Hi-NRG

Hi-NRG (High Energy) is a type of high-speed electronic dance music which was popular in nightclubs in the late 1970s and 1980s.

Hi-NRG disco started in 1976 in the United States as an underground genre that is faster and more electronic than mainstream disco. The first commercial hit of the genre was Donna Summer's "I Feel Love", which was produced in Germany by Italian pioneer of electronic music Giorgio Moroder. Typical examples of artists or singers of early 1980s American Hi-NRG disco include Amanda Lear, France Joli, Sylvester James, Divine and the Weather Girls. Bobby Orlando was behind many Hi-HRG hits around this time, either as a producer or composer.

By 1984, Hi-NRG became mainstream with hits in the U.K. charts such as Hazell Dean's "Searching (I Got To Find A Man)" and Evelyn Thomas's "High Energy". This form of Hi-NRG is typified by an energetic staccato sequenced synthesizer sound, where the bass often takes the place of the hi-hat (alternating a more resonant note with a dampened note to signify the tempo of the record). There is also often heavy use of the clap sound found on drum machines.

Dead or Alive's "You Spin Me Round (Like a Record)" became the most successful Hi-NRG single ever. The song reached number one on the U.K singles chart and the Top 10 on the Billboard Hot 100 in the U.S. Hi-NRG music was largely superseded by house music by 1990 but still enjoys an underground following, usually in the form of Hi-NRG versions of mainstream pop hits.

This description is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses materials from the Wikipedia article "Hi-NRG".