![]() This article angered a large part of the scene including Loftgroover himself who responded by saying “If you go to a speedcore thing, 99 percent of the people are white, and, to establish themselves as a bit different from other ravers, they shave their heads. This whole article was completely misinformed and Harpin even wrote a whole paragraph on the veteran London DJ Loftgroover, lumping him in with Nazism, without even realising that the artist he was writing about was black. Within the article, Harpin wrote that “Nazis have adopted Gabber music as their unofficial anthem” and that the “sickening scene is taking hold of Britain.” Concluding the article with “parents, you have been warned”, what this journalist had intended was to fearmonger and fabricate an ethical hostility towards the music genre itself as opposed to a few individuals within the scene. ![]() In Britain, although having been played at various megaraves such as Fantazia and even appearing on Top of the Pops at one point (Technohead), Gabber reached British newspapers in 1997 due to the Daily Star’s journalist Lee Harpin creating a sensationalist article titled ‘Nazi Gabber Hell’. ![]() Within the world of football itself, hooligans span amongst many political ideologies, not just amongst fascism. Although some interpreted the hooliganism on the face as baring signs of far-right nationalism and xenophobia, on the most part, hooliganism represented to Gabbers an ethos for living a drug-fuelled hedonistic life of chaos and as a means of forging a fraternal sense of community amongst one another. ![]() Many Gabbers and DJs themselves sported football tees at events and within Dutch football stadiums to this day, it is not uncommon to hear the genre being played out of the stadium speakers. Booming in industrial European cities such as Rotterdam, Hamburg, Glasgow, and even cross-continent in the former steelworks-dominated city of Newcastle, Australia, where the record label Bloody Fist emerged, Gabber attracted with it an army of bald-headed mainstream-disenfranchised youth, many of whose parents worked in industrial sectors.įrom the start, Gabber was heavily tied to football hooligan culture, with a large following of the Dutch football teams Feyenoord and Ajax in particular. Gabber in the 1990s in particular was undeniably a working-class youth subculture. Over the last few years, there has been a recent global resurgence in the popularity of Gabber, in part due to the revival of Gabber’s most notable events company Thunderdome, but also with the revisiting of the style by fashion brands and deconstruction of the sounds by so-called post-Gabber/neo-Rave music producers. The raw anger and darkness of many of the tracks were a long shot from the loved-up generation of Happy Hardcore ravers. In addition to the Skinhead hairstyle, most Gabbers wore colourful tracksuits from brands such as Australian L’alpina, and also commonly wore Nike Air Max trainers. Rotterdam also became renowned for the label Rotterdam Records, which was founded by DJ Paul Elstak in 1992.Īlthough Gabber has influences from older genres such as House, New Beat, EBM, Techno and Industrial, the visual style of the Gabbers in the ’90s were generally more comparable to the British Skinheads and football hooligans than the neon-clothed Acid House ravers, with bald heads being one of the most distinguishable trends of the subculture. The Dutch city became infamous for its club Parkzicht, where producers such as DJ Rob experimented in distorting and speeding up the sounds of House music. ![]() There has been an age-old debate over the origins of where hardcore dance music emerged, with some pinpointing cities such as Detroit, Frankfurt, and Antwerp – however it is safe to say that Gabber’s entry-point was Rotterdam. Gabber is a hardcore dance music genre that fuses heavily distorted 909 kick drums with synths such as the ‘hoover’ sound on the Roland Alpha Juno, samples from the likes of old Horror movies and ranges in BPM from 150BPM to well over the 200BPM threshold. ![]()
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