One thing that separates “true” house music from house-like pop music is song structure. While those tunes from Guetta feat. random R&B artist, Calvin Harris and so many others borrow Tempo (128 bpm) and Instrumentation (dominant 4/4 bass drum, clap on the 2 and 4, hi-hats on the 8ths, Avicii-esque synths) from House music but when it comes to song structure, they are a lot closer to Rock.
They nearly all follow a verse - chorus - verse - chorus - bridge - chorus - chorus scheme that essentially hasn’t changed since the Beatles. “Real” House music on the other hand has a drastically different structure based on elements being added or removed at the beginning of every phrase (I think someone else can explain this better than I can) leading to tracks that are 6 to 15 minutes long.
And if you think about it, those Mainstream artists hardly have another chance since they must be suitable to be played at radio stations and thus are not allowed to exceed 3 to 4 minutes in length. And since the “mainstream” radio listener doesn’t want to hear anything different to the accepted scheme, it’s very rare that Radio Edits of longer house tracks reach the same popularity as those produced to the Rock scheme. Levels being the only exception I can think of at the moment.
Also, Vocals are very different in house music and mainstream sound-a-likes. While real house mostly (there are exceptions… talking about Jack and his groove) use vocals in a repetitive sense to add to the track (more like an instrument), mainstream tracks try to tell some kind of story (how irrelevant it may be). You could say, that house music are “tracks” in the original sense of the word, while Guetta, Calvin Harris & Co. produce “songs”.
That is not a new phenomenon by the way, not at all. Look at early Hip-Hop that was largely based around sampling and scratching and how nearly all chart-topping hip-hop since the late 90s incorporated the scheme mentioned above.
Sure, you can produce exceptional music within that framework, but you are a lot more limited in options where you can stand out. In Rock music it was either about great lyrics or singers with great voices, but within what is called “crap for the masses” now, there isn’t anything extraordinary. It’s basically auto-tuned mediocre singers, singing about how much they drank and who they fucked last night and that simply isn’t enough to impress musically. And since some househeads are really scared by the sheer popularity of that stuff they try to portray it as inferior to “the real stuff”. And again that’s nothing new. I’m sure you could hear some punk fans referring to Blink182 or Offspring as “crap for the masses” in the 90s.
In the end, I think it’s an understandable reaction to defend the music you love by trying to create a distinction. But instead of trying to distinguish in the way i tried above it’s done by portraying one form of music as qualitatively superior. And the recent events around DJs getting kicked off the decks show, that there is a misunderstanding with Club Owners and promoters who think that people who listen to house-like Pop want to listen to House music. So, it is necessary to find different names, but I’m not the one to judge if “crap for the masses” is the right way to express it.
