Welcome To The Modern Dance
Back in the 80s dance (or electronica or club… whatever) was a simple enough thing: stick on a bass, bleed out the rest, and ride em cowboy but digital technology has exploded in the 00s and dance has merged (sometimes!) with hip hop concepts and away we go.
Now there are as many types of dance as there are DJs and producers and try dancing to trip hop, I dare you, you might be able to wave your arms around in a sorta dead hippie daze but…. It is similat to what happened to rock, blues , jazz and r&b, out of the clubs and into your record collection.
In 2009 you can’t cover pop music and not cover dance. How do you write about 09 and not write about David Gueta? You’d have to ignore not just his huge success in the UK but also his remix of Black Eyed Peas “I Gotta Feeling”. Indeed, how do you the band of the year, Black Eyed Peads, without covering dance You can either cover and cover pop or you don’t and you can’t. The future lies with folks like my great-niece Miriam -she loves music she can interact to whether its MJs moonwalk or Miley’s do-Ce-Do and Miriam may very well find herself listening to a major amount of dance before she’s fifteen years old.
Even more, the Trouble and Bass team produced one of the best concerts of the year at Summerstage this summer and if rock fans don’t get Boys Noize, what do they get? What is the difference between Boys Noize mixing the bass higher and higher and a guitar solo? Where’s the line?
And more still, Mark Ronson reinvented Dance and the cover song on stuff like Lily Allen’s cover of “Oh My God” and Tigger’s cover of Spears “Toxic” mashed with ODB back in 07. The producers behind the original “Toxic” have formed a band themselves, Miike Small.
Yeah, it’s going round in the other direction as well. Drop The Lime is a BAND aesthetic where they switch the main instrument from the guitar to the bass but haven’t bled all melody out and they are fun fun fun to watch.
I have been saying since February (here since I started Rock NYC) that the story of 09 is dance music and at this rate I will be a liar because dance will be so thoroughly integrated into EVERYTHING from indie rock (hi MGMT) to pop that the only thing left will be country music. To love tmodern music in 09 is to love electronica: you can dance but you can’t hide.
