The resources provided here as part of the Foundations of House project are extensive and ever-growing lists of rigorous and reliable resources for the continuation of house music scholarship. These resources comprise lists (presented as bibtex) sorted by format (monographs, articles, websites etc) that present useful and robust resources for scholars of house music and dance music in more general terms. There is a focus on house music and disco here, although given the genealogy of most contemporary dance music, house music presents the earliest branch of EDM-proper, hence the focus and relevance beyond simply house and disco.
These resource lists are freely available to anyone, and can be accessed below or from the website menu.
As part of this project’s commitment to the fifth research strand identified throughout previous work, these resources have been generated to support and further house music scholarship. Whilst this project does produce several novel scholarly outputs, in addition to less formalised commentary and critique, this is not the only way in which the project encourages further research. Here, this project identifies and publishes extensive and ever-expanding lists of texts, books, articles, A/V sources etc. that make up the corpus of reliable house music sources.
It has only been in recent years that popular music as a field has been given any degree of appropriate scholarly emphasis. Dance music, EDM, and even the historical roots of modern dance music (post-disco, disco and disco’s precursors) have not been viewed as worthy of study until the last decade. Dancecult, the only scholarly journal dedicated to contemporary dance music, began in 2009 (its obsession with Psytrance not withstanding). Before this, a handful of authors and scholars published interesting work that would become integral to what we now understand as the heritage of house music. The sporadic and/or late arrival of these texts and sources is not surprising given the framing with which dance music and disco were saddled with. Dance music was, in the UK, perceived as anti-social resulting in legislation such as the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994 (due to its relationship to events such as Castle Morton) . Furthermore, even dance music’s roots were often maligned by scholars and authors who purported to be on the side of ‘reason’. In 1990, the ‘Penguin Encyclopedia of Popular Music’ defined disco as:
“Dance fad of the ‘70s, with a profound and unfortunate influence on popular music... because the main thing was the thump-thump beat, other values could be ignored; producers used drum machines, synthesisers and other gimmicks at the expense of musical values.”
With these attitudes and perceptions of dance music extant in both public and academic consciousness, it is not at all surprising that identifying a corpus of literature that explores dance music (in the broadest terms) in a rigorous scholarly manner are hard to come by. Consequently, this project has been engaged in generating reliable and robust lists of scholarly work and popular sources that present useful and/or rigorous information for other researchers working within the field.
View Latest ResourcesA live version on Overleaf allows anyone to view the source code and bibtex files for each list, in addition to a rendered version of the guidance documentation (containing an exhaustive bibliography). Those using a reference manager may simply wish to copy and past the contents of bibtex files into their reference manager. Bibtex is supported by most common softwares.
Download Latest ResourcesTo download the zipped source code, bibtex files for each list, and a rendered PDF of the guidance documentation (containing an exhaustive bibliography), please use this link.