Things Contemporary Dance Music Needs to Pack In

THUMP UK's Josh Baines loves dance music but hates everyone. We asked him to pick apart everything he thinks is wrong with contemporary dance culture.

Dance music transcends like nothing else. Every good night out you've ever had will have been soundtracked by the monotonous heartbeat of the 4/4, the smell of acric amyl nitrate and catpiss-mephedrone, and that taste that water has at the end of the evening. When you're sitting on your deathbed you won't remember the sadsack nights spent alone listening to Sun Kil Moon; you'll remember the nights out getting lifted to "Sweet Harmony" and "Anytime". 

It's a shame, then, that a lot of dance music is rotted and replanted. It gets splattered with mistakes and missteps that are replicated and repeated. In order to make sure that we can all spend our Sundays hunched over Arrested Development with catiously mild joints, not having to worry about where contemporary dance is going wrong, here's a few things that need eradicating.

The Fruitless Search for Authenticity

Don't worry, I'm not going to dive into the depths of discourse surrounding cultural appropriation here – but there's something exceptionally off-putting about pasty suburbanites peppering their self-consciously throwback house 'trax' with tweaked vocal snatches telling the listener to 'jack' or 'work'. Jacking meant something thirty years ago and still does today. It's part of the fabric of house's history. It isn't, however, an immediate way of lacing your record with the sweat of long nights in gay, black clubs way back when. Whatever power being told to jack may have had, however intoxicating an invocation it can be, is nullified by the fact that this isn't Chicago, you're not Funkmaster Farley and it isn't 1987. 

Artist Albums

Broad one this, I know, but it's pretty much indisputable that there has never been a good house or techno artist album ever. Here's why: 1) Realising that they can't actually write songs, producers feel the need to gussy up their bloated slab of techno with a half-assed concept. No one actually thinks about the potentiality of extraterrestrial life when they listen to a Jeff Mills album. 2) Sometimes they try and write 'songs'. 3) Dance music is built for dancing to in clubs and the thought of people dancing in their own homes is too embarrassing to contemplate. Basically, anything more than a 4 track EP is the sound of the artist wanking in front of a mirror.

Format Fetishism

Things the world resolutely does not need any more of: English graduates, parody accounts, and articles about the resurgence of vinyl popularity. Life is honestly too short to care about what format a DJ plays music off. Play cassettes, play CDs, play that Jersey Club mix off YouTube that you like, whatever. Just don't make a big deal out of it. 

Genre Appropriation

There's nothing better than producers cluelessly fingering whatever pies are big on ResidentAdvisor at the moment. We're all really impressed that you heard a Cassie song once dude. We're all really impressed that you heard a DJ Nate song once mate. We're all really impressed that you heard a Autechre song once mate. We've got those records and they sound better than your hamfisted attempt at boogie/grime/IDM/minimal wave/Turkish-psych so stick to that Nervous Tracks rip-off you were working on. 

Secret Warehouse Parties

Photo via

Let's be honest: most clubs are horrible spaces to actually spend time in. Cramped, ill-designed boxes that manage to quash any bonhomie before you've even heard the first mix. But at least clubs have toilets and proper bars and somewhere to put your coat. It's great that you read the historic dance text, Neville and Gavin Watson's Raving '89, and thought you'd book DJ Sneak to play in an old blind manufacturing space, but I read it and thought, 'fuck that, where's the nearest bus stop?' Anyone attending these kind of nights is as daft in their own way as those turds who cum at the thought of pop-up screening of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Enjoy the rat piss, fuckos.

The Continual Lionisation of the DJ

Photo by Jake Lewis

Playing other people's records, one after the other is a grossly inflated skill. Throw together twelve tracks from other people's mixes together on Traktor, think of a funny name for yourself, upload the result to Mixcloud and you too can be demanding free drink and drugs in clubs all over the city. Expect hordes of adoring fans to stand around the booth taking photos of you massaging the crossfader and tweaking the EQ or whatever bullshit impresses the kind of person who goes "yeah, that's a good song, I'd like to hear that in a club." You can play records. I can play records. I could smash that dubstep night you put on in that dive bar on a Wednesday. Easy. Book me. The DJ is a drone. The DJ is the sort of flatmate who only comes into the lounge when they can smell you smoking weed. Fuck DJs and fuck anyone impressed by them.

Festivals

I can see why the odd dance act at a standard festival is semi-appealing – though I carry scarring memories of being on top of a mountain in Bilbao and being faced with the choice between Kings of Leon and Fatboy Slim everywhere I went. I get why you'd need to see Diplo at Primavera Festival after enduring The Pains of Being Pure at Heart or whatever. That's fine; everyone knows a kickdrum on its own is better than 99% of anything any band has ever recorded. But who the fuck wants to spend a whole weekend in a field traipsing from Annie Mac to Ame making sure you didn't miss Armand Van Helden, all the while having to step over the strewn bodies of people who boshed a unholy amount of illicits by 7pm on the Friday? Who wants to spend two precious days of free time worrying about toilet roll and if Ricardo Villalobos is actually going to turn up?

Here's the thing though: despite DJs being twats, festivals being hedonism by Hieronymus Bosch, and clubs being fun-sucking cesspits, there is still nothing better than dance music. Nothing. It just needs cleansing, de-cunting, purifying. Let's wrestle it from the hands of the shutter-shade wearers and the Defected daytripper. Let's make it our house again.  

Follow Josh on Twitter: @Bain3z