The Happy Hardcore Piece

JDS “Higher Love” – When you listen to Happy Hardcore you get stared at. You can be quietly walking down the street one day, perhaps unware of the volume of your headphones, until you realize all around you can hear the metronomic WHUMP-WHUMP-WHUMP-WHUMP of happy hardcore at 180 bpm. Or try flipping through your Case Logic booklet in mixed company and watch the shrunken grimaces, haughty “evil eyes,” and condescending chuckles when you come to the CD covered with grinning smiley faces and Prince-ly grammar. Even your most pop-friendly friends will view you with a newfound concern.

Obviously the tweest of rave genres, even my ex-girlfriend Nancy – a notorious indie-pop fan – described her one visit to a happy hardcore party as “scary.” The cliché (true, of course) is the “candy raver”: an infantile mind trapped in a (mostly) adult body, all stuffed animal cuteness and body-glitter. As warped as it may seem, it’s really not so different from any other subculture you might toss up as a counter-example. How is a guy caked up with foundation and black-eyeliner any less goofy than someone wearing a dozen candy necklaces? (And besides all candy ravers want to do is hug you, usually, not burn down your church. Admittedly, neither mademy list of things to do today.)

Happy hardcore raves have names like “Hardcore Uproar,” “OVERLOAD!,” and “Lost the Plot.” The last is telling; an ancient phrase for drug-addled delirium, it also highlights that – like their contemporaries sporting rockabilly coifs or ’77-style liberty spikes – they’re essentially reproduction antiques. It’s not for nothing that the genre makes heavy use of sound-tropes that sound best under the influence of ecstasy. Like its cousin in “big room” trance, the sound of happy hardcore is tailor made for that rush surrounding dancers first few ecstasy experiences.

So – the most important part for you playing along at home – what does it sound like? A friend of mine once described it as “fast rave music,” and that’s as good a definition as any, especially if your working definition of “rave” is as superficial as most Americans. It shares gabba’s (happy hardcores angry loner cousin from the European mainland) ridiculously fast kick drum, a sound so attenuated by speed it sounds like a cartoon “sprooooooing!” Unlike gabba’s death-metal atmosphere, it is “toytown techno” taken to an almost religiously pure extreme. Melodies are those of calliopes, video games, cartoons. Synth riffs and stabs have an almost comical, campy flair. Samples are pitched up to levels of near-incomprehensibility. Vocals are mostly trilling divas exhorting you – the dancer – to let yourself go. There are sometimes warp speed breakbeats skittering around the thump (although these may be currently out of vogue), so fast and linear they lose any pretensions to “funk.” It is also, in the words of my friend, “the best thing ever…when you’re in the mood for it.”

My favorite happy hardcore track ever is JDS’s “Higher Love”, the second track from the first Happy 2 B Hardcore mix CD. It’s utterly generic in the best possible sense; my description of the genre as a whole works just as well as a description of this specific track. You can dance to it, but I’m old and out of shape and my days of hardcore stimulant abuse are long behind me. So my suggestion is getting behind the wheel on a sunny day, cranking this up, and just flooring it. It’s bliss overload. Jungle is my favorite music ever, because it’s funky, because it’s got (or had) an incredible range of moods/feelings/textures, because it combines so much other stuff I love (house/techno/ragga/rap/R&B). I could never call happy hardcore even close to a “favorite genre” (I wouldn’t call the soundtrack to Super Mario Brothers my favorite music either), but I’d be lying if I said that when “Higher Love” was playing it didn’t seem to make all other music seem redundant. (Click here to buy it from Amazon.)

(Jess Harvell is a freelance writer who has been published by the Village Voice, Seattle Weekly, and the Phoenix News Times, among other publications.)