Eurobeat


Eurobeat refers to two styles of dance music that originated in Europe: one is a British variant of Italian Eurodisco-influenced dance-pop and the other is a hi-NRG-driven form of Italo disco. Both forms were developed in the 1980s.
Eurobeat is directly related to the Japanese Para Para dance culture as it influences many song and business decisions. In the United States, Eurobeat was historically marketed as hi-NRG and for a short while shared this term with early freestyle music and Italo disco.

Characteristics

;SAW-style
A highly polished production with "musical simplicity" at its core; from bubblegum pop-like lyrics, catchy melodies, to "elementary" song structures, an average British Eurobeat song took very little time to complete. "Venus" by Bananarama and Mel & Kim's "Showing Out ", according to Waterman of SAW, were completed in a day.
;Classic Eurobeat-style
Either variant is not recognized primarily by the complexity of its lyrics. Very much like bubblegum Eurodance, Eurobeat has extremely silly or meaningless lyrics. Tempo and style varies, sometimes resembling "slower" Italo disco, sometimes "fast and happy" music like happy hardcore, with a sequenced octave bassline. Many feature guitars as a method of "sabi" or a beginning section followed by a very loud, highly technical synthesizer riff which is then repeated after the chorus. Songs usually repeat the verse, bridge, and chorus multiple times during the song. The beginning is typically like an instrumental rendition of the verse, bridge, and chorus, while the riff is a lot like an instrumental version of the chorus.

Use of the term

record producer Ian Levine's Eastbound Expressway released the single "You're a Beat" in recognition to the slower tempo of hi-NRG music emerging from Europe. Many European acts managed to break through under this new recognition, namely the likes of Modern Talking, Bad Boys Blue, Taffy, and Spagna. The term "Eurobeat" was subsequently used commercially to describe the Stock Aitken Waterman–produced hits by Dead or Alive, Bananarama, Jason Donovan, Sonia and Kylie Minogue which were heavily based on the British experience with Italo disco. During 1986–1988, it was used for specific Italian 1980s Euro disco imports, such as Sabrina Salerno, Spagna and Baltimora but was also used in the United States as a catch-all term for UK-based dance and electropop groups of the time such as Pet Shop Boys, purported to have a "European beat", hence Eurobeat. By 1989, with the advent of Eurodance and Euro house, the term was dropped in the UK.

History

United Kingdom

"The New Motown"

The trio of British record producers, songwriters, and former DJs Mike Stock, Matt Aitken, and Pete Waterman were involved in the British underground club culture, encountering the Black American soul music-focused scene called northern soul, Italian pop-Eurodisco, and sped-up Motown Sound-inspired tracks. As underground record producers, they sought to recapture the "nostalgia" of Motown Sound with a hint of campy playfulness where simplicity of musical structures, like in Italian disco, was preferred. This musical formula was proven to be successful enough to be capitalized on as they had a string of top 10 UK hits in the 1980s to the point of their version of Eurobeat becoming synonymous with British pop music as a whole.
Pete Burns of Dead or Alive regularly fought the production team over " to their production methods and concepts" which SAW were "quite firm about". Burns went on making a next album, produced by Burns and Dead or Alive drummer Steve Coy, without them, called Nude. Epic was reluctant about releasing the album but it turned out to be so successful in Japan that it was awarded the Japan Record Award Grand Prix for Best International Album of 1989 in the 'Pop' or 'Popular' Category.

Italy and Japan

"By the Italians, for the Japanese"

Meanwhile, in Japan in 1985, the term "Eurobeat" was applied to all continental-European dance music imports. These were mainly Italian and German-produced Italo disco releases. That sound became the soundtrack of the Para Para nightclub culture, that has existed since the early 1980s. Japan experienced Italo disco through the success of the German group Arabesque, which broke up in 1984. This did not prevent the release of two Italo disco-sounding singles in 1985 and 1986, produced and mixed by Michael Cretu. The later solo success of Arabesque's lead singer Sandra further introduced this sound to Japan. This attracted the attention of many Italo disco producers and by the late 80s while the Germans faded out of the outdated Italo disco scene and went for other newly rising popular scenes, mainly trance, the Italians created a new sound especially for Japan, but virtually unknown in the rest of the world. In Japan, this music is called "Eurobeat", "Super Eurobeat", and "Eurobeat Flash".
, including Lugagnano, Brescia and Mantua
, a discothèque located in Tokyo, was considered a mecca of Eurobeat during the 1990s and 2000s.
In the early 1990s when Eurobeat's popularity was gradually decreasing in Japan, two Japanese men, the owner and a managing director of Avex, a small import record shop at the time, decided to release a compilation CD. They went to Italy and met Giancarlo Pasquini later known as Dave Rodgers, then a member of the Italo disco band Aleph, and eventually released the compilation CD, the first Super Eurobeat, which proved an instant success and re-sparked Eurobeat's popularity in Japan. Avex also collaborated with foundational Eurobeat labels A-Beat C, Time, Delta long after Eurobeat's mainstream popularity peak.
Eurobeat's sound is its main link to its Italo disco origins, where it was just one of many different experiments in pure electronic dance. There are certain synth instruments that recur across the entire genre: a sequenced octave bass, characteristic are the energetic and heavy use of synths, distinctive brass and harp sounds, and tight, predictable percussion in the background. These sounds are layered with vocals and natural instruments into complex, ever-shifting melodies that, at their best, burst with energy.
The anime series Initial D, based on the manga by Shuichi Shigeno, uses Eurobeat music regularly in its episodes during racing scenes between the characters, and because of this it has come to the attention of some anime fans outside Japan. The series as well as the videogames use a large playlist of Eurobeat songs which also became memes in a lot of cases. In the movie version of this anime there’s no Eurobeat and for this reason, it has been criticized by the fans. The songs used in the films are instead modern-day J-rock songs.
In 1998, Bemani, a branch of the video game company Konami made a hit video dance machine, Dance Dance Revolution. The game acquired Eurobeat songs from the Dancemania compilation series from Toshiba EMI. Over time, DDR has featured Eurobeat songs on-and-off in their songlists. However, their number has dwindled due to efforts to make DDR more marketable to North American markets. Currently, there has been a push to add more Eurobeat into DDR, most recently with the addition of Super Eurobeat tracks in the latest arcade release, Dance Dance Revolution X2. Other music games in Konami's lineup feature a large number of Eurobeat tracks, including Beatmania, Beatmania IIDX, StepMania, and jubeat. The popularity of the genre also led Konami to create a Para Para game; ParaParaParadise.

Subculture

J-Euro

Subsequently there have been three types of music called "J-Euro" ;

Para Para

One of the dance moves Eurobeat spawned was para para, a type of Eurobeat music-inspired Japanese youth social dance performed in unison.

Themes

Yet another characteristic of Eurobeat is recurring song themes. Common themes include:
Eurobeat also has notoriety for name recognition, lifting titles from popular songs and using them as the names of Eurobeat tracks e.g. "Like a Virgin", "Goodbye Yellow Brick Road", "What Is Love", "Dancing Queen", "Don't Stand So Close", "Station to Station" and "Spark in the Dark". Artists usually adopt different stage names according to the mood of each song, or depending on who wrote their lyrics. For instance, Ennio Zanini has stated on the SCP Music website that he goes by the name of "Fastway" on songs which are more upbeat and sprinkled with high-pitched female backing vocals, and goes by "Dusty" on his more "serious" tracks.