I’ve decided I need to do one of these every week. Break up the heavy duty real estate theorizing — it can get a bit much even for me after while….
So… let’s see… hit Play on my Shuffle…
L’Amour Toujours (I’ll Fly With You)
Gigi D’Agostino
I have no idea how this track ended up in my music collection. I have never bought a single dance CD or MP3 in my life. Plus, I don’t know who Gigi D’Agostino is. Nor this song. So how did it end up not only in my music collection, but on my iPod?
I must have heard it at some point and dragged it over into the playlist…
But how did it end up in my possession in the first place? I suspect that everyone has songs or CD’s like this, where you hear it and go… “When did I get that?” Was it an ex-girlfriend who gave me a mix that I ripped back when I was digitizing my CD collection? Did I buy it and totally forget about it? Did the music fairy stop by my computer?
The upside is that I like it alot. 🙂
I love trance; I like dance music in general. Always have. In high school, I remember going to a friend’s house, sitting in the basement and listening to various Euro-disco tapes that she had brought back from her trips abroad. Songs with German lyrics and pumping basslines, with nary a stringed instrument in sight, like “Du bist mein ganzes herz” or something like that. All of it was catchy, sugary pop, unserious, and eminently danceable.
This song… what’s not to like? Nice beat, thumping bassline, a pretty vocal melody laid on top of it all. Close your eyes and you can almost imagine yourself at some dark nightclub with laser lights, beautiful young people blitzed out of their minds, the tang of sweat, sex, and animal attraction wafting through the humid air….
Turns out, according to Wikipedia, Gigi D’Agostino is some sort of a grandmaster of DJ’s:
As a DJ, D’Agostino is known as one of the “pioneers of Mediterranean Progressive Dance”[2] consisting of minimalistic sounds and catchy, Latin melodies and especially Mediterranean melodies. As a producer, Gigi D’Agostino’s strength – or “Gigi Dag”, the pseudonym he uses for himself in club productions – lies in transforming a piece, originally destined only for the discos, into a success for the main-stream public.
Until this moment, I did not know that there was such a thing as “Mediterranean Progressive Dance” of which Gigi D’Agostino is a pioneer. Is this a good thing? Can we slice musical genres by geography now? Maybe I can be the pioneer of the “Suburban New Jersey Progressive Hardcore” — if I had any musical talent whatsoever, at least.
Something I’m still trying to figure out… what makes a DJ great? I mean, what sets Gigi apart from the guy that played at my wedding? Is it their ability to know what moves the crowd? The European dance DJ’s don’t do any scratching or turntable skillz like the hip hop DJ’s do. So what makes them great?
In any case, that’s what’s playing. I’m going to go reminisce about days gone by. Dark cavernous rooms. Endless energy. When the world was all possibilities and crossroads. The soundtrack of those days would surely be techno and trance music.
-rsh
