Where hardcore began: Rotterdam, 1989–1993

Rotterdam is a working port. Containers, shipyards, the largest harbour in Europe, and about 655,000 people, which is roughly the size of Okayama. An hour away, Amsterdam had the canals, the galleries, and in 1990 it had the better parties as well: house and techno, tasteful, the kind of thing people flew in for.

Rotterdam had had enough of that.

What it did about it is the reason almost everything in the harder styles exists: hardstyle, rawstyle, frenchcore, uptempo. The music is called hardcore. Not the punk genre of the same name, but hardcore techno, built on a distorted kick drum, at 150 BPM or way faster. It was put together in about four years, on purpose, by a city that wanted to be the opposite of the one up the coast.

It started in a big old house in a city park. From December 1989, DJ Rob took over Friday nights at Parkzicht, and what came out of that room was fast, rough and distorted, built on a kick drum that sounds like it is coming apart. Rob Fabrie, who records as Waxweazle, explains it simply: "it was hard-edged because of the Rotterdam spirit: we are not bullshitting around."

Amsterdam noticed, and was not impressed. Asked around 1990 about the noisy scene down the road, an Amsterdam DJ said they were just a bunch of gabbers having fun. Gabber is Amsterdam slang, by way of Yiddish, for mate. He did not mean it kindly.

Rotterdam's answer came back on a record. Paul Elstak founded Rotterdam Records in 1992, and on the first Euromasters release he had a line cut into the run-out groove, the blank ring at the centre of a record where the music stops and the needle circles:

Gabber zijn is geen schande. It is no disgrace to be a gabber.

They took the insult and wore it. Thirty-five years later it is still what the subculture calls itself.

1992 was the year the rest of it stopped being a local problem too. Rotterdam Termination Source's "Poing" went to number one in the Netherlands and Denmark, which put a hardcore record in the national charts. And on 4 December, Elstak and DJ Rob launched a night at Parkzicht called A Nightmare in Rotterdam, which grew too big for the house almost immediately and moved to the Energiehal, a hall built for ten times the crowd.

The uniform arrived after the music, not with it. Ilja Reiman, who ran Amsterdam's Multigroove parties, remembers gabbers who "had long hair and dressed in nice white shirts and housey clothes." Then, in his words: "Bald heads and Australians came later."

Australians are tracksuits. Tennis tracksuits, specifically, by an Italian label called Australian by L'Alpina. Expensive, which was the point. Worn with a bomber jacket and Nike Air Max, or Cavello if you wanted colour. Most of the men shaved their heads; women braided theirs and shaved the sides. The clothes had a job, though. Nothing heavy survives six hours of what they were there to do.

Which was hakken, the part you can spot across a room. It takes its name from the Dutch verb hakken, meaning heels, because that is where the steps land: everything below the pelvis, fast, on the spot, against a kick drum running to 190 BPM. Nobody designed it and nobody taught it. It turned up next to the music and stayed.

Put a sound, a look and a dance together and you have a culture, which is roughly what happened next. ID&T built Thunderdome into an event and a compilation series at once: arena parties, and CDs in every record shop in the country. By 1997 Billboard was calling gabber the Netherlands' first homegrown youth culture. Thunderdome is still running.

Even so, there is one thing Rotterdam cannot claim: the first record. The track usually named first is "We Have Arrived", released in 1990 by Marc Acardipane on Planet Core Productions, in Frankfurt. Rotterdam made the city, the look and the dance. It did not make the first record.

What it did export was everything else, and slowly. Germany got its first Q-dance festival in 2004, Australia around 2009, the United States in 2013, Chile and Poland in 2015. That is about ten years for a Dutch genre to spread almost everywhere in the world.

Against that, 1993 looks early. That is when it reached Japan. Avex Trax licensed Rotterdam Records and released Rotterdam Techno Is Hard Hard Hard !!, so the music arrived here with its own Japanese name from the very first record: Rotterdam Techno, used in Japan and nowhere else on earth. A scene grew in Osaka's DIY venues and back-alley clubs, putting gabber's harsh sound together with anime, cyberpunk and gaming imagery.

Years before the Dutch had built a single festival outside their own country, it was already in shops here, under a name Japan gave it.

Japan was not late to this. Japan was early.