Diva house or handbag house is an anthemic sub-genre of house music that became most popular in gay clubs during the second half of the 1980s. It is known for booming unisex vocals, sometimes sampled from other recordings. Such samples come from 1970s soul, disco, gospel recordings and even show tunes sung by people like Bette Midler and other gay icons. This bombastic genre can include songs performed by dance specialists (see artists) as well as club remixes of pop songs by soul singers like Mariah Carey, Patti LaBelle, and Whitney Houston. In gay clubs, the subgenre is viewed as a "cult" genre determining gay dance music.
The name "handbag house" comes from the notion of a group of female club-goers dancing around a pile of their handbags. With popularization of open gay culture in the early 1980s, "diva" was the word that bound house music to gay dance scene, which was previously only defined by some italo disco compositions.
One of the latest examples of handbag, which somewhat became iconic to gay clubs, in the song Gonna Make You Sweat (Everybody Dance Now) by C+C Music Factory.
Famous quotes containing the word house:
“Every burned book or house enlightens the world; every suppressed or expunged word reverberates through the earth from side to side.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)