Diva house or handbag house is an

anthemic "Anthemic" is a song by live electronic music project Magnetic Man. It is the fourth single to be released from the debut album ''Magnetic Man'' and was released as a digital download on 22 July 2011. For its release, grime rapper P Money was adde ...

subgenre of house music that became most popular in gay clubs during the second half of the 1990s. ''The Encyclopedia of Contemporary British Culture'' defines handbag house as having "prominent female vocals, breakdowns, and a proliferation of piano 'stabs'." Modern diva house compositions use synth stabs and

four on the floor ''Four on the Floor'' is a 1999 compilation album consisting of songs by bands on Panic Button Records. It features four tracks by four of the labels bands, Screeching Weasel, Moral Crux A moral (from Latin ''morālis'') is a message that is c ...

rhythms.

Background

The term "diva house" was in use as early as July 1992, when '' Billboard'' magazine described "What Are We Doin'" by Dee Dee Simone as "iron-lunged diva-house." It is known for booming unisex vocals, sometimes

sampled Sample or samples may refer to: Base meaning * Sample (statistics), a subset of a population – complete data set * Sample (signal), a digital discrete sample of a continuous analog signal * Sample (material), a specimen or small quantity of so ...

from other recordings. Such samples come from

soul In many religious and philosophical traditions, there is a belief that a soul is "the immaterial aspect or essence of a human being". Etymology The Modern English noun '' soul'' is derived from Old English ''sāwol, sāwel''. The earliest atte ...

, disco,

gospel Gospel originally meant the Christian message (" the gospel"), but in the 2nd century it came to be used also for the books in which the message was set out. In this sense a gospel can be defined as a loose-knit, episodic narrative of the words a ...

recordings and even

show tunes A show tune is a song originally written as part of the score of a work of musical theatre or musical film, especially if the piece in question has become a standard, more or less detached in most people's minds from the original context. T ...

performed by singers like Bette Midler,

Judy Garland Judy Garland (born Frances Ethel Gumm; June 10, 1922June 22, 1969) was an American actress and singer. While critically acclaimed for many different roles throughout her career, she is widely known for playing the part of Dorothy Gale in '' The ...

, Liza Minnelli, and other

gay icons A gay icon is a public figure who is regarded as a cultural icon of some members of the LGBT community. The most widely recognized gay icons are often actresses and singers who garnered large LGBT fanbases, such as Judy Garland, Madonna, Diana ...

. This bombastic genre can include songs performed by dance specialists as well as club remixes of pop songs by singers such as Patti LaBelle, Aretha Franklin, Mariah Carey, and

Whitney Houston Whitney Elizabeth Houston (August 9, 1963 – February 11, 2012) was an American singer and actress. Nicknamed " The Voice", she is one of the bestselling music artists of all time, with sales of over 200 million records worldwide. Houston i ...

. The term "handbag house" appears to be particularly popular on British dancefloors and refers to the notion of a group of female club-goers dancing around a pile of their

handbags A handbag, commonly known as a purse or pocketbook in North American English, is a handled medium-to-large bag used to carry personal items. Purse, handbag or pouch The term "purse" originally referred to a small bag for holding coins. In man ...

. Dance culture's usage of the word 'handbag house' started life as a derogatory term. In the 1990s, as gay clubs and gay culture became more mainstream so did house music. The accessibility of diva house lead to the mainstreaming of gay club music. In the UK especially, handbag house became emblematic of the clubbing culture. According to music historians Bill Brewster and Frank Broughton, by the mid-1990s handbag house had helped to make clubbing into a "mainstream leisure activity." With the mainstreaming of gay culture in the 1990s, "diva" was the word that bound house music to the gay dance scene, which was previously only defined by

Italo disco Italo disco (variously capitalized, and sometimes hyphenated as Italo-disco) is a music genre which originated in Italy in the late 1970s and was mainly produced in the early 1980s. Italo disco evolved from the then-current underground dance, p ...

compositions. Music critic Simon Reynolds asserts that handbag house was "initially a disparaging term, coined by condescending cognoscenti vis-à-vis the anthemic, chart-penetrating house tunes that allegedly appealed to women, and above all to the folk-mythic construct of Sharon and Tracy." According to electronic music producer

Ewan Pearson Ewan Pearson (born 1 April 1972) is an English electronic music producer/remixer who works under various aliases including Maas, Sulky Pup, Villa America, World of Apples, and Dirtbox. He is also in Partial Arts with Al Usher. He has remixed ...

and academic Jeremy Gilbert, "handbag house" is often derided as "plastic disco" by dance music fans who prefer "the more esoteric sound of musics which eschew the 'mainstream' musical priorities of melody and verbal language." The mainstream appeal of handbag house caused underground dance music purists to flock to the spin-off genres of hardbag,

progressive house Progressive house is a subgenre of house music. The progressive house style emerged in the early 1990s. It initially developed in the United Kingdom as a natural progression of American and European house music of the late 1980s.Gerard, Morgan; ...

, deep house, and garage house. Sociologist Dunja Brill argues that criticism of handbag house carries a "misogynist slant in club cultural representations of the denigrated mainstream of 'Handbag House' against which Ravers define their subculture." Brill maintains that bias against handbag house "is expressed most clearly in a femininisation of the denigrated 'mainstream' of pop culture against which subcultures define themselves."

References

{{House music-footer 20th-century music genres LGBT-related music House music genres

Background

See also

References