Lots of Chicago tracks were only released over here. Even though nearly all the best records were made in Chicago, the music took off in a big way over here, it was massively popular, much imitated, loved by clubbers and ravers and misunderstood by the media. Again, many words have been written about the summers of 19, and you can google “second summer of love” if you need a refresher. In an important way, acid house was a UK scene. But I do include one UK track that was inspired by the Chicago sound, and there would be more UK stuff if this was a top 50 instead of a top 20.
I won’t include earlier TB-303 tracks like Alexander Robotnick’s ‘Problems D’Amour’ or Ice T’s ‘Reckless’, nor will I include Belgian New Beat tracks, which I see as coming from a slightly different lineage. Because of my own feeling of what constitutes “house” I won’t include banging techno tracks with distortion, such as Richie Hawtin’s early classics on Probe or the awesome acid bangers that constituted a good deal of Underground Resistance’s early catalogue. I won’t go into that too deeply – you probably know what a 303 is and what it sounds like, and if not then listen to any of the records below and feel the squelch.Īs far as “house music” goes, I mean music characterised by a four-to-the-floor kick-drum beat, made to be played at Chicago’s Warehouse club, and music directly descended from that stuff. For me, 99% of acid house is from Chicago. Zillions of articles and compilation sleevenotes have held forth on the history of the little silver box designed in Japan by Tadao Kikumoto which accidentally spawned a whole genre of music. Acid: it’s the sound made by a Roland TB-303. For the sake of this list I’m using an arbitrary definition of “house music with acid in it”. So how do you define “acid house”? So much has been written about it. To me it all sounded like a unified thing that definitely wasn’t hip-hop or jazz, and I wasn’t really motivated to get a grip on the finer details. I’ve always had a problem with genres I usually fail to grasp what it is that distinguishes one from the next. It took months for me to understand that hardcore rave was different to techno because of the breakbeats.
We originally posted Ed DMX’s list of the 20 greatest acid house tunes in 2009, but after Roland teased the return of the TB-303 it seemed timely to bring it back – and the tracks sound just as brilliant today.
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