boomboomboomboom

we have klubb exit with hard techno. then suddenly we have pop at lilith club. or synthpop at klubb retro. what the actual fuck black planet?

on paper none of this belongs in the same building. but stand in any of these rooms at 2am and your body is doing the same thing. moving to a kick drum that lands on every beat. four times a bar. over and over. it does not stop.

that is four on the floor. it is the thing under all of it. and it is more than a sound. it is a culture.

what it actually is

a bar of modern dance music usually has four beats per bar. four on the floor means the kick drum lands on all four of them. one two three four. every bar. the same.

so basically: boom. boom. boom. boom.

that is the whole idea. there is nothing clever about it.

the name is just a description. the kick is the drum that sits on the floor. you work it with your foot. you put four in every bar. four on the floor.

where it comes from

a drummer called earl young couldn’t get his song to move. so he got a clever idea. put a kick on every beat, and a hi hat pattern on top.

this is that song.

it moved. number one on the soul chart, top ten pop, a million copies sold. this is the beat disco was built on. then everyone copied it. donna summer. the bee gees. abba. for a few years the kick on every beat was the sound of the whole world.

they tried to kill it

1979. a baseball stadium in chicago. fans are told to bring disco records to be blown up between games. they fill a crate with vinyl and detonate it. thousands storm the field. it is sold as a joke.

it was not a joke. disco was black, it was latin, it was gay, it was working class. it was the music of outcasts.

the crowd burning it were rock fans. one disco musician saw the footage the next day and said it looked like a book burning.

you cannot blow up a beat. it went into the machines instead.

the pulse was already going electronic. in 1977 giorgio moroder built donna summer’s i feel love almost entirely from a synthesizer. kraftwerk were making music that sounded like beautiful robots.

the machines could hold the kick forever now, colder and harder than a person ever could.

then europe got hold of it. germany and belgium, the start of the 80s. bands like daf and front 242 stripped the beat down to muscle and called it body music. four on the floor for the body, not the head.

dark, mechanical, built for a room full of people moving as one. that scene is our direct ancestor.

detroit turned the same kick into techno. germany turned it into trance, faster and more hypnotic. and it ended up here. on a friday. at black planet.

why almost everything we play is built on it

this is not a rule we enforce. it is just where the gravity pulls.

here is why it pulls.

it is democratic. you do not need lessons. you do not need to know what a bar is. your body finds the beat in about two seconds because it lands in the same place every time. a trained dancer and a person who has never danced are equal in front of it. that is rare, and it is the whole point of our floors.

it is not about showing off. there is no right way to move to it. stomp, sway, barely move at all. nobody is doing choreography. the beat is not asking you to look good. it is asking you to stop thinking.

it is collective. when the kick is steady the whole room locks to one pulse. everyone’s weight drops on the same beat. for a few hours a few hundred people share one rhythm like one heartbeat. that is the opposite of being alone, which is the actual reason we do any of this.

it is healing. not in a hippie way. it takes a room full of people who would never otherwise share a space, different bodies, different identities, and locks them into one collective unifying beat. that does something to a person.

a former neo nazi hate group leader said he was deradicalized by raves and house music. after he left the group, the thing that filled the hole was a chicago dancefloor at four in the morning, thousands of people of every background, all of them moving to the same kick.

it dissolves you. the repetition is the medicine. nothing surprises you, so you stop tracking the song, so you stop tracking yourself. people call it trance for a reason. you go somewhere. you come back when the lights do.

it does not center anyone. not the coolest dancer, not the dj. it sits under everything else. you do not stand and watch it. you do not film it. the booth is not the show. the room is the show.

it is outcast technology. the people who kept this beat alive were pushed out of every other room. they built their own rooms and the pulse was the floor they built on. by outcasts, for outcasts is not a line we made up. it is the history of this drum pattern.

where we break it

we are not purists. but the exceptions are small. we have a few tracks, not many, at klubb retro that might be rnb or hip hop. at climax there are post punk tracks that might not be four on the floor.

none of that breaks anything. the gravity is still there. by the end of the night the room falls back to the kick on every beat, because that is where the bodies want to be. but the heartbeat of black planet is four on the floor. and black planet was made in this culture.

it has not stopped

a drummer sped up a ballad in 1973 and put a kick on every beat. fifty years later you are standing on a concrete floor in the south of stockholm and the same beat is coming up through your shoes.

it did not stop once in between. it traveled through bodies in history. bodies similar to yours.

come feel it.

ps. someone loved this beat enough to name a whole track after it. 1995. german eurodance. press play.