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I want to make something very clear before anyone jumps in here: I have nothing against Todd Burns or Stylus Magazine. Honestly, I don’t think I would’ve bothered to write about this essay unless it was written by someone whose work I respect.

I could not deal with the penetralia of jargon and name-dropping in that article; I have no idea what Burns is talking about.

It’s sad, really, when in order to promote one’s own tastes, one has to dump on other people’s tastes. It’s especially sad when we’re talking about something as purely pleasurable as dancing…and even I know that, and I’m probably the least dance-friendly person around (I’m an uptight, middle-aged, middle-class white guy with body issues, ‘kay?).

I still think it was pretty funny. I mean, he’s making fun of LAME people, right?

I mean, yeah, he was a punk-ass about it, but he is talking about a genre that gets its token on pretty hardcore in these polls. I can imagine a jazz freak or a rap freak or a teenpop freak similarly spazzing out (”you like music that I know WAY more about than you for the wrong reasons”). Wrong reasons: y’all dabble and get a buncha clowns on the polls. Which you could say about most niche-type genres. I could probably write the same essay complaining about everyone who voted for “Girlfriend” on their singles list. In fact, I should have, because it would have amused me.

(”teenpop freak” was a joke, by the way) (also, doesn’t Jane Dark write this essay about hip-hop every other year, except he throws in stuff about how the lame people are WHITE DUDES and forgets to be funny about it?)

i don’t take a piece that says “rock is shit and has nothing to do w/ dance music in 2008″ as The One True Ideology whether the author intended it that way or not.

sometimes i feel that rock is shit, rockism is shit and i love EDM for being the anti-rock. then the next day i’ll listen to a siouxie album and bask in its brilliance. so, my point is he wrote this ballsy piece and if you’re feeling it that day when you’re sitting on the can reading it you’ll say “Right on Todd!”, and if not you’ll say, “God, what a cock!”, but then maybe show it to your friend a week later.

i’ll say that i understand where the article is coming from. but it is a bit reactionary in it’s categorizations. it’s 2008 - fuck boundaries!

We Are All Rockists Now

Ha, Dave, don’t even get me started about Jane Dark/Joshua Clover.

Re: “tokenism” on year-end lists. Does it never occur to people that this happens mainly because top ten lists are an inherently flawed way of quantifying tastes, and that a great many people who have to fill these things out have varied tastes that must be simplified and dumbed down in order to make a tidy list? These lists eliminate the nuance of individuals’ taste, and then they do it all over again in aggregate.

I agree with you here, and there are pretty obvious reasons that, if you think about it for three seconds, you kind of need to take “consensus” with a grain of salt. But these can pile up, and then that one smug-ass band/dude/AVRIL comes along and you’re just like NO! I HAVE HAD ENOUGH OF THIS WORLD! And some of us keep it inside, and some of us keep it on the blog, and some of us publish it in our year-end comments for the Village Voice. I think the lattermost venue just needs to be funny or interesting enough so that you’re not actually trying to, like, defend a coherent thesis.

I mean, yeah, it’s the *logical* equivalent of “GAH, all of you like this FAKE ___ whereas I like the REAL _____,” but the structure of the argument isn’t what makes the argument useful or worth engaging with (defending or attacking), it’s the terms. “GAH, all of you like this fake pop whereas I like the real rawk” isn’t an opinion anyone wants to hear anymore, but it’s an argument that I’ve made in frustration before (what people wanted to hear from Kelly Clarkson versus what she actually did last year). Whereas “GAH all of you like this phony VAMPIRE WEEKEND while I listen to real SOULJA BOY RINGTONES!” has more power, even if you could break down the “logic” in it without much trouble.

Well written, Matthew. I’m a dance music fan, but basically had the same feelings you did after reading Todd’s essay.

And after all that he probably can’t even dance very well.

I don’t really think Burns is being some exclusive snob, if anything he’s parroting the popular perception of Dance music. While I agree with you that music genres are constantly evolving and therefore free of any conventions, I think Burns kind of has a point in that most people view Dance music from that “German” frame of reference. Me and you know it’s much more diverse than that but when most people think of Dance music I imagine they conjure up images from the Deep House Dish sketch on SNL with Kenan Thompson (the sketches themselves are always terrible but the music in them are always great parody). Who cares if Burns doesn’t consider Justice’s work to be Dance music? Maybe it isn’t, but whatever it is, it’s still great music that you can dance to.

Final belated word from me, but speak of the devil, here’s Josh Clover saying some punk-ass (and also not funny and also pretty inaccurate) stuff about his token “y’all just like the tokens” genre of the year, which is country this time. Except unlike Todd he gives me no confidence that he’s listened to the albums that “everyone else” missed, forgets that Miranda Lambert was praised by country critics as widely as she was by non-country critics (see: Nashville Scene poll where she swept!), and also makes no argument (good or bad) for why Miranda ain’t s’good as Taylor Swift (who is at least as good if not better) or Kelly Pickler (wtf?).

So yeah, the impulse is all over the place, and I’m not sure it’s the impulse (the “structure of rockist argument” or whatever) that’s the problem. It’s in the details. (At least Todd gave me a list of artists I haven’t heard to check out.)

(Also, one reason critics weren’t “all over” Taylor — at least the reason I wasn’t — was that her album came out in 2006 and I considered her for that year-end list. I didn’t include her, and should have, but it didn’t feel right to put her on my top ten this year.)

This all reminds me very much of the dustup a couple years ago between John Cook and Sasha Frere-Jones & Jessica Hopper; two other bloggers and I discussed rockist attitudes and I ended up quoting Producer Bill Laswell: “I don’t know what a purist is, I guess that’s someone who’s stuck.”

I do agree with Todd Burns that there are purer forms of dance music, but I frankly find some hardcore dance to be quite utilitarian. It’s music that’s designed for big clubs and extended dancing. The beats are a certain tempo, the music is mixed in a certain way, the arrangement ensures smooth blending of songs, and so on. It’s efficiently designed for a purpose.

The bit of Burns that offended me was “…you like dance music.” This struck me to my core. Music, you know that awful stuff that’s popular, with shape and form. Burns says of such fare, that “you can’t really dance to it.” How sad for him. Me? If it’s got a good groove — say, Lynn Collins’ “It Takes Two” — then you bet I can dance to it. Nothing wrong with my ass that it can’t shake to a good song. Maybe Burns has a stick up his.

Well, at least I understand now WHY you hated Todd’s article so much if you really think that’s what he wrote. I’m afraid I didn’t get ANY of that from it when I read it. And I’ve just read it again to be sure. All he seems to be saying to me (in a mildly provocative way) is that there’s far more interesting and ‘danceable’ music around than just the semi-rock/pop stuff that’s been hyped up this last year or so. How can anybody argue with that?

It’s pretty easy to argue with it when he phrases everything so poorly — I mean, keep in mind that the Village Voice is a publication intended for a mass audience, and if he was trying to be sarcastic/ironic, it doesn’t come off that way, necessarily. Also, it’s pretty fucking easy to argue against someone who says you can’t dance to something that lots and lots of people have been dancing to all year. “No, you’re not dancing the RIGHT WAY!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!”

I’ve been told by many people I’m not dancing the right way. Like when I tried to do the Soulja Boy dance at New Year’s and was roundly rebuked for…skipping a step, maybe?

I think there’s a slight fudging of “right” here, though — “you’re not listening to the right music” isn’t quite the same thing as “you’re not listening to the music right” (although even the latter could be valid, and not just if you put the headphones in your armpit or something). To me Todd is very much saying the former: “you’re not listening to the right music,” “If you’re dancing to this, you’re not doing the right dance.” (Whether or not this is actually true is debatable — someone pointed out that the people who DID vote for the more obscure stuff on Todd’s list also voted for, e.g., “D.A.N.C.E.” in singles.)

the 12″ ‘DVNO’ single should come packaged with a baggie of chazz and a pre-rolled dollar bill.

yeah, burns’ essay is way too serious– it’s dance music, it should be fun, who gives a crap if we’re not getting down to villalobos’ dubstep remixes or whatever– but i think he’s voicing a feeling that a lot of american dance music enthusiasts have about the popularity of ed banger et. al. americans get their dancing kicks at concerts and house parties, where spinning a minimal techno track is the quickest way to send all but a handful of girls off the dancefloor. justice or smd flirt with electro-house, but it’s close enough to what we’re used to that it works. unless burns moves to europe (where most people who listen to techno aren’t actually dance music lovers, they’re just on good drugs), he’s going to have to deal with it.

I do think there is truth in what the man says, no matter how caustic it is (hello…personality is key when writing). Rockism is something I just don’t buy and the art that seperates rock from dance is just too powerful to ignore. Rock may influence dance to a certain degree but dance music always survived on its own by not buying into the sloppy hooks of guitar driven groups led by mostly heterosexual men. I think those who buy into rockism should go to the school of Tracey Thorn for a while and learn something.

Boy MP, this is precious: “People dance to music because it moves them, physically, emotionally, and sometimes even, spiritually. If you’ve ever actually DJ’d for people — or better yet, have ever been to a wedding — you would know that people are most willing to dance to music that they feel connected to, and music that makes them feel connected to the people around them. ”

Surely you were laughing when you wrote that.