Dance Music Culture Research Articles

‘We Are All One, We Are All Gods’: Negotiating Spirituality in the Conscious Partying Movement

Research literature has been growing over the past five years which explores the religious significance of electronic dance music cultures. This article adds to this work by offering an analysis of spiritual discourses used within a particular underground dance scene in the UK, the ‘conscious partying’ movement. An ethnographic account is given of a typical dance night within this scene, which demonstrates how these spiritual discourses are embedded within a range of musical, artistic, therapeutic, and political networks and practices. The use and salience of spiritual discourses of oneness, energy, and immediatism within this scene are then analysed. It is argued that the conscious partying scene in the UK reflects spiritual ideas and practices within the wider global psy-trance music scene and that this study demonstrates the importance of ethnographic research for examining the complex ways in which such broader spiritual discourses may be negotiated within specific groups. The article concludes by identifying possible future research that explores in more depth the relationships between spiritual discourses, the aural properties of electronic dance music, and embodied practices of dance.

Making Beats: The Art of Sample-Based Hip-Hop (review)

Reviewed by: Making Beats: The Art of Sample-Based Hip-Hop Tim Anderson (bio) Making Beats: The Art of Sample-Based Hip-Hop by Joseph G. Schloss. Wesleyan University Press 2004. $65.00 hardcover; $24.95 paper. 240 pages Investigating how a specific sense of sonic identity is articulated, how one learns the basic ropes of conventional composition and then subsequently joins a specific aesthetic community, is a staple theme of many studies on popular music culture. From Simon Frith’s outstanding theoretical work on the subject (Performing Rites: On the Value of Popular Music) to Lise A. Waxer’s more recent The City of Musical Memory: Salsa, Record Grooves and Popular Culture in Cali, Colombia and Tim Lawrence’s excellent history Love Saves the Day: A History of American Dance Music Culture, 1970–1979, we have gained a richer understanding of the difficult socio-aesthetic terrains that comprise popular music and how groups and individuals have negotiated it to both create and fit into these worlds.1 Like the aforementioned examples, Making Beats: The Art of Sample-Based Hip-Hop is interested in the issue of aesthetic identity as it exists within a particular social dialogue. Unlike Frith, Waxer, and Lawrence, though, who investigate larger frameworks such as club scenes and fan groups in conjunction with music makers, Schloss centers on an element of production. Specifically, he focuses on how U.S.-based DJ culture engages a specific set of aesthetic criteria and sensibilities that comprise the hip-hop genre. Whereas past academic work on hip-hop has tended to focus on the MC as the primary unit of analysis, Schloss’s investigation of the world of the DJ/producer provides us with a penetrating illustration of the aspect of the genre that most hip-hop crews find most influential: the creation of the beats over which the MC performs. While Schloss peppers his work with some formal analysis, the majority of the book relies heavily on more ethnographic methods of analysis. Schloss mainly uses field interviews for analysis that bear great fruit. By representing the thick and sometimes tangled set of conversations that producers have regarding hip-hop style, ethics, and practices, he provides a glimpse into the various material practices involved in the manipulation of the previously recorded media objects. Key to Schloss’s study is his claim that the “social processes” that produce “beats” trump any simpleminded and straightforward claim that hip-hop is reflective of African American aesthetics. While Schloss does not deny that the “rules of hip-hop are African American,” he notes that one need not “be African American to understand or follow them.”2 This statement may seem obvious, but it is important. [End Page 154] Numerous Afrocentric processes are revealed by looking directly at social processes, community standards, and debates about how one should find a potential beat as well as how one should decide whether or not to use it. Consequently, Schloss’s analysis provides a formal understanding of how those outside the African American community are able to weave themselves into the hip-hop fabric as creative and vibrant forces. He is “concerned with the aesthetic, moral and social standards that sample-based hip-hop producers have articulated with regard to the music that they produce,” and as a result, creates an impressive work that shifts the reader away from the interpretive exercises that most scholars offer vis-à-vis hip-hop (or popular music, for that matter) and instead places the analysis on the processes of sampling.3 According to Schloss, “Looking at sampling as a discrete activity that individuals choose to engage in for specific reasons allows us to ask questions about who those individuals are, what their reasons may be, and what their choices can tell us about these questions.”4 To answer these questions, Schloss’s work relies on ethnographic methodologies. As interesting as this research strategy is, Making Beats often feels more like a set of interviews with interpretive commentary than it does anything resembling the rich variety of techniques that go under the banner of participant observation—the method that is most often associated with ethnographic research. Schloss’s research is certainly interesting, but...

Work and Play: Vagaries Surrounding Contemporary Cultural Production in Sydney's Dance Music Culture

Much recent research has documented how, under ‘creative’ capitalism, approaches towards work and types of work are changing. This paper extends this research direction, uncovering the discourses that influence conditions of work in one sector of the cultural industries: what can loosely be defined as the ‘dance music industry’. It examines the role that networking and social relations play in maintaining a music scene through which work opportunities are created. The paper also explores how attitudes toward work in this particular cultural pursuit are emblematic of wider shifts in working practices within the cultural and creative industries. The findings are based on interviews with various DJs and promoters within dance and electronic music scenes in Sydney. It is argued that the boundaries between work and non-work, and between ‘industry’ and ‘scene’, are porous for those engaged in this form of cultural production, with a need to further discuss the implications of these observations for the future of cultural work under advanced capitalism.

Electronic Dance Music Culture and Religion: An Overview1

This article provides a comprehensive and critical overview of existing research that investigates (directly and indirectly) the religio-spiritual dimensions of electronic dance music culture (EDMC) (from disco, through house, to post-rave forms). Studies of the culture and religion of EDMC are explored under four broad groupings: the cultural religion of EDMC expressed through ‘ritual’ and ‘festal’; subjectivity, corporeality and the phenomenological dance experience (especially ‘ecstasy’ and ‘trance’); the dance community and a sense of belonging (the ‘vibe’ and ‘tribes’); and EDMC as a new ‘spirituality of life’. Moving beyond the cultural Marxist approaches of the 1970s, which held youth (sub)cultural expressions as ‘ineffectual’ and ‘tragic’, and the postmodernist approaches of the early 1990s, which held rave to be an ‘implosion of meaning’, recent anthropological and sociological approaches recognise that the various manifestations of this youth cultural phenomenon possess meaning, purpose and significance for participants. Contemporary scholarship thus conveys the presence of religiosity and spirituality within contemporary popular cultural formations. In conclusion, I suggest that this and continuing scholarship can offer useful counterpoint to at least one recent account (of clubbing) that overlooks the significance of EDMC through a restricted and prejudiced apprehension of ‘religion’.

Review: Love Saves the Day: A History of American Dance Music Culture, 1970–1979

Review: Love Saves the Day: A History of American Dance Music Culture, 1970–1979

Love saves the day: a history of American dance music culture, 1970-1979

Figures vii Preface xi Acknowledgments xvii Introduction 1 1. beginnings House Parties and Discotheques 5 2. consolidation Party Pariahs and the Path to Permanent Revolution 33 3. pollination The Rise of the Downtown Party Network 55 4. recognition The Crystallization of a Sound 83 5. visibility The Message of Love and the Disco Mix 117 6. expansion Record Pools, Music Labels, New Clubs 155 7. prominence Forums, Formats, Franchises 205 8. ascendancy Eurodisco, Midtown, Downtown, Out-of-Town 251 9. dominance Disco Takes Over 303 10. turbulence Backlash and Survival 363 Epilogue 433 Notes 443 Selected Discography 457 Selected Bibliography 473 Index 477

Conurban

Conurban

Technoprophecy: a Response to Tagg

Philip Tagg's piece on 'rave' (in Popular Music, 13:2) will be helpful in furthering debates about dance music culture. It is a highly entertaining polemic, which is principally directed against an outdated 'rockology' in popular music studies. Tagg provides a musicological analysis of rave/dance music which offers some speculations on the relationship between the music and the social groups who make it and dance to it. He identifies a number of innovative musical-structural features of rave, including its intentional artificiality (p. 216), its ability to include traditionally non-musical sounds within a popular form (p. 214), and, for Euro-American popular music, an unusually frequent use of the Phrygian mode (p. 215). The main thrust of his discussion, though, is that, in certain rave sub-genres, there is much less emphasis on 'figure' (the musical foreground of melodic line) and greater emphasis on 'ground' (background, accompaniment) than in previous western music (pp. 216-7). Tagg asks whether such musical innovations express 'a radically new socialisation strategy amongst young people in our society' (p. 219). My hunch is that the answer to Tagg's question is no. It is clear, in spite of some notes of doubt, that Tagg is leaning towards a conception of rave as encoding a rejection of 'degenerate, hegemonic notions of the individual' (p. 219) - manifested in particular in the rise of ground and the decline of figure. This analysis is extended, again with some carefully expressed doubts, to the institutional politics of rave and dance music culture: the cooperative, semi-legal basis of some dance events and the prevalence of 'white labels' (12 inch vinyl singles which do not provide the name of the performer or the track) are offered as potential evidence of a refusal of individualism amongst (some) young people. Tagg's view that rave represents a new collectivism amongst youth is commonly heard amongst house and techno clubbers, and amongst journalistic proponents of the (sub) culture. But Tagg's interpretation is a significant addition to arguments for the radicalism of dance music culture because it adds another dimension, one which sees this collectivism as manifested in the lack of big, cohesive melodic foreground figures in the music (p. 218). This may be so, but listeners and dancers are still aware of the idea of a musician: the locus of virtuosic individuality is transferred to the musician programming the technology. There are individual ways of programming synthesised harmonic-rhythmic riffs and rhythms, just as there are individual ways of singing, or playing a guitar. Of course, it may be that techno audiences do not know, or do not care to know, who that musician/programmer is. But this fact could not sustain a claim for a new rejection of figure and individualism: people have been dancing for many years to recorded music, and have often paid little attention to the individuals who produced it, or their techniques. In addition, it is worth noting that the listening focus in techno is often directed not towards ground, but towards effects not dissimilar, perhaps, to what Hennion (1983, p. 172), in his study of the production of French pop songs, calls gimmicks.