dance music

   Dance music evolved from the remnants of disco in the mid-1980s. Like disco music, its characteristic sound was that of repetition and was mainly studio produced. This heralded the changing nature of live performance, it being a rarity for live musicians to be involved in the actual recordings of a dance track due to the introduction of the digital sampler which could distort, edit or convert any prerecorded sound. The mid-late 1980s saw the emergence of acts such as M/A/R/R/S with its seminal ‘Pump up the Volume’, Bomb The Bass with ‘Beat Dis’, S Express’s ‘Theme From SExpress’ and Deelight’s ‘Groove Is In The Heart’, along with the harder American styles of Eric B & Rakim’s ‘Paid In Full’, and Public Enemy’s ‘Terminator X’. Like disco, dance has a distinct gay following. It addresses the listeners as dancers rather than thinkers, the emphasis being on bodily expression and movement without thought, its rhythm plugged straight into the body. The dancer experiences the comfort of repetition, abandoning personal power and becoming subject to the track’s beats. This had large-scale appeal, including the rising notion of Gay Pride and the biggest reemergence of youth drug culture since the 1960s. It also brought about the promotion of DJs on a large scale, with club mixes, twelve-inch mixes and dance mixes of original songs. DJs had their own in-house systems by now, and were producing specialized mixes from their respective clubs. The evolution of dance music could be looked upon as a protest against the established music industry. Studios did not now need to accommodate musicians, just samplers, sequencers, turntables, tape machines, drum machines and synthesizers. An individual could now work from their own studio and produce a successful hit. Dance became the music of alienation and signified pop music’s conversion to postmodernism, with its distance from the actual artist or musician; hence the crossover from ‘song’ to ‘track’. The dance scene renounced its connection with disco as DJs started playing underground black American dance music, giving it more credibility and status. Clubs like the Hacienda in Manchester, Cream in Liverpool and London’s Ministry of Sound emerged as main showcases for committed DJs. Dance became more innovative and experimental, and the skill to produce tracks using the latest equipment became an art in itself, but it also became too deanimated in reproduction, often burdening a track with its own accomplishments.

   See also: clubs; hip hop; house; rave culture

   Further reading

    Potter, R.A. (1998) ‘Not the Same: Race, Repetition and Difference in Hip-Hop and Dance Music’, in T.Swiss, J.Sloop and A.Herman (eds), Mapping The Beat: Popular Music and Contemporary Theory, London: Blackwell.

   ALICE BENNETT