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.

Fortunately there have always been those who wanted dance music to hammer at its own frontiers; those who understand that, at its best, it can be stark, minimalist psychedelia, or a thumping assault on the senses, or something ecstasy-fried and cosmically delicious. The best dance music often has a grain of punk intent in its DNA, faceless music uncomfortable intentionally cuddling up to blatant commerce. Sure, it must remove us from our nine-to-five existences but why not in intriguing ways? If only to the tiniest degree, it might even expand our idea of what music can be.

There’s nothing wrong with glossy 125 BPM bop-along fare, of course, any more than there is with the old soul mafia who first hogged the rave limelight. They both have their role. The problem is that, outside trance and EDM, many of the world’s most respected DJs are in thrall to slow ’n’ smooth. It’s a concept, whatever style’s being played, that’s everywhere. Part of the reason is that Ibiza’s such an important hub, a testing ground that draws easy parallel with the rise of dance music culture in equatorially sunny regions of the United States. Thus there’s been a rise in new Balearic feeling, music that’s suited to balmy, tropical locales, swoony and even-tempered.

But most of us do not live in such places. Certainly dance music can be escapism, but let it be relevant to our environment. Britain, for instance, is currently on the rocks, screwed by the greedy few, and surely our dance music needs to reflect that: to be fired with danger and passion as well as escapism. One of the reasons the cultural impact of grime (and its mutations) is so much bigger than the relatively small number of clubs it gets played in is because it does exactly this.

Once upon a time a generation of artists repurposed second-hand equipment to create tracks that sounded utterly alien, that reflected their surroundings but also escaped them. Now the time has come for another evolution, for dance music to be less polite, less interested in cutting a deal. It needs to speed back up, be more imaginative, and regain something of the outsider about it.

So wake the fuck up! And let’s have it.