I see the light

In my upbringing there was a deep sectarian division between the neds and the moshers. 1

I was mosherlike (by default, being weird) but had some ned friends.

We would drive around the country lanes doing “circuits”, aimless circles looking for someone else wanting to race. They would blast happy hardcore and trance: “dance” music. As token representative of the mosh race I would loudly grumble about it. But what else was there to do? Man does not live by Iain Banks and Guitar Hero alone.

Moshers hated pop music, obviously - it was corporate and cliched and fake and saccharine. (And we hated classical for being elitist and inauthentic.)

Why dance though? Dance music often wasn’t very corporate. We just called it shit because we didn’t like the aesthetic and the implied “conformist” lifestyle. You had to define yourself, and the lazy or young man’s method for self-definition is to negate others’.

I went on my way, snobby, righteous, and graceless. It took about 4 years for me to hear this song and for it all to click. I was alone. I was sober. I was motionless. I was pretentious. But somehow the entire scene, the umwelt unfolded and I realised my stupidity: 3

2

• “Dance music” (in this Clubland / Bonkers lineage) is relentlessly positive and romantic. Both banal and transcendent. Notice that almost all of the vocals are female. It’s not a stretch to think that the boys loved it, not so much lusting for the voice’s subject (we didn’t know what she looked like) but resonating with her passion and goals and identifying as the object of the song (love is all that I need / and I found it there in your heart. It isn’t too hard to see / we’re in heaven).

• So it’s one of the only positive emotional outlets for rural men. (By which I mean policed men.) For some reason you didn’t get judged for dancing to a fast beat, where any other such expression would be called gay at best. probably the bpm and the volume are necessary parts of the social compact here. The kick drum and the sheer pressure of noise is the masculine component that buys space for the voice and the sentiments. Country music is farm emo. Dance music is blue-collar emo.

• Obviously this all hits much harder on the right psychoactives, which I held myself above (and still do)

• This marks me moving up a cognitive level. Contrarians see something normal and negate it (“pop music sucks”, “Shakespeare sucks”) and thereby feel distinguished. Meta-contrarians see something contrarian and negate that (“people say pop sucks but pop is good”) and thereby feel distinguished, despite agreeing with the consensus. Both of these are mechanical and stupid ways of thinking, but I think most of us have to inhabit and move through them to get to mental freedom, where you actually trust your impressions and state them regardless of which level of irony or reclamation others think it’s on. (Social influence is everywhere; we are apes. But it seems to me some people are much better at treating the opinions and canons of others as one variable and one source of evidence about value, rather as constitutive of value (relativism) and rather than snuffing out the critical light within.)

This is good music. It is not smart music - but most good things aren’t smart.

I still can’t dance.

Thanks to James, whose receptiveness and antipretentiousness fixed something rotten in my character, eventually.