Hype 5 // Best House Tracks 2016

No one takes a journey through life without having to face the loss of someone or something dear. After all, 2016 seemed to be more savage than the years before. David Bowie was the first of many whiplashes to go down, for many more to come. One tweet said losing Bowie felt “like we lost something elemental, as if an colour is gone.” I don’t know what colour it could be that would have vanished with Bowie, because he was the shades of so many colours. The news of Prince’s swift and sudden passing on April 21 left the world appalled as fans and celebrities reacted with remarks of sorrow and devastation. The feeling of a lost colour is mutual when discussing Prince and his majestic tones of purple, which were, quite contrary to losing them, on display more than ever shortly after his death. No other death of an artist pulled a bigger plug out of me than that of Prince, mainly because his impact on my young adulthood had carried such extraordinary force.

Since Prince’s passing I have turned away from handcrafted pop or rock and roll in its traditional sense. The void Prince left brought me back to house music, to which his music once had led me instinctively, because it was an essential notion in his own universe of styles: make people party, move and dance. After Prince’s death, his apocalyptic funk of 1999 still offers a lot of lessons: In a year of Brexit, Trump for president, the Orlando shooting, the Nice tragedy, excesses of diminishing democratic privileges in Turkey and Russia, the song spits in the face of fear of certain and total destruction and tells you what to do: Live! While dancing is a crucial act of life, we have to return to the clubs, raves and dance halls and “party like it’s 1999.” Here’s a list of this year’s house tracks that were indispensable dj tools for a rampant night out in order to follow Prince’s advice.