Has There Ever Been a Dance Record with Decent Lyrics?

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Has There Ever Been a Dance Record with Decent Lyrics?

It’s time for the percolator to get down down down down around the world around the world around the world.

The succinct answer to the question above is no. The slightly longer answer is a no, with a few becauses and a few caveats.

When you're younger and more impressionable and desperate to establish some connection to the world around you, and the lives of others, it's easy to understand lyricism as a form of poetry. Back then, poetry wasn't the self-indulgent artform it became as soon as your young person's railcard expired. The poetic, when you're a teenager, is imbued with a sense of the mystical; the process of reaching towards some kind of metaphysical higher ground. Then you get a bit older and you reach it, and you realise that, like everything else, it's made of shit and it crumbles and you fall away, into the gaping void of adulthood.

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Adults who have favourite lyrics and favourite songwriters aren't to be trusted. They're the blokes down the pub with the Bob Dylan tour t-shirts on, the guys who slip Half Man Half Biscuit references into everyday conversation and they're no better than people whose entire being centres round parroting lines from the Simpsons or re-enacting Monty Python sketches. It's a life built round reference rather than experience. Lyrics are nothing more than words forced to fit the human voice. Which is fine, and they work on that level, but as soon as you see them written down, any affect, any importance, is lost. They become just that — words on a page. Some of those words, heard in their proper context, are fantastic, are affecting, are amazing.

Which brings me to my real point. Words on a page don't really translate into the club. Dance music doesn't need to adhere to the traditional structure of the pop song that we've come to know and love ever since our great grandparents soft-shoe-shuffled in ballrooms to Bobby Darrin or whatever people did before ecstasy and strobes were invented. Club tracks don't need to rely on verse-chorus-verse-chorus-middle-eight-chorus because they work on a more functional basis than songs do. A club record is designed with a sense of total intentionality. It has to make you dance. It might do other things along the way—you might smile or cry or have any number of odd emotional reactions to it—but firstly, and most importantly, it has to make you dance. As soon as it stops doing that, it's failed. It's primary function has not been fulfilled. It's status as what it set out to be—dance music—is revoked and it becomes just music, music without purpose, music that's become annulled. Which is sad.

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Ever since we hauled ourselves out of the swamps and started chucking spears about and painting buafflos on the walls of our caves and eating acorns or whatever the fuck we did before the Greeks gave us entertainment and the Romans underfloor heating, we've been creatures primed to dance. We used to, allegedly, apparently, dance to the primal pounding of a drum beating long into the night. We don't need lyrics to get us dancing. And it's that, that link to the primordial past, that's why no dance record—and I'm defining dance record here as anything that came out after "On and On" by Jesse Saunders—has ever had good lyrics.

Instead, what you get, is three kinds of lyric. Each of which is shit. You get the Command, the Pinger Poem and the Hippy Dippy Bullshit Nonsense. Let's look at each in a bit more detail.

The command is probably the most obvious and easiest to detail. How many tracks in the last three weeks have you heard that ask the listener to JACK THEIR BODY or MOVE THEIR BODY or JACK THEIR BODY AND MOVE IT or MOVE THEIR BODY WHILE JACKING IT IF YOU COULD PLEASE YEAH THANKS THAT'S GREAT MUCH APPRECIATED NICE ONE THANKS AGAIN CHEERS? Probably at least twelve. Why? Because the command feels authoritative. When you're told to do something repeatedly, while quite possibly very under the influence, you're likely to do it. When Paul Johnson tells you to get down, you probably will. Same was when Byron Stingily tells you to c'mon get up. Over the course of the average night out, you've probably been forced into moving every which way but loose. Which is fine in the club, but when you get home and hear these songs, you're plunged into a world of total and unerring stupidity. Which, coincidentally, is the kind of stupidity that's only palatable when one's two pingers deep at a holiday camp. Which leads us nicely onto our second category.

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Drugs, famously, are only interesting to two types of people: those who take them far too often, and those that never have. Anyone who's ever done the odd pill here or the odd dab there knows that drugs are fundamentally boring to talk or about and that people who glorify, even just slightly, drug taking, are, again fundamentally, the most boring people on earth. Which is why dance records that explicitly bang on and on about them are, pretty much without exception, fucking rubbish and the ones that do it in a hee-hee-I'm-a-naughty-sixth-former-trying-to-sneak-this-past-my-mum way are even worse. It's not big, it's not clever, and yes, we somehow did understand your big and clever metaphor because we're older than 11.

And, because we're no longer 11 year olds lolloping around on the carpet in our parent's frontroom, gormlessly gawping at the telly, gulping down pop culture without any sense of selectivity, just happy to be wowed by it's never ending spew of easily swallowable objects of distraction, we don't really need to hear lyrics like "It's a lovely day/and the sun is shining/everywhere I go/I see children smiling" even if "Lovelee Dae" by Blaze is a certified 10/10 all time classic. Lyrics like that and like this, only serve to create a mental disconnect when you're in the club, heightening the artificiality of the good will you're feeling at that exact moment when the room stops being just a room and becomes some sort of heaven on earth. Then you leave the room, leave the club, and you unwittingly stumble into a world where the original sin's just been committed. Through sheer embarrassment you're plunged into the ice bath of life as lived and you hate whatever fuckhead it was who thought necessary to put vocals on this. San Soda, mate, you're as bad as Eve and we've never really forgiven her.

In short, then: there are no good lyrics on a dance record ever apart from the ones on "Just the Way You Are" by Milky.

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