what got you into dance music?

In my musical infancy I defined myself by not liking dance music- whenever some friend told me about a group and I thought they were shit but didn't wanna hurt their feelings, I just went "well, at least it's not dance music".

I've gradually learned to dig a lot of it, but until very recently I still had to use the excuse that it wasn't *really* Dance music, as in:

Afrika Bambaata- well, that's Hip-Hop!

The Madchester scene- well, that's Indie!

Human League- well, that's New Wave!

I started running out of excuses at about the time that I started to get into Basement Jaxx ("well, that's...uhm...Prince type stuff!"), Aphex Twin ("well, you..err...can't dance to that, so it can't be dance!") and Tricky ("that's, uhhm, mumbling Brit-Hop!")...the first dance track that I learned to love without denying that it belongs to the genre was a version of "Boy/Girl Song" by Aphex Twin, closely followed by "Groove Is In The Heart".

m.

Goth?

"Being a child int he 80s" sums it up - everything we heard growing up was "synthetically"-produced pop designed for clubs, like the Madonna and Scritti me and the other cubs boogied to in 86 (everybody thought we were crazy!). When acid house kicked in, the tartrazine kids weren't going to say no - Bomb the Bass did it for me with "Beat Dis".

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i've always thought that if you didnt like that stuff if you were a kid when it was goin on then you'd been effectively brainwashed by your rock-lovin luddite parents, HA

Well yes, but y'see, I LIKED my parents, and everyone my age pretty much sucked- they were all about soccer and beating each other, and none of them had any appreciation whatsoever for Greek mythology or Che Guevara (I was an odd kid)

Either "Stayin' Alive" or Star Wars was my first 45.

As for house music (birth of modern dance music?), clubbing in D.C. in '88. My first 12-inch: "It Takes Two"

I already said TV, I know, but this was a very important show for me.

My mates were almost fascistic about disliking dance and electronic music. When I got into Orbital it was like a an epiphany.

(circa four)

(circa 10, [Temptation] b/c it was on the "Something Wild" soundtrack (cassette version, stayed in parents' car for years) and I thought I'd lost my mind when "Trainspotting" came out with a different version)

(circa 12, along with "James Brown is Still Alive", Marc et Claude's "I Need Your Lovin' (Like the Sunshine)", Human Resource's "Dominator" ("there is no other") and various other gems from a friend who was getting into DJing)

When I was a little kid I was really into Go-Bots. They were the tiny cheap precursors to Transformers - matchbox-scale vehicles that could be rotated and tweaked until they resembled a big robot. They fascinated me for hours. They had a TV series for a short while and it was fairly fucking horrendous.

However! At the same time I was obsessed with Go-Bots, the film Beverly Hills Cop came out. The Axel F Theme, completely synthesized and driven by machinery, became the song for all Go-Bot battles ever. Synth music and its compressed-reverb trappings became my ultimate pleasure on the radio. By the time I was 12 I was already scouring shelves anywhere that music was sold for anything that seemed 'Techno.' I once purchased the picture disc CD of the Akira OST!!

I didn't get into dance music. Dance music got into me. And it has YET TO LEAVE, the money-grubbing bitch that it is.

Aphex Twin -> idm -> MTV AMP / big beat / trance -> going to raves (starting with Boston '97 redlight parties) -> going to nightclubs

then when Vocalcity came out I started listening to house and techno and i've been trapped in stasis since then, help

i'm pretty sure having my own copy - that i stole from dad - of sly & the family stone's greatest hits circa 1972/1973 did it for me. and despite being a rock fan for the most part, i also loved just about everything there was to be loved about disco in the 70's. and the pop r&b of the day. and it's a cliche for sure, but "I Feel Love" changed my life when it came out. i played my 45 of it at least a thousand times. everything since has been me wanting to feel what i felt sitting on my bed listening to that single. and my punk/post-punk/new wave days in the early 80's only turned me off of classic rock for a while. never dance music. and half of the new wave i listened to was dance music too. the 80's were majik. and horrible. but majik too. especially if you had your ears open. i loved when worlds collided back then too. joy division was probably my favorite band and when new order came out with "confusion" i thought i had died and gone to heaven. two of my favorite things kissing in public!

"I Feel Love" changed my life when it came out.

Me too! Huge, spacy, prog rock production on massive disco speakers.

"Flashlight" by Parliament was the funk flip side of the coin that same summer.

damn, so jelly of those who were alive and cognizant when 'i feel love' came out

It's one of the upsides to being hella old!

acid and ecstasy

Taping songs off the radio in the 90s and my favourite ones always being the vocal, pop, girly anthems. Dance music was always something I was interested in but I didn't really think I was particularly more a fan of it than other music, until my parents bought me this compilation, and I adored it, especially the second disc. I would like to pretend it was something a bit more sophisticated but trance, Ibiza Uncovered documentaries and Kevin & Perry were all ubiquitous when I was in my teens.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MHvMRyRSKGU

Only born in 88, so can't claim any authenticity laden backstory but:

As a 10 year old devotee of the Mortal Kombat soundtrack and the Chemical Bros, I first heard Jeff Mills and Plastikman when an astute older cousin visited. That had no immediate effect until I turned 16, as it was followed by a long latency period during which I was suspicious of "electronica" and even more so of dance music. In the meantime I went from top 40 rock and hip-hop to boring so-cal punk to Indie rock to, finally, Warp Records et al. A year after, at 16, an acid-techno/rave friend urged me to go beyond ambient/idm/electronic indie schmaltz/etc. Despite open-mindedness, I'm ashamed to say there was an unnecessarily long traversal from the allegedly "respectable" end of ascetic "intelligent" dance music to conventional - let alone totally unabashed - dance music (what can I say, when you're young and stupid [not to mention white, middle-class, and straight] the ambivalences and anxieties between identity and what you "should" listening to can be very powerful, regrettably). That friend also pointed me to "Ishkur's electronic music guide" which was vital for me at the time, and a necessary foil to Allmusic hegemony. And of course ILM, which I found in 2005, when there was a much stronger dance presence (ILM first pointed me to Tessio!). Also, Phillip Sherburne's pitchfork column and blog were really vital. Artist wise, Akufen was very important, as were Michael Mayer (i.e. Immer and Fabric 13), Matthew Dear (Dog Days!), Farben, Luomo, and villalobos. So to answer the question in one word: MICROHOUSE. I don't care what you say, I will defend microhouse to the death because that made it all possible for me.

Maybe more specifically was compulsively listening to Little Fluffy Clouds in the summer of 04, at 16 y/o: quasi-paradoxically (or at least hypocritically) loving it before I knew and accepted that I love dance music.

Baby Ford and drugs.

i forgot to mention sex

i like listening to and playing and dancing to dance music. i've been imagining a troupe, like pina bausch inspired but really untrained and casual, and we do our thing every wednesday morning or w/e. who's in. you have to bring a poster to decorate the room.

oh and be sexually active. sorry virgins!

in ed.b's boat here, swapped my copy of Burned Mind by Wolf Eyes for Immer and Total 4 with some dude on another message board (i was 15) and that was that. well, that plus Erlend Oye's DJ Kicks.

aphex twin, ymo. once i discovered drexciya, i was (and am) hooked for life.

oh yeah, drexciya was a good one. i remember stumbling on to 'journey home' when napster was around and got me into detroit techno

nice! it was "the quest" for me.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:MTV_Amp.png

fart
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/0/07/MTV_Amp.png

ILM, which I found in 2005, when there was a much stronger dance presence (ILM first pointed me to Tessio!)

i had this exact same experience--ILM, luomo, 2005

"I don't care what you say, I will defend microhouse to the death because that made it all possible for me."

dude, i don't know who you are but i really like your post and i thank ILM in my head all the time for turning me on to Kompakt because that became one of the ruling forces in my life for a long time in the 2000's in a big way. and it totally gave me hope for the future. or it felt like the future was now when i first heard that stuff and completely reinvigorated me as far as electronic music goes.

daft punk. 97 = moved in a big city for the first time = access to college radio so musically i was all over the place but daft punk, and chemical bros too i guess, made me realize i had preferences in dance music. acid/house/techno over trance/jungle/drum n bass hehe. don't particularly have awesome memories about the stuff that i ran into live back then, whatever, and being poor and ill informed i was stucked , really got into it when i installed soulseek shortly after napster died: it seems electronic music (especially idm) was the most shared genre in there so that helped.

screamadelica pointed me towards both dance music and the rolling stones. then digeridoo and selected ambient works changed my life.

I think it was Orbital 2 or Underworld - dubnobasswithmyhedman

another really formative song for me was "lookout weekend" by debbie deb, that was a much bigger thing than shannon where i grew up

and new order too, of course

the klf

I addressed this upthread a bit, but I really had this break at about the end of May 1999 where I went into hospital with a collapsed lung and a copy of Remedy and when I came out I basically only bought dance music for the rest of that year.

What's keeping me into dance music. (One of the things anyway.) For which I mostly have the previous poster on this thread to thank. I can't stop listening to the most recent mix on his site. I listened to it over and over getting ready for work, and it's the first thing I put on once I got home.

Awww, this thread's making me feel all warm inside :)

So many people I know got into dance music through

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=odQgfUUegQI

and

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3_5IJRXoKQE

and

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zIXqmt0zw3Y

That stuff pretty much tore a bunch of my friends away from me. I was all like "Nooooooo, you can't listen to techno! Come back to earth and listen to punk and grunge with me!"

A few years later, one of those friends would smoke me down and we'd listen to trance and stuff. I wasn't too down with it, but he gave me a tape that said "Tribal" on it. I was all like liberal guilt "I guess it can't be bad if it's tribal." Then around the same time, I got Deee-Lite's "Dancefloor Oddities & Sampladelic Relics".

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51fQKYhEuBL.jpg

I felt a little weird buying that tape, but it was the real breakthrough. It allowed me to hear a bunch of different styles of dance music.

Around the same time I bought Strictly the Best 17, which was a direct result of listening to tons of Sublime and wanting to learn more about dancehall.

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51bE7Fk1PSL.jpg

lol. don't know why I posted those giant album covers.

That Deee-Lite remix disc was also one of the first dance CDs I was exposed to shortly before I started going to raves.

herbie's "rocket", "axel f", john carpenter, wendy carlos, etc absorbed as a young child translated into a lifelong love of synthesized sound

Hard to underestimate how stuff like the weird science fiction/ 80s soundtracks & Doctor Who themes, really laid the foundations for a love of electronic sound when I was under 10.

to me the future was cool and it sounded like a synthesiser arpeggio.