Acid House - Etymology

Etymology

There are conflicting accounts about how the term acid came to be used to describe this style of house music. One ties it to Phuture's "Acid Tracks" Before the song was given a title for commercial release, it was played by DJ Ron Hardy at a nightclub where psychedelic drugs were reportedly used. The club's patrons called the song "Ron Hardy's Acid Track" (or "Ron Hardy's Acid Trax"). The song was released with the title "Acid Trax" on Larry Sherman's label Trax Records in 1987. Sources differ on whether it was Phuture or Sherman who chose the title; Phuture's DJ Pierre says the group did because the song was already known by that title, but Sherman says he chose the title because the song reminded him of acid rock. Regardless, after the release of Phuture's song, the term acid house came into common parlance. The reference to "acid" may be a celebratory reference to psychedelic drugs in general, such as LSD, as well as the popular club drug Ecstasy (MDMA). According to Rietveld, it was the house sensibility of Chicago in a club like Hardy's The Music Box, that afforded it its initial meaning. In her view "acid connotes the fragmentation of experience and dislocation of meaning due to the unstructuring effects on thought patterns which the psycho-active drug LSD or 'Acid' can bring about. In the context of the creation of Acid Tracks it indicated a concept rather than the use of psycho-active drugs in itself.

Other accounts are not based on the LSD or psychedelic connotations. The theory that acid was a derogatory reference towards the use of samples in acid house music was repeated in the press and in the British House of Commons. In this theory, the term acid came from the slang term "acid burning", which the Oxford Dictionary of New Words calls "a term for stealing." Since acid house makes substantial use of sampling, this can be deemed "stealing from other tracks." In 1991, UK Libertarian advocate Paul Staines claimed that he had coined this theory to discourage the government from adopting anti-rave party legislation.

Some of the accounts claim that Genesis P-Orridge coined the term on the Psychic TV single “Tune In (Turn on the Acid House).” Some of these state that he combined the terms acid and house after seeing them separately on the covers of albums he saw in a Chicago record store. Other accounts, including one from P-Orridge himself, say he merely bought records from a bin marked acid. A variation of the story states that the bin's label was a reference to a corrosive liquid, but P-Orridge mistook it as a reference to LSD. One account goes on to say he bought the whole bin and played the records at his regular DJ gig at Ibiza, where he introduced the Chicago sound to the MDMA-using, Osho-following "orange people" there, who discovered the music and drugs complemented each other. P-Orridge's role is disputed by music journalist Simon Reynolds, who calls it a "self-serving myth", and by Fred Giannelli, another member of Psychic TV.