What are words worth: We should change the way we talk about dance music

The other day, while procrastinating on Twitter, I rediscovered a tweet from Dutch artist and Rush Hour affiliate Hunee. No, it wasn't his "You can't Shazam a feeling" (a literary masterpiece), it was one from two years ago:

It struck me how relevant this comment still is. Because it’s true, isn’t it? How many times have you heard those exact adjectives trotted out to describe a set, uttered by your mate when you miss a big night or in the tweets to a successful DJ the next day. The fact is, words like destroy, smash and kill are obnoxious, cold and overwhelmingly negative and we’d be better off exploring our vocabulary. See: Wonderful, brilliant, excellent, captivating, delightful, enlightening, splendid, tremendous, rewarding, fulfilling, passionate. There are certainly enough words out there. And if you feel like these words are testing your brain capacity a little too much, maybe just say that you like something?

All of this might sound like I’m jumping the gun a bit. “It’s all a load of fun” I hear you cry. “PC GONE MAD” someone else sprays from the back. Yes, I realise when people use these terms they aren’t actually saying Patrick Topping’s basslines have them bleeding from the eyeballs. But do you think David Mancuso “killed” his dancers? Or what about when acid house (and a shit ton of ecstasy) arrived – were dancefloors being "obliterated" or were football's terraces being united? "Actions speak louder than words", "a picture tells a thousand words", "Sticks and stones may break my bones but words will never hurt me" are all phrases downplaying the importance of language, but when words are the basis of human communication (besides the splash emoji of course) we need to start placing some importance on them.

Since seeing Hunee's tweet, I realised that a day hasn't seemed to go by without an atrocity taking place or a fear-inducing decision being made by a global leader. Death and destruction feels all-encompassing in 2017 with social media acting as a megaphone for all the negativity. And I'm not saying we should simply shut ourselves off from anything negative in the world, but when we already hear words like 'destroy', 'smash' and 'kill' screamed at us from the front pages of tabloids or by the scrolling ticker on the 24-hours news cycle, do we need to use them when describing music?

The bond between crowd and DJ is sacred. They soundtrack your night and help you forget your outside troubles. But the culture’s changed since the simple days of just playing some records to like-minded people. We’ve reached a point of idol worship where it’s all about the DJ conquering us. We’ve become the adoring masses, expecting the DJ (and the booze and drugs) to "destroy" us with a few handily-placed EQ cuts. The DJ has embodied the spirit of Genghis Khan in the booth, pillaging the town he or she comes for and leaving ravers with a smoking pile of brains they have to clean up with 5htp and bananas the next day. I don't really want the thing I love to be described like that.

And don’t get me wrong, we in the media are 110 per cent guilty of propagating this language, myself included. It's an easy crutch to fall back on when trying to describe something in a pinch. Clearly, we too, need to use the synonym function that is only a right click away more frequently.

Dance music was born out of love and togetherness so let’s ditch the negative. There’s enough death and destruction in the world to ease off words like kill, smash and destroy.

Louis Anderson-Rich is Mixmag's Digital Intern. Find him with his head in a dictionary and on Twitter