Dance music dilemma

[Rune Blackwings]

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I'm your typical rock snob and hate most dance music. "You Spin Me Right Round" might be the only true dance song I like.

I actually am digging it. I dunno the ACDC is an improvement on the BeeGees or the BeeGees is an improvement on ACDC

[Rune Blackwings]

[davis]

Man, I remember a scene in Oliver Stone's "The Doors" where all these people were dancing to "The End." "THE END." Which has to be one of the slowest, most boring, over-rated songs ever. If someone can dance to that, they can dance to anything.

'The End" is never boring for any of us that dig it. over-rated? only if you don't like that kind of sonic darkness. it's more for meditation than dancing.

[bob_32_116]

I don't think anyone was suggesting you CAN'T dance to the song in the OP, just saying the reason it wasn't a success at a dance party is because it's not the kind of music many people like to dance to these days.

It's true, you can dance to almost almost any tune that has a well defined rhythm, and one that's not too odd like"Apocalypse in 9/8". I imagine you could devise a dance to Dave Brubeck's "Take Five". Youu might find it a challenge, though, to try and dance to this.

[klothos]

Exactly. Sometimes reading these type of threads I wonder maybe if the Dance revolution of the late 80s was restricted to Europe. Because many Americans haven't got a clue about Dance, Techno, Rave, House, Acidjazz, EBM, EDM, Trip-hop, Dub-step, Drum & Bass, Deep house, Goa, Trance, Bangra, Bro-step etc.

Do you realize that everything that you mentioned in the list above is some form of electronica or loop/sample computer generated music?......

Its also possible that Americans and Non-Euros have a wider scope than Europeans about what constitutes a modern dance-groove and dont want to be pigeon-holed in a smaller (electronica-only) box.

For modern dance, perhaps Americans and non-Euros are a little more flexible in that regard

[syncopatico]

Man, I remember a scene in Oliver Stone's "The Doors" where all these people were dancing to "The End." "THE END."

Those *drug-addled hippies* could dance to anything, i.e., the Grateful Dead!

And since you referenced a scene in a movie, luckily what Martin Sheen was doing along to The End at the beginning of Apocalypse Now certainly wasn't "dancing"!

[spacefreak]

Exactly. Sometimes reading these type of threads I wonder maybe if the Dance revolution of the late 80s was restricted to Europe. Because many Americans haven't got a clue about Dance, Techno, Rave, House, Acidjazz, EBM, EDM, Trip-hop, Dub-step, Drum & Bass, Deep house, Goa, Trance, Bangra, Bro-step etc.

They don't seem to have realised that Dance in musical terms isn't a word that describes the rhythmic moving of the body but that it was a music genre from the late 80s onwards.

Hmmm... but americans started the whole dance music genre. Chicago house and Detroit techno, in the mid-80s, few years before the europeans. The reason this stuff didn't become more popular over there, was that it was centered around the gay scene. It was the UK youth that turned these sounds completely mental.

I think that the pivotal piece that predated and revolutionised the whole dance scene was New Order's "Blue Monday". And the introduction of MDMA of course as the hedonistic drug of choise...

[Zeuhlmate]

Dancing is to my knowledge something you do with your body, usually to music.
Any kind of music. Classical (walz, ballet) to african drum music to ...whatever. Look at the audience at Woodstock.
How can Dance music be a musical style?

Kids can dance to anything.

[PeterG]

Do you realize that everything that you mentioned in the list above is some form of electronica or loop/sample computer generated music?......

eeer..no it isn't...

but that's totally irrelevant anyway as nearly all music nowadays, especially prog, includes that.

[klothos]

eeer..no it isn't...

but that's totally irrelevant anyway as nearly all music nowadays, especially prog, includes that.

er....tell me which one of those in your list have songs whose original conception of the arrangement is from software as opposed from the organic instruments used?.....even most acid-jazz is looped/sampled organic instruments against other loops but written/conceived in a computer, not from the actual instruments used in the sampling


and, yes, I totally understand that we live in the digital cut-n-splice era of recorded music but at least some forms of music have the emphasis on production, not on the actual writing/arranging of the song


Like I said, Americans and non-Euros just aren't as fickle about what constitutes modern dance music....

Dancing is to my knowledge something you do with your body, usually to music.
Any kind of music. Classical (walz, ballet) to african drum music to ...whatever. Look at the audience at Woodstock.
How can Dance music be a musical style?

Kids can dance to anything.

+1

[davis]

I actually am digging it. I dunno the ACDC is an improvement on the BeeGees or the BeeGees is an improvement on ACDC

I'd say both. I'm not a BG's fan at all. ACDC makes them tolerable. My sister would probably say ACDC ruins it.

I don't think anyone was suggesting you CAN'T dance to the song in the OP, just saying the reason it wasn't a success at a dance party is because it's not the kind of music many people like to dance to these days.

It's true, you can dance to almost almost any tune that has a well defined rhythm, and one that's not too odd like"Apocalypse in 9/8". I imagine you could devise a dance to Dave Brubeck's "Take Five". Youu might find it a challenge, though, to try and dance to this.

I'd consider Steely Dan's "Show Biz Kids" a great song to dance to.

[Progbear]

Still waiting for someone to post something by Bach, or some other baroque dance suite, as an example of “dance music”

Latter-day “electronic dance” music is horrid. It peaked with “Supernature,” end of story:

[battema]

Dancing is to my knowledge something you do with your body, usually to music.
Any kind of music. Classical (walz, ballet) to african drum music to ...whatever. Look at the audience at Woodstock.
How can Dance music be a musical style?

Well....there are actually many styles of dance music, because there are many styles of dance. An expert at west coast swing will be spectacularly and utterly lost attempting zouk or kizomba...and a salsa dance is going to have some challenges with club music, to put it mildly. Ballroom is going to be awkward in just about any setting OTHER than a ballroom, heh.

Someone mentioned The End by the Doors...this is dancing in a very, very, VERY loose sense. It was a shiatton of drugs and the semi-voluntary movement of the body. I see the same thing nowadays at some jam band concerts. As a pure form of spontaneous personal expression...

Younger folks nowadays prefer club music; that has particular beats and speeds and isn't necessarily going to be something highly open to creative liberty where the beat is concerned (what happens above the beat however, can be quite interersting...The Field and some stuff from Villalobos come to mind immediately).

I love some of this stuff. Lindstrom has a fantastic album called 'Where You Go I Go Too' that has a 20 minute workout that sounds like the Ozrics covering Miami Vice. More recently Todd Terje did a great, silly one called It's Album Time that has a pretty impressive spectrum of grooves, including a spectacular 80's synth-disco bit called Delorean Dynamite.