The first thing to know about bloghouse is that, when it all began, nobody called it bloghouse. During its sweaty, neon-slathered 2000s reign you might’ve called it electro, or indie dance, or maybe you didn’t know what the hell to call it. The point is that bloghouse wasn’t a traditional music genre. Was it a fashion trend? The gateway drug to EDM? The mid-aughts equivalent of hair metal? Music was at the core of the thing, but more than being unified by any specific sound, bloghouse was about how you found it: on MP3 blogs, the Hype Machine aggregator, or auto-playing from Myspace pages.
The sound was like obscenity—hard to define, but you’d know it when you heard it. Here’s a brief list of some of bloghouse’s super-stylized subsects: the Ed Banger roster’s dafter, punker French house; banging electro mercenaries à la Mstrkrft and the Bloody Beetroots; the chiptune rave nihilism of Crystal Castles and HEALTH; rock bands who took the “Losing My Edge” parable about selling your guitars to buy turntables literally, from Simian Mobile Disco to Van She Tech; “nu rave” crossovers like Klaxons and Does It Offend You, Yeah?, though preferably in remixed form; just about any group of three to four Australians with v-necks and a synth keyboard; Robyn-esque electro-pop like Yelle and Ladyhawke; the dirty bass lines of fidget house circa Crookers and Switch; nostalgic ’80s dreamwave from College and Kavinsky; rappers in skinny jeans and Creative Recreations; pre-Bieber Diplo; a Calvin Harris who sang live; anything remixed by Erol Alkan or 2 Many DJs; mashups presented as a totally legitimate art form; whatever American Apparel was currently stocking at the register; Kid Cudi “Day ‘n’ Nite”; Kid Cudi “Day ‘n’ Nite (Crookers Remix)”; and exactly one Kanye West record.
In the early years of the new millennium, clear-cut divisions between “mainstream” music and the indie “underground” were steadily eroding. If you wanted to point to the moment that distinction became passé, you could consider The O.C.’s 2005 second season, in which Modest Mouse and the Killers played at a fictional Newport Beach venue, and Daft Punk’s “Technologic” and LCD Soundsystem’s “Daft Punk Is Playing at My House” soundtracked a house party. Also under revision: how music was being found in the first place. Deep in the post-Napster age of torrents, zShare links, and iPod shuffles, the idea of staying in one lane started to feel played out.
“When you could download whatever and go crazy, it seemed kind of dated to just be into one scene,” says Greg Gillis, better known as Girl Talk, a biomedical engineer turned college campus party-starter whose 2006 album Night Ripper almost singlehandedly put mashups—supersongs made up of parts of two or more songs—on the mainstream map.
Gillis played in noise bands as a teenager in the ’90s, but he also had a sincere love for Top 40 bangers. “There was a classic ’90s indie snob thing where a lot of people really looked down on pop and sometimes rap music. I was in this noise band, and we were smashing televisions at shows and lighting up fireworks at the audience, clearing rooms all the time, and the fact that we were playing Britney Spears was just one aspect of that.” While rule-breaking was part of the promise of the underground, the scene came with a taste code that carried its own set of boundaries. “I wanted to smash those rules if possible,” said Gillis. “Not just for the sake of smashing rules, but because I actually liked the music we were sampling.”
At the time, bloghouse felt revolutionary; in retrospect, it presented a now-defunct version of the internet as a utopia for culture and community. There were no corporate streaming services employing algorithms to create the illusion of “discovery,” and social media had yet to usher in competitive personal branding. The Man hadn’t yet figured out how to bounce back from the post-Napster CD sales crash or how to monetize the untamed digital landscape. For the moment, the power was in the hands of the people—the bloggers, DJs, bands, promoters, and bored kids for whom finding new tunes and reading about other people’s parties felt like a day well spent.
