Gabba

This article is about the music subgenre. For the cricket ground in Brisbane, Australia, see The Gabba.

This article or section should be merged with Gabber.

Gabba (pronounced gahbagh or gahbuhr in Dutch) is the slang version of the word gabber, a type of techno music also known as hardcore house. The style was born in Rotterdam, distinguished by the loud and often aggressive sound. A weird, freaky sound can make a good gabber track, which usually has either a scary or a happy mood. The music style contrasts with happy hardcore. The essence of the gabber sound is, for example, a distorted Roland TR-909 bass drum, overdriven to the point where it becomes a square wave and makes a recognizably melodic tone. The typical gabber track is from 160 to 220 BPM (beats per minute).

Origins

The term originated in the Netherlands, and is derived from the Yiddish word khaver, meaning friend. Apocryphally, one of these gabbers wanted to enter a club in Amsterdam, where the bouncer said, "No gabber, you can't come in here."

Gabber originated in Rotterdam, the Netherlands; Rotterdam is the holy shrine of hardcore house music / gabber. Many consider Rotterdam Termination Source's Poing! (1992) to be the archetypal gabber track. The record shop Midtown in the Nieuwe Binnenweg of Rotterdam is one of the shrines of Gabber music. Fans dressed in Australian and Cavello track suits, Nike sport shoes, army boots, bomber jackets, and a lot of them would have shaven heads. Female fans often kept a small tail of hair on the back of their heads. Later, in 1997 and beyond, their clothing style more and more changed and brands like Fred Perry and Lonsdale were added to their outfits.

The style began in the late 1980s, but some claim that it was diluted by happy hardcore and, for hardcore fans, by commercialisation. The commercial organisation ID&T helped a lot in making the music popular by organising parties and selling merchandise. After the airing of what were felt by some as humiliating video clips, some gabbers felt they were being made fun of and were discriminated against. The name gabber is somewhat less used these days to describe this music style. Many would now prefer to call the style hardcore. To find someone that calls themselves a "gabber" is becoming more and more rare. After surviving underground for a number of years, in 2002 the style became more popular again in the Netherlands.

Subdivisions

The gabber genre has a number of different styles related to it, including speedcore, terrorcore, hardcore, hardstyle, bouncy techno, nu style gabber and noizecore.

Opinions

It is a misconception that all gabber is simple and loud music. The style later became (somewhat limited by the fans' taste) to be a creative style, in which complex rhythmic and melodic combinations are very common, unlike most modern dance music which is more meant to be simple and easy listening. In a lot of gabber, melodies and drums are overlayed with a number of filter effects, which adds richness to the music. Gabber has grown into a serious style of music where producers are encouraged to experiment.

Because of the shaven heads and the clothing preference some people confuse gabbers with skinheads or neo-nazis, but this is inaccurate. While some feelings of nationalism were quite strong among some gabber groups (bomber jackets were often decorated with Dutch flags), there was no hatred of foreigners or racial idiology involved at all with most of the gabbers. However, the gabber culture was falsely demonized, resulting in a lot of people leaving the gabber culture. This left mainly the die-hard gabbers (some hardened by all the bad criticism of them), resulting in the more extreme types appearing somewhat more dominant in the scene than before. Although some gabbers are more like gabber/skinheads, with various ideologies, the gabber culture and gabber as a term is not properly generalized as such. A lot of different kinds of people are just into it because they love the music.

The gabber scene is often associated with the use of speed, ecstasy, Ketamine and other drugs.

Record labels

Mokum records Industrial Strength Records]

See also

• Chav

External links

• HardSound
• Industrial Strength Records
• Ishkur's Guide to Electronic Music