How Bloghouse’s Sweaty, Neon Reign United the Internet

07:30 AM

Dance music was truly alternative in the early 2000s.

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At a Paper magazine dance party at the Montmartre Lounge, from left to right, are Steve Aoki, Mark Hunter, and KATHY PERRY. The dress code is "bad-ass Michael Jackson monster looks."

This story should be saved for later.

The first thing to know is that when it all began, nobody called it bloghouse. You might have called it something else during the sweaty, neon-slathered 2000s reign, or you might not have known what to call it. The point is that it wasn't a traditional music genre. Was it a trend? Is the drug the gateway drug to the electronic dance music? The mid-aughts equivalent of hair metal? Music was at the core of the thing, but more than being unified by any specific sound, it was about how you found it: on mp3 blogs, the Hype Machine aggregation, or auto-playing from Myspace pages.