Gabba
Gabba (pronounced gahbagh in the Dutch dialect from the city The Hague = Den Haag) also internationally used as the slang version of the word gabber which is mostly used (pronounced gahbuhr in Dutch —the "g" is pronounced as SAMPA /x/) is a type of techno music also known as hardcore house the style was born in Rotterdam, distinguished by the loud and often aggressive sound.
A weird freaky sound can make a good gabber track, which usually has either a scary or a happy mood. The music style contrasts with Happy hardcore.
The essence of the gabber sound is for example a distorted Roland TR-909 bass drum sound, which is overdriven to the point where it becomes a square wave and makes a recognizably melodic tone. The typical gabber track is from 160 to 220 BPM (beats per minute).
The gabber genre has a number of different styles within it. Besides the regular gabber there is the very fast terror kind of gabber and the more dark industrial types.
Also what some would call a hard acid house song, typically with Roland 303 resonance sounds but with a loud over modulated bass drum, would fit perfectly in a gabber's music collection.
It is a misconception that all gabber is simple and loud music.
The style later turned out (somewhat limited by the fan's taste) to be a creative style, in which complex rhythmic and melodic combinations are very common, unlike most regular modern dance music which is more meant to be simple and easy listening.
In a lot of gabber, melodies and also the drums have a lot of filter effects, which adds a lot of richness to the music. Gabber has grown into a serious style of music where the producer does not hold back his experimentation as much as in other styles.
Gabber originated in Rotterdam, the Netherlands; Rotterdam is the holy shrine of hardcore house music / gabber. Many consider Rotterdam Termination Source's Poing! (1992) to be the archetypal gabber track. The record shop Midtown in the Nieuwe Binnenweg of Rotterdam is one of the shrines of Gabber music. Fans dress in Australian and Cavello track suits, Nike sport shoes, army boots, bomber jackets, and a lot of them would have shaven heads. Female fans often kept a small tail of hair on the back of their heads. Later, in 1997 and beyond, their clothing style more and more changed and brands like Fred Perry and Lonsdale were added to their outfits.
Because of the shaven heads and the clothing preference some people confuse gabbers with skinheads or neo-nazis, but this could not be more wrong. While some feelings of nationalism were quite strong among some gabber groups (bomber jacks were often decorated with Dutch flags), there was no hatred of foreigners or racial idiology involved at all with most of the gabbers. However the gabber culture was falsely demonized which resulted in that a lot of people started to turn their backs on gabber life,only for the hardcore die hard gabbers(some hardened by all the bad criticism on them) to remain, in which
the more extreme types appeared somewhat more dominant in the scene then before.It is true that some people in a part of this scene are more like gabber/skinheads (with various ideologies) but as a whole the culture of gabbers and gabber as a term should not be generalized as being such. A lot of different kinds of people are just into it because they love the music.
The style started in the late 1980s, but some claim that it was diluted by happy hardcore and, for hardcore fans, by commercialisation.
After the airing of what were felt by some as humiliating video clips, some gabbers felt they were being made fun of and were discriminated against.
The name gabber is somewhat less used these days to describe this music style.
Many would now prefer to call the style hardcore or other terms and to find someone that calls themselves a "gabber" is also more rare, they would normally describe the style of music they are into.
After surviving underground for a number of years, in 2002 the style became more popular again in the Netherlands.
The Gabber scene is often associated with the use of speed, ecstasy and other drugs. This was not so good for the gabber image but one has to take into account that this was not especially a gabber scene problem. The use of Ecstacy might have been more popular in the mellow house scene.
With parties lasting 24 hours. The commercial organisation ID&T helped a lot in making the music popular by organising parties and selling merchandise.
Styles of related music are hardcore techno, terrorcore, happy hardcore, Bouncy Techno and Speedcore. In the early 2000's Hardstyle can be considered a derivative from gabber and hardtrance.
The term originated in the Netherlands, and is derived from the Yiddish word gabber meaning friend. Apocryphally, one of these gabbers wanted to enter a club in Amsterdam, where the bouncer said, "No gabber, you can't come in here."
