2016: The top 40 was where house music went to die

We're looking back at the trends that defined dance music in 2016. Next up, the sorry state of commercial house

A disturbing trend has reared its ugly head throughout 2016. It’s one that has struck fear into good-hearted people, who have looked on in dismay as an increasing number of the population has been seduced by falsehoods. No, we don’t mean post-truth politics and the normalisation of fascism, but the rise of terrible sounds masquerading as house music infiltrating the charts.

You now can’t sit in any barbers or walk through any shopping centre without having your ears assaulted by flimsy productions that evoke about as much excitement as a Christmas table lecture on the ins and outs of an elderly relative’s golf swing. While the OG Chicago mould of the genre is packed with enough soul, feeling and fiery passion to shake the foundations of any club and burn down social boundaries, this new crop of tracks sound like they’ve been made on the instruction to stick it in the oven for 15 minutes at 100°.

In years previous the poppier side of house has been in fine health. The likes of Duke Dumont and MK have hit the top spot with anthemic dancefloor fillers that are undeniably infectious, the latter’s effort coming in the form of a remix of Storm Queen, one half of distinguished New York disco outfit Metro Area. Disclosure also scored a number two with ‘White Noise’, a funky pop-house fusion in the mould of beloved Toronto group Azari & III containing a skippy, metallic synth line that, if slowed down and stretched out, wouldn’t sound too dissimilar to those Romanian minimal noises that changed your life at Sunwaves last summer.

Nowadays casual listeners would be forgiven for thinking that house is about clumsily combining ridiculously obvious samples with beats damper than a trip to Atlantis. It’s a trend that began to bubble last year, spurred on by Sigala’s juvenile Michael Jackson-sampling chart-topper ‘Easy Love’, and fired full steam ahead on pumping cylinders of ham-fisted production in 2016.

Tracks have breached the upper chart slots with blasphemous samples of vintage reggae, underpinning them with puerile synths and sound layers so twee they’d make a cardigan wearer weak at the knees, turning dub into a steaming dump. Iconic r’n’b vocals have also felt the lazy wrath of producers who have clumsily squashed hooks into tracks that make Jamie xx’s use of steel pans look conservative. Or worse: used them as spoken-word-sample-before-the-drop moments, a cliché more played out than a retired stage actor.

The heavy sampling rife in this music is at best uninspired, and at worst, appropriation. There’s about as much talent in constructing half a song around a ready-made classic chorus as there is in preparing a Pot Noodle. It’s a wonder how the scene of predominantly white males is able to make these cynical cash grabs with their hands clutching so tightly to the coattails of recognisable bangers by black artists. This is music for people with no interest in creativity, who enjoy their repackaged nostalgia trips to be served tepid with a side order of bland. Presumably deriving enough excitement from the sand-covered, half-naked models posing as YouTube backdrops.

The incorporation of these samples into, most commonly, tropical house foundations adds serious insult to the injury, sapping the life out of flawless old-skool cuts with draining Magaluf beach party beats. Forget soul music, it’s just dull music.

Tropical house is a genre so bad that its founder Thomas Jack has already distanced himself from the style, with the Australian asserting to Noisey that it is “so annoying that I’m over it”. Succinctly put. He further complained that “people would go grabbing, like, 90s pop songs and putting fuckin’ flutes over them.” No clue where they got the idea to jack from others, Thomas?

Nearly three decades on from its birth Juan Atkins is still making techno, and Frankie Knuckles made and played house up until his last days. For the most part dance music is underpinned by forward-thinking approaches and a desire to pioneer. The underground is booming right now, with inventive collectives and individuals popping up in all corners of the globe and pushing things on. There’s currently no reflection of this in the bastardisations littering the charts, with the top 40 now strewn with the corpses of dead tunes.

Groups like Disclosure have proven that it’s possible to do commercial well. When it comes to chart house in 2016, we’d rather listen to white noise.

Patrick Hinton is Mixmag's Digital Staff Writer. He wants quality house every weekend, please

Alex Jenkins is a freelance illustrator and regular contributor to Mixmag. Follow him on Instagram