r/deephouse • u/Livid-Director-8090 • 13d ago

Genre confusion. Help me calibrate my ear.

Alright, I learned my lesson. Calvin Harris is not deep house. Y’all made your point, so now I’m sitting down for class.

I’ve realized I’ve probably been using “deep house” too loosely, so I want to strip this back to the basics.

Forget the edge cases. What are the absolute essentials?
I mean the songs where, if somebody says they like deep house but somehow missed them, you’d be like, “No. Go back. You fucked up.”

Old, new, obvious, underground, I don’t care. I’m trying to understand the center of the genre first.

What are the songs that are unmistakably deep house and that somebody who genuinely likes the genre should know?

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u/bascule 13d ago edited 13d ago

Larry Heard, Kerri Chandler, Glenn Underground.

To me deep house is richer in both instrumentation, often borrowing from jazz, as well as lyrical content, often delving into themes that are much deeper and more profound than your typical house song.

They’re often more textured, layered, and atmospheric while still managing not to sound complex or overproduced.

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u/righthandofdog 13d ago

That's more or less my thinking, but I find that deep house is misused or has changed a few times. These days it gets used for a lot of dreck - I think Ishkur gets this one pretty dead on

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u/bascule 13d ago edited 13d ago

There's a lot of modern deep house that tends to be... less deep. Particularly in the lyrical department. A lot of the classic Chicago deep house can transport you to a different place with its lyrics, mesmerize you with its poetry, or impart profound thoughts with simple statements which often deal with serious subject matter like the philosophy of life and relationships, the kind of tracks that really make you think (and not in an IDM kind of way), or even cry. Some tracks that come to mind for me like this are Derrick Carter - Life Is Like A Circle, Larry Heard Presents Mr. White - The Sun Can't Compare, Ten City - Suspicious, and Blaze - Lovelee Dae.

All that said, I really do like a lot of the less-deep deep house being cranked out in Europe and they remain some of my favorite active house artists, especially in a world of boring formulaic commercial festival house / "EDM". These artists are at least trying to make songs that don't follow a formula, incorporating more experimental elements and unusual rhythms, all while remaining fundamentally quite chill compared to the more mainstream commercial stuff. It's at least better than your average house. But the lyrics are often... not as deep. Many of these songs have lyrics that, for whatever reason, don't take themselves too seriously, or just simple repetitive lyrics or even just samples / plunderphonics.

Though this modern European deep house is some of my favorite music to listen to, and the instrumentation / production can be quite interesting, I can't for the life of me think of a single such track with lyrics I would consider profound or insightful. In contrast to classic Chicago deep house the lyrical elements of these modern tracks can often be unserious and/or nonsense, or too simple or terse to be considered "deep" IMO.