Wow, um... you are missing the mark by about 10 years I think. There was bit more going on than 303's and 808's by 1998! Who cares that the "popular" genres were happy hardcore or gabba? Were these popular genres in any way representative of the electronic music/techno "genre" as a whole? Of course not.TomViolenz wrote:There is obviously no accounting for taste, but I maintain that stance at least for a better part of the 90s, and I think that notalgia for this being the time when you (and I) were young is severly clouding your judgement.yup yup wrote:It was mentioned somewhere here before and this confirms it. You really don't know what your talking about do you? Horrible music made better with drugs? Before that it was all about who could louder, harder, faster and cheesier?
I have a hard time thinking of anything from before '98 that held up to the tests of time.
I don't even mean that in a bad way. The sub culture around it was definitely new and absolutely liberating.
But look at the available tools at the time and the people doing it.
A TB 303, TR 808 etc. had a very limited sound pallete and even if you didn't use the inbuild sequencers but connected them to an Atari ST, the sequencing and sound shaping was extremly limited.
People back then took a Punk attitude and just started to produce. At that time you could basically get everything released anyways.
Which is good and was necessary to get more people involved in it and thinking they can do it too.
But be serious here: Popular genres back then were: Happy HardCore (lol), Trance and Gabba for fucks sake.
I for one can't listen to anything from back then without cringing.
Even if you just take the big names: Orbital, Underworld, the Chemical Brothers, The Prodigy, Leftfield, Daft Punk, all these had already released highly acclaimed (even in the mainstream) albums by then (starting around 1993-1994), sometimes several.