Dance is the new rock 'n roll. Or so says DJ Kurtz.
When the scandalous sounds of Rock and roll first rent the air of WASP Middle America, screams of "Sacrilage!" filled the air, and the nation's moral guardians took to the airwaves, denouncing the likes of Tutti frutti and Jonny B. Goode as "The Devil's Music" (well, they do say Beelzebub has all the best tunes), and calling on the country's youth to foreswear such perverse noise. A couple of years later, Rock and Roll had been corporatized, sanitized, and had the and replaced by a fetching little 'n. Which still finds favour with the poodle permed "rockers" whose bands have names like "Whitesnake" and "Thunder". It was popularized in the States by a racist good aole boy, with an over-active pelvis, from the Southern bible belt, and in britain by a man who would later be a born-again Christian, but by then the damage had been done; Chuck had danced the duckwalk on the 50's equivalent of MTV and Rock'n Roll had changed from being the black street slang for shagging, into a new musical genre and signpost for the State Of Our Youth. Since those heady days in the late 50s, there have been few other scares in Rock'n Roll's rather tame history. One occured in 1969, when a bunch of drugged up "Hippies" invaded a small town in the U.S called Woodstock, and camped there for three days of Love, Peace and interminable sets by Santana. The only really important thing that occured was one of the last performances by that doyen of Heavy Metal, Jimi Hendrix, but he came on stage so late that most of the audience were either stoned or sound asleep. That, however, did not prevent various self- appointed moral guardians complaining about Hendrix's rather inventive rendition of The Star Spangled Banner. The only other notable thing about Woodstock was that it resulted in a number of unfortunate children, comceived doring the festival, being saddled with names like "Saffron", "Moon Unit" and "Dweezle", paving the way for a future generation of serial killers.
Fastforward another seven years, and witness the birth of punk, not in some Soho'd backstreet of Malcolm McClaren"s fevered imagination, but in the good ole US of A, where bands like the Ramones and Richard Hell and the Voidoids were bashing away at their own unique style of garage rock to anyone who stood still long enough to listen. But, as usual, the British took Punk, politicized it and claimed it their own... and, just for a moment, for a microcosm in music's long and corrupt history, Something Significant Happened. Not the media-soaked hysteria of Silver Jubilee Union Jack Waving Shock-Horror Headlines concerning Johnny (call me Rotten) Lydon's polemics, nor in Sid Viscous (sic) t-shirts. Not even in the White-Man-Inna-Inner-City angst of The Clash. No, the "something" was the quiet, emergent backstreet industry of handmade 7" vinyl (remember vinyl?) sleeves, home-made records and labels like 4AD, Factory, Fast, Small Wonder, Rough Trade and Stiff, whose slogan: "If it ain't Stiff, it ain't worth a fuck!" perfectly summed up the attitude of these new labels. Independence was born. And, although most of the pioneers of what became known as The Chain With No Name have sold their worthless souls, the latest Faustian pact being the use of Joy Division's classic Atmosphere in a First Direct advert, fer crissake, I mean, Ian Curtis would be turning in his grave, the way music gets exploited in postmodernist advertising, as I was saying in my semiotics seminar only the other day [contd. p.94], the Spirit of Independence (sounds like a cross-channel ferry) lives on... but where? I hear you cry!
Well, Major knows where: oh yes, he does, and it's not in the puerile agitpop of The Moaning Street Preachers, nor is it in the Union Jack Waving, America Hating, sixties Fixated, kinks apologists like Blur, Oasis or Elasticasuedebelly. No, what has got major and his desperate bunch of NIMBYs really cacking their true blue Y-fronts is a style of music, so subversive, so well organised, so dangerous and so threatening to the stability of this sceptred isle, that they have had to introduce legislation to limit its influence. Yes, for the first time in the history of rawk 'n roll, a government has legislated in order to try and suppress one of its offspring. It is unlawful for more than 10 persons to gather, without prior permission of a licensing authority, to listen to music, which is (and I quote): "wholly or predominantly characterized by the emission of a succession of repetitive beats"; Clause 58, Criminal Justice Act 1994. So, what is it the Man is frightened of? Ecstasy? Faceless techno bollocks? Mass raves on the M25? No, what REALLY frightens them is that Acid House, Rave, Techno, Jungle and the various other sub-genre of the dance culture, have a life of their own, independent of the BPI, Radio 1, EMI, Virgin 1215, The Word, MTV and any other corrupt and meaningless institution which the government has sponsored, in order to keep rock 'n roll where it can be controlled, consumed and lobotomized. You should have seen it coming: the mass hysteria of the media on the loony right, concerning "illegal raves", New Age Travellers, and the effects of Ecstacy on the nation"s yoof. Questions in the house, blockades on the M25, the refusal of licences for any events involving music with "repetitive beats": the writing was on the wall, but most of the kids were too busy keeping up with the latest Carter / James / Neds / Mega City Four t-shirt, or wondering whether the Smiths would ever reform, and would Morrisey ever write another decent song. Fortunately for us, and for the future of rock 'n roll, the chain of indie stores set up after the punk explosion, plus the ever-vital club scene, kept things going, and the saddoes writing in to the music press and complaining about the "ever-increasing number of crap dance records in the indie charts" totally missed the point: Dance music IS indie music. Not fucking Blur, Oasis, Suede et al. These bands are being embraced and cossetted by an establishment which is desperate to see the end of dance music and the complete domestication of rock 'n roll as a tool to control yoof culture. The NME cannot see it, neither can Melody Maker, nor can the organisers of festivals, and neither can Radio 1. But the people on the street see it, the people running the scores of Jungle pirate stations see it. So do the people in the clubs: the DJs, the technoheads, the triphoppers, the internet surfers (who have a similar battle facing them), and the 'ravers' (whoever they are).
Dance music is the ONLY music that is keeping rock 'n roll alive: it is the ONLY music which creates the kind of media panic reminiscent of those hysterical headlines and speeches of the fifties, and it is the ONLY music which scares the shit out of HM Government. It is also unique in being the only form of popular music to be legislated against. So, if you want to be subversive, Ms/Mr Student, throw away your Carter / Suede / Oasis t-shirt, invest in a few Jungle collections, and go out there and protest against the CJA. You may not change anything, but you can take solace in the fact that if you go to a club, playing a certain type of music, you will probably commit the first and only "subversive" act in your miserable life. So what are you waiting for?