We Busted Dance Music's Most Damaging Myths

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We Busted Dance Music's Most Damaging Myths

Ever get the feeling you've been cheated?

Club culture is founded on myth and built on lies. We're told that dancing is important, that DJs are important and that keeping up with every record ever released on every label in existence is worth your time, effort, and money. This myth-creation-system is reinforced in countless interviews and endless smoking area chats. Internet forums are littered with bedridden proclamations about unity and communality as if those things exist just because a few dudes in Chicago turned disco into house.

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There's an element of seductive seclusion at play here, a positioning of dance music as something that exists outside of the realms of mainstream popular culture, a kind of wilful denial of the matter at hand. It's just dance music, lads, designed to be heard when you're fucked in a club, or when you're lying in bed trying to sleep afterwards.

The self-seriousness of dance music is at odds with the knowing disposability of pop. Pop music understands its purpose, accepts its immateriality and playfully embraces the ephemeral. The dance community, as it were, seems to have an issue with this. We're so awed by the past, so perpetually indebted to forefathers and those-that-went-before-us that we end up suffocated by history. The lies we wrap round records to give them some meaning beyond, y'know, just being records. Which, apparently, isn't enough. Every 12" has to be epochal, every club night transcendental, every DJ legendary.

Being a kinder friend than dance music, we wanted to flag some of the most pernicious of these. Learn from them.

HOUSE IS A FEELING

House music is up there with lager, swimming pools and Zurbaran's Saint Francis in Meditation as one of mankind's highest achievements to date. Sadly though, ever since Rhythm Control stapled a Chuck Roberts speech to Larry Heard's seminal "Can You Feel It" and gave us the world's been told that house is a feeling. This foundational myth, a myth that attempts to position house music as a kind of eternal force for good in the world, a potential tool of salvation and redemption, might be more palatable and accurate if a) it actually meant anything and b) if Heard himself hadn't dismissed the mash-up.

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While house's roots as a music of change, progression and societal upheaval cannot and should not be dismissed or diminished, the seeming lack of interest in dissecting the oft-mentioned, oft-cited, oft-relied upon 'feeling', results in a baseless backwards thinking. It's given us shit names for club nights and terrible records. But, more importantly, it's given us successive generations of parochial, provincial nobodies who think knowing a few Marshall Jefferson songs is akin to a kind of pseudo-spiritual investment in the restorative powers of house music, rather than a literal investment in a few bits of battered plastic bought for inflated prices on Discogs.

THE UNDERGROUND STILL EXISTS

"The underground"

Everyone likes to think they exist outside of the mainstream, that their record collection, their clubnight, their label, their personal brand, is an exotic "other" that's deserving of deep investigation. Dance's obsession with the idea of retaining a semblance of underground integrity is understandable. After all, the narrative of dance music is, largely, a narrative of minority groups expressing themselves and asserting identities through musical expression. Sadly, this hasn't really been the case since…ooh, the early 90s?

Everything cool, everything new, everything radical, exciting and invigorating is repurposed and repackaged until the original fades from view and the facsimile is seen as the real. Dance music, to use that that nebulous, unhelpful but unavoidable term, is no different. House is back in the charts, your brother blasts Kerri Chandler tunes on the back of the bus and American megafestival Ultra's 'underground' stage consists of those totally unknown DJs Dixon, Jamie Jones and Pete Tong.

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Read more about Ultra here

"Underground" codes as nothing more than wilful obscurantism that does little more than put distance between the product and it's potential consumers. It exists for the purposes of articles and flashily packaged retrospectives. It means nothing. Put it this way, if a record is played to three people in a former community centre in Camberwell on a Tuesday night is it an underground experience or just a shit club night?

THE CLUB IS KING

Clubs! Aren't they great!

The idea of the perfect nightspot is one propagated by the 2000 articles that spring up each week about the queue at Berghain, the histrionic eulogies to closed down clubs, and the breathless puff piecery around whatever club got you and your mates in for free with a few beers thrown in last Friday. And it's a prime example of the mythmaking that centralises the experience of dance music over the actuality of it. The fantasy of clubbing makes the reality of it seem even more dispiriting. The dreamily lit, fairly priced, spacious and welcoming club of the imagination, a place where love overrides and the DJs are always playing records you like, doesn't exist. In reality 99.999% of clubs are just beer-sodden carpets in dingy basements that smell like poppers and regret, where you can blap the last of your overdraft on a vodka and coke, often surrounded by a room full of the kind of people you wish terrible, terrible things on.

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Read more about shit club experiences here

All music sounds better through cheap headphones on the bus anyway and you're less likely to get stuck talking to some jaw-dragger about David Cameron and how good smoking is. Possibly. Depends what bus you catch.

OBSCURITY IS INHERENTLY GOOD

Championing the unheralded is the critic's responsibility and the source of one of it's most intense joys. Enthusing about something you love, something you want to share with the world, is a privilege and usually always a joy to see, hear, or read. That's not the problem here. The problem comes when obscurity is confused with quality.

I'm not sixteen anymore, so the thought of liking something predominantly because your mum might ask what it is over tea, so you can then sniffily tell her that she wouldn't know what it is anyway and that she's making you really annoyed by asking those stupid questions and yes you will go straight to your room and not have pudding and no pocket money for a month and you are very sorry and yes you will pack your bags and leave home if that's what she wants because you can't handle living here any longer, isn't what I'm about these days. So sod your super limited run repress of an rebellious Azerbaijani techno record released on sandpaper coated vinyl.

Simultaneously, I'm also not a deluded poptimist who blindly champions anything mainstream for the sake of boasting on Twitter about how I'm devastated that Boredoms played the same night as Taylor Swift, or how I've spent my day's listening alternating between One Direction deep cuts and Xenakis records either. Do you know what I am? Just a person who loves music. All of it. Big or small, as long as it's good. I live for it. So, let's stop pretending that because only you and 356 viewers on YouTube have heard the B2 on some forgotten techno that makes it a "lost classic."

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IT WAS BETTER BACK IN THE DAY!

Your dad, there, having a whale of a time way back when

Most of you reading this won't have ever seen Larry Levan or Ron Hardy or Frankie Knuckles or David Mancuso or Kevin Saunderson or Junior Vasquez or Danny Rampling in their prime. You won't have visited the Hacienda or the Gallery. You weren't at the M25 raves. You didn't take ecstasy on a beach in Ibiza in 1987 and watch the sun rise behind Alfredo at Amnesia. So why do you, we, I, pretend we were, that we did? Because nostalgia is an easy way of accessing the authentic. It lets you slip seamlessly into the past like Zelig in a Hypercolor tee. Which, obviously, is appealing to a generation so fearful of being found as frauds that they've become hyperaware to the point of paralysis.

I get that playing on the eternal power of the past is an easy(ish) way to generate ticket sales and maybe even shift a few records, and reading about the supposed glory days can be pretty appealing on a Friday afternoon at work, the fact is, it is complete bollocks. Things were different, yes. We won't see another Summer of Love, or 48,000 capacity raves thrown in woods every again, no. That's not a bad thing, or a good thing. It is literally just the passing of time and the evolution of a culture that heavily petted the idea of societal change and decided that, actually, getting paid loads of money and snorting a fuck-ton of coke was more fun. The thing about nostalgia is that it essentially admits that the present is shit and the future isn't worth thinking about. We let blokes old enough to be our dad tell us that clubs used to be better when they were younger than we are now and rather than think, "Piss off, grandad," we get scared and cower down to our elders and just give our nights names that sounds like they might have been good in the mythical Good Old Days rather than proving them wrong. We gorge on empty nostalgia it like the saps we are. Things weren't better back then and nor were they worse. They just were. In the same way we are.

Come on, then didn't even have Twitter or ITVBe back then so how good could it have been anyway?

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