The unkillable music

Some things die. Some things don't.
I was casually drifting through the net tonight when I came across this remix of Dominik Eulberg's Sansula. It's the first I had heard of Eulberg. The remix in question is by Max Cooper, a low key producer of no great fame.
Another remix of another track. Nothing new there. But beyond the anonymity of the artists - even the use of real names seems to point to colourlessness - there is something rather haunting about the track. The ingredients - soft swirls of synths, clunky cowbells, and a weird, distant moan like a foghorn. The music - straightforward house beats, a constant pulse underneath the track. Techno, basically - or house, or tech-step, or whatever people call it nowadays.
This music is dead though, isn't it? So I thought to myself as I had a listen.
Then I listened again. It really is a dead genre, I thought.
But then it struck me that perhaps I might be wrong.
This music has been a constant on the electronic scene since I was a teenager, and indeed well before that. It began, in a different guise, with disco in the 1970s. Then people like Larry Levan helped transmute it into something else. By the late 80s, we began to see a proliferation of different takes on the four-to-the floor sound: Detroit techno and acid house among them.
By the time I started seriously listening to music in the early 1990s, rave culture had adopted the beats and spun, smashed and shredded them into something more brazen. But the basic recipe was the same.
Once my twenties and the 2000s came around, I somewhat forgot about techno - and about artists like Orbital and LFO who had dominated my youth.
And yet, as I listened to this remix, I thought: today, the four to the floor beat is as ubiquitous as ever.
People like Carl Craig and Richie Hawtin are still making music - indeed, are lauded as "legends" of the genre. And artists like Pantha Du Prince, John Roberts and Shed are still being heralded by the critics.
It strikes me as perverse in a way. Surely genres die, don't they? Grunge died, reggae died, 2 tone died. At least I thought they had. But the house beat, the four-to-the floor beat, is resolutely still with us.
The question of course is why. But there I am unsure. If I was pretending to be David Foster Wallace, my anthropological interpretation would put it down to the innate desire for the tribal drum. If I was pretending to scientific wisdom, I would put it down to the correlation between these beats and the human heart. And if I was Foucault, perhaps I would see in it some perverted human need for regulation and control.
But I am none of these people, and I can think of nothing penetrating to say about it whatsoever.
All that occurs is to suggest that this music is the unkillable music.