ABSTRACT

This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book provides an extended version of the American adventure. It looks at the use and development of house music in England. The book deals with house music in the Netherlands, where there had been a tendency to follow English youth and pop cultures, due to the availability of British music publications. It discusses similarities in the use of production technologies of house music, despite the local differences in musical traditions. The feeling of control over one’s cultural production is a source of a great sense of pleasure and power. The book also provides some of the similarities in the spaces and technologies of consumption and the discourses that surround house music. As with products in popular culture, the formal qualities of house music are recognisable, yet ephemeral and always changing, depending on who is producing and using it at what and time.