Enter the Abyss: Rants and Dance Music

As every article ever written about dance music since someone hooked up two gramophones and crafted a rudimentary smoke machine out of a galvanised bin and a few discarded fags and thus created club culture, is obliged to mention, going clubbing, in any form, is about negating the drudgery of the workaday life most of us struggle through, knowing that potential salvation lies in reach every Saturday night in dark rooms stuffed with drugs and strangers. We go clubbing, we're told, to repeatedly try and reach some kind of transcendence and levitation above the quotidian. This is sacred zone of denial. Do you know what breaks that spell? Ranting. Rants bring us back down to dogshit-and-debt reality. Except for that one all important exception, which we'll get to soon.

The 'rant' I'm talking about here encompasses everything from your standard foamy, nut-brown Clarksonian diatribe against the perceived injustices of PC to your boss screaming about figures you've not thought about all week at 5pm on a Friday. The rant is the expulsion of the ego through the mouth. It is performance, a self-aggrandising soliloquy that serves to reveal the speaker's inability to communicate discursively. Dance music, again as we're reminded of in pretty much everything written on it in the last forty years, is about community, exploring interpersonal relationships and examining who we are in relation to others. The ranty-dance track is a truly abysmal thing to behold, down there with Cassie samples in the abyssal depths of club-hell.

Being an intrepid soul always happy to plunge elbow-deep into the sewers of club culture, I've braved a few minutes with the worst rants ever put down on 12" and removed for the dub on the B side, before hosing myself down with the exception I've made a real rhetorical point of mentioning. Before that - and honestly, it's good - here's a trio of misguided diatribes that'd get you glared out of the pub before you'd got thirty seconds in to your hot take on Kendrick Lamar.

The Prodigy ft. Sleaford Mods - "Ibiza"

This week saw stadium-shock-jocks the Prodigy attempt to snap their ageing audience out of a mortgage and mortality induced slump in the back of a Mondeo by collaborating with hip young gunslingers Sleaford Mods on "Ibiza" - a strong contender for 2015's lowest ebb. Its existence is a pity. In the same way the Prodigy are above barrel scraping Casio-preset-end-of-pier-Call-of-Duty-soundtrack-dubstep, Mods frontman Jason Williams can do better - a whole lot better - than the fucked-on-bitter-Mark E Smith-at-Amnesia karaoke he dribbles out here. If it's meant to sound as tacky and listlessly grim as the Ibiza we imagine from the sanctuary of yellow-curtained living rooms on grim Sundays with the Mail's Live supplement on our laps, then all involved have done well. If, as we suspect, that isn't the case, then "Ibiza" is about as appealing as half an hour spent in a lift with a bad-breathed bloke who thinks Larry David's character in Curb is a "fucking hero" who "tells it like it is," rather than being a self-absorbed irritant.

Dan le Sac vs Scroobius Pip - "Thou Shalt Always Kill"

Remember Dan le Sac and Scroobius Pip - and reader, I could barely bring myself to type that name, so please, read on, for my benefit, so my struggle is worthwhile - and their 2007 'hit' "Thou Shalt Always Kill"? Remember that? A different world wasn't it? Blair stepped down, Jermaine Jackson was on Celebrity Big Brother, and enough people parted with very real money to propel this shitty clump of sub-student union open mic night stand-up to the dizzy heights of number 34 in the UK charts. There are people out there now, real people, people you might walk past in the street, people you might see from busses or on beaches, who have lines from this tattooed on themselves for perpetuity, lost souls who wander round public libraries on wet Wednesday mornings muttering, "Thou shalt not express your shock at the fact that Sharon got off with Brad at a club last night by saying "Izzit"" to themselves. They exist and they are in thrall to what might just objectively be the worst song ever. I bet Tim Lovejoy, still to this day, thinks it's really, really clever.

Oh, and if any smartarse out there cries about this not being 'dance music' then let me remind you that a) you can dance to anything, maaaaaan and b) check the Wiki description, yeah?

VINDICATION. VERIFIED VINDICATION.

Freeland - "We Want Your Soul"

The common thread between this atrocity trio is a kind of common room analysis of capitalism that results in records with about as much punch as a piss-sodden copy of Wall and Piece. This is nominal-dance music for the kind of spods in your A2 politics class who'd walk in smelling like a Muse gig. Get this lads, Coca Cola and McDonalds are BAD! Like really bad. Like, so bad that their inherent badness can only truly be conveyed by the holy trinity of George Carlin, Charlie Brooker and embarrassing Microsoft Sam vocals. Clearly Adam Freeland was so embarrassed at being an adult man who wrote the line, "we'll show you shrinks, we'll show you spooks, we'll buy you drinks, throw away your books/We'll sell you crap, we'll charge you tax, we're out buying big guns and you'll front the cash," that he smothered it in the grating tones of a text-to-speech mechanism, the kind of thing normally reserved for horny year 7's who get off on getting a computer to say the word "fanny" over and over again. In fact, listening to the Microsoft Sam saying the word "fanny" over and over and over again over a flat kick would be like Bach compared to this. This is the record your reclusive older cousin - the one with the air rifle and the bumfluff - plays as he shoots children posing as adult men on Halo night after night.

Aaaand here's that previously promised massive exception. Those Guy's "An American Poem" is a blistering analysis of the African American experience that propels itself via Ras Baraka's - now mayor of Newark, New Jersey - hyperspecific spoken word blast. It works, both as a rant and as a record. Why? Well, It avoids sloganeering and trite commentary, for a start. It doesn't sound like someone trying to rant, for another. Lastly, it shows up the three previous horrowshows for what they are: gross affectations of indignation, nothing more than punchline free segments from a comedian you'll never see again's one and only Live at the Apollo performance.

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