One Y2K-Era Sound That Hasn't Had a Revival
a.k.a. With nostalgia running rampant through dance music, seemingly every genre from the late '90s and early 2000s has experienced some sort of resurgence in recent years. Not this one.
Five weeks from now, the 2020s will officially be halfway over. It’s hard for me to get my head fully around that—the degree to which the pandemic warped our collective perception of time can’t be overstated—but with the decade’s back nine sitting right around the corner, it does seem like an opportune moment to think about what’s defined the 2020s thus far. When it comes to dance music, the easy (and admittedly cranky) answer might be something along the lines of “a bunch of pretty vapid and obnoxious trends,” as illustrated by the prevalence of pop edits, hard techno, trance, Instagram / TikTok DJs and a bunch of other things that tend to piss off aging ravers.
Thankfully though, there’s been more to 2020s dance music than Britney edits, nosebleed-inducing tempos and influencers in the DJ booth. Musically speaking, the past few years have actually been something of a boom time for breakbeats, as genres like jungle, drum & bass, hardcore and garage have all experienced significant resurgences. While that the linear thump of techno has been wildly successful on a commercial level, and the genre is still capable producing quality tunes, its reputation has taken a noticeable hit in the 2020s, to a point where it’s now rarely seen as a hub of creativity and forward thinking. Add in the swelling popularity of sounds from Latin America and Africa, not to mention the steady growth of the rhythmically adventurous (if somewhat nebulously defined) bass music sphere, and a credible argument can be made that much of the decade’s most rewarding dance music has had little to do with four-on-the-floor orthodoxy.
Yet even as dancefloors have warmed to a wider range of tempos and drum patterns, they’ve also remained stubbornly in thrall to the past. Recycling has always been big in dance music, and the 2020s have put that tendency into overdrive. Aside from the aforementioned revivals, the past few years have also seen large-scale flirtations with electroclash, bloghouse, trip-hop, progressive house, Eurodance and numerous other ghosts of dance music’s past, many of them from the late ’90s and early ’2000s. In purely aesthetic terms, Y2K-era cosplay has dominated the decade to date, and that, in combination with the current affinity for breakbeats, should have theoretically cleared the way for one specific sound to come steaming back into the dance music conversation.
That sound? Nu-skool breaks, which oddly doesn’t seem to be one anyone’s radar.