How much is the fish?

Recently I was writing some database scripts to store music styles and sub-styles for usage in the application. An essential part of that task is to prepare initial data - put together actual styles that we gonna have in the remix interface. House, techno, dubstep, drum'n'bass, rock, pop, ... with help of team members we gather about 40 different genres, some of which I thought was very new and unknown to me. Have you ever heard of Hard Dance for example?

But today, while reading history info about this week's band, I found out that I know all these genres, just didn't know the exact names. Welcome pretty old but still young music team - Scooter - a famous representation of techno and hard dance music from Germany.

When I was a teenager, it was not considered cool to listen to dance music, techno, or other related things. Rap was considered as totally inappropriate phenomenon. If you want to be cool, you should have only true music in your player. By true we usually mean some rock.

But Scooter was above these rules. Everybody knew Fire and How much is the Fish. Everybody heard about Scooter and loved it. Every school disco party could not happen without at least one of Scooter's songs in 90th. It was known and recognizable. Why?

I didn't know it back then, but today I read that Scooter initially was not a band. It was a pure remixing project of several friends and musical producers in Germany in 93-94. The fact is, one of their remixes became quite successful in the German arena of those days. For unknown reasons, Germany is a motherland of dancing music in some sense. Think about Daft Punk. It started in Germany by Giovanni Giorgio when he played in diskotheks in Germany back in the 80th-90th.

I guess, the timing could not be better for Scooter. Life became lighter for people, with new technologies, synth music, better sound equipment, portative audio, and small and big disco parties - people wanted some good dance. Remixing, apparently, was the right thing for such purpose. Stadiums of happy hard-core dancers could not be wrong.

Remixing was always quite weird to me, to be honest. When I bought a pirate mp3 with all Scooter albums for that moment, one of the releases consisted of 5 same songs, remixed differently. Radio mix, pop mix,... I didn't get it. I chose one and listened to it. Now I see that the whole 30 years of musical experience of Scooter is built around artistic remixing and performing someone else's songs. And it's beautiful! Even more, I started to love some of the remixes or covers much more than the originals. Maybe because of another energy, that the cover performer brings, compared to the initial version.

Anyway, years are passing by, but Scooter's remixes pop up in my playlist here and there. It is very symbolic, that my current job is at a startup for creation of music remixes. It is my happy hardcore!