Tag: gabber

  • Gabber is dead

    In October 2010 I posted about Mid-Town’s Rotterdam shop closing on my personal blog. Last week however, the curtain dropped permanently for what was left of Mid-Town (the labels and webshop). They went bankrupt.

    What’s kind of interesting to see from the official papers, is that with Mid-Town some infamous labels also cease to exist: Rotterdam Records, DJ Paul Elstak’s Forze Records and Terror Trax Records.

    It’s sad to say but it’s the last in a long string of ‘gabber landmarks’ that have disappeared: the demise of the FFWD dance parade (also in 2010, while not strictly hardcore, usually had a large hardcore following), the radio program Turbulentie on the also bankrupt radio station Stads Radio Rotterdam over a decade ago and the infamous Parkzicht club. Like it or not these things were part of Rotterdam’s cultural heritage and something that gave Rotterdam a voice in the rest of the world.

    While a common slogan among gabbers is “hardcore will never die“, it can be concluded that gabber is dead. In Rotterdam at least. Or that it’s least a spirit without a body.

  • Pearl Jam – Alive

    In this week’s Origin of Samples-post a classic case of who’s stealing from who. In 1991 a relatively unknown Seattle band Pearl Jam released an album entitled ‘Ten‘. One track from that album would go on to be one of the anthems of its generation at the explosion of the grunge hype: ‘Alive‘.

    Only a year later, on a proverbial attic, some guys got together and made hardcore gabber under the name Neophyte. Eventually a rock guitarist named Jarno Butter (whom I’ve shared some classes with in highschool, but that is a different story) joined their ranks to play with them during live sets. They released many tracks that gained international fame in an underground scene. One of the tracks, released in 1996 under their happy hardcore artist name Bodylotion, was entitled Always Harcore. Although in entirely different genre and not directly sampled from the original, it’s clear the vocal melody from Always Harcore comes directly from Alive.

    It’s not uncommon in the hardcore gabber scene to use tons of samples from other music and film quotes (especially if they contain the word ‘fuck’). What isn’t very common however to sample from their own ranks. And that’s basically what German Europop-band Scooter did in 2004 when they ripped the chorus from Always Hardcore and crammed it into their own hit single One (Always Hardcore). Even though pretty much every Scooter song is based on another song, you can still wonder if they knew the original original.

    To what extent Neophyte stole/were inspired by Pearl Jam and Scooter stole/were inspired by Neophyte or Pearl Jam, I leave you to judge. Here’s the original Alive: