warehouse-rave anthem What is House? stuck to simply repeating the question, suggesting that the answer was impossible to reach, or self-evident, or both …
That house is so difficult to pin down is largely a result of its adaptability. The basic template that was laid in Chicago 25 years ago - the solid thump of the kick drum and the skip of the hi-hat - has now been adopted and twisted to meet the particular needs of youth cultures across the world. Much like hip-hop, its be- came a kind of pop music lingua franca, yielding a global panoply of movements, each with distinct local identities, from the hypersensuality of 2step garage to the rough bounce of Angolan kuduro. To make a culinary analogy, think of bread; how a few simple core ingredients are used universally but with a bewildering variety of results, each one a reflection of that society's par- ticular culture and history.
Few societies, however, have taken to house music as enthusiastically as South Africa. The German label Outhere Record's Ayobaness! compilation brings together -