Fingertips’ music correspondent John Johnston looks at the unstoppable rise of dance on the British pop charts
It’s official. With La Roux, Dizzee Rascal and even the Black Eyed Peas getting in on the act, dance music has taken over pop.
Dance music is everywhere. Think of Dizzee Rascal’s ‘Bonkers’ – a certified banger and Radio One favourite – or La Roux’s ‘In For the Kill’ – this summer’s Ibiza anthem – a huge commercial hit selling some over 600,000 copies, boasting as dubstep’s first smash hit with the Skream remix dominating the airwaves.
Think of the strange, electro funk of Black Eyed Peas’ ‘Boom Boom Pow’ tearing up everything from the dance floors of Fabric to your 11-year-old sister’s room.
Then there’s Tinchy Stryder, Chipmunk, Bashy and others following Dizzee Rascal’s footsteps; ditching the aggro of grime for dance-pop and on their way to becoming the first British rap stars.
In the dance-averse US mainstream, Lady Gaga, Black Eyed Peas and Rihanna are clogging the billboards with house and electro.
Even normally limelight-shunning alternative has fallen for dance music’s charms.
Take the Mercury Music Prize nominations as proof: Florence & the Machine, Bat For Lashes, La Roux, Friendly Fires, Kasabian and The Invisible are as suited to the dance floor as they are rock clubs.
Even NME is fawning over the likes of Bloc Party, MGMT, Vampire Weekend and the xx, who all have one foot in clubland. Even the metal kids have swapped jumping around like lunatics to Metallica to, well, jumping round like lunatics to Prodigy and Pendulum.
What started this movement to the clubs and dubstep beats though?
Peter Robinson, curator of the Popjustice website thinks it has something to do with the way that genres come and go in broad brush strokes.
“The broadest stroke of all, when you’re faced with an oversaturated male guitar band pop climate, is to swing to the opposite of male and the opposite of guitar and the opposite of band – so La Roux is the total opposite of, for example, The Twang.”
Although this highlights how the music industry is always looking for something new to sell, this genuinely feels like a new generational shift.
Lining up outside Fabric I found that the new crop of dancefloor enthusiasts aren’t the fanatical acid house fans who used to frequent the joint. It’s the iPod generation with the ability to pick up and access the best of past and present.
Jaimie Hodgson, NME’s new band editor, was recently quoted in MixMag saying: “People and bands might still wear the clothes of different ‘style tribes’, but they’ll still pick the best of all kinds of music.
“The perfect example is the xx. It’s second nature for them to combine amazing low end that close to dubstep with new wave guitar that sounds like the Cure.”
It’s not all about mashing different things together though and hoping it fits.
Dubstep has been the magical missing link, the ester bonds in the DNA of today’s pop music, knitting together the disparate scenes. What’s happening now is merely a return to what Britain has always excelled at, taking music from the clubs out into the open.
In the 1960s the Beatles, the Stones, Kinks and the Who played the black dance music of the time, and every next great band from the Clash to Human League have always had one foot on the dancefloor.
The iPod generation has also brought something far greater to the new sound.
Tired of the closed-knit, sterile markets that have been in place since the mid-80s with major record labels, they have learnt to use new technology and ways to work on shoestring budgets to bring a work ethic and philosophy that is flourishing in today’s digital world.
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