Photo - People dancing at a MoMA.P.S.I event featuring HOUSE MUSIC DJS spinning in the grounds of a Public School in Long Island City in Queens, New York. 'MoMA' stands for THE MUSEUM OF MODERN ART in New York City. That amazing museum has been sponsoring HOUSE MUSIC festivals in Long Island City for over 25 years. *We mean 'HOUSE' as the music very often referred to as HOUSE MUSIC. HOUSE MUSIC is often described as "a steady four-on-the-floor beat, a tempo of 110 to 130 beats per minute, and prominent kick drums." Such a technical description ignores the underground urban feel of a music that is a seperate genre of DISCO like that of REGGAE. A reduction and streamlining of AMERICAN DISCO, HOUSE MUSIC has it's own unique culture. Most sources confirm that the first HOUSE MUSIC recording to be made commercially available came out in 1984. It was the JESSE SAUNDERS 12" single of "On And On" by JESSI SAUNDERS. Many sources insist that New York City area discos were spinning HOUSE MUSIC tracks earlier than that. There are numerous explanations about the beginning of HOUSE MUSIC. The two most popular explanations are quite different from one another. Some sources claim that HOUSE MUSIC started when Frankie Knuckles played New York area underground DISCO like that of VISUAL and LOOSE JOINTS, EURODISCO, and classic AMERICAN DISCO and MONTREAL SOUND in the Chicago disco 'The Warehouse' in the early 1980's and he inspired young minds to create comparable music. That music would eventually be called HOUSE MUSIC, in memory of The Warehouse. Others don't dispute any of those events. They claim that the word was actually an underground acronym : H.O.U.S.E. meaning - Homosexuals Of Unusual Sexual Experiences! They maintain that long before Frankie Knuckles played in the Warehouse there was an underground movement in the streets of Chicago with it's own secret acronym directly tied to the struggle of the Black American LGBT community. As H.O.U.S.E. grew into a bold new counterculture involving straight people, other mythology about it quietly became acceptable to the originals from the beginning. That was only because they actually knew how it all really started. One record company executive of a group of Chicago area labels specializing in HOUSE MUSIC and HIP HOP gave us a cassette in 1989 containing 30 minutes of a radio show that was aired on a Chicago area campus radio station (like CKCU.FM) back in 1977. It actually ended off with the station going off the air for the night. Those 30 minutes were filled with part of a radio show which the host called the "House Jacking Show". That executive said she had recorded the shows as a teenager listening to late night HOUSE MUSIC shows, insisting that HOUSE MUSIC started in the late 1970's. Music on that tape we didn't recognize except for a MOORES BROTHERS BAND intrumental and the original LP version of "Don't Leave Me This Way" by HAROLD MELVIN & THE BLUENOTES. How and when it really started is not as important as is it's impact. HOUSE MUSIC would quickly spread to Detroit and beyond New York. It was an explosion of popularity of HOUSE MUSIC that continuously spread across North America. After a couple of years there was HOUSE MUSIC being recorded in England, Mexico, France, Italy, Spain and Germany. After 35 years there are over 60 different styles and sub-genres of HOUSE MUSIC that have been played in discos like ACID HOUSE, NEW YORK UNDERGROUND, BOOTY HOUSE, AFRICAN HOUSE, DEEP HOUSE, NEW JERSEY SOUL, UK GARAGE, SPEED GARAGE, HIP HOUSE, and NABI There are also at least 16 different styles of HARD HOUSE,145 different styles of PROGRESSIVE HOUSE, 260 different styles of TECH HOUSE, 80 different styles of DISCO HOUSE, 75 different styles of ELECTRO HOUSE and over 210 different styles of TRIBAL HOUSE. These numbers, however outrageous they may appear to be, are very conservative estimates. One source claimed that they are over 80 different styles of TRIBAL HOUSE in Mexico alone! HOUSE MUSIC is being recorded in over 70 countries in dozens of different languages. Language barriers prevent us from accurately reporting on the variations of HOUSE MUSIC in some markets like INDIA and THAILAND. All told a conservative estimate suggests that at least 379,000 HOUSE MUSIC recordings that have been made commercially available since the release of the JESSE SAUNDERS 12" single of "On And On" in 1984. Some sources suggest that HOUSE MUSIC has had a greater impact on popular music than all of the different genres of the standard DISCO of the 1970's and early 1980's. By the mid 1990's much of the disco industry began calling everything (except for DRUM & BASS and HIP HOP) HOUSE. Even early NUDISCO was just automaticly called HOUSE. This overall classification irritated TECHNO artists and DJS. The attempts of TECHNO people to insist upon seperating from it was further complicated by the rise of PROGRESSIVE HOUSE and the various styles of TECH HOUSE. It was difficult for labels to market TRANCE and TECHNO as unique music without wholesalers and import/export companies automaticly classifying and selling them as HOUSE.