ciborgs

This Is Our House: House Music, Cultural Spaces and Technologies
RIETVELD, Hillegonda. Ashgate Publishing, 1998.

House music has had a considerable influence in shaping the sound of pop music from the late 1980s onwards. From underground dance events to the pop charts, traces of this aesthetic can be found in many guises. This book is a comparative study which traces a genealogy of house music across England, the Netherlands and US cities, such as Chicago, from the early 1980s to the first half of the ‘90s. In doing so, it maps some of the power structures that are at play in the uses of its specific technologies of production and consumption. The author, Hillegonda Rietveld, was already steeped in dance club culture before she decided to write this loving piece of academic prose about house. Taking critical cultural studies as a vehicle and house music as its aesthetic fuel, she ram raids boundaries of academic disciplines, fusing ideas like a meticulous DJing curator.