I miss the 90ties and Gabber

I love this one… Brand new and also Dutch (N Vitral is from Rotterdam now)
Crazy tune!

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Interesting! Did people adhering to this subculture also shave their heads and wear tracksuits and nike’s?

It wasn’t quite the same style wise, more Adidas than the Australian stuff the Rotterdam geezers were wearing but the sunglasses were the same.

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Nope, the hardcore scene was pretty big in our city as well. Actually, the word gabber was invented in Amsterdam. In Amsterdam you had the Multigroove parties while Parkzicht emerged around the same time in Rotterdam. Later, obviously, IDNT took over as the major organizer and daughter organization Q-Dance (also Amsterdam based) is currently one of the biggest organizers of these parties.

Here is a nice little minidocu for you :slight_smile:

and another one, based on the Hemkade 48, another legendary hardcore venue:

I also remember rivalry between Gabbers and Skaters. That was bit difficult for me, because I was both :smile: and listened to both Hip-Hop and Gabber. That is actually quite a fitting combination, because a lot of the famous Hardcore DJs have a hip-hop background and there are a lot of hip-hop samples to be found in (early) hardcore.

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Haha amazing! I was wondering what happened to all those old gabbers these days. I never knew Amsterdam had a big gabber scene.

I was born in the late 80’s so I guess I was too young to really experience the gabber hype. Nobody in my school was a gabber, there were some skaters but most kids were into 2pac back then. There were a lot of stories about gabbers beating up skaters and the other way around in afterschool brawls between certain highschools though… did you experience any of that?

Well, one of the main things that happened was that in the late 90s early 2000s, the huge influx of “mainstream” people, the bad reputation the scene got in the media because of racism at parties (which was definitely a big problem, not so much in Amsterdam though because the Ajax hooligans wouldn’t tolerate it) and all the drugs (that, those hooligans did allow and facilitate :wink: ultimately caused the popularity to drop dramatically.

What also happened is that Hardstyle was born around 2000-2001 and this actually became the much more popular harder style of dance (a lot of DJs switched as well, think Dana, Pavo and others). For a couple of years, hardcore sort of went underground again until its popularity rose again in the mid 2000s.

By now, there are many subgenres (and Hardstyle is now basically slow hardcore with the same distorted kicks) and you really see a difference in audience depend on which parties you go to. With my 37 years I am one of the youngest when I visit Multigroove, but definitely in the senior category on parties like Thunderdome.

I didn;t experience any sort of violence between gabbers and skaters. There was definitely violence on hardcore parties though. Clashes between hooligan groups, Amsterdam hooligans beating up neo-nazis, there was quite bit of that. However, overall, I always experienced it as a very friendly and tight community. In that sense, I really associate it with the origin of the word Gabber (which basically means friend as you probably know)

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Thanks for this history lesson man! I hadn’t really thought about gabber for a long time before reading this thread, in my mind it’s vaguely connected to a long gone era when things were better and life was simple. It’s funny that the word gabber is known internationally because of these guys.

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Most welcome, I have a lot of great memories related to this music and these parties and still have a special connection to the music, so I love to reminisce about these things :slight_smile:

You know what, i will just keep learning from your OT hip-hop beats in return :wink:

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Great reads here! Thank you!

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Well that’s the one I was thinking of.

Nice one, that was doing my head in

I love these pictures from Ellie Uyttenbroek and Ari Versluis. It’s a project called Exactitudes that went on for decades I believe, they might still be at it. They have a book called Exactitudes, not just gabber, many subcultures.

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  1. I miss it too
  2. I stumbled over this the other day and instantly got a huge smile and flashback
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Awesome! that is the one!

Obvious troll is obvious :laughing:

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Days of Thunder! I was there in 92 and it was magic!

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I agree with above, no need to miss it, this was released some days ago.
And I just discovered this piece of art from 2018 from 90s hero tellurian:

Nice 90s mix from him:

But for me as owner of newer generation mackie this is hard to watch…

Haha, I started a bit later. I was 7 in 1992 :slight_smile: Must have been awesome!

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Oeeh! def gonna check these out. Cenobite is one of my favorite labels. I still listen to this set quite often. Being there was magical!

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Not really a gabber kind of guy. But did like this minimal beauty when John Peel gave it plenty of airplay back in the early 90s. It had quite a lot of mainstream attention, this one, didnt it? Which is odd for a track quite so brutal and out there.