SIMON REYNOLDS DISCUSSES CURRENT DANCE MUSIC IN TODAY'S NY TIMES

Screw that, we're talking about dancing and having fun, and that's NOT Moby these days. What we need is a picture of Altern 8:

http://www.trancentral.ru/pix00/10_misc/altern8.jpg

http://www.yegor.com/Music/moby-7.jpg

see? Lookee!

In the UK in the 90s there were dance #1s coming out on a fucking conveyer belt. The big problem is that most of them were rubbish.

*or is it Rest of World?

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I think this is true about much of ILM

Maybe he should have mentioned Waltzes as well. I mean, okay, Britney Spears makes Dance Pop. You can dance to Rock. If it has a beat, you can dance to it. But he's talking about Dance - from Chem Bros to Kompakt. I mean, this is an article not about him (and what music he likes) but about the state of Dance music in the US.

xxpost - history is written by the "winners"

That's right, we're stopping you from dancing to any records except electronic ones, with physical force.

And fuck the barely concealed contempt in the you can dance to all sorts of music too whining

and as for Matthew's post, perhaps the people want rave culture to be more popular in America because they're into it. not because they hate Britney. fairly certain Simon R did actually do a blog entry about Toxic anyway, so good example

xpost - it is all the same!

hence some people in the US, flagrantly, on this thread, while knowing what dance music is, can't understand the wider concept of it, that which distinguishes it from hiphop etc.

you're so defensive about this, is all i mean ronan. I sincerely doubt that dance music needs defending, it does quite fine on it's own.

There seems to be a spate of disingenuousness about the specific meaning of genres round here lately, too.

In accords to non electronic dance music, Im still waiting for a Funk revival

yes, raves didn't take off on a large scale in america because of homophobes, yep, uh huh.

perhaps it's just because, duh, the US and the UK are completely different countries? with different economies, social customs, class traditions, and even property rights? (there's no way that in America circa 1988 you could've commandeered a big farm estate for a rave, like you could in the UK).

I think it's stupid and overstepping the mark to complain about Americans who like dance music and the culture inherent to that wanting it to become popular.

Just because you can fucking dance to anything does not mean it sounds like Tiefschwarz or Kompakt. Hence the Britney comparison seems like lazy tossed off rubbish.

It's as if to say 'why the fuck would you listen to kompakt or tiefschwarz, YOU CAN ALREADY DANCE TO THE MUSIC IN THE CHARTS'

And you can apply that example to pop vs any other genre that isn't successful in America.

That doesn't explain the relative sales positions, does it? And are you saying that a big part of the anti-Disco thing wasn't the perceived Gayness of the music and its fans?

I dunno if anybody's actually saying this. My reading on SR's article is that, if anything, he's lamenting that 'dance music' is not popular in the US, without going into any realistic discussion as to why that music would be on a different scale here than in the UK or Germany. And he does it in such a simplistic way (tho given the NYT audience, and more likely his editors, i understand that) that if I was, say, German, I'd be offended! I mean he writes like Tresor or Basic Channel or even Kraftwerk didn't exist!

to say that there is one sole reason why some people didn't like disco is as just as specious and strawman-ish as anything a homophobe could actually say about homosexuals!

However there are US internet radio websites such as

dirty radio
http://www.dirtyradio.net/

I have read comments by Felix Da Housecat and Cannibal Ox, for instance who are scathing in their contempt for US mainstream music media.

The thing is, the u.s. already has its own unique dance culture in place - european dance music would have to supplant the weird hip-hop/pop conglameration that currently rules the charts in order to have any effect. And Philip Sherburne's article from a couple months back did a better job at this - european dance music is having an effect subversively, in that hip-hop artists use some similar sonics to euro dance artists. But the idea that european rave culture is going to (or ever really had a chance of) supplanting American dance culture is sort of ridiculous.

xpost - i wasn't responding to any point you made, ronan, but to that specious claim that all disco haters are fag bashers or whatever.

Also, perhaps what puzzles people about the relative failure of dance in the US is House and Techno's American roots?

also in today's NYT:

One Word for What's Happening to Actors' Faces Today: Plastics
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/23/movies/23darg.html?oref=login

I agree that what people dance to is entirely dependent on context, I said pretty much the same myself above. It's worth noting that pop dance which does not fit the super minimal description counts for alot of the 'dominance' over here, or has counted for.