Good questions. Any way you look at it, the world and everything in it – including dance music and club culture – is undergoing a massive, perpetual, disorienting shift. Everything is changing – for the better? Or the worse? Much depends on who you ask. Accurately, neither is true – rather, the times we are living in are complex and contradictory; change occurs at a pace we cannot possibly keep up with.
Dance music has always been a reflection of the times; it is not an island. The unique convergence of technological, generational and economic shifts we are currently living through are having their wild and unpredictable effects.
Many of them are positive. The potential of technology to democratise the means of production, of the power to create and communicate being taken into more and more hands, is theoretically limitless; new voices emerge, communities are formed. Barriers are broken down. And yet: we find ourselves exhausted. Particularly by the economic situation. Everything is more expensive; no-one has any money.
The conditions prove difficult to maintain.
But perhaps even more exhausting still: Instagram. Influencers. Algorithms. Being online. What is it doing to us? What is it doing to dance music? Does anyone care? Can we stop scrolling long enough to think about it? We have tried.
It feels like social media, in particular, is intent on reshaping us, and by us, we also mean dance music, for the individual is not truly separable from the collective. Social media, it seems, is the messenger for the fast-food era of the modern age, from fashion to identity to electronic music – not because it cares (it doesn’t); but because it is in the business of hoovering up everything indiscriminately, for its own purposes.
It would be helpful, at this stage, to look at Instagram et al, not as an app, or a tool, but more as a kind of digital crack. Addictive by design, it promises an exchange of dopamine for submission to its pervasion of our nervous systems, rewiring us in the background, steam-rollering everything into strange new forms, reshaping us in its own image. Taking meetings in the Oval Office with suitcases full of cash. What are we doing here?
We are, apparently, and amongst other things, engaged in a cultural production of endless repetition, and a shift to conformity as cool: submission to and reproduction of trends, behaviours, and performances of identity and affiliation. Where originality, and even eccentricity, were once aspired to, conformity is the new game in town; non-conformity, even, is simply another purchasable product. A phenomenon, we feel, that sits oddly with both dance music and queerness.
Dance music and queerness are defiant and resistant in nature. In their true form, they exist to oppose normative systems. They are characterised by people taking risks, not playing it safe. They are to be lived, experienced, not consumed, or performed. They are about the collective, not the individual. Dance music is not a product. Queerness does not conform to a grid.
We spent a lot of time this winter asking ourselves how dance music is doing. The conversations were hard, even existential in nature. We sought the wisdom of our elders. We also listened to a lot of music. Yasiin Bey (formerly known as Mos Def)’s 1999 classic ‘Black On Both Sides’ was, at one point, on particularly heavy rotation. On its opening song, the aptly-titled ‘Fear Not Of Man’, he addresses the state of hip hop, more than a quarter-century ago:
“People talk about hip-hop like it's some giant livin' in the hillside. Comin’ down to visit the townspeople. We are hip-hop. Me, you, everybody, we are hip-hop. So hip-hop is going where we going. So, the next time you ask yourself where hip-hop is going, ask yourself: Where am I going? How am I doing?”
We posit that the same thinking applies to dance music. There is no giant living in the hillside. We must all ask ourselves the same questions.
Never forget: the future is not yet written – it is ours to create.
It must come from within.