Arguing Is All That Dance Music Has Left
a.k.a. With discourse (or what passes for it) spiraling out of control, conflict increasingly feels like the only thing that reliably animates conversations about dance music.
PLUR is a lie.
For all the misty-eyed, nostalgia-laden talk about the “good old days” of dance music—which somehow always seem to coincide with the early-to-mid twenties of whoever’s speaking—the truth is that the culture has always been something of an ethical cesspool. Humans rarely do well when no rules and lots of drugs are involved, and even during the ’90s—when raving was supposedly at its aesthetic and spiritual height—the culture was plagued by shady characters, predatory dudes, craven behavior, grossly capitalistic practices and a frequent lack of concern for the safety of everyone involved.
Was it fun? Did it produce some incredible music? Yes and yes, but no matter how many kandi bracelets were gifted to me on the dancefloor or how much free fruit was made available at the rave, dance music’s utopian ethos always rang a bit hollow to me. There was just too much darkness around, and it was pretty hard to buy into the idea that ravers were building some sort of enlightened community when local promoters were constantly shit talking their rivals and stabbing each other in the back—when they weren’t brazenly ripping people off, that is.
In the decades since then, a sizable portion of that outright criminality has disappeared from dance music, particularly as the culture has increasingly gone legit, moving from abandoned warehouses and illicit spaces into licensed venues and festivals. The genre is now the foundation of a global, multibillion-dollar industry, and while there still seems to be plenty of room for bad behavior—particularly on the part of DJs, the most popular of whom are essentially regarded as pop stars—it’s unquestionably harder to get away with stuff when so much money and attention is involved.
So… things should be better, right? Dance music has never been bigger than it is right now, and its influence extends far beyond the club. Film, television, advertising, commercial pop production, the dressing rooms at H&M—dance music is everywhere these days, and yet, many of its devotees appear to be openly miserable. Spend a little time in the corner of social media devoted to dance music and you’re bound to find two things:
An endless stream of self-promotion
DJ discourse
During the past few days, the latter has been especially intense, with “conversations”—I use that word very lightly—erupting over the merits of mixing in key, Grimes’ Coachella meltdown and a pithy essay in which a young Brooklynite trashed contemporary party culture and the Nowadays venue in particular. (In an effort to not directly feed the beast, I’m purposely not linking to any of this stuff. However, it you can’t help yourself, I assure you that none of these arguments / pile-ons are difficult to find.)
And that’s just the latest discourse outbreak. Keeping track of every online “debate” has become damn near impossible, but it was only last month that dance music was up in arms about DJ Seinfeld making a Burial edit. Things have become ridiculous, and a good portion of the blame should probably be assigned to social media itself. Platforms like Twitter are designed to incentivize conflict and outlandish behavior, and do so while also minimizing nuance and allowing incomplete / incorrect information to circulate unchecked. None of that is conducive to rational conversation, but while it explains why certain types of content catch fire online, what’s happening with dance music discourse can’t be laid entirely at the feet of our tech overlords.