Slow dance: Why is so much dance music so slow and polite?

Oh, dance music, global behemoth, decades old and you’ve finally conquered the world, putting all the nay-sayers in their place. But at what price? Why are the beats so slow and so smooth? Why is the production so polished and polite, so very, very nice? Why is 120-125 BPM everywhere, even on tracks that are supposedly techno? Why are you cuddling up to a squeaky-clean pop sound? What happened to the bleeding edge?

Lost in music, that’s where the dancefloor should be. Lost in it. In 2016 it’s more likely to be taking endless selfies with buff mates, “lovin’ it”, the soundtrack from the speakers easy to ignore, genteel shuffle-grooves paced at a friendly plod. It’s music that doesn’t interfere too much with interaction, so that we can slip from its grip and get back to wherever social media’s at. Arguably the biggest dance act in the land, Disclosure, initially a breath of fresh depth in a world of cheese, have proved, as per their Glasto set, to be r’n’b-tinted pros with all the crunch and sonic danger of supper club jazz. And this from the land that gave us The Prodigy.

It’s always been this way. The pendulum of dance music swings back and forth between head-frying originality and something much less forceful. Even right at the start, in the late 1980s, as soon as people outside a tiny London/Manchester clique started to embrace US house music and make their own peculiar British hybrids, the first adopters were already sneering at ‘acid teds’, regarding them as rave plebs whose taste was supposedly unrefined. The sneerers were usually old soul boys who really wanted their dance music forever in the shadow of Paradise Garage-style vocal disco: sedate, classy and funky. Battering techno, hardcore and the like was an assault on their values.

A generation on, dance music is a bunch of online cottage industries run by nice, boring, professional guys, ready to cordially cut a business deal rather than cause a fuss, better versed in synch rights than boundary-pushing, spiritual inheritors of the old soul boy mantel. Sure, we need these people to make the whole thing tick, but we need some frothing-at-the-mouth, dangling-from-the-chandelier maniacal mavericks too.