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Jazz begat swing, which begat disco, which begat synthpop, which begat ambient house -- according to an infographic put together by Thomson.
The travel company has built an interactive map that details the evolution of western dance music over the last hundred years or so, showing roughly where on Earth the musical styles were born, and how they combined with each other to create more.
It starts with traditional folk music from Europe, Africa and the Caribbean, and then jazz, blues and R&B by 1950. The sixties soul and funk explosions are documented, which then spark off the rise of disco in the States and synthpop in Europe. In the late 70s and early 80s, hip-hop, house, electro and post-punk explode, and the chain reaction spawns a plethora of other genres.
Those are just the top-level dance genres -- Thomson says the chart "does not delve into all possible sub-genres" -- probably because that'd be impossible to read.
Also, Thomson says in a blog post, "It is often difficult to pin-point the beginning of a genre to a single year, so we have placed the birth of each genre within five-year periods. When the explosion of dance music arrived in the 80s, many genres arrived in the same five-year period as the genres they influenced. In this situation, the
'influencer' genre starts to fade in on the map at the time the influencing line appears. "Non-dance music genres which influenced dance music are also included, but their own influences are not shown. Often where a genre was first born was not the location it eventually gained most popularity."
There are plenty of holes we could pick in the chart -- there's no line drawn between Hip-hop and UK Garage, for example, and the huge influence of Northern Soul on the British dance music scene goes goes undocumented. But those are minor quibbles on what is broadly an excellent look at how different music genres interrelate.
You can see the chart above, but for the best experience head over to the larger, interactive version.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
