Dance music’s affect was collective catharsis, not romantic introspection

Evidence

In a discussion that Simon Reynolds and I had about UK dance music, Reynolds argued that the “emotional turn” represented by Blake and Darkstar was an implicit acknowledgement that “dance music no longer provides the kind of emotional release that it once did, through collective catharsis.” The music doesn’t have to be explicitly sad for this to be the case — there is a melancholia intrinsic to the very turn inward. As Reynolds points out, the idea that Nineties dance music was unemotional is a fallacy. This was a music saturated with affect, but the affect involved wasn’t associated with romance or introspection. The twinning of romance and introspection, love and its disappointments, runs through twentiethcentury pop. By contrast, dance music since disco offered up another kind of emotional palette, based in a different model of escape from the miseries of individual selfhood. — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk, 1304

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to ch60’s claims about controlled desublimation and ch26’s death-drive material — affective regimes in pop are a running Fisher theme. — connects to: The inward turn in post-dance music privatised what rave felt collectively — Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life: Writings on…, 450; Music communicates emotion and shared cultural symbolism rather than propositional content; Dance music’s inward turn traded collective affect for privatised emotion — Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life: Writings on…, 450 (+4 more)
• QUESTION: Worth chasing: what exactly was dance music’s ‘different model of escape from individual selfhood’ — Dionysian dissolution? This connects to earlier chapters on the collective vs. the bourgeois individual.

Broader Connections

• Music communicates emotion and shared cultural symbolism rather than propositional content #qualifies (0.80)