Rhythm is a Dancer Strike it Up ) and Belgium’s Technotronic ( Pump Up the Jam By the mid ’90s, however, grunge was the nation’s fixation. While America accounts for 35 per cent of worldwide music consumption, of that number, more than 85 per cent are American artists. Kevin Unger, a club columnist for Canadian Music Network, an industry trade publication, says America “often turns a really blind eye to international acts, and I think that’s an ego thing more than anything else.
” The merging of hip hop and R B under the “urban” rubric had a lot to do with dance music’s vanishing from commercial radio, but Unger insists dance is responsible for its own downfall. He points to two millennial developments: the apotheosis of the DJ and the proliferation of the remix. Despite all the magazine features proclaiming DJs as the future of music, mainstream consumers never really bought these self-satisfied, largely nameless headphone-junkies as viable “personalities,” much less musicians.
Remixing, meanwhile, was a club practice that turned recognizable songs into vaporous abstractions. Many people decided that dance music had becoming a little too abstruse. “I think the public needed something they could sink their teeth into, and so they turned to urban, because it’s still got a beat that you can dance to,” says Unger.
“Here, they had an artist they could brand, they had a face they could put to the music, and they abandoned dance music.” Towards the late ’90s, music marketers minted the phrase “electronica” in order to brand a new wave of percussive music emanating from Britain and France. One of the defining compilations was , a 1997 video-game soundtrack comprising, among others, the Prodigy, Leftfield, Daft Punk and the Future Sound of London.
As with most arbitrary descriptors, “electronica” soon became a catch-all for everything from big beat (Fatboy Slim) to techno (Underworld) to drum ’n’ bass (Roni Size) to more outré beat manipulations (Aphex Twin). By embracing everything, electronica ceased to mean anything. “It ultimately became a bad marketing term by major labels who were trying to figure out, 'How the f--- can we break the Chemical Brothers?
’” says Freeman. For proof of America's dismissive attitude to dance music, you needed only watch this year's Grammy Awards. Many observers saw the introduction of a new category, “Best Electronic/Dance Album,” as a sign of legitimacy, but it's telling that the nominating committee could only come up with one American act, the Crystal Method.
The other four nominees? British (including Basement Jaxx) or German. Furthermore, one inclusion ( , the latest snoozer from DJ Paul Oakenfold) wasn't even an original album, but a mix CD.
Photo by Jamie Beedon. Dance music is a way to throw off the manacles of thought and reason and surrender to the power of percussion; it rarely has an agenda beyond physical abandon. “Political” dance music is oxymoronic, for the simple reason that partiers don't want polemics messing up their vibe.
And yet, dance music has a history of inspiring panic. Back when rock ’n’ roll was the dance music, people were so scandalized by Elvis’s pelvis that in an early appearance on , he was only shot from the waist up. In the early ’90s, public hysteria about the effects of the drug Ecstasy prompted the British government to stanch the growing rave scene by outlawing dance parties in some areas of the country.
The so-called Disco Era is now just a gauzy memory, but few can forget its fiery end — in America, at least — when an angry mob stoked by radio deejay Steve Dahl convened at Chicago's Comiskey Park in the summer of 1979 to light disco records in a massive funeral pyre. It was only the climax of the persecution of disco, which many right-wing politicians saw as an epidemic of mindless hedonism perpetuated by blacks and gays. That was more than a quarter-century ago, but many contend that the same attitudes are still at play.
Witness Basement Jaxx’s Grammy acceptance speech in February. “It’s nice to be recognized in America,” Ratcliffe told the crowd, “because dance music hasn't figured much in American consciousness for a long time.” Wary of appearing spiteful or unappreciative, he ruminated on the reasons for the band’s low stateside approval.
I think there's a bit of a homophobic/gay thing here with house music, which is a shame. His elocution may have been clumsy, but the sentiment was quite clear. “With house music, its roots are gay, black, Puerto Rican and so on, and while those communities are still making that music, it’s gone way further, says Toronto DJ Denise Benson.
But I do agree that that stigma exists.” Adds Benson, “The other thing about Basement Jaxx is that they've never been afraid to be sexy. Some of their stuff is really blatantly sexy and you could totally assume it's queer, even though they're both straight guys.
” Having given us Christina Aguilera and Lindsay Lohan, America can lay claim to the lion’s share of sleazy pop. Yet it demonstrates a weird prudishness when it comes to dance music. No band embodies the Atlantic divide in dance music better than New York’s campy disco revivalists, Scissor Sisters.
With 1.6 million sold, their eponymous debut album was the best-selling album in the U.K.
in 2004. In the U.S.
, it moved a paltry 150,000 copies. Lead singer Jake Shears credits the disproportion to the band’s playfully homosexual image. “People in the U.
K., more so than in the United States, realize that music transcends sexuality, Shears told one interviewer. Sexual proclivities aside, Unger contends that if dance music is ever to regain Top-40 prominence, it must rub out the associations of DJ culture and reinvest in melody — the more recognizable, the better.
Efforts are already underway: Britain’s Cabin Crew is getting major UK chart action with Star to Fall , a springy variant of Waiting for a Star to Fall , a 1988 hit for Seattle's Boy Meets Girl. “I think it's a brilliant way to go,” says Unger, “and I think it's a way of bringing the element of song back into dance music.” That may be, but it doesn’t address America’s abject refusal to dance to anything but its own drum machine.
Andre Mayer writes about the arts for CBC.ca. Interesting take on Basement Jaxx.
Their music is quite interesting. However, where I part ways with you is in your rather blanket comment, "While music consumers in the U.K.
seem to embrace diversity, in North America, tastes have become increasingly homogeneous." Basement Jaxx personifies two important near equal halves of the UK music industry, POP and Dance. As a North American living in the UK I find their music far more homogenous.
Actually it is so much so that I have been desperate for some other types of music. What you would classify as homogenuity in the North American market, I would classify as a broader pallet, which rightly or wrongly, is not wholly fixated with dance or pop.
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