For the everyday music cynic, the much anticipated performance from Daft Punk at the 2014 Grammys went exactly as expected. Two of the most influential electronic music producers in history bumbled around onstage with Pharrell Williams, Nile Rodgers and Stevie Wonder in a stagnant disco karaoke; awkward and pastiche-ridden, and cementing the act's gargantuan success in 2013 with Random Access Memories. More Andrew Lloyd Webber's 'EDM: The Musical!' than progressive breakthrough moment, it's the album that launched one thousand hackneyed think-pieces about the "re-birth" of disco, the rise of EDM and, with the 2014 awards season signalling the wider presence of dance acts in the popular consciousness, the seemingly growing space given to them in awards ceremonies.Having been the first dance act to be nominated for both Record of the Year and Album of the Year at the Grammys, some will say that 2014 was the year that EDM "arrived" at major music awards, but it was actually last years Grammys that saw a recent, palpable shift: when EDM harbinger Skrillex dominated. 'Bangarang' won both Best Dance Recording and Best Dance/Electronica Album, and his remix of Nero's 'Promises' won Best Remixed Recording (Non-Classical), which is just about the only other category that a dance artist can cast a shadow in. Screw-face all you like over Skrillex, but 2013 was the closest the Grammys have ever been to a genuine representation of dance music's massive cultural shift in the US mainstream. For the US market, that's dire.How is it that, when it comes to major music awards ceremonies, dance acts are standing in such shallow waters?Arriving nearly a decade after the likes of Chemical Brothers and Fatboy Slim ruled, the category looked like a milestone but was in fact an already withering slug; a dragging of the deadened industry foot into the present. The Grammys have always been rubbish at keeping up with electronic music and frankly, as vile as his music is, after the 2012 shit-storm that was Deadmau5 and a rightly uncomfortable Dave Grohl, looking like a post-PTA Guitar Hero v DJ Hero mash-up with spiked punch, Skrillex's triple threat felt like the US riding the EDM zeitgeist like a 12 O' Clock Boy.It's not just the Grammys that have been attempting to push forward with electronic music. Stateside, the Billboard Music Awards has categories for Top Dance Song, Album and Artist (and weirdly, for Top EDM Song, Album and Artist too), and the MTV EMAs ran the Best Dance category consecutively from 1994 to 2003; re-instated in 2012 to mark the explosion of acts like Avicii, Swedish House Mafia and Calvin Harris. In the UK, the 2014 Brit Awards have given four nominations a piece to Disclosure and Rudimental, as well as a near-mandatory nod to Daft Punk in the Best International Group category. However, unlike the Grammys, Billboard and the MTV EMAs, there hasn't been a dance music category at the Brits since 2004. What the hell is that about?
The Brits category of Best British Dance Act ran from 1994-2004, and was awarded to killer international acts like Basement Jaxx, The Chemical Brothers, Massive Attack and The Prodigy before being canned, effectively pencilling dance acts into the judging linear notes. Since then, by the time a dance act has been nominated, it's either for a sweeping stylistic crossover into major label pop territory (think Scissor Sisters, or Kylie Minogue circa 'Can't Get You Out Of My Head') or disjointed amongst major label pop and rock acts in more general categories, and standing no chance of competing against the Adele's and Arctic Monkey's of the day. The Brits are hardly the Oscars, but as the only major televised music awards ceremony in the UK catered to a UK audience, its lack of a dance category is laughable.This feels particularly fruitless considering that nom du jour acts like Disclosure and Rudimental are positioning themselves as the current UK crossover thrust. As a new generation purpose-built on late 90s house divas, the leftovers of garage, and their steady trickle down into mid 2000s pop and R&B, they're aiming for the kind of big-top festival success previously reserved for Disney Club kids - yet in an awards-obsessed industry that seemingly doesn't know how to properly cater to and represent them.Although this movement of dance acts into non-specialist awards categories to a degree reflects the cultural shift in the UK and US pop charts (perhaps most vividly seen in the continued success of Calvin Harris -18 Months), this shouldn't discount the re-instating of a specialist dance category at the Brits. Dance music should be championed at the Brits, but with an awareness of the rich history and culture of it within the UK. How is that the island that brought the world such forward-thinking genres as grime, garage, dubstep to the world, be so terrible at representing dance music to the masses, in equally forward-thinking ways?
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Aside from a few notable winners - Dirty Vegas in 2003, The Chemical Brothers in 2006, Daft Punk in 2009 – the Grammys have awarded Best Dance Recording to various disasters like Cher's 'Believe', Baha Men's 'Who Let The Dogs Out' (which beat, um, Eiffel 65 – 'Blue'), and more established pop artists like Justin Timberlake and Britney Spears than anything vaguely like classic main stage dance acts, like The Prodigy or Massive Attack. Of the various bizarre decisions the Grammys have made with electronic music categorisation - instating Best Dance Recording (1998) nearly two decades after the short-lived, painfully late Best Disco Recording (1980), for one - it was introducing the Best Dance/Electronica Album category in 2005 that really stumbled them off anything resembling a tastemaker path.
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