I Bet That You Sound Good on the Dancefloor
Posted on | January 10, 2009 |
The Dancy Future of Pop
The nineties was the era of grunge. That angst filled, distorted-guitar rock produced some great songs and regrettable fashion, but was by-in-large death to a dancefloor. Since the late nineties, rock bands that have intentionally set themselves apart from grunge, have largely fallen into two camps– dance bands and folk-influenced.
The popular folk-influenced bands, a la Bright Eyes, rose to fame relatively slowly. The word of mouth murmurs grew into rumbles. Their songs were used in movie soundtracks and TV shows. Pitchfork lauded them. Playlists were passed among friends. These bands did find success and fame but, not mega fame and usually not any radio hits. But that was ok. They were “indie” bands, they didn’t want mega fame anyway.
Of course many of the dance bands were “indie” too. Indie in their case meant influenced by 90’s British guitar rock styles and ethics. The Killers are the prime example.
But, I’ve noticed as time has gone on, that the distinction has gotten stronger. Dancy music has gotten dancier. Folky music has gotten folkier. Songs seemed to be designed either for the dance floor or for music conesuiers looking for unique sounds. With the importance of radio fading, so to is radio-friendlyness. The dance hit, which has always been important, is now the best way of reaching a large audience quickly. So it makes sense, that an emerging band would seek out a dance hit.
This comes as a bit of a surprise to me. As a long-time critic of mainstream radio, I assumed that if it were to lose it’s strangle hold, that a better, wider selection of music would receive attention and the best songs would naturally become (at least minor) hits. My model for these ideas, naturally enough, was non-mainstream radio–John Peel, PBS, College DJ’s.
I didn’t forsee that the breakdown of traditional distribution would change the very character of music, but it has. The radio, for all it’s faults, was a the primary place everyone interested in music would turn to see what was happening in music. Even if you hated most of what was played, you would listen because there still might be something good. Now there are a million places and myspaces to find something good, or terrible.
While it is easy to blame the internet for the eroding relevance of mainstream radio, it’s not the only culprit. In the mid 1990s the Telecom Act allowed radio ownership to be consolidated on an unprecidented level. Many regional stations were bought up by bigger national companies quite quickly. I remember this as the time Alice radio swept the nation. This consolidation had the effect of eliminating the regional hit. Regional hits were often watched by DJs and music industry execs and often were the assurance big companies needed to gamble on new bands or musical styles. The death of regional hits along with ultra cautious “proven hit safe” playlists of the conglomerate stations essentially froze radio in time. Or at least severly slowed its ability to keep pace with new music trends. Essentially, mainstream radio was culturally irrelevant before the internet could deliver its punch.
So now that radio has faded largely to the background, pop music as a unifying force must find us on the dancefloor. It was easy to forget in the days of big radio that pop music is, by definition, a unifying force. It was easy to forget that we seek out music that we have in common with as many others as possible and that music becomes our pop music. We want pop music to unify us. In the days of big radio we thought it was forced upon us, and that was half true, but the other half is that we picked our monster hits, we just didn’t have as wide a selection to pick from as perhaps we would’ve liked. Now we have so much choice that we will fall into our sub-sub culture niches everywhere but the dancefloor. The dancefloor will musically unite us. Other music will scarecly be considered pop music, if it still is anymore.
There is a precedent for this paradigm. Looking back to when radio was still emerging the 20’s and 30’s, the predominate music was dancy, big band music. It wasn’t until the 1940’s that radios became affordable enough for most individual households to own them.
The somewhat obvious conclusion is that unless another technology comes along that can provide large, captive audiences in another venue besides the dance floor, pop music will remain dancy. We are unlikely to see ballad style mega hits anymore. Even pop classics songs like “Hit Me Baby, One More Time” aren’t as dancable as songs like “West End Girls”. Conclusion: future pop stars will be like The Pet Shop Boys–stripped down, talented song writing groups that can score dance hits in many countries without huge promotion budgets or help from the radio.
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