Hardstyle: Is it all in the name?

What is hardstyle?  I’ll be honest, I was one of those uneducated types who’d avoided any contact with any type of hard dance music and had lumped ‘hardstyle’ in with ‘hardcore’.  This was a big mistake.

Hardcore purists are a world away from their Hardstyle second cousins.  Hardcore celebrated brutal node-destroying beats and breaks, whilst Hardstyle was living off the ether of rave and slowed-down nu-gabber.

When discussing dance music (or any music), you have to talk about the way that it makes you feel.  In a lot of cases (including hardstyle) you don’t have vocals to give narration to the story of the song, and so the weight of translating emotion in the song is laid entirely on the beats and melodies.

The beats in dance music serve an important function.  House is perfect for those who want to go to a club and dance but not spill their drinks from dancing too hard, whereas a style like down-tempo is more likely to be consumed at home in a relaxed position in your lounge-room.  I am generalizing a bit, but you get the picture. The beats drive action (or inaction, in the case of down-tempo).

Hardstyle is uptempo, as its name would suggest, but not as speedy as its Hardcore brethren (Speedcore, Metalcore).  Its predecessors such as Rotterdam and Nu-Style Gabber were embraced by soccer fans and dis-affected college students.  Hardstyle was born out of those styles but became somewhat slower and more deliberate, making the beats and synth stabs more pronounced.

The sped-up beats of the older Hardstyle music do not carry with them much emotion, although compared to the hardcore genres they do allows a small amount of room for introspection   Hardstyle seems less angry, but yet still fronts with a somewhat tough facade.

The current hardstyle offers a little more variety, and the emotion is measured in the rise and fall of the melody.  It uplifts, and then uplifts a little more before leveling out and waiting once more for the coming build up and bass drop.  Recent Hardstyle sounds have been dressed up with vocal clips and other random aural accouterments cribbed from the stadium-sized sounds of the Euro Trance cliques, making for a more commercial sound.

Today’s hardstyle certainly has a lot more variance than it’s early incarnations, and even tries for a real punt at emotional connection that isn't ecstasy.  Where it goes to from here is anybodies guess.  Music cross-pollinates these days in ways that it never did before, so I don’t think Hardstyle is immune to change or about to die out. 

Its strength is comes from two directions – its power and ability to empower the disaffected and angry youth (of which there will never be a shortage), and its desire for pure ecstasy, the fleeting delirious thrill sought by many young dance music aficionado's.

Maybe one day we will evolve to the point where any emotion can be expressed at 140bpm, and Hardstyle will be  a rebellious outlet for a new wave of musical genius.   Or maybe it continues morphing and moving, it’s lack of relative connection with the everyday confining it to the basements of the world.  

We will see.