Let’s dance: but what to?
Norman Cook announces that there’s no decent dance music out there in today’s Guardian.
Which is why, apparently, his new album is going to be a bit more rock and roll.
At the same time, he adds on the basis of the size of his DJ gigs: there’s no shortage of people who want to dance.
If he’s honest, I think he should say: there’s not shortage of teens and 20somethings who want to take pills and try and get off with each other, and as long as the soundtrack is acceptable (ie goes up and down in all the right places, and doesn’t ask too much of the listener) then it’s fine by them. It’s not big. It’s not clever. And it stopped being cool a long time ago. But it’s still a great night out if you’re 19.
He’s right: dance music has been creatively floundering for quite some time, after a quite remarkable and incredibly influential run. Every so often, I listen to whatever’s new and find it’s remarkably familiar to the stuff I was sweating to a decade ago. Slightly better, perhaps, but it doesn’t feel like there’s been a decade of genuine progress.
[Yes, you say. but what about R&B and hip-hop? And I say: Sorry, I’m too old, too flabby and too white to even half appreciate it. Call that a song? It’s just some bloke whining! And have you seen what they’re getting up to in the video? It’s obscene!…at least Duran Duran videos had a proper plot…]
Of course, I’m can remember (as my dad used to say, before he realised just how old that phrase made him sound) a world of clubbing before four-to-the-floor, automated drum beats and synth bass lines.
We grew up in that post-punk, post-disco world of funk and new wave and all various combinations of the two. I seem to remember it was quite good, although my dancing at the time was rather over-enthusiastic, very, very serious, and fuelled primarily by Vodka and bitter (often in the same glass) rather than the concoction of chemicals available these days (by which I mean Red Bull and Smirnoff Ice, of course). And, as yet another 80s sound-a-like band appears every week, it seems that’s exactly where we’re heading back to.
The big mistake is to think that ‘dance music’ has a monopoly on dancing. When Primal Scream released the utterly Rock and Roll Give Out But Don’t Give Up at the peak of the dance craze, Bobby Gillespie, I seem to recall, stressed the fact that in their time: The Stones were dance music. And if you read Nik Cohn’s book, he stresses the same point all the way through. Yes, I find it hard to think of the Ministry of Sound full of people strutting to Dogs Die in Hot Cars: but maybe that’s just a lack of imagination on my behalf.
Now, where’s my double breasted shirt and pleated trousers?