Lapis the Nevrean

soooooo you ever heard about eurobeat?

do you want to know how this... happened? i can tell you!

eurobeat comes straight from disco. in particular italo disco, at least at first, as far as i can tell, italo disco was just disco from italy. it's maybe more consistently upbeat and, well, cheesy than disco as a whole. also, italo disco would sometimes dabble in weird lyrics. (yes this is an italo disco song)

something important i had to learn as an american about the european music scene is that europe never had the massive disco backlash & downfall that the us did. they just kept loving disco. and so it stayed around and kept mutating, picking up more synthesizers and stuff as we enter the 80s. by then, there was italo disco that sounded like this, with lots of synth and drum machines. (the lyrics remain as weird as ever.)

i also need to talk about "high NRG" music. it, i think, arose in parallel with italo disco? but it also might have been influenced by it? idk. genres are a fuck. anyway, it seems to have originated in the US. the important things about high NRG are that it's fast, has an electronic four-on-the-floor vibe, and compared to most disco, it's not very funk-influenced. here's an example that's literally called High Energy. gay clubs could not get enough High NRG music, and a lot of the songs and artists are very gay in turn.

after these styles were established, the 80s hitmaking juggernaut known as Stock Aitken Waterman entered the scene. their music is heavily influenced by both italo disco and high NRG. they gave these sounds their big mainstream break all over the world with their many massive hits. the US only thought they had gotten rid of disco... but now they were accepting disco's child right back into the charts :P

anyway, it's time to go to japan. we gotta go there at some point, right?

japan also loved the shit out of Stock Aitken Waterman's hits & this "new" sound. it caused a huge impact crater in the music scene as these sounds bodyslammed into jpop and people began trying to reproduce it. this caused the sharp divide in sound in 80s jpop that i've written about here before. the name "eurobeat" for this music came from japan, where it was applied to all foreign dance music indiscriminately.

but by the early 1990s, japan, like most of the world, was getting a little tired of the stock aitken waterman brand of eurobeat. however, the executives of japanese label Avex thought the sound of italo disco still could have legs in japan. so they went to italy and had a talk with a couple of guys from an italo disco band named aleph. they agreed to make avex a special compilation album for japan called Super Eurobeat.

japan loved it. it would be the beginning of an empire.

eurobeat largely reaches japan through these compilation albums, and is actually only made by a handful of italian people under various aliases. early eurobeat sounds very much like standard italo disco. however, the more super eurobeat albums were pumped out (and they came out at a ridiculous rate), the beats just kept getting faster and faster and the synths kept getting more frantic. within just a few years, eurobeat had already reached its Final Form- super fast with wild synth lines. (also, in the storied tradition of italo disco, they haven't stopped having weird lyrics sometimes. ) and this is the kind of music people know as eurobeat today! :)

eurobeat has had quite the cultural lifespan, especially after initial d brought it out of japan to an international audience of weebs. it's been in memes and stuff and there are still people discovering and rediscovering the music, including via newer creations like Luka Luka Night Fever and, uh, brony music?

so i guess that's all. this is by no means complete, so if you have things you want to add, absolutely let me know in the comments! and enjoy all the songs i linked to here!