Since everyone but me is at Daytona, it's time to write about dance music.
Back in the 80s, in my wild youth, I loathed dance music. My friends and I called it "dance fascist music" and sneered at anyone we knew who danced to it, and rapturously adopted the Smiths' 1986 song "Panic" as our anthem:
Burn down the disco
Hang the blessed DJ
Because the music they constantly play
It says nothing to me about my life....
Hang the DJ, hang the DJ, hang the DJ
Of course, we went out dancing every night (I don't believe I got a full night's sleep until sometime in the early 90s), but not even by the wildest stretch of language could anyone contemplate calling what we danced to "dance music." I was researching Johnny Marr's session work for
this article, and stumbled over a review of The The's album
Infected (which Johnny Marr did NOT play on, in case anyone out there is keeping track), which said something to the effect that despite the "danceability" of the music, "no one could possibly dance to anything this incredibly depressing."
Hell, I used to dance to a song called "Armagh" by a British band called the Au Pairs, that contained the memorable lines, "We don't torture, we're a civilized nation." They were talking about Great Britain and Northern Ireland, but gosh, someone oughta cover that song for today, ya think? But back to dancing. Yes, I danced to "Infected" (still the greatest anti-romance song ever written), but I never, ever danced to actual 80s dance music.
So what happened to change all that?
My friend JD told me that it wasn't me that changed, it was the music. He said that 80s dance music really was just that bad, and dance music today is really better.
Another friend speculated also that the music changed, but his reason was that the drugs changed. He says that I only like "post-ecstasy" dance music, despite the fact that I gave up all my Wicked Ways at the age of 24 and have never done ecstasy on the dance floor, or off it.
My personal theory is that both those things are true, but probably the most important change in dance music had to do not with drugs but with technology. Modern dance music is very much about technology, both in its original conception and recording, and in the endless phenomenon of remixing that characterizes it as a genre. Dance music today, whether called by its rightful name or by its marketing alternative, "electronica," is simply more interesting, more layered, more complex, and more inventive than dance music of the 80s. It's also far more diverse. And at least in this country, incredibly unpopular. Which may also be part of why I like it now. I love an underdog.
I had to laugh at JeffB, who wrote in his post-SXSW music blogging frenzy that he did now and then like some dance music, naming the Chemical Brothers and Moby as examples. I didn't laugh because that's not dance music, but because it's dance music with street cred; hardly anyone is going to think you're disco trash because you like the Chemical Brothers or Moby - and I like them, too, but I also like honest-to-god-divas-of-the-dancefloor dance music, like Kristine W and Suzanne Palmer and Deborah Cox, who between them are responsible for three, count 'em THREE, of the most played songs on my iPod, Kristine W's "Fly Again," Suzanne Palmer's "Show Me," and the Hex Hector remix of Deborah Cox's anthem "Absolutely Not," which helps put the "fem" back in "feminism" and is thus a big hit with me.
There are some real problems with the way dance music is marketed, one of them being the fact that most dance CDs are six versions of the same song remixed six ways by six different producers and costing twelve bucks. The number of songs I like well enough to pay twelve dollars for six versions of is, let's be frank, very small. I have "In the End" and "Rapture" by Iio - two songs that are so good they make me dizzy, anything and everything Narcotic Thrust has ever done in any and every remix anyone ever made of their songs, and the remixes of "Stupid Girls" by P!nk, because as I think we've already more than established, I LOVE HER. That might be it, other than a bunch of 99 cent-dance-song-CDs I've picked up in the clearance bins.
Speaking of 99 cents, that brings us to the single thing that might well change all that: iTunes, where you can, for one penny less than a dollar, buy just one version of the song you like. At least half my purchases on iTunes are dance music, and they don't even have a very good dance music catalog (although for recent releases it's not too bad; it's just not very deep). Suddenly I can have almost every dance song I want for one-twelfth what it used to cost me. Sadly, this seems to mean I am spending ten times more overall on dance music; I have to think they had that in mind when they came up with their pricing strategy.
Budget aside, the days are over when I sneered at dance music. Now I'm a believer. And in the words of P!ink (did I mention that I love her?):
If God is a DJ life is a dance floor so
Get your ass on the dance floor now...
Before everyone comes back from Daytona and I'm in BIG TROUBLE.
