E-Mail This Article to a Friend Second generation DJ Steve Lawler’s hard house BY MICHAEL FREEDBERG

Now that techno-ized Eurodisco has made it onto American commercial radio big-time, dance music’s only secret continues to be house music. Deep house, hard house, tribal, diva style, trance — these you pretty much won’t hear on radio Stateside, but you can darn well hear them on club-DJ releases like Steve Lawler’s new two-CD set, Lights Out, Vol. 2 (Global Underground). And this set marks Lawler’s emergence as an original. Whereas his Nubreed (2000; also Global Underground) showed the influence of Danny Tenaglia in its light, sexy rhythms, ironic attitude, and oddball selections (and, due being due, included a track by Tenaglia himself), Lights Out, Vol. 2 take a very different sonic course. Here you’ll find hard beats, splashy arrangements, jetting voices, sound effects, goofiness and happiness — mixes similar to those done by radio DJs on FM in other countries. This style of house-music selecting and mixing is popular with second-generation house DJs. The first disc of Lights Out, Vol. 2 resembles the handiwork of DJ Jonathan Peters, a major presence in New York City club life these past two years. The second, trancy and quite hard, stands close to the work of DJ Carl Cox.

Cox and Peters both came to prominence in the late 1990s, when house music’s creators had begun to lose their edge, their ability to amaze the dancer. The first house music, in contrast to that of the "new breed," was softer in tone, lusher in melody, more female in vocals, with progressions much closer to those of jazz. It was a small excitement for a very small (but intense) crowd. Then came Junior Vasquez, who from about 1992 created a harder, wilder, darker house music even while retaining the original’s lush, female orientation. Vasquez’s great works remain the fullest of all that house has had to offer. They sum up its dark, obsessive vision of life (and, as Vasquez saw it, of the gay life): of its getting, spending, loving, presenting, declaring, joking, communing.

Yet even as Vasquez was making his statement, his contemporary, Tenaglia, began to take house music outside its New York City purity, blending it with a lot of styles popular in European dance music. In Tenaglia, alongside the lush rhythms of classic house, one heard the metallism of the Chemical Brothers and the dreaminess of Italian disco and the screams and atonality of electronica. All of the second generation’s house DJs depend far more on Tenaglia’s expansive vision than they do on Vasquez’s insider’s viewpoint.

Lights Out, Vol. 2 is no exception. Disc two, with its hard edgy beats, crazed ecstatic vocals, electronic riffs, and cold synthesizers, would be inconceivable had not Tenaglia’s work come along (and Carl Cox’s in its wake). Still, this second disc has a rhythm of its own, a hard, syncopated beat deeper than Tenaglia’s sexy wiggle and less pounding than Cox’s hammer. You can best hear this rhythm in the bridge from UN7’s "R.R." to Sahara’s "The Only One." Here you’ll find a walking strut, a proud, boasting rhythm that in Tenaglia’s mix would most likely excite a female vocal. In Lawler’s work, it stands on its own.

Lawler’s music, like most second-generation house, shows greater confidence in being a man than the attitude taken by house music’s creators. Theirs was a female-centered rhythm world with men on the outside looking in, begging to be noticed. Compared with the female-only mystery rites created by the first house DJs, Vasquez’s "I-am-gay and here I am, dancing with all my friends," for all of its exclusion of the "straight" world (and its music), was a big step forward in the way it celebrated masculinity. In Vasquez’s world, gay guys were the goddesses in house music’s mystery rites. Now comes the second generation, in which any guy who’s proud of his body and ready to put it to the test on the dance floor can be the goddess.

Lawler’s music is "queer eye for the straight guy" — but for the gay guy, too. That said, he has all of the quirky taste as a selector that the great house music DJs have always counted on — wherever did he find Polekat’s "Dancin’ Queen (You Know What I Mean)"? — and his mix technique is just as lush, with overlays, quick cuts, and voice drop-ins like those of classic DJs as Louie Vega and David Morales. All of his music — from the girly glee of Danusha’s "Movin’ On" to the keening funk of Alcatraz’s "Gimme Love" to the tribal exotica of Alan Barrat’s "Zulu Nation Part 6" to the proto-Britney-ism of Eric Kaufmann vs. Jet’s "My Girlfriend Is a Robot" to Solar vs. Audio Fly’s "Live Love" — feels as if it belonged on the same ethical planet. Confident in his inclusiveness, he taunts the disco nay-sayers. Just listen to Presser’s "2 Black 2 Gay," in which the darkest, deepest house beat underlies 1970s anti-disco DJs pronouncements that disco was "2 black 2 gay for Middle America." One can almost hear Lawler smirking. After all, look who’s doing it now!