Defending the Indefensible: How Blog House was Secretly Brilliant

Defending the Indefensible is a semi-regular series which sees us trying to find merit in the abject, the terrible, and the deathly dull. We don't believe that there's such a thing as "guilty pleasure", so this series sets out to prove that even the most shocking and schlocky corners of dance music can find a home in somebody's heart.

Remember blogs? They were about before Tumblr turned up and turfed all but the most dedicated off their Wordpresses, and were more likely to be thematically concerned with Sarah Records or late 80s German centre backs than otherkins and sitcom reaction .gifs. Blogging, back then, felt adventurous, felt like the creation and cultivation of a uniquely online personality. There was something exciting about the self-involvement and self-deception involved in thinking that anyone else in the world wanted to read your writing about old video games, or the socio-economic dynamics at play in Birds of a Feather.

Blogging wasn't all purple prose and potential book deals. Some people, quite a lot of people actually, used the intellectual expanse of the blogosphere to simply link out to records they liked. This was how blog house was born. Let's roll back to 2006 to witness that birth.

2006 was an odd one. It was the International Year of Deserts and Desertification, Saddam Hussein, James Brown and Steve Irwin died, bird flu flapped it's way round the globe, and clubs from Birmingham to Beirut were stuffed to the gills with barely legal revellers losing their shit to blog house. For those too young or too old to remember, blog house was the name given to a nebulous set of records that shared an inherently garish visual and sonic aesthetic. The canon, as it were, comprised of heavily compressed tunes that combined grindingly dull electrohouse with the worst of Tuesday night indie club fare. It was big, brashy, bold and utterly, utterly boring: music for walking haircuts and SuperSuper readers. The name stemmed from the method of circulation that sent Au Revoir Simone remixes through bedrooms all over the world. And you know what? It was secretly brilliant.

Back then it seemed like the humble blog — the extended MySpace bulletin for the terminally self-involved — had the capacity to change how we consumed culture forever. It felt, for a bit, like control had been wrestled from those who traditionally held power. The mass had negated the need for the elite. What actually happened was that a load of narcissistic teenagers played up insecure personas and blatted out a few sentences on how amazing the new Is Tropical single is before mentioning a girl from sixth form and repeatedly typing 'zomg'. The blog is a dead medium. Not even Carles could save it now.

This isn't some rose-tinted walk down the boulevard of the internet when it was all fields and trees when I was a lad, honestly. The passing of time can, and often does, reveal home truths we thought we'd buried down at the end of the garden, next to the budgie and the hamsters and the deflated footballs. I went down the yard last night, came back with muddy knees and an armful of Digitalism 12"s and, oddly, I couldn't be happier.

The joy of these records stems from their refusal to even begin contemplating the fact that life isn't an endless parade of fashion show afterparties, cocaine binges with artists from France and a never ending array of very expensive, very brightly coloured trainers. It's a fantasy I'm happy to buy into. I can pretend that Justice were true, genuine, very real visionaries rather than two greasy blokes from France who looked in good need of a wash, who somehow made a career — however brief it may have been — from fusing the dunderheaded excesses of 70s fuzz-rock to the dunderheaded excess of 00s boilerplate electro. Let us praise once famous men.

There was something luridly appealing about the music that the likes of Kitsune and Ed Banger blapped out week after week, something disgustingly intriguing about combination of indie disco ease and sleekly synthetic bump and flex that it came smothered in. It was McDonalds music, Burger King bangers for an Adderal-addled generation who demanded that culture was immediately consumable. Songs like "Don't Go" by Puzique or "Pogo" by Digitalism or "Work On You" by MSTRKRFT weren't meant to be poured over and preserved: they existed fleetingly, momentarily rocking to the top of the Hype Machine charts before disappearing into the ether like so many Mediafire files lost in the rain.

It was a time when it was exciting to live virtually, if you can imagine such a thing. We changed MySpace themes and profile songs willy nilly, each deft re-calibration of HTML and CSS a radical shift in who we were, or rather, who we wanted to be in the world. That soundtrack, fizzy, effervescent, thudding, tingling as it was, was a perfect fit. It didn't pertain to any kind of permanence. It was, and I know this word seems to have fallen off our collective lips as the world seems to get worse and worse, day on day…fun. This was fun music that knew it was fun, that wanted to be fun, that probably soundtracked all the fun parties none of us went to because we were too busy having fun on the internet.

I for one, want fun back on the agenda. You'll catch me in the dancefloor, dropping Heartsrevolution remixes like it's 2006 all over again and there's no tomorrow. Join me, BAPE jacket and all, down the front at White Heat that exists only in my mind, forever pretending it was the Rex Club.

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