The Pandemic Didn't Ruin Dance Music
a.k.a. Many of the issues currently plaguing the genre can be traced back to long before Covid.
During the past few years, one topic has come up again and again in dance music circles: that the genre—and, more importantly, the culture around it—has become profoundly different in the aftermath of the pandemic. And by “different,” few people mean to imply that things have changed for the better. When I interviewed Ron Morelli back in 2022, he lamented that “conventional-circuit dance music has become a kind of clown show,” and when Matrixxman tweeted last year that being a professional DJ had become “embarrassing,” he was only half joking. Although naysayers have always been a part of dance music, it’s perhaps never been easier to find people opining—loudly—that the genre has gone to hell, or at least flushed a good portion of its credibility down the toilet.
What’s driving all this doom and gloom? The signs of dance music’s (supposed) downfall have also been discussed ad nauseam over the past few years, to the point where they’re likely familiar to pretty much anyone with even a passing interest in the genre. The proliferation of pop edits and other mainstream / tacky sounds, particularly in spaces once considered to be “underground.” Faster tempos. Short songs. Shorter attention spans. The shrinking number of nightclubs and venues, and the industry’s ongoing prioritization of festivals instead. The growing influence of social media, especially visually driven platforms like Instagram and TikTok. The rise of influencer DJs, and the increasing number of once “serious” artists scrambling to follow in their footsteps. The arrival of Gen Z artists and clubbers, and their general disregard for how dance music culture operated during previous eras.
That’s just a partial list. Admittedly, some of these complaints about the genre’s current state of affairs are merely the byproduct of intergenerational tensions that have always been present within independent music cultures. The difference now is that social media platforms—and their conflict-incentivizing algorithms—have not only handed a megaphone to anyone and everyone with a grievance (real or imagined), but also reward those with the most outlandish things to say. So yes, it’s fair to say that things in IRL dance music aren’t necessarily as bad as the average Twitter conversation might lead you to believe, but at the same time, the critiques that have surfaced in recent years are also far too numerous to be written off wholesale. When people say that contemporary dance music feels different, they’re most likely telling the truth, but it’s worth asking what exactly they mean. Different from what? And, more importantly, when?
“From before the pandemic” is the answer most frequently given, but is that accurate? Covid was an unforgettable event, and it definitely broke a lot of things, so it’s not hard to understand why so many dance music aficionados have instinctively pointed to the pandemic as the moment when things purportedly went off the rails. I myself have done so, at least implicitly, in my own work, but as time has gone on, and the critiques of modern dance music have persisted, I’ve increasingly found myself thinking that the “blame the pandemic” narrative is far too neat for my liking. If Covid had indeed “broken” dance music, then that would mean the genre was in a reasonably healthy place as recently as March 2020.
My own memories immediately conflict with that notion, but in the interest of digging deeper, I went back and looked at some of the conversations gripping dance music in the months and years before lockdown hit. (Thanks to the ongoing decline of the professional music media, the documentation of that era was actually far better than what’s happening now.) And while the discourse around dance music back then was perhaps more optimistic, or at least less overtly despondent, many of the issues presently affecting the genre, and its attendant culture, had already taken root.