Gearbox is reaching a huge milestone and is celebrating it in a big way. They’ve recently announced a “Gearbox Classics” event to celebrate 15 years of the label. They’re hosting it at the Klokgebouw, a venue that has already hosted ‘raw’ Hardstyle events in the past (remember Loudness…?). This event will be divided into two stages, one focusing on music from 2012 up until 2019, and another from 2020 until 2023… Which leads us to the question:
How can the second timeframe be considered “classics”? How can even part of the first one be considered “classics” either?
First and foremost, I am really happy to see a label such as Gearbox take the time to celebrate its legacy with a huge event. I was already listening to Hard Dance for some time when Gearbox came along, so I’ve had the pleasure of watching them grow first-hand, from an underground, fairly unknown label with smaller artists to the institution it is today. I may not always have connected with the sound they released, but they deserve all the credit for having discovered artists who are now huge in the scene, and for having released all sorts of music, including different kinds of Hardstyle, some Hardcore and even Hard Trance very early on.
But pitching this as a classics event might be a little too much.
For me, Hardstyle classics generally belong to the period between 2000 and 2012/13, with a few exceptions extending up to around 2014/15. Gearbox started at a time when what we now define as ‘raw’ classics were still in full force, but only became increasingly influential past this phase, as it helped shape a new sound, a new era of ‘raw’. Can we call tracks from this era classics already? Maybe a few, but in my perspective we certainly cannot consider the entire era a classics era. A classic should be something that has stood the test of time, not simply something that belongs to a sound we’ve already moved on from.
To be fair, in a way I can see why calling this a classics event might make sense when Hardstyle evolves as quickly as it does. This certainly changes our sense of time (see what I did there?), making us perceive that time moves faster, and that, for example, 2020 was a long time ago… when, in the bigger picture, it really wasn’t. The sheer number of labels and releases within the Hard Dance ecosystem nowadays certainly helps with this perception of time fleeting faster.
But I can’t help feeling that Gearbox is jumping on the current hype surrounding classics events. Why does celebrating 15 years of the label have to be marketed as a classics event? Isn’t its history, and its role in shaping modern Hardstyle, already enough reason for a celebration?
I certainly think so. Gearbox started from almost nothing and ended up at the top of the harder styles. That’s an achievement worth celebrating in its own right, without having to label relatively recent music as classics. And when we start pitching the recent past as being “classic”, we risk diluting the value we attribute to what classics really are…
