At three in the morning on King Street, nobody in the room has bought a drink, because the Paradise Garage never sold any. The floor has been going five hours and will go five more. The man watching from the ramp came alone. He knows about forty people by sight, and he won’t speak to any of them until the lights come up. Seoul on a Saturday reaches the same hour with the trains already stopped, in a basement off a hill in Itaewon, and the arithmetic is identical, because nobody is leaving for another three hours whatever gets played. Every era here is a different answer to that hour. The dates are real. So are the endings.
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Which era of dance music is yours?
Thirty six quick questions, most of them not even about music. You get one of thirteen real eras, from the Bronx block parties to the lockdown streams, and a card to send your friends so you can compare.
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The Era Type quiz sorts people into thirteen real periods of dance music, each with real dates. Most of the questions aren’t about music, because nobody has a rehearsed answer about lending a kettle. Where you land says more about how you handle time and other people than about what’s on your phone.
Six hidden axes carry the scoring: Control from Improvised to Planned, Allegiance from Reads Room to Holds Line, Depth from Canonical to Dug, Patience from Slow Build to Wants Peaks, Social from Solitary to Communal, and Time from Reverent to Futurist. That last one does the heaviest lifting here.
Each era is a period with dates, records, cities and a reason it ended. Chicago made its own records from 1984 because importing them was slow. Detroit techno got its name from a British compilation in 1988. The stadium decade ended with a bankruptcy filing in early 2016.
Underground and mainstream both get a section, and the EDM festival decade is treated as seriously as Detroit. Each era carries a criticism, usually about who got paid and who got credited. The question people type is eras of dance music. Below are the thirteen.
The Bronx Block Parties, 1973 to 1979
Dance music sorts into thirteen eras here, each defined by dates rather than by feeling. This is the earliest. On August 11, 1973, Clive Campbell, known as DJ Kool Herc, played a back to school party his sister Cindy organised in the rec room of 1520 Sedgwick Avenue in the Bronx. The dancers went hardest on the drum breaks, so he bought two copies of the same record and played the break back and forth between them. Grandmaster Flash sharpened the cutting, Afrika Bambaataa built the Universal Zulu Nation around parties in parks, and the sound often ran off a street lamp.
Landing here means you think a party is something a neighbourhood throws for itself. The criticism is that this era has become a founding myth. Most of the people there were teenagers with borrowed equipment, nobody planned a culture, and more of those parties ended badly than the stories admit. Treating 1973 as sacred is a good way to miss the block party happening this weekend, on a smaller street, under someone else's lamp post.
Why Does A Hip Hop Era Sit In A Dance Music Quiz?
Because the break came first. Looping the drums so a floor can keep going is the same idea that runs through house, jungle and every DJ tool since, and the Bronx parties were happening in the same city, in the same years, as the Paradise Garage. The two scenes rarely shared a room, but they shared the conviction that the dancers decide what a record is for.
Notting Hill Carnival in London turns a whole neighbourhood into a sound system for a weekend, which is the block party at city scale.
The Paradise Garage Years, New York, 1977 to 1987
The Paradise Garage was a members club on King Street in lower Manhattan, open from 1977 until it closed in 1987, with Larry Levan playing on a system built by Richard Long. It took its shape from David Mancuso's Loft parties, running since 1970 on invitation. Nights were long by design. The records were how the room talked.
Landing here means treating a night as a place rather than a performance. The criticism is that this is the most romanticised room in the whole history of this music, and reverence for it has hardened into a kind of laziness, so that somebody who lands here can spend a decade defending an experience they didn’t have against every room that’s open tonight. It was a private club. It had a door, and a door decides who counts. You weren’t there.
Why Is The Paradise Garage Still Talked About?
Because it settled what a night could be. Long hours, a system built for one room, dancers instead of spectators, and every serious club since has argued with those terms. Seoul has no room with that lineage, so the nearest thing here is an Itaewon basement where the same forty people arrive before one and are still there when the trains start.
Smartbar in Chicago has run on residents since it opened in 1982, which is what you’re after.
Chicago House, 1984 to 1987
Chicago had the Warehouse, where Frankie Knuckles held the residency from 1977, and the Music Box, where Ron Hardy played louder and rougher. From 1984 the city made its own records rather than importing them. Jesse Saunders put out On and On, then Trax and DJ International pressed almost anything that moved, often badly. A Roland bass machine built for guitarists got misused into acid. In January 1987 Steve Silk Hurley's Jack Your Body went to number one in Britain. The secret stopped being local.
This era belongs to people who would rather finish something than perfect it. That’s a real strength and it’s also how you end up with a hard drive of nearly finished ideas, because releasing forty rough things is easier than being judged on one careful one. Roughness starts as a choice. Chicago also shows what happened next, which is that the people who made the records mostly didn’t get paid. That problem is real and it isn’t settled.
When Did House Music Start?
House started in Chicago in the early 1980s, in a room before it was on a record. The Warehouse ran from 1977 and the city began pressing its own records in 1984. The name is usually traced to the club itself. House reached Korea without a scene attached, as imported records rather than as a movement, which is why the Chicago lineage in Seoul is carried by a few small rooms rather than a generation of clubs.
Sub Club in Glasgow has run Subculture, its weekly house residency, since 1994, which is the Chicago model transplanted.
Detroit Techno, 1985 to 1992
Three friends who went to school in Belleville, outside Detroit, built a music out of Kraftwerk, Parliament and the late night radio of the Electrifying Mojo. Juan Atkins got there first, as Cybotron and then as Model 500 on his Metroplex label. Derrick May released Strings of Life on Transmat in 1987, and Kevin Saunderson had the crossover records. The word techno was fixed by a British compilation in 1988.
Landing here means thinking in systems and long horizons, and preferring to be understood in ten years rather than liked tonight. The criticism is that futurism is easy to perform and hard to deliver, and a lot of people who land here have mistaken being difficult for being early, and nobody can disprove that for ten years. Detroit techno was made by Black musicians in a city being written off, then exported, renamed and monetised largely elsewhere. Claim the lineage and claim that too.
What Is The Difference Between House And Techno?
House came out of disco and gospel, and techno came out of machines and science fiction. Both are Black American music from the same few years in the same part of the country, so the split is about intent rather than about tempo. In Seoul the Detroit line runs through the Itaewon and Hapjeong basements, where a record made in 1987 can still set the terms of a Saturday and nobody in the room announces it.
Movement in Detroit puts the lineage in front of you.
UK Acid House and Rave, 1988 to 1992
A handful of London DJs came back from Ibiza in 1987 having heard a room that mixed everything, and put it into small clubs like Shoom. Within two years it had outgrown every building it was in and moved to fields near motorway junctions, with phone lines telling thousands of people where to drive. Parliament legislated against unlicensed parties, and by 1994 the phrase repetitive beats was in British law. By then the mass version had already become an industry.
This is the least controlling result in the quiz. A night is something that happens to a group rather than something one person delivers, and this type is good at surrendering to a room. The criticism is that the era is remembered through the feeling and almost not at all through the records, which is convenient if you never had to have taste. Loving everything and loving nothing look identical at five in the morning. Name one record.
What Was The Second Summer Of Love?
Britain in 1988 and 1989, when acid house went national. The phrase covers the two summers when small London clubs emptied into fields near motorway junctions, and the story ends in legislation rather than in boredom. Korea never had that outdoor moment, and the nearest relationship to it is a festival field an hour out of Seoul where most of the crowd didn’t come for one name on the bill.
World DJ Festival is the nearest thing in Korea to a field full of people who didn’t come for one act. fabric in London turned the warehouse party into an institution, and Toronto has run warehouse parties since the early 1990s.
Hardcore and Jungle, 1992 to 1994
British rave sped up until it broke. What came out was jungle: breakbeats cut to pieces and pitched up, with sub bass from sound system culture underneath. It ran on dubplates and London pirate radio before shops would stock it, so a track could rule a room for a month without officially existing. The engine of most of it was six seconds of drumming from a 1969 B side by the Winstons.
Landing here means an unusual tolerance for pace and for things being unfinished. The criticism is that this instinct burns through material, and it burns through people too, because a scene moving at that speed can’t hold a record for longer than about a month and doesn’t keep track of who made it either, which is how jungle spent the middle of the decade being sanded down and re credited to people who arrived long after the hard part was done. Notice how often you drop something the moment it stops being difficult. Nothing was allowed to age.
What Came After Jungle?
Drum and bass came next, and then everything it fed. Jungle didn’t stop so much as split. One half took the newer name, and the rougher half stayed roughly where it was. Korea met the sound through its descendants rather than through 1993, so a Seoul floor taking real sub weight is usually taking it from a drum and bass night rather than from a jungle one.
Toronto kept jungle when London moved on, and the city still books it as a music of its own.
Goa and the Psytrance Diaspora, Mid 1990s
Parties in north Goa ran from the 1970s freak scene onward, and by the early 1990s the format was fixed: sets played from DAT tapes, tracks released nowhere, timed so the peak landed with the sun. When local pressure made it harder, the scene scattered rather than died, into Israel, Japan, Britain and later Portugal. It has never once been fashionable.
This is the rarest result here. It means planning far ahead, serving an arc rather than a crowd, and being comfortable outside the conversation entirely. The criticism is that a scene which can’t be embarrassed can’t be corrected, and psytrance built a closed vocabulary that files outside opinion as ignorance, and the same move is available to you. Certainty that has never been tested isn’t conviction. A closed room stays closed.
Is Psytrance Still Popular?
Yes, quietly, and mostly outside the cities. It never had a mainstream year to lose, which is one reason it has outlasted several scenes that were much bigger than it. Korea's version of it runs outdoors, on sites a train ride out of Seoul, timed to a sunrise the same way Goa was.
Shambhala in British Columbia has run since 1998 with no corporate sponsors.
UK Garage and 2 Step, 1996 to 2001
It began as an after hours room. American vocal house played fast, for a crowd that wanted something warmer than jungle. Then the drums dropped their second kick and 2 step arrived, all shuffle and gap, built for a crowd that came to be seen as much as to dance. Between 1999 and 2001 it was on daytime radio and at the top of the charts. Then it split in two. One half went pop. The other got colder and harder and became grime.
Landing here means taking the social contract of a night seriously. You dress for it, you show up for the people, and enjoying yourself isn’t treated as a lesser way of listening. The criticism is that this is the most audience pleasing result here, and pleasing an audience is a skill that turns into a ceiling, because the room will always ask for the thing it already knows and you’ll always be able to give it, right up to the night when you notice that you haven’t had an idea of your own in two years. Garage shows the cost. The moment it was fully accepted it was over, and the interesting part was the half that had been refused entry. Acceptance was the ending.
What Is The Difference Between UK Garage And 2 Step?
2 step is a rhythm inside UK garage, not a rival to it. Garage is the wider scene, and 2 step is the shuffle that appeared once the second kick came out of the bar. In Seoul the sound arrives as a dress code as much as a tempo, and the rooms carrying it are the ones where people came out to be seen rather than to study the booth.
Toronto's Caribbean and British diaspora kept 2 step alive through the years London forgot it.
The Minimal and Blog House Split, Roughly 2003 to 2009
In the 2000s the floor split. One half went minimal: long tracks where almost nothing happens, centred on Berlin and Cologne and, by way of Windsor, Ontario, Richie Hawtin. The other half went the opposite way, compressed and bright and loud, distributed as MP3s through blogs and MySpace pages, with the Paris label Ed Banger at the front. Both halves despised each other and were reacting to the same event. The file had replaced the record.
You land here if you’re the most deliberate person in the room and the least interested in whether the room agrees. The criticism is that both halves mistook a stance for an idea, and a stance can be held for years without ever being tested, which is how minimal ran out of things to remove and blog house ran out of headroom at more or less the same time. Reacting against a trend is still being led by it.
Why Did Minimal Techno Fall Off?
It ran out of things to remove. Reduction is a finite strategy, and once a track is down to a kick and one gesture there’s nowhere left to go except backwards. Seoul still has rooms that never softened the position, and a Hapjeong black box will put a floor through forty minutes of almost nothing without apologising for it afterwards.
Stereo in Montreal has run since 1998, its main room serving no alcohol and a system built for long reduced sets.
The Streaming and Algorithm Era, 2015 to Now
Distribution stopped being the difficult part. A track can be finished on a Tuesday, carried by a playlist or a clip, and be everywhere by Saturday. It’s gone inside a month. Sets get cut into fragments and served back as content, which changes how people behave in the room while it’s still happening. The whole history arrives flat, so a record from 1988 and one from last week land in the same queue with no context at all.
Landing here means being fast, unsentimental and good at finding things, and being right that a lot of nostalgia is a defence mechanism. The criticism is that everyone in this era shares the same references while believing they arrived at them independently, because the thing feeding you is feeding several million other people the same week. It can’t tell a discovery from a delivery. If you can’t say where something came from, you didn’t find it. You were served it.
Is Streaming Ruining Dance Music?
No, but it removed the order things used to arrive in. Scarcity did some of the sorting before. Now it’s done by a feed with no memory and no stake in the outcome. Korea runs on phones more than most places, and a Gangnam Saturday can be built almost entirely on a record that a clip made unavoidable four days earlier.
Toronto's version of this era isn’t a building at all, but a promoter with a following and a room borrowed for one night.
The EDM Festival Decade, Roughly 2010 to 2015
For about five years dance music became American stadium music. Electric Daisy Carnival moved from Los Angeles to Las Vegas in 2011, and Ultra in Miami grew into a broadcast event. Swedish House Mafia sold out Madison Square Garden in December 2011 before splitting a year later. Vegas casinos signed DJs to residencies worth more than most touring careers, Skrillex, deadmau5 and Avicii were on pop radio, and the form narrowed to the build and the drop alone. SFX Entertainment bought festivals worldwide and filed for bankruptcy in early 2016, which is as good a closing date as any.
Landing here means wanting the payoff now and wanting the whole room to get it at the same second. That instinct built the largest audiences this music has ever had, and sneering at it is mostly a way of avoiding how hard it is to do well. The criticism is that a form which delivers a peak every ninety seconds can’t hold anything at all between them, and it drove out most of the people who came for the in between, and because the decade ran on a sponsor's calendar rather than on a scene's there was no lineage underneath it to catch what fell when the money moved. The money left first.
Why Did EDM Peak And Then Fade?
It stopped being the centre. The money that inflated it moved on. The form had narrowed to the point where the only thing left to do with it was repeat it. In Korea the decade landed in the biggest rooms and stayed there, which is why a Gangnam Saturday at one in the morning can still sound like a main stage.
Ultra Korea brought the American main stage format to Seoul in 2012, and World DJ Festival absorbed the fireworks. Veld in Toronto has run at Downsview Park since 2012, apart from the two pandemic summers, and XS at Wynn is the casino residency model in its first room.
Amapiano and Afro House, 2019 to Now
Amapiano came out of the townships around Pretoria and Johannesburg in the middle of the 2010s, built from kwaito, deep house and South African jazz, and settled into its shape around 2019. A little over 110 beats a minute, long stretches of almost nothing, then a bassline on the log drum sound that became its signature. Kabza De Small and DJ Maphorisa released the first Scorpion Kings record that year, and the sound stopped being a local one. Afro house is the older cousin, the deep house lineage Black Coffee carried out of Durban and Johannesburg. What made amapiano different is how it travelled: dance challenges and short clips moved a track from Soweto to Lagos to London in weeks.
Landing here means being patient in a way that’s social rather than solitary. The criticism is that a sound which spread on a fifteen second clip gets judged on fifteen seconds, and there’s a good chance you’re doing it too, humming a log drum you’ve heard four hundred times. There’s also the older problem. South African producers made the records and much of the money is made elsewhere, in the pattern Chicago and Detroit already showed. The clip isn’t the record.
What Is Amapiano?
Amapiano is South African dance music built around the log drum. It sits a little over 110 beats a minute, leaves long stretches where very little happens, and rewards a crowd willing to wait for the bassline. It reached Seoul through clips long before it reached Seoul through DJs, and it’s still easier to hear here on a phone than on a floor.
Konka in Soweto is the room the movement built for itself, and Toronto's African diaspora runs Sunday day parties that suit the tempo.
The Lockdown Streams, 2020 to 2021
In March 2020 the clubs closed, nearly everywhere, nearly at once. Berlin's venues pooled into United We Stream within days, and Boiler Room ran Streaming From Isolation from living rooms. Club Quarantine, started in Toronto, ran nightly on a video call with a door policy of a meeting link. HÖR, the tiled Berlin room, became the stream people kept open. In Seoul, a cluster of cases traced to the Itaewon clubs in early May 2020 closed the district and put the word club into the national news for the wrong reasons.
Landing here means being most yourself with the work and least yourself with the crowd, and finding that a set watched alone on a laptop was the best thing you heard that year. The criticism is that the stream cut the room out, and the room was doing a job nobody missed until it had gone, because a set played to a camera forces no decisions at all. Some people came back in 2021 less patient with strangers. It’s worth asking whether you did. Nobody could disagree with you.
What Happened To Clubs During Covid?
Most of them closed, and the sets moved to screens. Some never reopened. The rooms that did come back found a crowd that had spent a year listening alone. Seoul's version of that year is specific, because the Itaewon cluster in May 2020 made the district itself the story and the rooms there carried it for months afterwards.
Club Quarantine in Toronto was the only room a lot of people had that year.
Frequently Asked Questions
Which Era Of Dance Music Am I?
You’re one of thirteen real periods, and which one depends on six things: how much you plan, whether you serve the floor or your own idea, how deep you dig, how fast you want the peak, how social you are, and whether you face backwards or forwards. That last axis carries the most weight here. The Era Type quiz scores all six, and most of the questions aren’t about music at all.
What Are The Eras Of Dance Music?
Thirteen in this system, each with dates. The Bronx block parties, 1973 to 1979. The Paradise Garage years in New York, 1977 to 1987. Chicago house, 1984 to 1987. Detroit techno, 1987. UK acid house and rave, 1988 to 1992. Hardcore and jungle, 1992 to 1994. Goa and the psytrance diaspora in the mid 1990s. UK garage and 2 step, 1996 to 2001. The minimal and blog house split, roughly 2003 to 2009. The EDM festival decade, roughly 2010 to 2015. The streaming and algorithm era, 2015 to now. Amapiano and afro house, 2019 to now. The lockdown streams, 2020 to 2021.
When Did Dance Music Start?
It depends where you start counting. New York rooms were doing the essential thing by the early 1970s, with the Loft from 1970, the Bronx block parties from 1973 and the Paradise Garage from 1977. Dance music made on machines rather than out of other people's records starts in Chicago and Detroit in the middle of the 1980s. Korea came to all of it later and out of order, which is why a Seoul floor can hold a 1987 record and a record from last month without anybody treating the gap as strange.
What Was The Best Era Of Dance Music?
Whichever one you can name records from. The quiz refuses to rank them, because the alternative is the usual writing that decides in advance which five years counted and then defends the choice forever. The most common result is the lockdown streams at fourteen percent, with Chicago house next at ten, which isn’t the pair anybody expects.
Is There A Best Era To Land On?
No, and rarity isn’t quality. Goa and the psytrance diaspora and the EDM festival decade are the rarest results at four percent each, amapiano follows at five, and hardcore and jungle sits at six. Landing on a rare one means your answers were unusual rather than good. The Paradise Garage years, the result most people hope for, come up nine percent of the time.
Do The Eras Overlap?
Constantly, and the dates are edges rather than walls. Chicago house and Detroit techno overlap almost entirely, the streaming era was already running while the EDM decade was still being paid for, and the lockdown streams sit inside the streaming era rather than beside it. Every result gives a primary era and two secondaries for that reason, and the secondaries are usually the more useful half.
Where To Go Next
Thirteen eras, real dates, no correct answer. The quiz treats the Vegas residency decade and the Paradise Garage with equal seriousness, because pretending only one of them counts is how most writing about this music goes wrong. For the scored version, take the Era Type quiz.
This is the third of five. The DJ types and the clubber types are already up. The venues and the festivals close the series, and both quizzes are live now: venue, festival. If you want the one that started it, the DJ quiz is still the shortest way in.
Every archetype sits at The Types, and the rest are at Quizzes. For the longer history, start with Spin Through Time or the dance music tree.
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