Dance music’s shift to fragile introspection marks a loss of collective cathartic release

Evidence

The Darkstar record is an example of a self-conscious turn towards emotionality in UK dance. Most of the album features a human voice and songs, sung by a new member of the group recruited specifically for that role. And just this week I’ve read about two other figures from the same scene — James Blake and Subeena — who are releasing their first tracks to feature their own vocals. But this turn to expressivity seems to me as much rhetorical as it is actually going on in the music. After all hardcore, jungle, UK garage, grime, bassline house were all bursting with emotion in their different ways. What people mean by “emotional” is introspective and fragile in ways that we’ve rarely seen in hardcore continuum music. (Obviously we’ve seen plenty of that in IDM going back to its start: Global Communications and Casino in Japan actually made records inspired by the death of family members.) The idea that artists and commentators are groping towards, without fully articulating, is that dance music no longer provides the kind of emotional release that it once did, through collective catharsis. So there is this turn inwards, and also a fantasy of a kind of publicly displayed inwardness: the widely expressed artistic ideal of “I want my tracks to make people cry on the dancefloor”. Because if people were getting their release in the old way (collective euphoria), why would tears be needed. — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk, 1243

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to Fisher’s wider theory of ‘depressive hedonia’ and the decline of collective affect in late capitalism — a theme spanning his k-punk corpus and Capitalist Realism. — connects to: Dance music’s inward turn traded collective affect for privatised emotion — Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life: Writings on…, 450; UK dance music shifted from future-directed to intensive internal exploration — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 1236; Dance music’s affect was collective catharsis, not romantic introspection — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 1304 (+4 more)

Broader Connections

• Dance music’s affect was collective catharsis, not romantic introspection #expands (0.85) — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk, 1304
• The inward turn in post-dance music privatised what rave felt collectively #corroborates (0.85) — Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life, 450
• Nineties dance music was affective but not introspective or romantic #expands (0.80) — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk, 1304
• A music generation can elapse from rave euphoria into haunted deadbeat melancholy #corroborates (0.80) — Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life, 215
• Sample-triggered sorrow can seep into club pop from outside its lyrics #expands (0.75) — Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life, 464